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Paradise Lost in the Great Karoo : Athol Fugard's (Croad to Mecca"

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Paradise Lost in the Great Karoo : Athol Fugard's (Croad to Mecca Paradise Lost in the Great Karoo : Athol Fugard's (CRoad to Mecca" ERROL DURBACH T AHE CENTRAL dramatic icon in Fugard's most recent play1 is a lonely woman on a country road. There are three such women, and three such roads. Elsa Barlow makes her 800-mile journey from Cape Town through the God-deserted wilderness of the Karoo to New Bethesda, where the houses are without electricity or running water or the simplest amenities of the modern world —• a trek from enlightened South African liberal attitudes into the stagnating world of reactionary nineteenth-century Afrikanerdom. She gives a ride to a destitute African woman forced to leave the white baas's farm after her husband's death, dropping her off where the road forks to walk the last eighty miles in the cold Karoo night, with a baby on her back, to Cradock — a journey from nowhere to nowhere. And, in the middle of nowhere, leading out of the darkness of New Bethesda, is the visionary road of the sculptress Helen Martins — the road to a fantastically reconsti• tuted Paradise in the midst of wilderness, destitution, loneliness and spiritual distress. The familiar Fugard territory of decrepit cityscapes and mud• flats, of South African prisons and Port Elizabeth tearooms seems curiously remote from the austere and distant region of the Karoo ; the habitual, almost Beckettian couplings of paired opposites -— Boesman and Lena, John and Winston •— now give way to a triadic pattern of relationships where, for the first time in Fugard's drama, two women provide the focus of the whole event; and in place of his customary analysis of the soul of man under apart• heid, and the appalling racial tensions generated by the political system, Fugard shapes this material into an artist-parable and explores the abstract theme of creativity under totalitarianism. 4 ERROL DURBACH His development, even to his most sympathetic critics, would seem to be a mirror of the White Liberal's failure to effect signifi• cant political change in South Africa — "a retreat," as Dennis Walder puts it, "into self-scrutiny, fantasy, and an obsession with the psychopathology of the isolated consciousness" (100). Mar• garete Seidenspinner, more critical of this apparent withdrawal from the political fight, traces in Fugard's plays a pattern of dis• engagement from passionate involvement in the suffering of the Black and Coloured communities to a form of solipsism, from Liberal hope to a pessimistic dedication to lost causes, from a universal concern for social issues to a regionalism which, she claims, "facilitates his compromise with the current situation and enables him to redefine his function as a writer within the acces• sible demarcation lines of South African existence" (219). But The Road to Mecca, it seems to me, does not lead away from the vital political issues of the earlier plays nor does it imply a lonely withdrawal into the private consciousness of the disaffected artist. Art, in this play, is revolution — as it had been in The Island, where to stage the Antigone on Robben Island was to threaten subversion. But the rebellious artist in The Road to Mecca is not a dissident Black. Fugard, as Albert Wertheim points out, has returned to the artist-figure of Dimetos, whom he now conflates with the figure of the "persistent, indefatigable Afrikaner" last seen in A Lesson From Aloes ( 17 ) ; and if, as Fugard maintained in his interview at Yale, "Helen is me" (Honnegger 35), it be• comes clear what particular group of South African artists she represents — the disaffected Afrikaner himself, the traitor to his own national ideology, the outcast from the tribe whose art has made him anathema to the community and isolated him in the terrible freedom of his craft. Although Fugard has never claimed to belong to the group of dissident Afrikaner writers known as Die Sestigers ("The Writers of the 'Sixties"), his focus in The Road to Mecca is brought to bear upon the dilemma of the Afri• kaans artist who chooses to remain in the wilderness his country has become, who mourns the lost hope of Paradise and uses his art (as Miss Helen puts it at the end of the play) to "misdirect all the good Christian souls around here and put them on the road to Mecca" (79). FUGARD'S "ROAD TO MECCA" 5 The Road to Mecca is a deeply personal if not an autobio• graphical play, set in a region of the country about fifteen miles from Fugard's birth-place, which cries for the beloved country with the voice of an entire generation of contemporary Afrikaner writers — André Brink, Etienne Leroux, J. M. Coetzee — who can neither relinquish their culture nor live with what it has become. Pity the Black man in Sizwe Bansi is Dead who must survive within apartheid at terrible cost to his integrity. Pity the child in "Master Harold" . and the Boys who must grow up tainted by his racial heritage. But pity, also, the liberated Afri• kaner who is oppressed by the failure of a national ideology even as he is bound by love for a land as bleak as the countryside around Middelburg and New Bethesda. The Karoo lies in the remote fastnesses of the Eastern Cape, a landscape of unremitting desolation flanked by mountain ranges which intensify its isola• tion and ensure its inaccessibility, its villages widely scattered and its population predominantly Afrikaner. These are the people of whom Pauline Smith wrote in her tales of The Little Karoo ( 1925) and whose way of life has remained largely impervious to the advent of electricity or, if Fugard is to be believed, the en• lightened political values of the twentieth century. Arnold Ben• nett, in his preface to Pauline Smith's short stories, describes the Karoo dwellers as simple, astute, stern, tenacious, obstinate, unsubduable, strongly prejudiced, with the most rigid standards of conduct — from which standards the human nature in them is continually falling away, with fantastic, terrific, tragic, or quaintly comic conse• quences. They are very religious and very dogmatically so. (9) Their religion is an austere brand of Calvinism, and their Church is the Nederduitse Gereformeerde — the Dutch Reformed — which, until very recently,2 enjoyed the uniquely paradoxical situation of embracing both Christianity and apartheid in the same general ecumenical gesture. The play does not protest openly against the laws that enforce segregation or perpetuate the injustices of the Nationalist regime; but the powerful pres• ence of the Dutch Reformed Church, its authority, and its power are constant reminders of the close affinity between Government policy and the Church which has justified this policy.3 In the 6 ERROL DURBACH Reverend Marius Byleveld we see not only the "Nationalist Party at prayer" (which is how the Dutch Reformed Church has been defined ), but one of the great forces in persuading the Afrikaner that segregation, conformity, and racial superiority are endorsed by the Bible and sanctified by the faith. "When one considers the facts of the Afrikaner's history," writes Brookes, "and realizes that his Church and his cultural leaders have encouraged his feelings and not challenged them, it is not difficult to under• stand why apartheid has taken such a hold on the South African white electorate" (xxxi). The extraordinary difficulty of break• ing that hold, of embracing a freedom even lonelier and more desolate than the Karoo, is the theme of Fugard's play; and his heroine is a seventy-year-old woman whose human nature (in Bennett's phrase) "falls away" from conformity and rigidity — and who dares to countermand her faith, her history, and her culture through the dissident and heretical vision of an "un• Christian" Mecca. The Road to Mecca is the route to a difficult and fragile freedom — freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of creativity —• inhibited by the manacles forged in peculiarly South African habits of mind. And the three women on their different roads are mirrors of the liberated/manacled self, each seeing herself reflected in the image of the other. Elsa Barlow, all but shattered by her inability to sustain a vision of freedom based on trust, travels deep into the heart of Afrikanerdom to reconfirm the possibility of liberation in the life of Helen Martins. "She challenges me," Elsa explains to the Dominée: She challenges me into an awareness of myself and my life, of my responsibilities to both that I never had until I met her. There's a hell of a lot of talk about freedom, and all sorts of it, in the world where I come from. But it's mostly talk, Dominée, easy talk and nothing else. Not with Helen. She's lived it. One dusty afternoon five years ago [. .] I met the first truly free spirit I have ever known. (66-67) En route to New Bethesda she encounters its opposite : the black woman whose road is the rest of her life, for whom no "Mecca" waits. She is the paradigm of woman's soul under the Afrikaner regime, incapable of resisting subjection, overwhelmed by the FUGARD'S "ROAD TO MECCA" 7 spirit of the Karoo, whose response to her fate is to endure it with the stoicism that characterizes so many of Fugard's social victims. There, but for the grace of God. ... I asked her who she was. She said: "My English name is Pa• tience." She hitched up the baby, tightened her doek, picked up her little plastic shopping bag and started walking. As I watched her walk away, measuring out the next eighty miles of her life in small steps, I wanted to scream.
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