This article first appeared in THE WEEKENDER

29th March 2008

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“Powerful” is a word that is over-used in the description of dramatic works – and more’s the pity, because when a truly powerful piece of theatre like Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking comes along, it’s difficult to find the vocabulary to discuss its effect.

The show, created by the Magnet Theatre Company, is currently running at the Market in Johannesburg and has been on South African stages since the middle of last year (at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, and subsequently at the Baxter in Cape Town). It was first performed in Cameroon when the company was invited to a theatre festival there in 2006. This trans-African connection both explains and adds significance to the production’s engagement with a pan-African theme: the experience of being a refugee.

Numbed by statistics about those fleeing poverty, political oppression and even genocide in countries across the continent, most of us have become indifferent to their plight. Indeed, it’s all-too-easy to gloss over the journalistic insistence on the scope of the problem – echoed in the programme for Every Year, Every Day, which contains extracts from sixteen different newspaper reports on refugee-related issues. Yet the great achievement of the play is to make it impossible for any member of the audience to ignore the millions of individual tragedies bound up in the nationalist constructs that delimit our understanding of “forced migration”.

It isn’t really appropriate to call this a play; it should be categorised as a piece of physical theatre, in line with Magnet Theatre’s manifesto to “emphasise the role of the body and gesture in the language of the theatre”. Actresses Jennie Reznek and Faniswa Yisa, under the direction of Mark Fleishman, undoubtedly follow this injunction. Their fluid movements, their physical agility, their close attention to posture, their subtle changes of facial expression, their inventive use of props: these contribute to characterisation and narrative in equal measure.

But, crucially, this is also a work that foregrounds verbal language – and the barriers created by linguistic difference.

The story begins in a Francophone African country (let’s say Cameroon). Reznek and Yisa interchange roles as they portray the contented domesticity of a mother and her two young daughters, Ernestine and Agi. Chores such as cooking and washing are turned into games, and the girls explore their environment playfully. This idyll is destroyed when the family is caught up in a violent sociopolitical eruption: a coup, perhaps, or a programme of ethnic cleansing. These now-generic causes of the suffering inflicted on innocents are depicted in a few horrific moments through a compact symbolism of pangas and balaclavas. Reznek plays both the victim and the perpetrator as the mother is raped; the “house” burns down before our eyes; the smoke rises into a single spotlight.

Worst of all, Ernestine is killed. Agi, now an only child – although she seems to think, or at least pretend, that her sister is still alive – and her mother begin an arduous journey of escape by foot, by truck, by train and by any other means of transport available. The atmosphere of combined despair and fortitude is enhanced by the haunting strains of Neo Muyanga’s musical accompaniment (a strong presence throughout the show).

After many months, they end up in Cape Town. Until this point, the only language heard onstage has been French. For those members of the audience who don’t speak French, this may be rather disorienting, although there are only brief snatches of dialogue; moreover, Reznek and Yisa are so adept at physical storytelling that the linguistic disjunction needn’t be alienating. Insofar as it is, however, this is salutary to South African audiences. For when mother and daughter arrive in Cape Town – “our turf” – they are utterly lost in the South African babel, without even the lingua franca of English to help them. They do not understand, nor are they understood.

The Capetonians (of all race groups) that they interact with don’t come across as a very sympathetic lot. In fact, quite the opposite: our fictional compatriots give voice to the xenophobic resentment of many South Africans when it comes to citizens of other African countries living within our borders. At school, while she stutters her way through class, Agi has to put up with taunts of “Amakwerekwere!” Her mother receives the same insult as she is shoved from pillar to post while trying desperately to find a Home Affairs office where she can obtain refugee status.

Every Year, Every Day, I Am Walking illustrates the narrative of displacement on both a communal and a personal scale. Towards the end, a mature Agi reflects on the place she now lives in and the place she used to call home by commenting, “I don’t know much about here – I can’t remember much about there.” This perhaps captures the universal condition of refugees. Nevertheless, the production convinces primarily through the micro- rather than the macrocosmic; at its centre is the heart-rending but ultimately affirming relationship between mother and daughter.