What a Freedom Fighter Looks Like

Justice Albie Sachs, a veteran of South Africa’s struggle against apartheid, perches on a table in the lecture hall in the law school at USC. He’s a thin handsome man with an expressive lined face and drooping eyes, wearing a patterned black and white silk long-sleeved shirt. The right sleeve dangles empty. He begins his tale at the moment when he awoke in a hospital bed, his eyes bandaged.

This is how he described that moment in his memoir, The Soft Vengeance of a Freedom Fighter:

“What happened?” and a woman’s voice said, “It was a car bomb,” and I collapsed into darkness again, but with a sense of euphoria. I’d survived. For, I don’t know how many decades, every single day in the freedom struggle, wondering, “If they come for me today, if they come for me tonight, if they come for me tomorrow morning, will I be brave? Will I survive?” They’d come for me and I’d got through. I’d got through. I just felt fantastic. Then darkness, quiet, nothing.

Sachs had survived an assassination attempt by his own government. He recalls singing to himself as he lay there. He learned the song from Paul Robeson, his hero. He invites the audience to join him in song, singing “It’s Me Alone…” but no one in the room takes him up on it. (Perhaps lawyers and law students are not big on singing.) But Albie Sachs sings anyway. He is a liberated guy, a 76 year old with a wife in her forties and a five year-old son (with two grown sons by his first marriage.)

He remembers, in those long days in the hospital, how someone sent him a note, promising to avenge the bombing. He recalls his sense of horror and alarm at the prospect. “If we get democracy, rule of law in South Africa,” he said at the time, “that will be my vengeance.”

This is what he calls “soft vengeance,” this process of reconciliation, of perpetrators “turning knowledge into acknowledgement.” It’s the denial in a society, he says, that is corrosive, oppressive.

Listening to Albie Sachs, I recall a visit to ALOUD several years ago by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, the only psychologist on South Africa’s Truth Commission. Pumla described the Truth Commission as “…a mode of accountability that focused not on the retribution of punishment, but the restoration of the dignity of both victims and perpetrators.” And forgiveness did not come cheap in post-apartheid South Africa. Apology from perpetrators was a serious business, a “cleansing process”: The doer of evil deeds acknowledged the crime, expressed remorse, made a public apology. The public nature of the process was essential. In a country where everything had been kept secret for so long, people were able to hear the truth about their past.

Albie Sachs describes the notion of “restorative justice” as “discovering the humanity of the people who harmed you, the people who did terrible things to you.” How, I wonder, would it help our country to get past the oppression of denial, if we were to hold a Truth and Reconciliation Commission now– after centuries of slavery and racism?

“You would be driving, and you would hear the voice of a victim who was tortured, their voice in your own car, in that small space. You hear somebody talking about what happened to them and breaking down on the stage of the Truth Commission, and you are present with them as they break down. You hear their voice. You hear their pain. You can’t escape it,” Gobodo-Madikizela told us.

Albie Sachs is an exuberant man. When he speaks, he gestures emphatically with his left hand, and what’s left of his right arm, the one blown off in the car bomb, gestures as well. He’s all there. Completely there. The empty silk sleeve ripples in response to his thoughts. When he woke up in that hospital room, he tells the hushed audience, he realized he’d “only lost an arm.” He felt, he said, “utter joy.” He felt “an utter conviction—that I would get better, that the country would get better.”

From an Island, #4 (Homage to Rauschenberg’s ‘Pelican’)

No sense trying to sleep during full moon madness, the night after our “Homage to Pelican,” for me a joyful return to the zone of performer’s mind, the thrill of improvisation. And especially meaningful to be performing with Susan Banyas, with whom I danced and made theatrical mischief for many years as the expandable duo So&So&So&So.

To plucks and clunks of John Cage, Carrell escorts Lucinda up onto the chairs (Rauschenberg’s “Ancient Incident”) where she sings in soaring soprano:

OSPREY
OSPREY
ROAM FREE

IBIS!
IBIS!

MALIA HELD
A PELICAN

(etc)

Susan and I glide around on Bob’s black rollerskates (the very ones, yes, that he used in his 1958 “Pelican”, now with fraying shoelaces) adorned with our palm frond parachutes, gently propelling Lavinia and Kate off-balance (they are our Cunningham-Carolyn Brown muses), blue bicycles spiral on the grass in the distant lawn. I’m told an osprey flew over (cue osprey!)the performance during the final moment, wriggling mullet in his talons, illuminated by the sun.

And then there was the egret who wanted some ice:

From an Island #3 the pelican rescue

Some of the strange events on the island this week, among them the rescue of a great white pelican at sea. Our hero, Matt (long-time Rauschenberg “can do” guy) is at the helm when we notice the injured bird… is a fishing line wrapped around his neck? He can’t lift his wing and is unable to fly. Matt doesn’t hesitate. The rescue will commence! Bill takes the helm, others shout out directions as he aims the pontoon straight for the pelican. After several tries, Matt lunges over the bow of the boat and hauls the giant bird onto the deck. Great white pelicans have a wing-span of 9 feet! Our pelican struggles, then settles down, Malia’s calm hand on his beak, stroking him, talking to him. Matt examines the bird– there’s a bloody gash under his right wing. Our resident painter, Lucinda Parker, offers art history commentary, Leda and the Swan, while others wield cameras, cell phone to call CROW, Center for Rehabilitation of Wildlife on Sanibel. We stare into the eyes of the pelican on the journey back to Captiva, where Carrell awaits on the dock of the Fish House with a pelican-sized cardboard box to transport our friend to medical help. I am happy to report today that Patient #142 is stable.

Another strange occurrence– standing on the lawn near the mangroves as a shrieking osprey clutching a wriggling mullet in its talons circled three times over my head. Flying fish! How strange to spend your life swimming in the sea and your death high in a tree.

I’m still searching for a double-spiraled lightning whelk (one in a million), there are preparations afoot for a Mullet Parade at Jensens tonight

LeBrie Rich and one of her original felt mullets

and then there’s the appearance of a mysterious boar…

From an Island, #2

Jon asked for more pictures from Captiva, so I’m thinking, which ones? The strangler vines that remind me of Daphne turning into a tree?

I wish I could show you the turtle that Lucinda saw in the jungle, the one with the delicate sepia pattern on its cream-colored carapace, but s/he hasn’t revealed her/himself to me yet. Whenever one of us sees some new wildlife, there some anxiety about having not been observant enough to see it when it’s a combination of attention and LUCK that brings it about. Bill was able to show me where the screech owl sings and Lucinda had heard him in that spot already several times.

Yesterday I watched an osprey devour a mullet for lunch. there was only half a mullet there by the time I happened on the scene… usually it’s still wriggling as it’s devoured, now that’s, as Beckett would say, “lepping fresh.”

“After lifting its catch from the water, an osprey turns the fish’s head forward, thus reducing wind resistance while flying back to the perch.”

In his new memoir, Nick Flynn notes: “Mimesis, it would seem, can only come from close attention to the world, and this attention (as Weil points out) is a type of prayer, another (possible) way to escape the cage of ego.”

Drawing the little blue heron on the dock of the Fish House was today’s prayer, my blue pencil following the rotation of his body as he warily watched me watching him.

On an Island

“Odysseus asked to spend eternity making his way from a war indefinitely far in the past to an island indefinitely far in the future.”

I’m presently on an island. I’m sitting on the dock of the Fish House, reading The Lost Books of the Odyssey. A pelican drops scissor-like into the sea. A pair of dolphins are breaking and breathing and arcing in the channel. The same ones, perhaps who awakened the photographer who was sleeping here the other night, woke her at 4 AM. To be awakened by dolphins! That’s the magic of this place, Captiva, where I am in residence with a group of ten other painters, dancers, writers, performers.

Walking back through the jungle to our cottage at dusk from the dance studio with Susan, we’re talking about how we began making theater together years ago, returning to our sources. I’d just read aloud to her a poem by Robert Creeley, “Histoire du Florida,” about age, that ends: “Come out, while there’s still time to play.”

Then a bobcat lopes across our path, taking our breath away.

Captiva is where Bob Rauschenberg lived and worked for decades, and his compound—with studios and houses, lawns and jungle– is now, thanks to the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, being opened up as an artist residency program. We’re the pilot residency (hey it’s a difficult job, but someone’s gotta do it), helping to tweak the studios and the protocol so that generations of artists after us will create here in these remarkable spaces.

Reading in Calvin Tompkin’s Off The Wall, about Bob’s trip to India, the sight of a golden sari trailing in mud made him realize: “that everything is relative, that everything is acceptable , and that you don’t need to be afraid of beauty either.”

which applies, I think, to this vision from the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge, from yesterday:

Lear in Paris

“Better thou hadst not been born than not to have pleased me better.”
(King Lear to his daughter)

I performed naked for my father once (you see, that got your attention! ) I’ve written about it on this very blog. I’ve used his voice in a soundtrack and I’ve mined his wartime letters in my book The Souvenir. But it never occurred to me to perform with my father… what would Norman Steinman have thought of the invitation? (I used to tape my family seders for use in my plays, and the one year I didn’t set up the tape recorder, my father asked, “Aren’t we interesting to you any more, Louise?”) Would this very private man have agreed to perform with me, simply out of love and a sense of solidarity? That’s what three stolid German fathers agreed to do with their daughters who form the radical theater collective She She Pop, for “Testament,” an astonishing take on King Lear which I saw at Theatre des Abesses earlier this month in Paris (in German with French supertitles.)

There’s a saying in French: tenir tete a quelqu’un… standing up to someone. How do we stand up to someone who has power over us? What if Norman and I had aired our disagreements, our differing perspectives of life– on stage? What if I’d argued to the audience as witness– that my older brother, the math genius and doctor-to-be, received preferential treatment during my childhood? What if my father had bemoaned on stage my choice of going into the theater and said, as he often did, “You’d have made a very good lawyer.” This is raw, uncomfortable powerful theater.

It was deeply moving to see these flaccid older men stripping to their underwear in the “tempest” scene (while being doused with water from a plastic bottle by one of the daughters), revealed in all their frailty and wounded pride. An annotated paperback of Lear—a template for this deep conversation about parent/child issues, is displayed on the wall with an overhead projector. Key words set off the scenes—what is the equivalent of your father arriving at your house with his courtiers? Lisa Lucassen diagrammed how much space would be left in her tiny flat if her father moved in with his entire library, concluding, of course, absolutely none. One daughter/actor recites all the benefits her father will receive under the German health care system, while on a video screen (the camera is live on her father on-stage), he intones repeatedly in a quavery voice, “but I will always love you. But I will always love you.”

She She Pop/Testament

Perhaps my father, like one of the German fathers in the play, would have graphed a complicated mathematical equation (he was once a math teacher) to chart the dynamics of our love and obligation for and to one another. My pharmacist father may not have understood why his daughter spent hours in a dance studio, crawling on the floor or playing with Howdy Doody puppets. But he never withheld his support, emotional or material. And he was there in the audience for my performance at Project Artaud, accepting a piece of matzoh from his naked daughter on the stage. Ah what one does for love.

Amsterdam, Winter 2012

The Portugese Synagogue was empty on a winter’s day in Amsterdam, dust in the pews. I caught my tiny humunculus of a reflection in the sheen of the silver chandeliers. Outside, a statue of the philosopher Spinoza (banned from the same Portugese Synagogue for his radical ideas, history’s first “secular Jew”) cast his gaze on the nearby canal. On an adjacent street, I found these two musicians– the saxophonist with a ready smile and a tip of his cap, both of them playing with gloves. I dropped some coins into their instrument case and stood still in the chill air, soaking up their soulful sounds. The day before I’d visited Anne Frank Huis, it had been over thirty years since my last visit; how can it not fail to move one to the core climbing those steep stairs to the annex, the glimpse of sky from the attic window? When I was last in Amsterdam decades ago, I played a demon at the Mickery Theater in Ping Chong’s AM/AM. Returning to this beautiful city, Wandering these streets is a joy, surprises abound.

Ah to be alive in Amsterdam on a winter’s day in 2012, what a gift. I stood transfixed listening to their music. 

Amsterdam street musicians (notice they’re wearing their gloves!)