Karen Jeynes's speech

Good Day

I am very honoured to be speaking to you all today. This invitation arose out of my attendance of the European Festival’s Association AGM earlier this year, where I met Ary Sutedja. At that meeting I spoke with pride of South Africa’s cultural diversity. This is what I said:

“I’d like to start by giving a brief overview of the country. South Africa is a large country, with a population of around 48 million. It is also a geographically large country, with nine provinces. The smallest province, Gauteng, is the largest economically, followed by the Western Cape and KwaZulu Natal. We have eleven official languages. which are, in order of numbers of first language speakers: isiZulu, isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Sepedi, English, Setswana, Sesotho, Xitsonga, Siswati, Tshivenda and isiNdebele. Other languages commonly spoken are sign language, Arabic, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telegu and Urdu, Khoi, Nama and San languages,. South Africa has a large number of French and German speakers – an estimated 160 000 – and a growing number of Mandarin speakers – an estimated 300 000.

We are black, white, coloured and asian, we are Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Rastafarian and believers in African spirituality. We are also, increasingly, a home to Congolese, Nigerians, Somalians and of course approximately 2 million Zimbabweans.

Out of this rich background have emerged artists in every genre. We have heavy metal bands and marimba groups, beadworkers and goldsmiths, playwrights and mimes, opera singers and kwaito singers and filmmakers and circus performers and photographers and poets and ballet dancers and painters and hundreds more besides. In preparation for this morning I met with and spoke to numerous arts practitioners. Their message was the same across the board – we’ve got talent. Piles of it. In every arts form you can think of. That has never been our problem”

Shortly after my return, our problem became very evident. Our country descended into violence. Some called it xenophobia, but many of the victims were Venda and Tswana – South Africans. It was a violence born of fear, and poverty, and desperation. It is a violence that is still haunting the country.

To start with the quote I ended that speech with, Jean-Paul Sartre once said “there may be more beautiful times, but this one is ours.” After lying awake one night listening to the screams not very far from my home, I called my friend and colleague Erica Glyn-Jones and said that we needed to do something. And, being artists, we put on a concert. In one week some of South Africa, and indeed Africa’s top artists rallied round, and we ended up with a show so full that people waited in the foyer outside hoping they could sneak in at interval. We were turning well-known artists away because our line up was so full. Even then we ran for almost three hours.

We raised over R70000 that day, we gathered blankets, clothes, goods – but the biggest thing we raised that day was people’s spirits. People had an emotional need to connect, to make public their outrage, to join together with like-minded people. They needed catharsis. That is what art can do, what art has always done.

From the woman who couldn’t believe we would confront her with images of refugees in burnt out shacks in a foyer installation because she had “come for a nice afternoon at the theatre”, to one of our beneficiaries who thanked us for “bringing sexy back” to the issue, to a politician saying that this was the first time they had actually cried about this issue, art succeeded where no lectures, no news stories, no rallies could. For a few hours, we were all the same, all united. People are still stopping me, emailing me, talking about this concert and its effect.

In my opinion the single greatest purpose art serves in the 21^st century is to make people feel less alone. In a world by fear, prejudice and hatred, where huge companies are spending millions trying to convince us something is wrong with us, art offers a lifeline. When the song lyrics could be our own feelings, when the character on stage could be our mother, when the painting shows a scene that reminds us of home, we feel that somehow, someone, somewhere, understands us.

I spend a lot of time on Facebook – another device for helping us not feel somehow alone – and there’s a group called “Why Yes, I Do Frequently Burst Into Song”, for people who, well, frequently burst into song to express their mood. It makes me happy to know that, to date, 382084 other people all over the world love to break into song. And in their album notes for In Time: The Best of REM, the band comments that their song “Everybody Hurts” doesn’t belong to them, but to anyone who ever received comfort from it. Nurturing and stimulating this fellow feeling is the best gift we could have in this century. When we feel we have something in common with someone else, even it is as simple as liking the same movie, we feel we understand them a little bit better.

The violence I spoke of earlier comes from hatred. Hatred comes from fear and fear comes from a lack of knowledge or understanding. We all remember how terrifying the ghostly shape on the wall in our bedroom was as children, until we were shown it was just the way the light reflected off the toys on the shelf. Art has the power to cause that shift in understanding.

And having that power implies that art also has that responsibility. "It is the job of the artist to think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare say things that no one else will say.” Howard Zinn. Whether we choose to explore intimate personal themes or global political ones, we must always be aware of how our art will be perceived. Gay relationships, womens rights, the end of regimes –  all have received immeasurable boosts from the arts. Indeed there are many who believe that the portrayal in Hollywood of black presidents, from Chris Rock to Morgan Freeman, and especially the ongoing role of Dennis Haysbert in the TV series 24, has helped the cause of Barack Obama.  "One wonders to what degree a scenario played out in a safe, contained, fictionalized context might have prepared people for the real thing," said Darnell Hunt, a professor of sociology and director of the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at the University of California

Yes – art is not reality and it never will be. Or, as Pablo Picasso put it, “we all know that art is not truth.  Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”  But it is because art is one step removed from reality that it has so much power. When things are not immediate and real we can take time to look at them more closely. We can look at a character on stage and relate to them, and then through them to ourselves.

Truly great art can make you glimpse, even just for a second, someone else’s point of view. This could be the point of view of a murderer or someone who chooses to commit suicide – things which in the cold light of reason and logic seem impossible to understand. Art also has the power to present false images, to perpetrate flawed perceptions. Art can be propaganda. And like any form of propaganda this is all very well – as long as it’s for the cause we ourselves support.

South Africa has a strong history of using art as a political tool. Our protest theatre played an important role in the struggle against apartheid. Nelson Mandela has marked his political career with art, from the reading of Ingrid Jonker’s poem “Die Kind” (the child) at his inauguration to commissioning one of South Africa’s most controversial theatremakers, Brett Bailey, to create a piece for his 90^th birthday celebrations at home. Not forgetting his 46664 music concerts, following in the worthy tradition of Live Aid and other benefit concerts.

And yet when a song was released last year with the refrain “De la Rey De la Rey, sal jy die boere kom lei?” (De la Rey will you come and lea the people, referring to one of the leaders of the Boer war) people across the land were outraged. No, you can’t express your opinions if I oppose them, seemed to be the overwhelming message. At the other end of the scale, Jacob Zuma revived one of the more sinister struggle songs, “Awet ‘umshini wam” (Bring me my machine gun) which is now chorused by his supporters and, disturbingly, by the crowds who wrought the xenophobic violence.

Euripides, who died in about 406BC declared: “The tongue is mightier than the blade”. In 1839, in his  play “Richelieu: or the conspiracy”, Edward Bulwer-Lytton echoed this with: “The pen is mightier than the sword.” Perhaps today we should say that “the blog is mightier than the atom bomb”?

The fact is that as a political or social tool, nothing beats art. People are wising up to blatant advertising for causes. People are getting bored of the news, the bad news, day after day. Art is much more interesting, less black and white and more shades of grey. When movies, books, plays are made “based on historic fact” but wandering from it for the sake of plot devices or romance, the newly presented version will override the boring history books.

Whether we are writing, acting, singing, dancing, painting, sculpting, we are creating people’s visions of the world. In South Africa we are inundated with American television. Every soundbite reinforces our views of American culture. Every Hollywood film perpetuates those stereotypes – or challenges them. We need to seriously ask the question: What are we saying here? What do we want people to think about us? We are recreating our culture on stage – whether that be our national culture, our culture of motherhood, our culture of relationships.

Art is a great repository for culture. Since people became people they have used drums, dance, songs, stories, to pass on how they feel. We have created stories to explain things that seemed inexplicable – the myths and legends of Africa, Ireland and Scotland, Greece, Egypt, the stories of the San and Aborigine and Native Americans. Songs, art and stories which have been passed down for generations – these are what remind us who we are and where we come from.  In fact art is so important to us that each country is represented by two pieces of art – a flag, and an anthem.

As we continue fumbling our way through the 21^st century, what could we possibly need more than art – the reminder of our humanity, our vulnerability, our uniqueness and our sameness.

I would like to end with a quote from Henry James – you’ll have noticed I like to quote other people as much as possible, it makes my ideas feel less alone!

“We work in the dark.

 We do what we can.

 We give what we have.

 Our doubt is our passion,

 and our passion our task.

 The rest is the madness of art.”