E. E.
Sule, Nigeria
Phillippa
Yaa de Villiers’ Magical Stage
It was a chilly night in
perhaps the most cultural city of the world, Berlin. The
venue was the marvelous, figurative embassy of the Republic
of South Africa, that country that evokes in us one
horrendous chapter of man’s inhumanity to man. We were here
courtesy of Flora Veit-Wild and Susanne Gerhmann, the
conveners of the aptly themed conference: Conventions and
Conversions – Generic Change in African Literatures. This
night was for extra-scholarly pleasure, and Phillippa Yaa de
Villiers was going to entertain us.
The stage was set before we
entered the small hall. It was a room of a child, a girl.
The lights ushered Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, perhaps in her
late thirties, to the stage gently like a silent rain. Soon
she possessed the hall. Her poetic wording penetrated the
audience in the manner persistent raindrops dig into bare
earth. Increasingly her one-actor dramaturgy, her smooth
mutations in accordance to play-within-play, her
near-perfect histrionics within the corners of the stage,
and, above all, her piercing message held all of us captive.
It was a touching story of
apartheid. The persona Alex Coetzee, forty, reminisces on
her dramatic childhood and growing up. Her father abandons
her mother after impregnating her; in turn the mother
abandons the child after giving birth to her. She is adopted
by a barren white couple. She gets all the plastic love and
care, and in her teens realizes she does not belong where
she is. Colors, tastes and choices become the abiding
indicators of alienation; she insists that if her foster
mother were her biological mother she should have known her
colors, her tastes, her choices, naturally. When she starts
going to a higher institution she gets fully imbued with the
free radical spirit and immerses herself in the heating
anti-apartheid activism. She realizes how strange her foster
home has become, and consequently quits. But now at forty,
she is preoccupied with one thing: to find her father, to
discover her real home.
In a one-actor display
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers brings out the charm of this drama
on stage. For most of us who are not from South Africa, the
immediate surprise was that South Africa, in spite of the
post-apartheid luxury (?), is still the richest in drama on
the continent; and that the inhumanity of apartheid is a
subject that will linger for long.
Free Verse
Co-habitation
cohabitation is
mental, dis(re)memory, menial. beneath h(i)eaps of
robust brainwork.
first: rental fleshes, illegal feelings,
extra-judicial surrenders, carefree immersions
second: into the legitimacy of emotion all will
flow. cohabitation is spice of life. it is! |
and the fleshes
ahead of souls shall be united.
they shall redeem heart and reason and age. |
| they shall lisp like
in- |
fants,
lap like rolling river. |
| eagerly outraged sel- |
ves,
liminal enunciation. light! |
| and shall flow in
shif- |
ty
rhythms, cerebral nothings. |
| not seeds, nor seed- |
lings.
not carapaced moans. |
|
subtle, sublime com- m- |
|
union.
cohabitation is spice of life! |
| a poem written on
honeycomb. |
