I never imagined I’d write The Syringa Tree…

and I never imagined I’d write about South Africa, the paradise lost into which I was born. I offer this play as a journey into a place, and into my own heart, that secret sorrowful place I called home until I began to write.

The first unexpected words that went onto the page opened a well of joy, grief and remembrance so powerful that I now cannot imagine the energy it took to suppress this world within so fiercely, and for so long, to keep it at bay in my thoughts, and to run to the furthest corners of the earth to remove myself from it. Of course it followed me wherever I went. I carried it within me, finding my responses confused and angry. I never wanted to discuss it. I had no answers. I was never a politically active person. I didn’t understand how to change or fix it. And in the unexpected creation of this piece, I have come to allow myself to feel the depth of love I had for that earth, and the people I knew and loved there. The Syringa Tree has brought me home, despite myself. It has called me to be the best of myself as a person, and as an artist.

I marvel at the events that have brought me to this place. I was born in Emmarentia, a suburb of Johannesburg, in the early days of the official implementation of apartheid. The Nationalist government, architects of this policy, had come into power about ten years earlier. The early days of my childhood were spent under British Colonial Rule, and although South Africa gained its independence when I was about five, ties to Britain and the Commonwealth were as strong and enduring to English speaking South Africans as the ties of the Afrikaans speaking people were to their own culture and language. Mingled through this complex, divided social fabric were Blacks of many different tribal origins comprising the overwhelming majority, and among others, Indians, Asians, Portuguese, Lebanese and a large Jewish community, many settled from Russian Jews escaping Tsarist rule. And those designated by the government as Coloureds, of mixed race, who fell between the cracks of society and became known as „God’s forgotten”.

The changeover from British rule was signalled to me as a child mainly in the fact that I was now no longer measured in feet and inches but in mysterious things called centimeters, and the sixpence and ‘tickies’ I so prized in my grubby pocket were replaced with new, shiny bigger money called rands and cents. But the people around me remained the same, even though the Queen had moved on! I was cared for by nannies who loved me with gentleness I can still feel against my skin, while designated by law to be separate from their own children.

Black children would never be granted a „pass” to be in a white area, particularly at night, and would live in the desolate townships and homelands, cared for by the aging parents of those working in the cities. I never felt their resentment, and yet I look back now at what must have been an unfathomable longing for their own children. I made no judgement on it then. I was a child. I lived in it. It was my home.

Thirty years later, in a class taught by my director, Larry Moss, I unsuspectingly did as he asked when he said „Turn to the person next to you and tell them a story.” Without warning, the image of an attack on my grandparents’ farm, Clova, came roaring into my mind. I had not thought about it for decades. We neverdiscussed it. Clova was lost to us and I was never taken back to what had been the simple but idyllic place of my childhood holidays. I quickly tried to think of something else to tell, when Larry said to the class, „Don’t censor whatever it is that came into your minds. Tell that story. It will choose you.“ I tried to make sense of the murky images, and began to mouth the words. The second part of the exercise was to stage the story we had just told. I think I was the first trembling person to bring the work back, and I stood there as though I had an earthquake in my body. I felt terribly vulnerable dealing with my own life. At the end of it, Larry said „You have to write this.“ And so I began the rather astounding task of writing about my life.

I had no idea at first what I was writing. I wrote with fear, grief, and shame. But I wrote also with love, joy and a well of remembrance. At first I wrote autobiographically. And then I began to love the freedom of combining those events with the poetry of language and imagery. It developed as a more fictional story deeply invested with aspects of my life. The coming together of it is the mystery. I wrote it, never imagining the journey I was embarking on.

Several weeks later, when it was done, we began rehearsal. I thought at the first reading
we would invite twenty six other actors to join us, or at least a few to double! And Larry said „No, you’re going to do it yourself”. At my shocked protests, he told me to be quiet and say the lines, and thus began our work.

And then Matt Salinger came, with an early invited audience, also expecting to see a company of actors! He has worked voluntarily and tirelessly since that day. Both he and Larry stand at my side. They have graced my life with their courage, and their generosity.

Carried in this story are my deepest feelings about a hauntingly beautiful place caught in unforgivable sorrow. Nobody won. And it’s a story filled with joy and wishes. Some might come true.

Pamela Gien, Ja