Mandla Mbothwe’s blog post reflects on iKrele leChiza, the second ReTAGS’ Practice as Research (PaR) theatre production which engages not only with tragedy from a South African perspective, but also the Homeric character of Telemachus and themes of self and home. He is a Founder and Artistic Director at Mud and Fire Parables, Lecturer and Researcher at University of Cape Town and Co-Artistic director at Magnet Theatre.
iKrele leChiza: an attempt to make sense of Tragedy
By Mandla Mbothwe
The loss of an ability to dream might be caused by the fact that we no longer really sleep, silala obungahliyo (sleep soundly), and maybe that is caused by a lack of true darkness and because of that we are never truly present in our waking time. This is the tragedy of uku phutha-phuthana while ibambeke ngeyesigcawu (to stumble/fumble in the dark held up by the slightest spider’s thread). We thought we had arrived and we had woken up from a bad dream, and that the sleeping time and the waking time were now separated, but, in fact, we have been tricked and time has mutated and we are back where we started.
iKrele leChiza, loosely translated as the spear of the herb, emerges from a research project that examines the concept of tragedy from an African and global South perspective. The production process began through a reading of Homer’s Odyssey, particularly the story of Telemachus, which while not a tragedy itself, prompted an investigation of the idea of tragedy as understood from within an African worldview. In addition, I intended ukuzilanda (to re-trace) my past performances in order to resurface and reincorporate, content, concepts and aesthetics. This is an attempt to embark on a journey of ukuzibuyisa (self-recovery) through searching for tragedy in this work of iKrele and of the past.
In Homer, Telemachus searches for his father who has not returned from the war. He does not know if his father is dead or not. At home, the family is under great pressure from the suitors who seek to marry his mother, Penelope, and take over the family’s wealth. Telemachus tries by all means to seek help to protect the family. When all his attemtps fail, the young boy decides to go and search for his father so that he can come back with him to rid the house of the suitors and restore the wellbeing of the family. After a long seach, and many important lessons learnt, he returns home only to discover his father there and together they wage war against the suitors and restore order to the home.
In iKrele leChiza I follow a similar structure. However, in iKrele both parents are absent and the house is occupied by Luphawu the son and Mesuli the daughter. In the absence of the parents, the suitors are constantly robbing the family of its wealth, trying to force Mesuli into marriage with the intention of devouring all that is left to her by her parents. Luphawu is still young and so he struggles to deal with the situation. He goes to family, to local chiefs, to both the tradtional and judicial powers to seek help, but with no result. Both Luphawu and Mesuli are haunted by amathongo (ancestral dreams) and so Luphawu decides to go and search for his father, to bring him home to take revenge on the suitors and to restore iintsika (the pillars of the house). On his journey he discovers that his father, Ngangezwe, is stuck waxingetyeni leminoya (in the spiritual rocks). In his journey to the other world to search for his father, he meets various figures including liberation heroes. Finally he finds his father in-between the world of the living and that of the departed. He cannot take him home with him, but his father presents him with Umkhonto (the spear), the protector of home, to revenge all that seeks to destroy intsika (the pillar), and ufelelwebokhwe (the goat hide) as the restoration of ubuntu (common humanity, oneness). At the end of his quest he returns home as a man. The journey and the return become a rite of passage, similar to umaluka wenkwenkwe (the initiatiation rite of passage).
Luphawu’s quest is to find his father. My quest, on the other hand, has been to retrace my journey into the stories I have told and to discover how they might relate to the concept of tragedy. The quest is to consciously listen and absorb narratives that I have collaborated in creating and interact with them again – perhaps as a form of praying – to harvest more of what they have become. This process, I know stems from the desire to go back and retrace those elements that speak to tragedy from the perspective of these performances, how they were conceived, how they were created, and how they were performed. From the battles of being home-sick even when at home, through to the search for ulwimi olwenziwa ingqambi ngama ndwendwe (language polluted by visitors) and for buried identities. I explore the notions of ikhaya (home) and ubuntu which are under siege by what we could call suitors. The tragedy of this is the fact that many who were victims once are now the carriers of the perpetrator’s spear and they are pointing at new victims, with the spear’s sharp tip kissing their hearts.
The seed that grows from the wound or the wound that gives birth to stories, maybe siphutha-phuthana nje (we are desperately fumbling in the dark now), we are born of that wound, that our lives in what seems to be the waking time is a search for that healing, and the tragedy of it is the fact that we never find it but the searching gives us comfort and eases the suffering.
I think the tragedy in Africa, in South Africa to be specific, is that we have lost the imperative of mystery that comes with culture, language and pluraversity which has always located at the heart of my interest. It is “a practise in not being one” that continues in gifting us with the question “can we listen to this knowledge and aesthesis not as a mystical belief but as holding the possibility of exiting our confinement in the amnesic superficiality of the modern individuality?” (Johannes Neurath, quoted by Ronaldo Vazques: 2019 in Precedence, Dance and the Contemporary).
Maybe the tragedy is being trapped in our own obsessions about being trapped. What if we are not trapped at all, we are just mutations, long disrupted by the tendencies of coloniality’s divide and rule, of separation and exploitation, of the destruction of self-confidence and the conquering of the mind, or of the praising of singularity over plurality. The tragedy of being stuck in our lives, stuck in our heads, stuck in our past, stuck in our beliefs, stuck entlungwini (in the pain) of things being stuck. We need to be in search of a dream for a new language that returns us into the future that is imbued with narratives of possibility. Sibambeke ngeyesigcawu (we are trapped by the spider), by the last thread of the spider web, we must return the falling pillar to its place, or dream of a new one that will hold up the space of sleeping and waking time.
Maybe the tragedy of it all is that that which I seek will never be achieved in full. Maybe it can only exist in fragments, in bits and pieces. Maybe it is in the harvesting of these fragments in a chaotic state that I/we will find comfort to move on a little. Maybe the tragedy is the fact that we can never be the same and in full harmony, that the homes we once knew will never be without the threat of collapsing into ibhodlo (ruins). Maybe the tragedy of it all is to lose sight of our dreams that are being buried in our presence by our past.
“Can we unlearn our being spectators in the modern world of representation and its world-artifice? Re-membering, relegates our earth-bodies, our animal-bodies, our ancestral opens a path outside our amnesic condition, as individuals, as consumers as spectators. It opens the horizon in beyond the superficiality immanence”
– Decolonial Listening, Ronaldo Vazques (interview by Zoe Dankert: 2019)
Those before us disappeared because they went to war seeking the herbs that would help them to dream again, not just any dreams but of amathongo namaphupha (ancestral dreams and the waking time dreams) so as to reimagine the beauty that lies ahead of our current decaying humanity, in search of a full, rounded humanity, ukuphelela komntu (the perfection of the human). Its tragedy is in ukuvuma’kufa, the acceptance of death, of the current state of affairs and to be trapped in the liminal – a state between this life and the other. This is the darkest state, where seeing by the flesh not only is deficient but hides the actual truth of ubuntu.
The awakening can only take pace in the state of sleeping. The resurrection can only happen in the state of burial. Maybe it is at the darkest point of the unknown that the glimpse of mystery exists. Maybe the idea of what we think of as enlightenment, the vision of our eyes that is controlled by our rational mind – that is fed by colonial systems – is the true blindness. This is the absence of ikhaya (home), the fast disappearing of ubuntu, maybe this is our tragedy. Those who are chosen to dedicate their lives in seeking ubuntu in its totality must travel into the dark places of tragedy and accept their death only to be rebirthed in a new community, a new dream of ubuntu.
References
Johannes Neurath, quoted by Ronaldo Vazques: 2019 in Precedence, Dance and the Contemporary.
Decolonial Listening, Ronaldo Vazques: 2019 (interview by Zoe Dankert: 2019)