Boesman AND LENA TWO PDF

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CRAWFORD NORTH COAST

BOESMAN AND LENA ANALYSIS: Act 1: A coloured man, Boesman, and his woman Lena, are settling for the night on some mud-plots, where they are going to build a shack. They have walked with all their possessions from the shanty-town where they lived, because it has that morning been razed to the ground by government bulldozers. Lena has been beaten by Boesman for dropping three empty bottles from their collection for which they would collect the refund money. Exhausted and confused, she tries unsuccessfully to remember the order of all the settlements from which they have been forced to move on. Boesman refuses to correct her, and jeers at her as he erects their shelter. As Lena finally resolves to leave him, she sees someone sitting alone a short distance away, and, yearning for companionship, calls to him to join them. Boesman, hostile and suspicious, laughs derisively when he sees that the decrepit creature who at last moves towards them is not coloured, but black, and that Lena therefore cannot communicate with him as he speaks Xhosa. Though frustrated by his inability to understand her, she succeeds in persuading the old African to sit by their fire, and tries to seize from Boesman one of the two bottles which she claims is hers. Boesman drops his threatening stick and goes off when Lena reminds him that the old man would be a witness if he beat her to death. Managing at last to make the old man say her name, she fetches one of the two water bottles, gives him a drink, and describes some of her wretched experiences: her affection for a dog that Boesman had repelled; that day’s beating and exhausting walk; her failing sight; and the increasing weariness she feels at every new trek with Boesman, who no longer shares any happiness with her. She then recalls the child they had who died at the age of six months, and her terrible sufferings in subsequent miscarriages. Boesman returns; Lena feigns lack of interest in the old man, but then tells Boesman that he intends to get some gardening work the following day and buy them some wine. Boesman derides her; Lena lays out supper and, not allowed to divide their bread into three, she undertakes to share her half with the old man. By giving Boesman her bottle of wine, she bribes him to let the old man stay. Keeping the wine, Boesman refuses to let him inside their shelter, but is prevented by Lena’s threatening tone from driving him off. Lena goes to search for firewood; Boesman snatches the blanket she has given the old man, but flings it back as she returns. The Act closes with Boesman watching the other two by the fire, sharing Lena’s half of the bread and tea. Boesman’s food is untasted. Act 2: An hour later Boesman is drunk and Lena and the old man still huddle under the blanket. Boesman is trying to make Lena re-enact, for his entertainment, her pleas of that morning to the white officials to spare their shack, and to get the old man to add his appeal. He then mimes, first Lena’s actions at the demolition of the shacks, and secondly, the movements of the bulldozer. Finally, recalling the whole scene, he declares defiantly that by the burning of the shacks the wretchedness of their condition had been wiped out, and he had won his freedom to walk where he would. Lena’s constant nagging presence, however, and the need to find a night’s shelter, had soon proved that such freedom was illusory, and that the coloured people of South Africa are ‘whiteman’s rubbish’.

The old black man, similarly, is an item of garbage that Lena has ‘picked up’, and for which she has paid the price of a bottle of wine. Continuing his taunts, he threatens to drive her away the following night. As he retreats into the shelter, Lena chatters to the old man, and, remembering her youth, begins to sing and dance. Boesman watches her from the shelter. She sings a song recalling their wanderings, and, when she settles down with the old man, Boesman confesses to having broken the three empty bottles himself. Neither can fully understand the anguish of Boesman’s state which has led him to beat Lena and now drives him to smash one of his own hands against the other. He is enraged by Lena’s chattering to the uncomprehending old man; she in her confusion pleads for another blow so that the old man can witness it. Boesman pours out a frenzied utterance of disgust at their condition. Utterly mute in the plight which is their life, they are like the silent, stillborn children that Lena bore and he buried – as they two will soon be buried. They are too disgusting, he declares, for the old man to look at; but Lena reveals that he cannot do so, for he is dead. Boesman, at first unwilling to touch the corpse, becomes terrified at the thought of the likely investigation into the death. Boaded by Lena’s taunts that she will reveal his hostility, which will then be seen as a motive for murder, he becomes increasingly violent. First he kicks the body, then beats it, giving Lena the chance to say that he will be convicted for assault on her as well as on the old man. Panic-stricken, he decides to walk away, and asks Lena to go with him. She defies him, declaring she will stay and sleep in the shelter, whereupon he pulls it down. Collecting together all their possessions into an impossible load for one person, he stands whilst Lena walks towards the old man. She returns to Boesman, loading some of their goods on to her head, and sets off with him on another – her last – walk. Notes: Page 242: The author’s introduction to Boesman and Lena and other plays includes several passages from his notebook describing people he had seen who had helped to inspire his characters of Boesman and Lena (e.g. pp. xxi – xxii). He omits, however, a significant entry that he wrote in the Notebook in December 1968, in which he describes a ‘Boesman and Lena’ type of coloured couple he had seen walking towards the Reservation, she leading a ‘location mongrel’ on a length of string, he, hatless and his head shaven bald – presumably after a spell in jail – carrying a large sack which Fugard presumed contained the couple’s provisions. Three months later, after two performances of Boesman and Lena at Rhodes University, he notes considerable changes in his thinking about B & L, prompted by further observation of the same couple. ‘Lisa tells (him) that the dog is dead … stoned by the man.’ His note continues: ‘What hurts me …? The bleeding head of the dog, and that of the man merge.’ Page 270: ‘I’d sit out there with a dog to-night.’ One cannot help but be reminded of Cordelia’s words in King Lear when she hears how her father had been turned out into the storm: Mine enemy’s dog Though he had bit me, should have stood that night Against my fire. Neither the situations nor the ideas are parallel. The associations of the dog and the fire, however, and Lena’s next words ‘We’ll need more … making shelter’, and also the fact that she is addressing an old man, stir in the reader’s mind, or heart, the memory of the suffering Lear. Page 292: Boesman’s summary of his wanderings with Lena follows the detailed outline of their twenty or more years together that the author set out in his notebook in July 1968, whilst he was working on the play. This entry reveals how fully Fugard realised his characters before distilling them for dramatic presentation.

‘OUR SAD STORIES’: At one level, the story of Boesman and Lena is an indictment of South African society. Athol Fugard (Notebooks; March 1969) doubted whether he had said enough about this ‘social’ content, but no-one who sees or reads the play can doubt that the two coloured people are victims of Apartheid. Fugard’s opening stage direction decribes their life as one ‘of hardship and dissipation’, and the wretched conditions in which they exist are at least an excuse for their reliance on alcohol, whilst one may be tempted to ask whether they are not its cause. ‘Whiteman’ closes his mind to the plight of those in the coloured townships until he decides that their diseaseridden pondoks are threatening his own health and security. His solution is then to bulldoze the entire township, burn whatever possessions the occupants cannot cling to, and then ignore those occupants until the same procedure happens again at another township. The only time whiteman will intervene is when a death occurs in what he chooses to regard as suspicious circumstances. If Boesman is found beside Outa’s corpse, which he has beaten till his knuckles are skinned, as he beat Lena herself earlier that day, whiteman will ‘just grab’ him, deciding that there is sufficient evidence to remove the need for questioning. Lena’s bitter query summarises the whole situation: ‘Why don’t they ask some questions when we’re alive?’ (pg. 287) That the victims of such a system deteriorate, both physically and morally, is inevitable. There are constant reminders of Lena’s nearness to death: her confusion induced by exhaustion; her own description of her wasted frame – Pap ou borste, ribbetjies (pg. 281); ‘another day gone … I haven’t so many left’ (pg. 242); and the author’s notebook states (September 1968) that at the end of the play Lena is setting out on her last walk. Her way of life helps to account for the death of their first, live child, and for her subsequent miscarriages; and the dead babies are symbolic of what has happened to the relationship between Boesman and Lena, as all their hopes are stillborn. At the same time, as Lena wears out physically, Boesman’s capacity to hold down satisfactory work deteriorates. Baas Robbie (pg. 292), judging from Lena’s ejaculation – ‘My God’ – seems to have been a harsh employer, and in any case his death puts an end to Boesman’s work on his farm. Boesman then drifts from one occupation to another, at one time serving a short prison sentence for theft (pg. 245), and now, at the time of the play, planning to steal a spade in order to dig out a few worms to sell as bait. Claiming that his tin is full of live worms, he will, in fact, have filled it mainly with dead ones. In addition to being a brutal oppressor of Lena, he is undeniably a thief, a liar and a drifter. Outa, the old African, is likewise a victim. One of the effects of what is presented as a corrupt society, however, is that there is mutual incomprehension between its coloured and black victims – ‘He’s not brown people, he’s black people’ (pg. 258). Though Lena can murmur, ‘Hotnot and a Kaffer got no time for apartheid’, Boesman in fact, treats blacks as whiteman treats him – ‘Black bastards’ (pg. 259) and ‘He’s not coming inside. Bring your Kaffer and his fleas into my pondok. Not a damn.’ (pg. 269). Finally, Fugard would seem to imply, the whiteman, beset by fear and guilt, is himself debased by the society he has created, so that Lena observes: ‘Whiteman’s drinking himself to death. Take your sack, knock on some back doors and it’s full by no time’. (pg. 262). The implications of the Boesman-Lena relationship, however, go beyond their social meaning. As the play was taking shape, Fugard found himself absorbed by his characters at a deeper, ‘metaphysical’ level. As he indicates in his notebook, he saw their predicament as ‘a metaphor of the human condition which revolution or legislation cannot substantially change.’ Though their predicament, that is, in one sense derives from the South African way of life, its effects on them is determined by what they are, by their particular combinations of human qualities reacting to that predicament.

In the first Act, Boesman appears as a bully, an oppressor, brutalised by the circumstances of his life so that he stones stray, starving dogs, abuses Lena, rejects a dying old African. That he and Lena have had moments of happiness together is made clear: “It used to be side-by-side, with jokes. At night he let me sing, and listened” (pg. 264). From this kind of sharing, as well as from their shared privations, grew their love. Gradually the audience comes to understand why that love has turned to hate and what are the motives for Boesman’s vicious conduct. In the second Act, Boesman reveals the effect on him of burying their dead children and, more recently, of hearing a whiteman laugh as he beat Lena in their bulldozed township. His disgust at their conditions of life has produced a hatred not only of humanity in general, and of Lena, but of himself. (Fugard discusses this in the extract quoted from his notebook on pg. xxiii of the Introduction to Boesman and Lena.) Terrified of discovering his value, he has tried to stave off any such discovery by acts of physical violence against Lena, and for the same reason he rages when Lena brings in the old man. His disgust at Lena’s cringing demands for his beating witnessed by Outa, leads to some sort of insight. His revulsion ( ‘sies’) is not just for Lena, but for himself, for he sees that they are bound to each other, that they are, as Fugard says ‘each other’s fate’: ‘There’s only me. All you’ve got is me and I’m saying “ Sies!” … You think I haven’t got secrets in my heart too’ (pg. 288). At the end of the play therefore, though he has shouldered all their possessions, he stands motionless, seemingly unable to move until Lena joins him and takes her share. some time after writing this play, Fugard realised that ‘almost exclusively, “woman” – a woman – has been the vehicle for what I have tried to say about survival and defiance.’ Here it is indeed Lena who, battered and not far from death, can finally say, ‘I’m alive, Boesman. (Qt. Milly’s cry, ‘Mildred Jenkins, you are still alive!’, in People are Living There). Life has baffled as well as tortured her: in the first part of the play her concentration on trying to remember the order of their walks seems to express a yearning to find an order, or meaning, in life and an identity for herself. It is Boesman’s words that point this significance: ‘You’re lost’ … ‘Find yourself?’ … ‘One day you’ll ask me who you are’ (pg. 252 – 253); and “When … where … why! All your bloody nonsense questions’ (pg. 254). There is irony here, for though he claims ‘I know my world’ he is bewildered by himself, and when he finally (pg. 292) tells Lena the right order, they both know they are no nearer a solution: “It doesn’t explain anything’, she laments, and he, lamely agreeing, replies, “I know.” Lena has come in the course of the play, however, to understand her value as a human being: she has shared her tea, her bread, her blanket, with Outa, who has learnt to speak her name. She can say at the end, therefore, ‘somebody saw a little bit. Dog and a dead man.’ (pg. 293) She has survived to shoulder another crushing burden, and to instruct Boesman to kill her outright next time his violence overcomes him, rather than ‘let the old bruises put the rope around (his) neck.’ Though no nearer to an understanding of the misery of the human condition, in her last defiance of it she is heroic. ‘Flowers on the rubbish-heap’ In a talk on BBC radio (Kaleidoscope, 25 January 1984) Fugard stated that the sense of ‘texture’ of a character is very important to him, and gave this as one reason for remaining in South Africa, since he feels himself too old to learn about ‘new’ people in the same way. This ‘texture’ of Boesman and Lena – and Outa – and their world is perceived from the moment the play opens, and it comes as no surprise to discover that on his study wall Fugard had a map of Port Elizabeth and its environs, with all the townships marked, so that he ‘lived’ his characters’ walks from Korsten to Swartkops etc. He knows the feeling of digging for Prawns – ‘Your hands are stiff, the mud and water is cold, but after a little while you start to sweat and it’s okay.’ (pg. 279); the coloured people’s passion for condensed milk; their delight in dance and mime (Boesman’s mime of the bulldozer). He feels the difference between the ways in which the feet of blacks, coloured people and whites strike the earth in their dances, and senses the historical reasons for this: ‘Not like your dances. No war-dances for us. They say we were slaves in the old days. Just your feet

on the earth and then stamp. Hit it hard! … Nothing fancy. We don’t tickle it like the white people’ (pg. 280). Above all, he reproduces the rhythms and phrases of their speech, even though he records (Introduction, pg. xx) that he wrote much of the play originally in Afrikaans and had to translate, except for those phrases for which he could find no English equivalent. (English audiences, or readers, who have to use the glossary, cannot, of course, fully appreciate the effect of these Afrikaans words and phrases. One can guess, however, that for a bilingual South African audience they enrich still further the realism of the presentation). Fugard’s notes reveal what care he took with the structure of this play, knowing, as an actor as well as a dramatist, that realistic characters must be presented in a well-organised play. Thus, the first Act can be considered as having two movements, linked by their dynamic factor which is Lena: in the first she is trying to orientate herself, is momentarily elated when she thinks she has done so, then ‘flounders’ again. The Act drives on, however, into its second movement, because she calls Outa in, and her involvement with him affects Boesman and his relationship with her. The second Act, therefore, begins with an exploration in greater depth than hitherto of that relationship, resulting from Lena’s growing involvement with Outa. It finishes with a second, contrasting movement, in which the death of Outa leads to Lena’s feeling herself alone, yet finally accepting her lot, which binds her to Boesman. Fugard’s imagination has transmuted this raw material of realistic characters and a wellorganised plot into a play that is often poetic, and he records how, in the process of writing the work, the map of Port Elizabeth was superseded by the mystery of the ‘word’ which lay in the blank paper (Introduction pg. xxiv). It is through word and image, then, that the themes of the play are ultimately apprehended. Boesman and Lena are ‘whiteman’s rubbish’, and though Boesman’s speech from which this phrase is taken does not come until the second Act (pg. 277), the audience perceives the association the moment the play opens, and Boesman and Lena come on to the mud-flats burdened with their shabby belongings and a piece of corrugated iron. When the play was first produced in London, Fugard decided to fill the stage with real rubbish, brought in from London’s refuse-tips. The word itself, though in a different context, is repeated early in the play – “When she puts down her bundle, she’ll start her rubbish” – ‘Rubbish?’ (pg. 241). Shortly afterwards, Lena, confessing that ‘My life. It felt old to-day’, describes that life in terms of worn-out possessions: ‘the old pot that leaks, the blanket that can’t even keep the fleas warm. Time to throw it away.’ In such a speech, there is a ‘heightening’ of language in place of the realistic dialogue of other parts of the play, and it is a measure of Fugard’s skill that the change from one kind of language to another is usually imperceptible. A more deliberately poetic style is introduced in Boesman’s speeches in the first part of Act 2, and here the effect is to illuminate both his character and also their predicament which is at once South African and universal: He wasn’t just burning pondoks. They alone can’t stink like that, or burn like that. There was something else in that fire, something rotten. Us? Our sad stories, our smells, our world! And it burnt, boeta. It burnt. I watched that too. The end was a pile of ashes. And quiet. (pg. 275)

Here, and again, for instance, in his speech on pg. 284, are some of the ‘flowers on the rubbish heap’, and they are there in Lena’s speeches, too. Lena is several times associated with living creatures: at the opening of the play, for instance, she perceives the grace and soaring lightness of a bird’s flight – and envies the bird because of its contrast with her heaviness on the mud-flats. There are, too, the frequent references to the stray dog she has pitied and yearned for; she remembers how when their shack in the bush was discovered the boer aimed his gun at them and Boesman ‘went down that road like a rabbit’.

Even when recalling to Outa ...