|
|
|
Interview with Apollo Amoko Lead actor in "The Island," performed at the University of Michigan Museum of Art
Ann Arbor, Michigan, November 19, 2000
|
"The
Island" is a play written in 1975 by the internationally acclaimed
white South African playwright Athol Fugard, in collaboration with
black actors John Kani and Winston Ntshona. It recounts a
well-known interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone that
was staged by the prisoners of Robben Island, off the South African
coast, in the late 1960s. In the Robben Island production,
the man who volunteered to play the role of Creon was a prisoner with
little stage experience named Nelson Mandela.
University of Michigan graduate students Apollo Amoko and Darius Cobb
play internees in the South African prison camp who have been cellmates
for almost three years. John, the character played by Mr.
Amoko, is a passionate, fiery, and overbearing intellectual, consumed
with preparations for the prisoners' presentation of Antigone. He
has bullied his cellmate, Winston, into playing the title role, and
berates him for his slowness to learn the part and his later reluctance
to carry through with his commitment to play it at all. When
John finds out that his sentence has been commuted, and he has only
three more months to serve in the penal colony, however, the roles
reverse. At first, John offers generously not to talk with
Winston about his impending freedom. But he can't help
counting the days. Bitterly, Winston reminds him that he
will be left behind, and that John will quickly forget
him. John is tortured by guilt as Winston tells him what his
freedom will be like. "Your freedom stinks, John," Winston
tells him. "You will laugh, you will eat, you will fuck, and
you will forget. Fuck slogans. Fuck
politics. I am jealous of your freedom, John."
The climax of the play is in the prisoners' performance of Antigone. John
plays Creon, the head of state, who has sentenced Antigone to death for
burying her brother, Polyneices, a traitor, next to that of her other
brother, Eteocles, who defended the state. The hero was
buried with all honors, but Polyneices's grave was to be left
open. Antigone defied the law by burying the body of her
brother. It is clear that, on a purely political level, the
trial and punishment of Antigone is a story of the ancient struggle
against injustice, and this is what made it so passionately
representative of the South Africans' struggle against political
oppression. The moral issues that arise between John and
Winston, however, are even more compelling, and elevate the play from a
purely political level to a spiritual one.
"Winston is, for me, ultimately the more interesting character," Apollo
Amoko told me, as we talked about the performance a few days after the
event. "To me, the pivotal moment is the third scene, when
John is going home in three months. I don't think that the
fourth scene--the staging of Antigone, with Antigone's
sense of 'Even in death I have conquered'--quite answers the image of
Winston that we have at the end of the previous scene--the image of
this man who, as John says, put his head on the block for others, and
then says 'Fuck the others'. The reading to which I'm
inclined is that Winston is crushed. That's the image that
the third scene leaves us with. He tries really hard to be
happy for John, that John is going away. And he tries really
hard to say that there are higher ideals, and that it's worth
sacrificing your life for the sake of these higher
ideals. And then, I think, he says, 'Maybe it isn't'."
 "My
reaction," I responded, "was that, in this play, we see how the system
of injustice imposed by the white regime upon the South African black
majority did not stop at enforcing inequality between white and black,
but replicated this same inequality in the prison itself, and among the
inmates themselves. The sentencing system was completely
arbitrary, and this produced inequality in exactly the place where one
would expect to find equality. Even though all the prisoners
were serving sentences, you actually found inequality among them,
because they were all different sentences."
"That's completely true," Apollo agreed. "For instance,
Winston says to John, 'Forget me. Forget me because I'm
going to forget you.' And then he says, 'Others will come
like you, and count like you, and go like you, and I'll still be
here.' He's sort of a heroic figure, because he's sacrificed
everything, and he's there for life, with no prospect of being
released. And I guess for me the big question that I think
the third scene is posing is, 'Is that a fair sacrifice to ask from
anybody?'"
"To me, this brings up the question of the inherent unfairness or
arbitrariness of life, in general," I commented. We're all
stuck here, am I right? We're all serving some kind of penal
servitude, in a way. But we have different types of
sentences that we're serving, and some sentences are lighter and some
are harder."
"Yes, I agree with that, in general," Apollo replied, "with the
provision that, of course, this is a particularly extreme
example. I guess that I'm coming up with a very pessimistic
reading of what the play is about. It's surprising me as I'm
articulating it. But I think at least it opens a possibility
to say that, rather than just looking at these gestures of incredible
bravery and self-sacrifice, like Winston's or Antigone's--these
incredible triumphs--that one might pose the question whether it is
ever justified to put anybody in that situation, whether it is ever
justified to ask anybody to put his head on the block for others, and
what it really means to say that there are higher ideals before which
we can sacrifice everything, before which we can sacrifice our
families, our children, our freedom."
"When you refer to Winston's self-sacrifice, you mean those actions
that landed him in prison, in the first place, am I right?" I asked.
"Yes, of course."
"But in the course of the play itself, he does not sacrifice
himself. His life has already been taken away from him."
"Yes. That's why I like the third scene. He's not
a heroic character. He's a beaten down man who's given up on
life."
"I had a
different reaction to it," I insisted. "I see that he's
beaten down, but to me, the fact that he's beaten down gives him
greater clarity. You have to be beaten down before you can
realize what life is all about. He has greater insight than
John does. When he says, 'I'll forget you, John,' he's
really dismissing him. He realizes that the reality of his
future life in prison will have nothing to do with the fate of others,
either in the prison or in the outside world, but will hinge purely on
how he is able to adapt to his own personal circumstances."
 "I
agree that the play does ask profound questions about how does one
measure the worth of one's life in situations of extreme desperation
and deprivation," Apollo offered.
"To me, it doesn't necessarily have to do with extreme desperation and
deprivation," I countered. "I see the same issues in the
most ordinary situations in daily life. I see people
measuring themselves against others, people who are not content with
their lives, who wonder what they've done with their
lives. These people have been tricked or coerced by society
to think less of their own achievements than those of
others. And I think that this offers a deeper parallel to Antigone,
because in the play Antigone honors both her brothers, despite the fact
that one received approbation, the other vilification, by the
state. The lesson here is that there is dignity in the most
ordinary and even wretched human circumstances. It is only
when we allow ourselves to be convinced that, because of our
circumstances, we have lost our dignity, that we are
undone. This principle can be applied to every facet of
life, not just to political inequality and injustice. It can
be applied to any situation in which we are made to feel unequal or
unworthy, whether because of our appearance, our background, or our
achievement. So the play is not necessarily about people who
make great sacrifices for a higher cause, but about the way ordinary
people choose to live their lives on a daily basis."
"What makes this interesting for me, on a personal level, is that I'm
not looking for a great big cosmic answer," Apollo
confided. "I'm not about to make dramatic gestures of
self-sacrifice like either Winston or John. I, personally,
do not think that I have the capacity."
"I agree with you," I said. "First of all, I don't think I
have the capacity, either. Most people
don't. Secondly, self-sacrifice is a double-edged
sword. It can be the gesture of a hero or a
fool. The really hard thing to do is to accept your life,
your destiny, and who you are. That's very
difficult."
"It seems to me that the extremity of the circumstances in the play
makes such choices much more clear-cut," Apollo maintained.
"Of course, it dramatizes the existential situation," I
conceded. "If you have a person facing life in prison,
that's about as dramatic an existential situation as one can
find. But it's still an existential situation that we all
share. Just the other day, I was watching a show on TV, in
which they were interviewing prisoners who were serving life
sentences. These prisoners have their whole lives ahead of
them, and the most fulfilling activity they can look forward to is
picking up trash within the prison grounds. One of the
prisoners told how he had found a wounded bird, helped the bird to
heal, and set it free. For him, that was a great
contribution that he was able to make to life--more meaningful than
anything else that he had been able to do in ten years'
time. That's an extreme example, yet we're all wrestling
with the same problem of how to make a contribution to life with
whatever limited resources and opportunities we possess."
We parted on the corner of State and Liberty, in Ann Arbor, next to a
town landmark--a two-story mural of Woody Allen, Edgar Alan Poe, T.S.
Eliot, Franz Kafka, and Gertrude Stein. They were all
writers who had made a contribution to our modern culture, and who had
been privileged to do so. From a political perspective,
there was an immense gulf that separated their privileged experience
from that of the political prisoners represented in the
play. But then I thought of the example of Antigone, who
buried the bodies of her two brothers side-by-side, and I wondered
whether this gulf was not simply an illusion. |
|
|
Date Submitted:
7/17/01 |
Copyright Information:
"The Island," a one-act play devised by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and
Winston Ntshona. Directed by Michael Dickman. Sponsored by The
University of Michigan Program in Compararative Literature, Museum of
Art, Department of Classics, Department of English, Global Ethnic
Literatures Seminar, and the Detroit South Africa Project. Photo by
Edward West, from the project Casting Shadows, 1999. |
|