A reckoning with forgiveness

Is forgiveness something brave and beautiful, or a commodity that must be traded when you have nothing else? Who benefits from it? The one who forgives or the one who is forgiven?

Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept is a performance created by two theatres: The Market Theatre from South Africa and the Kosovar Qendra Multimedia. The former has a house in Johannesburg and has been an important political voice against the apartheid regime since 1976. Qendra Multimedia is a company based in Pristina, Kosovo, and writes on its website that they work with alternative art that addresses social and political problems. Together, the two theatres deal with the past from their respective countries: the forgiveness processes after the blood feuds in Kosovo and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. Through stories from different parties in the two atrocities, we as the audience are drawn into situations where the perpetrator and the victim must stand face to face.

Apartheid in South Africa was a system of racial segregation that involved widespread oppression of the African population. After the fall of the regime in 1994, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established to investigate abuses and grant amnesty for confessions. In Kosovo, the performance depicts blood feuds, a tradition in which families avenge murders with new murders, which led to long-term spirals of violence before reconciliation initiatives in the 20th century attempted to stop them. The performance's activist project is to problematize such reconciliation processes by questioning whether forgiveness actually creates justice, or whether it primarily serves the perpetrators at the expense of the victims. It particularly criticizes the idea of ​​reconciliation without real accountability. Truth is also an important theme.

There is no clear linear plot, but rather several episodes from the two countries put together. The actors on stage are from Kosovo, Albania and South Africa, and they present the conflicts separately. In other words, it is clear on stage who comes from where.

We meet South Africans who tell stories of being rolled naked in a blanket, of a son who is exposed to acid attacks, and Kosovars who tell stories of losing their fathers and brothers at an early age to the blood feuds. Some of the descriptions are so terribly painful that the sweat starts to flow, and several in the audience squirm in their chairs with horrified facial expressions. Some even let out shocked gasps and hopeless sighs. It is rare that the audience is unable to hold back their emotions. With music and lighting design intensifying, the atmosphere becomes so violent that it is sometimes downright uncomfortable to be present. Like when a mother tells us that a policeman cut off her son's hand and kept it in a jam jar in his office as a trophy.

But then the lights come on. The actors “break” character, and it turns out that the action takes place in a rehearsal room where a play about the two events is being made. The seriousness disappears, and we are back in the trivial. From the fictional rehearsal room, it gradually becomes clear that many of the stories told on stage are made up. Do the stories we tell have to be true, or does the end justify the means? The fictional theater is just trying to create an exciting performance to promote its message.

The double layer of fiction opens up for reflection on what truth is and its value, but my immediate thought was that this is primarily a cheap move to create contrasts in the dynamics. By repeatedly alternating between cruel and intense stories and a cheerful everyday life in the theater, the form becomes predictable and quickly wears out. The move gradually weakens the intensity of the material, because the audience learns that the discomfort will always be interrupted. If they had dared to let the audience sit even longer in the unpleasantness without knowing that soon the lights will come on and we can relax again, the performance would have been much more difficult to digest. At the same time, the move highlights how relaxed our relationship is to atrocities that do not directly concern us in our everyday lives. The actors laugh and joke at work and do not seem to take the theme very seriously when they are not in the middle of it. They seem more concerned with wanting nice costumes and ketchup on their pizza.

When the colonists in South Africa who took part in the apartheid regime are to be forgiven, what happens? The police officers who have made a career of beating up, terrorizing, dividing families and objectifying people are given amnesty. And those who have indirectly taken part in racism are given a few tons of guilty conscience to lift from their shoulders. But what about the victims? They still carry trauma, have suffered lasting physical and psychological damage, and racism in South Africa was in no way destroyed after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. So who was it really for? Here the political core of the play becomes clear: It questions whether reconciliation can become a form of unjust ending disguised as a solution.

In the play, the forgiveness process in Kosovo is portrayed differently, but they describe the situation differently than they act it out. The blood feuds are presented as a settlement between families who have “taken blood” from each other. When they tell stories, however, there is more focus on a victim and a perpetrator, instead of both parties being both. This makes it difficult to interpret what they want to say about the concept of forgiveness in this conflict compared to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, especially if you are not familiar with the conflict before. What nevertheless emerges is how deeply revenge was internalized in Kosovo. Those who forgive were seen by many as cowards and weak, as traitors to their own family: Why don’t you take the blood back? Through the stories, the basic mechanisms of revenge are revealed, and it becomes crystal clear how harmful and unsustainable it is on a general basis, even though it can be experienced as necessary and very tempting.

The performance throws many questions and opinions at the audience, and there is a lot to chew on afterwards. It is a clearly activist project that criticizes the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, spreads awareness about what actually happened during apartheid, and about the blood feuds in Kosovo, where they show unfiltered how revenge can destroy an entire society.

The artistic expression itself is simple and somewhat uninteresting. There is a musician on stage who plays the flute and sings, but the music is generic, and the interactions between the musician and the actors do not become a real dialogue between two art forms, which for me is the whole point of live music on stage. There are also a couple of choreographed scenes. These appear somewhat out of place and as breaks from the nerve-wracking stories. The set design is also simple with only a few chairs and tables. This holds water because the aesthetic is obviously not the focus, but if the performance had left aesthetic, and not just intellectual, traces, I think the messages would have come across even better.