a.magazine’s African Interview Series

Pamela Gien is an artist who was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and emigrated to the United States over 20 years ago. She is the author of the Syringa Tree, a play about the experience of life during apartheid South Africa from the perspective of a young child. There are 24 characters in the play, and Pamela, an actress by profession, plays them all. Pamela Gien won the OBIE Award for Best Play 2001, the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, the Outer Circle Critics Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, a Drama League Honor, and a nomination for the John Gassner Playwriting Award. The Syringa Tree had its world premiere at ACT in Seattle, followed by a two-year run in New York. Pamela has since travelled around the world, including London and Cape Town, performing the play, astonishing audiences with her adept portrayal of such diverse characters, and moving them deeply through the raw emotions and profound insights contained within the story. Pamela has also written a novel of The Syringa Tree, published to excellent reviews in August 2006. She is currently at work on another story set in her homeland of South Africa.

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When did you leave South Africa, and why?

I was born and grew up in South Africa, and went to university there – I went to Wits university. And I met my husband when I was in South Africa – when I was very young actually – about 16. Then I went to study in Paris for a while, and I loved being overseas. I loved the whole newness of it. I’ve always been interested in travelling, so when I came back to South Africa, I had, I suppose, that little seed of wanting to travel more, but also wanting to settle down and start my career. I did work in South Africa for about four years after we got married. We got married in 1980. I did a lot of work with Pact and SABC and some workshops with the Market theatre, different things that most actors do in South Africa.

Both my husband and I had thought about travelling, just for a year to start with, that was our plan. We just thought we would see the world and try to do a year of travel, and … I remember coming home from doing a show, and he was at home reading the newspaper, and I said to him, “Maybe we should go and see the world, and see America,” because I’d never been to America, and he put the newspaper down, he said, “When would you like to go?”

Within three months, we had packed everything up and we were on our way. We put everything in storage, we didn’t emigrate then, we thought we were really going on a year’s trip. But … as I’ve travelled around the world with the play, … I hear from so many South Africans who say to me: “I always thought that I would want to leave if things didn’t change. I always was so uncomfortable with what was going on there.” And that was my feeling really. I think I left for two main reasons: the first was that I was a young person, I was curious and excited to see the world, and then I also was profoundly uncomfortable and sad, in a way I probably could not have articulated then, about the state of how things were at home.

Where do you feel is home, and has your definition of home changed over the years?

Well, interestingly, whenever my husband and I speak about going to South Africa to visit - we both have family there and we go back and forth – whenever we speak about going there, we always say, “We’re going home.” So even though we’ve lived in America for 25 years and …I know that I deeply love America, I know that I feel tremendously grateful to have had the opportunities that I’ve had here, and to learn and be part of a culture that I admire, …it really moves me to be part of a nation who have gone through a lot of what South Africa has gone through, but at the same time, I think it moves me because I am so deeply South African. I love what the American constitution says, precisely because I am a South African, because of what we’ve all lived through. So while I’m grateful to call it my home, South Africa will always be my real home…whenever I go there, I feel completely at ease and completely at home, in a way that I don’t feel anywhere else.

How often have you returned to South Africa since you left?

When I first left, I came back quite frequently to work, and to see my family - the first eight or nine years. After that, there was a period of time that I just stayed away. It was during that time that I started to really allow myself to feel the feelings I had about it, even though at the time, as I said, I couldn’t articulate them very well.

I struggled and struggled with my feelings about having left, and I feared that if I went back [again], I would be overwhelmed emotionally…I wouldn’t be able to cope with it. And then I feared that if went back, I would never be able to leave again. And I think that told me how hard it was to leave in the first place…you don’t realize…one has so many conflicting feelings…but at the same time, it’s a wonderful feeling to have that richness in your life, in your internal life. It’s difficult, but it’s also enriching.

The first time I came back [after that period] was at least five years ago. It was after I did the play in New York – I remember leaving New York, and knew I was heading out, to home. I think I must have cried all the way there, cried when we landed, then the worst was when we left again, and I was a ball of tears all the way back again.

I’ve come back almost every year since then. But after I came back, I remember…instead of being overwhelmed with my own feelings, I was overwhelmed with what was happening there. It was so powerfully different, and for all the problems and things that still made me feel sad – you know, it still made me feel sad to see somebody with a bundle of sticks on their head and nothing….There’s something different about the feeling in the country, a spirit of ownership. I noticed it from the minute I arrived at the airport in Johannesburg – the guy who offered to help me with my luggage, and he got a trolley for me, and he said, “Let me run with you to the next terminal,” and he was so proud to help me, and I just found that so different…there was something so proud, so owning about it that I found myself so much more moved by those things…my own feelings didn’t seem to matter so much anymore.

Do you want to talk a little bit about how you came to write the play?

I never in a million years expected to write a play or to write anything at all because I’d been an actor my whole career. I was working in a professional acting class with Larry Moss, who I’d say is probably the best acting coach in the world at this point… I was so lucky to be recommended to his class by a fellow actor here in Los Angeles, when I first came to Los Angeles from New York…I majored in Dramatic Art and English at Wits, and trained in Paris a little bit, but I hadn’t ever studied just pure acting in an acting class, so the whole thing was very new to me.

…He came into class one day…[and] gave this particular exercise, which was, “Turn to the person next to you, and tell them something that happened to you. It could be something that happened a long time ago, or something that happened this morning, say in the bank. Just turn now and start speaking. So I turned to the chap sitting next to me – his name was Bjorn Johnson, he’s an actor – and I don’t know where it came from, but into my mind flooded an image of my grandparents’ farm, Clova, and I thought, Gosh, what in the world am I thinking about that for? I won’t think about that.

My grandparents were attacked on their farm. I was ten years old when it happened, and as a family we sort of moved on from it, it was very traumatic at the time, it was quite an unusual thing at the time. I mean now it’s…sadly an everyday occurrence…you know, what’s happened to the farmers in Zimbabwe…now one wouldn’t be surprised to hear something like that, but in those days it was shocking because this was a farmer – He was English, he’d come out from England when he was a young man – beloved of the African workers on his farm. I mean, they used to follow him around, and they helped him build the farmhouse, they loved him…he really was beloved and a decent, kind, humble man. And the farm was an extremely simple place, it wasn’t a fancy farm at all, it was the best kind of South African farm – you put your shorts on and your flip flops and your hat and off you go, and that’s the best of all possible worlds. As a family – he was my mother’s father- we all dealt with it and moved on, but it was such a painful event, we never discussed it, we never really raised the subject out of respect to my mother…So, here I was all these years later on another continent, and this image came to my mind of walking with my grandfather on the gravel road that led from the gate to the farmhouse, and I just thought, What in the world? I quickly thought, I won’t think about that, I’ll try to think of something else, and as I thought that, Larry said to the whole class, “Don’t censor whatever it is that just came into your mind, tell that story, it will choose you.” I thought, Ah, no! And then I thought, Well, I’ll just quickly tell the story about that and then we’ll move on. And I told Bjorn one of my thoughts…driving home from my grandfather’s funeral, and I was, as I said, ten years old, and as I was telling him these thoughts, I was thinking, Gosh, that was a strange thing for a ten-year-old to be thinking about, and then we switched sides and Bjorn told me his story of something that had happened to him. The exercise lasted only three minutes.

And then Larry said to us, “The next part of this exercise is to stage the story that you’ve just told.” So I thought, Ah, no! This thing’s never going to end. He said, “You can come back in a week, in a month, two months from now, with some version of it staged. It can be using other actors, you could do it own your own, you can read a text, you can make a small film, you can do anything but just bring it in a fleshed-out form.” And I went home thinking, Well, I’m never going to go near that exercise. And something – I don’t know – well, I know now what it was, it was that I had a real need to deal with it, …every day I woke up after the class, I had little snippets of memory and things coming to me that I had not thought about in decades. And there was something quite wonderful about remembering things, and also something quite painful and difficult about remembering things. So interestingly, I was the very first person to bring that exercise back, even though I was probably the most reluctant.

And then that’s how it really started. I did probably like a 20-25 minute improvisation, which, in retrospect, had all the bare bones, it sort of had the skeleton of the play. Growing up, it had a monologue in the bed, as a child, it was all through the child’s voice. It seemed from the very first moment it was through the child’s voice. I don’t know why it had to be that, but it just naturally was that. And it had going out to the fire at the back of the house, with our huge syringa tree, and the people gathered around the fire, then it had my relationship with my nannies, and the wedding dance…it was very primitive, just an improvisation really…and then it had leaving to go to America at the end. So, as I say, in retrospect, it was the whole spine of the story. And at the end of it, Larry said – and I was shaking from head to toe because I had never stood up to do my own material or felt that exposed before – Larry said, “Can you look out and see your colleagues?” The whole class was standing and people were weeping, and Larry said to me, “These are such important stories from people’s lives. We need to hear these stories, we need them because we need to learn. You have to write this as a play, and you have to write this as a film.” He said that I left that class like a deer in the headlights with wide, staring eyes (laughs). He thought I’d never come back!
But after that, I came home and I really just started to write even though I had never written anything. I just sat down and started, and then I couldn’t stop. I wrote it in about eight weeks. I gave it to him and we started to work on it….

When I first started working with Larry, I kept saying to him, “But who would be interested in this? It’s just my funny little life. It doesn’t matter to anyone, it doesn’t mean anything to anyone.” And he would say to me, “This is such a universal story, …it’s so much about all of us. It’s about all of us…who have struggled in any way in this world,” and so when I hear from South Africans like you, Daniela, and South Africans of every race, it means the world to me to have someone say to me, “That was my story. That was my story. You told my story.” Every time I hear it, and I have hundreds of letters from people who’ve said to me they connect so deeply to the story because The Syringa Tree is their life.

I remember in the Syringa Tree, Elizabeth, at an older age, remembers her youth in South Africa, “I was really somewhere.” That just really struck me, and I am just wondering how important the concept of place, of home, is in your writing, and how much influence do you think one’s connection to a place has on a person?

Well, I think it’s enormous…and I think it unfolds more and more as you get older and as you travel more in life. I don’t mean travel to different destinations, I mean travel through the journey of your own life – emotionally and intellectually… I think our early beginnings are so influential and we either try to reinforce those in our life, try to implement and recreate the safety and the peacefulness or the good aspects of that, or we rebel against what those early beginnings were, or it’s a combination. I find myself very much drawn to things that feel familiar to me, and when I understand why they feel familiar, it’s always because there’s an element of home in them for me…There’s a place I love to go to here. It’s called Ojai…a place in California …which is considered to be sacred ground for the Indians…it has a very special feeling to me, and I took my sister there recently.…I’d told her over many years how much I love this place, and how any chance I get, I go there. And I said to her, “It’s something about … these hillsides out in the sun that have dry kind of things growing on them and then they have scented geraniums …and then there was a smell in the air, and it was the smell of wood burning fires, and the architecture of the building…white, plastered walls and cool, cement floors. And my sister said to me, “Pamela, this is like the farm – it’s like Clova.” I hadn’t made that connection, I supposed I hadn’t allowed myself to make the connection, but the minute she said [it] to me … I cried because I suddenly understood that’s why I love it there. I think I try to recapture some of what feels familiar and loving and kind in life, and I think that’s what home really is. It’s a feeling of safety, it’s a feeling of belonging, and I think South Africans struggle a lot with that all around the world. You know, where do we really belong? Where do we fit in? Who are we?

When I brought [the play] to Cape Town, it was truly one of the most amazing experiences of my life to be performing for South African audiences. And when I was a young actress there, of course all South African audiences were segregated, so it was all whites only. I remember as a young actress working for Pact, we all signed a petition … requesting that black actors be allowed to perform with us on stage. And so now, when I went to South Africa, and there I was, a white girl essentially playing characters of every race, I thought, Gosh, we’ve come so far…where black audiences…were so open to that. And that was a worry, when I first went there, I just wasn’t sure, I thought, they may just hate the whole idea of that. …. My first audience was almost all black, and they just stood up and cheered the roof off at the end. They were just an astounding audience actually …I mean, I think I cried at the end, and I put my hands down on the stage, and I thought, I’m really home. I’m really, really home. I’m home in so many ways. I’m home physically and I’m home within myself…..It was an enormous gift to me to have that kind of acceptance there, and I’ll never forget it. I’ll treasure it for the rest of my life.

And what is your perception of South Africa today compared to the era of The Syringa Tree or the different times that you’ve been back? How do you think it’s changed or hasn’t?

Well, you know, it’s so interesting that you said, “or hasn’t.” When I was there with the play at the Baxter, Manny Manim, the artistic director of the Baxter, said to me – I think he was quoting someone else, I don’t know who, but he said, “Everything changes and nothing does.” Isn’t that wonderful? And that just summed it up for me…everything has changed and nothing has. And I suppose what has changed…I’ll tell you a lovely thing that happened to me when I was in Boston doing the play. John Kani, the wonderful South African actor who was dealt with very punitively by the apartheid government for doing Fugard’s plays, an extraordinary man who’s lived a truly astounding life, said to me about South Africa now, “You know, Pammy,” he said, “I still see the man walking by the side of the road in the vlenterbroek (ragged pants),” he said,” but now he walks with face up. Face up!” I thought that was so beautiful - it was such a simple way of saying there are still tremendous problems, there are still things that are so difficult, but it has changed. That terrible spectre of apartheid is not there - that’s a magnificent change. Then I think…the crime is something that bothers me tremendously. The latest xenophobic attacks, I think have saddened every South African and people throughout the world …. A friend said to me, “I’m so sad to see that South Africa isn’t what I was thinking it might be by now.” Because people, internationally, have such hopes for South Africa. There’s such a sense of optimism, so when you hear something like that, it’s almost like going backward, but I try to think of those things as the problems that are to be expected after decades of oppression. These things come because people were denied educations, were denied the basics of human dignity.

But then also, as John Kani said to me, we’re ten years (it’s longer now, it was ten years then), ten years into our freedom, no one can take it from us…. But now we have to stop feeling that we deserve anything and everything and we have to work for things, we have to make change, and make it powerful, and make it good again. People were without for so long that then they felt they could demand everything, but what they have to learn is that you only truly get what you work for, what you earn, what you create, what you dream of and build. And that’s the next step for our country. So I feel hopeful when I think of it in those terms. And I feel hopeful when I see the terrific camaraderie between people of every race there now. It’s exciting. At the same time, it’s very saddening as a South African to hear the stories coming out of Johannesburg, out of Cape Town. I mean, I hear terrible, terrible things of people being shot in their driveways or attacked in their houses and you wonder…when will that change? When is that going to be taken in hand and controlled? I don’t understand how the country can prosper if basic issues of safety are not addressed.

Recently, I came out to do an article, and the black gentleman who drove me to the airport - he drives for the hotel - said he’d been hijacked four times … “… the last time they drove me to a dark place in the township, and I was on the ground begging for my life …. I told them I have small children. Please to spare my life….They wanted to kill me for the car.” I said, “That’s been going on here for a while…why do the police not do anything?” He said the police are so corrupt that they actually know about everything that’s going on and they won’t fix it, they don’t care. He said he felt hopeless about it, and that many blacks feel tremendously unsafe….It’s very difficult…when these fundamentals are not in place and respected, when there aren’t consequences for lawlessness, it’s very difficult to build a prosperous country. It saddens me that people will stop going there because they hear that it’s unsafe. And that’s very difficult…

If you could meet any African artist – author, painter, sculptor, musician, lyricist, singer, designer – who would it be? Why?

Ah, my goodness! Wow .… Well, my list would be endless, but I’d have to say probably on the top would be Miriam Makeba …her click song – growing up, it was a song that we all knew and sang and…I remember my nanny teaching me how to make the clicks, and I think it was…a song that connected us to each other in a way that was to do with our history and the place and our relationships at the time, and …to me, it was very powerful. I just think her voice is astonishing in that way…But you know, there are so many, … I wish that I’d had the chance to meet Alan Paton … I wish that I’d had a chance to meet Adam Small, the poet who wrote during the 60’s and 70’s …he called the coloured people, “God’s forgotten.” That was a very powerful image to me when I was growing up, and I remember thinking, How can that be? How can that be? If God is all-powerful, how could he forget anyone? It really was an awakening image for me.

Praise for the novel of The Syringa Tree by Pamela Gien
A gorgeous, hopeful, heartrending novel. . . . This uncommonly moving, deeply humane novel nearly dances in a reader’s hands with the rhythms and the colors, the complicatedness and the inimitability of southern Africa.”
–O The Oprah Magazine