African Women Writing Resistance: An Anthology of Contemporary Voices

Surviving Me

I am a lecturer at the Tshwane University of Technology Department of Drama, Gauteng, South Africa. The young adults I teach come from diverse traditional African cultures, but they are heavily influenced by Western culture, as evident in their fashion, speech, and entertainment choices. Although young people today are bombarded from various sides regarding self-improvement and self-empowerment, demands that they focus on their (Westernized) education are juxtaposed with the insistence that cultural traditions be upheld. Often, little or no explanation or justification is given: it is simply tradition. The confusion borne out of the clash between tradition and modernity is dealt with in various ways. Young black educated men and women, when faced with traditional circumcision and traditional menstrual rites, often choose to forego their knowledge of Western teachings about human rights and doggedly follow tradition, regardless of any questions they may have. White African youth brought up in strict Calvinist cultures often function blithely within narrow boundaries regardless of questions they too have. The tradition versus modernity struggle persists for all. 174 Surviving Me Janine Lewis I was brought up in a white English South African environment where I was fortunate to be able to ask questions and get answers that were as honest as they were revealing. This background has taught me to voice my opinion or ask questions of various cultures, not to pass judgment (and fortunately it has never been perceived in this way) but instead to find answers to my questions or allow others to voice their answers, so that we learn together about our cultures and our differences. We may agree to differ on various viewpoints, but I think it is important to at least have the opportunity to volunteer our opinions and discover where the points of agreement and disagreement actually lie. In facilitating a course I designed, “Theatre for Empowerment,” I strive to provide an environment for voicing the “forbidden”questions and opinions, as well as a platform for the open discussion of the forbidden. The course has brought me into various places, cultures, and situations within the rural, semiurban , and urban sectors of South Africa. Through the course I have learned to appreciate and embrace differences between the peoples of South Africa. Eventually, this desire to embrace difference led to the devising of the play Surviving Me. In this play, a young African girl confronts her archetypes through her dreams in an effort to make sense of her reality. She is grappling with the issue of facing her past in her pursuit of finding herself. Which one are you now? Rural or real? Whose rules do you follow? Which traditions do you follow? Which culture? Are you real? Where do you fit in? A script was created in collaboration with Marianthie van der Walt, an alumna of my course. This concept script was then further elaborated with the multicultural , multilingual cast. Eight of the eleven official languages of South Africa were represented in the cast: Tswana, Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, Seswati, Afrikaans, Sotho, and English. Identity questions within the South African context were shared and explored through the performance process. I would like to believe that, although we may not have found concrete answers, by asking or voicing the questions we have grown as individuals in pursuit of a new unified culture. The play was presented under my direction at the Tshwane University of Technology, Department of Drama in March 2006, with an original video montage created for the show by Katty Vandenberghe and vernacular text in Xhosa by Sibongile Ngele. Verbal exchanges take the form of abstract prose Surviving Me 175 compiled to create an eccentric tale. The play uses a variety of performance techniques, including masks, physical theater, and puppetry, where the mask is used as an extension of the performer. A pivotal moment in the play describes a young girl’s journey of selfdiscovery and her present-day exposure to virginity testing, a sensitive and hotly debated practice still performed in South Africa. This section is told by intertwining two stories in three juxtaposed voices: the young girl’s story, describing her first virginity test at age seven; her mother, who defends the cultural tradition of virginity testing by saying that it is far less gruesome than female genital mutilation and tells her own story in Xhosa; and the young child echoing the mother’s story of being genitally mutilated (as...