Trains and things

This past week, Julia, Wenli, and I went to a play at a new theater in downtown Cape Town. Funnily enough, the reason I had heard about the play was actually because it was reviewed in the New York Times. Nothing like getting your local news from abroad, haha!

The play was the newest work by South Africa’s most prominent playwright, Athol Fugard. I didn’t know this before, but he wrote the story Tsotsi (which was later made into the Acadamy Award winning movie). This new play was called “The Train Driver,” based on the true story of a woman who was run over by a train as she waited on the tracks holding her 3 children. The play was the fictional story about how the white train driver who ran her over, traumatized by the event, then went on a personal journey to try and find out who this woman was, where she was buried in the end, and why she chose to end her life. As you can imagine in this country, where everyone is still trying to figure out how to exist in a post-apartheid society, some of the major themes of the play were how different life is for blacks and whites (especially economically speaking), how “white guilt” manifests itself, and how to give everyone in this country an equal opportunity to be claimed as a member of society and have an identity as opposed to just being ignored.

In the play, the train driver was particularly disturbed by the fact that no one had come to claim the woman’s body, and in the end when he couldn’t even find her grave because she had been buried un-named and un-identified and he was going crazy with guilt and trauma, he came to the conclusion that it was his job to claim her as his own, implying a strong bond between him and her despite their very different existences in society. This was just before he was murdered by township gangs (he was staying with a black gravedigger in the in the township, trying to look for the woman’s grave, after his wife kicked him out since he had gone crazy). I liked the play, but Julia and Wenli were less impressed, feeling that it didn’t shed light on anything new and didn’t present a particularly novel way of discussing the issues at hand.

Even if the play wasn’t for everyone, I will say it had a rather surreal connection for me, as the day before we saw it, the train I took home after work ran over and killed someone on the tracks at one of the stops. I don’t know whether this man was simply unable to make it across the tracks in time (seriously, there is an entirely different culture of safety here, and I’m amazed I haven’t seen someone been run over by a car yet, as people are constantly crossing high-speed roads one lane at a time waiting on the meridians until the next car goes by to get one step closer to the other side) or whether it was a calculated decision. It was just a very weird experience, as the train stopped and the door opened and a few women who had just seen the accident were screaming and crying and very traumatized, while another businessman nonchalantly stepped on the train and very bluntly described the gore of the accident to the other passengers and then proceeded to call his wife and tell her exasperatingly how he was going to be home late again because of someone else’s stupidity. Perhaps most telling about this whole experience was that, over the next couple of days as I searched the news for more details about the story and what had happened, I couldn’t find anything reported anywhere. Kind of like the story of the woman in the play, with nobody claiming her body or caring to remember where she was buried. Well, as the reprint of the original news story (the true story for the basis of the play) in the play program said, “Statistics published at the beginning of this month indicate that approximately 400 people die on the train tracks between Cape Town and Khayelitsha every year.” I guess with those numbers, it’s impossible to care about everyone. I don't know...