SA News? Best thriller read on the planet, but...

I love following SA news. The kiwi stuff is lukewarm potty water compared to the fiery mampoer of the SA film scripts that get dished out every week. Yes, they’re potential film scripts: from the shenanigans of Julius Seizure to the recent, apparent uncovering of the first democratic election in 1994 being rigged in places (surprise, surprise). Then there’s the ANCYL carnival with its latest episode, trying to “closer [sic]” the wonderful Twitterati. Or we can change channels and pick the bleak soap opera of the Kebble-Agliottit trial where the father, Roger Kebble, is now alleged as implicated in the killing of his own son. I wrote with relish on my Mocking Truth column on NewsTime about my childhood relationship with Brett Kebble and Glenn Agliotti, enjoying my flicker in the limelight as a TV company, and, separately, 702 approached me for any tasty smut about my childhood relationship with Kebble.

No matter how many bodies pile up, the CSI shows, Chuck and Criminal Minds remain among the most popular current TV series worldwide. Conspiracies, watching with sick, helpless horror the development of dictators in waiting and violence never fail to be popular. I wish it wasn’t, but there you are.

Most people do not walk around with copies of Shakespeare’s plays for daily reading. But stuff like Titus Andronicus and King Lear are required reading for people who wish to understand better a violent society and the supreme roles of madness and chaos in shaping history and countries. Andronicus reads like an over-the-top gory thriller (which I will relate a bit to South Africa in due course). Titus, the returning Roman general, has the eldest son of the imprisoned queen of the Goths Tamora sacrificed on a burning pyre and not many lines later Titus kills one of his own sons. Later Titus’s daughter Lavinia is raped by Chiron and Demetrius, the sons of Queen Tamora, after they kill her new husband. Chiron and Demetrius want to ravish Lavinia on top of her dead husband’s body (“Make his dead trunk pillow to our lust”) and implore their mother to watch the rape! She declines the sweet invitation only for broader conspiratorial reasons. After the rape the two sporting lads cut off Lavinia’s hands and tongue so she cannot tell anyone who violated her.

For several scenes Lavinia is kept alive by her father Titus (a spectacle to behold on stage). Eventually she is able to tell him who mutilated her by drawing the queen’s sons’ names in the sand while she holds a stick in her mouth and between the stumps of her arms. Titus exacts revenge on queen Tamora by killing her two rapist sons, and makes a pie of their blood and bones which the queen unknowingly eats at a banquet while Titus looks on in grim satisfaction. About the same time Titus kills both the queen and his own daughter, Lavinia. Now he has killed another one of his own children. The murder of the queen is revenge; the reasons for stabbing his daughter to death is given with a “poetic justification” which has less to do with mercy killing than a study in desensitisation and psychopathology. Undoubtedly any audience would sit absorbed or shell-shocked, with that sick horror I mentioned above, a horror perhaps amplified by the fact that the Elizabethan or contemporary audience chose to come and watch. And these are just a very few of the scenes of spectacular violence in Titus Andronicus. Quentin Tarantino could have a field day turning Andronicus into a contemporary gangster-style movie, though the excesses beat by miles anything he’s done.

The sheer horror of Andronicus’s narrative does not impact quite as much when reading the play. But condensing part of the synopsis as I have done above brings home the unbelievable excess and gruesomeness. The poetic language of the play at times puts cute clothes on what’s really, nakedly, going on. The most famous and striking is Titus’s brother Marcus who finds the mutilated, raped and still living Lavinia. On seeing her with blood pouring out her mouth, twitching about with two arm stumps, he stands before his niece and launches into no less than forty six lines of superb poetry about her plight, which takes several minutes of stage time to just speak … while she bleeds. For God’s sake, why doesn’t he rush to Lavinia’s aid, do the Elizabethan equivalent of dialling 911?

The scene in which Marcus waxes poetic while his niece silently suffers is analogous to a country like South Africa haemorrhaging with corruption and violence while the political figures and media simply have more and more to say. Of course, what the politicians of the ruling party and the Fourth Estate have to say often differs widely. But do words stop what is happening?

Clearly not, some would say. So, like Marcus’s speech — potentially absurd, and therefore an embarrassment to some stage directors who simply cut out the entire section for a theatre production — are words themselves what has gone wrong? That is to say, have what newspapers provide, online or otherwise, simply become entertainment, something to do over coffee just as I do, as many others do?

The Fourth Estate as entertainment, something to do. The main problem with living in a country where extreme violence is the norm is desensitisation, which has now become contingent on entertainment and boredom. The three stressed words now collocate. Friends living in SA tell me in a matter of fact way of daily violence or potential violence. More than one has mentioned how township folk are still in danger of their lives if they use a car pool to go to work instead of taking a taxi. They can be stopped, beaten up and forced to take a taxi. Friends mention still being threatened with knives and guns if they just swear at taxi drivers. I was horrified and truly upset and bewildered by the casual manner in which they referred to these events. But I am just as “guilty”: I started this column speaking of a love for the entertainment, the “something-to-do” that SA news has to offer.

Words may have gone wrong. But that’s because, at best, they can only reflect what is really there. But words still remain one vehicle through which people are invited to wake up and do something about their particular, suffering Lavinia. “When will this fearful slumber have an end?” the crazed, mortified, blood-stained Titus says at one point in the mayhem and butchery of the play, pointing out the pervading nightmare (“fearful slumber”) annihilating so many while everyone … just “sleeps”. The line stands out with a deliberate awkwardness: he appears to momentarily realise their actions are the result of them all having lost their senses (desensitisation), then plunges straight back into his own ruthless insanity.

Waking up, regaining our sentience and hopefully our consciences, is a motif in the play. In Andronicus Shakespeare still, albeit tenuously, reminds us of the power of words to kick our arses out of bed: “ … There is enough written upon this earth / to stir a mutiny in the mildest thoughts … ”

Titus Andronicus woke me up. Not that it’s the only experience that has. I last read it when I was a long-haired youngster and just needed to hand in an essay about it on time. SA news is not for entertainment. But if any informed person finds himself indifferent to the narrative of the play, hopefully he can choose to get some form of therapy to overcome his desensitisation. Unfortunately, that kind of reader or viewer will be the last to notice he is living life asleep. What kind of readers should we be?