A Conversation with theatre-maker, Nwabisa Plaatjies

Over email, whatsapp and voicenote, two black women exchange meditations on the body, the land and the natives who dare to disturb.

Director and theatre-maker Nwabisa Plaatjies describes the land as something that leaks. Something that purposefully or accidently loses or admits contents. The leaking land as something that can exude, but also as something that allows things to escape. The leaking land as porous, as perforated. The land as gaping wound and a cautious, safe cleft.

In accordance with popular narrative, the land is something that can be taken and taken back. Or rather, it is a thing to be given, still useful for all it’s leakiness. The land is breathing, it is heaving. It’s racialized and gendered and politicized and it is here where Nwabisa meets it while re-imagining The Native Who Caused All The Trouble, herself also race and gender and politics.

“Land is something that we use. Land is something that we are. Land is something that leaks. Something that gives things to us. Something we pollute at times. Something that we are constantly engaging with in our daily lives.”

Her voice comes through steady, but she pauses. Stopping to find, to allow for exploration, what land can be. If there are other ways to describe it.

“Of course, there’s the much more [to it than the] simple narrative of “Give us back the land” so we can use the land as a resource but when I was doing this particular play, I was following Tselilo’s narrative of land being something that is God given, that does not belong to anyone. I was looking at it from an embodied point of view. Looking at this I had to start with myself, as a female, as a black woman. This is why I delved in deeper kulendawo. I made the main character a black woman. I looked for a black female protagonist to play uTselilo.”

The land as grammar and punctuation, as in, “the question of the land”.

“They ask me how did you get here? Can’t you see it on my body? The Libyan desert red with immigrant bodies, the Gulf of Aden bloated, the city of Rome with no jacket. I hope the journey meant more than miles because all of my children are in the water. I thought the sea was safer than the land. I want to make love but my hair smells of war and running and running. I want to lay down, but these countries are like uncles who touch you when you’re young and asleep. Look at all these borders, foaming at the mouth with bodies broken and desperate. I’m the colour of hot sun on my face, my mother’s remains were never buried. I spent days and nights in the stomach of the truck, I did not come out the same. Sometimes it feels like someone else is wearing my body.”

- Poet Warsan Shire in “Conversations about Home (At the Deportation Centre)”.

With actress Faniswa Yisa as the lead, Tselilo becomes woman. Sand leaks with a container balanced on her head. She births a sand baby. She cradles and rocks it as it bleeds gravel.

“Sand in the play is used to represent land in an embodied form, whether it is a baby, in a leaking form. Or uNomakrestu who had the boobs are made out of sand, spilling… spilling sand…. We can say that at that point that sand represents the land as a resource, the land as milk. Or when Tselilo gives birth to the land and this land being taken away and she’s rocking it like a child.”

“Sand in the piece got to be a metaphor for the many forms that land can take. Land as a commodity, as something that can be sold. Land as something very significant to culture and being.”

Nwabisa Plaatjies. Image by Jesse Kramer.

“But where is the light and why does it not come in through your bloody fingers? You hold your bloody fingers before my eyes and there is light in them but I can not see it.”

“You say: There are countries in my bloody fingers. I am interested in the borders.”

Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human

Radical Empathy is a pencil drawing by the Zambian-born artist Nolan Oswald Dennis. I first see it sometime in 2016, in a gallery in Woodstock that looks out onto the ruins of District Six.

I walk through these ruins five days out of seven. And the informal monuments, the testimonies and silent witnesses persist. A charred part weathered by time. A wall that refused to completely fall. If you are not careful walking here, you might trip over the foundations of someone’s bulldozed home. My black body gliding over the graveyard of District Six.

In the original telling of the story, playwrights Vanessa Cooke, Danny Keogh and Fink Haysom tell the story of a Mosotho man who in 1937, claims a plot of land in Cape Town in order to build a church. Tselilo has his story negotiated, his screams transcribed by Edna, a white woman who is married to the policeman who will arrest him.

Plaatjies explains, “It’s based on a man who fought with colonial officials esithi they can’t own land, land belongs to God and he wanted to use a certain piece of land to build his church. So this man fought with them… And then Cook, Keogh and Fink wrote a play around that which was “The Native Who Caused All The Trouble”.

They were quite aware of their own positionality, as white people, and we are introduced to the story of Tselilo through a third person, through a couple. uEdna who is married to a police officer then engages okanye witnesses a carriage kaTselilo on a field while doing his work. When I decided to do the adaptation, I focused solely on the story of Tselilo, the story of this man who decides “I’m going to fight these officials because land can not belong to anyone.

In Akin Adesokan’s piece, “A Corpse and Its Jurisdiction”, a body lies at a major intersection in Lagos while various arms of state argue about whose problem it is. And there, in a story about a dead man at a traffic circle, the politics of the body (even after it has gone cold) meet the politics of space .

While speaking with the Mail & Guardian, Plaatjies locates the border on the body and the body as woman. “We can’t talk about the land without engaging with the body, and I’m talking about the female body. I’m talking about the physical body and the limitations and the fears, and the stories, and the narratives, and the politics that go along with it.”

In Tselilo’s story, in his refusals, I see Nomzamo Winnie Mandela. In his ability to dare to say no, Limpho Hani and all the other natives who’ve refused. I asking Plaatjies about being black and woman, about disposition, about exile in your own land.

“The narrative is changing. It’s very hard for me to hold onto [ the notion of being twice displaced] because I’m black and I’m a woman. The narrative is changing. It’s hard for to hold on to lanto yokuthi I’m twice displaced probably because I think times are changing and I think it’s an incredible period to be black and to be a woman, especially with the opportunities that are coming our way.”

“There are women rising who are inspiring us to be better versions of our selves and encouraging us to be our greatest selves. Which is also something that I liked in Tselilo the character, it was his courage to fight authority, to be unreasonable, and that is what I find about young black women and older black feminists in this generation is that everyone is being encouraged to be quite courageous and to fight for their dreams, to become who they want to be.”

“I acknowledge all the violence and they crimes that women have faced. I acknowledge the oppressions that we face on a daily level but on the other scale of things there is a wave of black feminism that is constantly encouraging us to be our greatest selves. You know, forcing everyone to accept our greatness and I think that that part has more power than the oppressed side or being displaced in a type of way.”

The Rabbits Who Caused All The Trouble is a short fable by James Thurber first published in The New Yorker in 1939. Used as allegory, the rabbits refer to persecuted minorities while the wolves in the story are the oppressors. As the wolves enact their violence, the other animals are just mute spectators as the events build up, leading to a genocide.

“They were trying to escape,” said the wolves, “and, as you know, this is no world for escapists.”

All written accounts of this play refer to the incident on which it is based, a black man, a piece of land and a carriage in 1937. While we honour him for his refusal, we can not find his name.