Telling the truth about the world takes many forms
Last year was the year of “post-truth” and barely three weeks into 2017, Donald Trump’s Orwellian lie machine belched out the phrase “alternative facts”.
Falsehood parading as verity is a phenomenon as old as human communication. Paradoxically, although we live in an era that offers sophisticated tools for factchecking, the notion of truth has been put on the endangered species list.
There are, of course, philosophical, psychological and material grounds on which to question the notion of absolute truth.
Two people can witness the same event and give directly opposing accounts.
Claims about religious or ideological truth are dubious and should be met with a healthy dose of relativism. Quantum mechanics has taught us to accept that “both/and” is a necessary way of describing the physical universe.
We are on slippery ground when truth merges with subjectivity and perception.
What about “truth” in the arts? For millennia, artists have struggled with the opposition of history and science.
Some artists have affirmed their ability to imitate reality; others have claimed that the art of imagination and illusion is preferable to the grim and unjust world we inhabit.
Such oppositions are based on reductive binarism.
Science, we know, is not and never has been “objective”. Historians, likewise, in arranging, selecting and (quite often) making up facts, have constructed narratives that differ wildly one from the other.
Indeed, their interpretations can even be influenced by fictions – consider the ways in which Shakespeare’s many plays have skewed the historiography of medieval England or ancient Rome.
Our judgment depends on the truth claims being made by an artist.
Is he or she purporting to depict actual events and people accurately, or claiming the prerogative of creative licence?
Is the “truth” being sought through the act of art-making an individual’s self-discovery or a collective insight?
Is it metaphysical, emotional or intellectual? Many artists resist being pinned down on this score.
I encountered various kinds of truth while sitting in the Mannie Manim Theatre during and after Mike van Graan’s new play, When Swallows Cry (at the Market Theatre until February 5).
The work developed through a collaborative project in which Norway’s Ibsen International Foundation brought together eight playwrights to produce scripts tackling the theme of migration. It is a finely wrought piece, interspersing scenes from three tense encounters between unwelcome migrants and those who “belong”.
The performance I attended was followed by a discussion in which Van Graan, debutant director Lesedi Job and other panellists participated in a question-and-answer session.
What emerged at first was an assertion of mimetic “truth”, as members of the audience who work with immigrants and refugees attested to the faithful retelling of all-toocommon migrant experiences: asylum seekers from places such as Zimbabwe and Somalia treated with racist and violent disdain by US airport authorities or Australian detention centre warders.
Then other forms of truth were tested.
How, questioners wanted to know, did the play relate to the author and director’s (divergent) personal stories? This line of investigation exposed a gendered fault line in the production, which has an allmale cast portraying a total of nine male characters.
Mpho Osei-Tutu, Christiaan Schoombie and Warren Masemola move into and out of their respective characters with aplomb, and in so doing, give the audience a tangible sense of the global networks in which people, money and goods are exchanged.
There are moments of dark humour in each episode even as it seems to hurtle towards a tragic conclusion.
Nevertheless, while the portraits of migrant experiences in the US and Australia are despairing, Van Graan has crafted a sliver of hope in the story set on African soil.
A do-gooder Canadian trustfund kid is captured by a Somali warlord; the dialogue that follows draws a trajectory connecting the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the plundering of resources by multinational companies in the 21st century.
An indisputable truth about labour and capital and the consequences of this relationship, is played out before us. We discern the sad truth of ongoing white privilege and black anonymity.
But Van Graan also gestures at another “truth”: the artist’s optimistic vision that even in a country such as Somalia, individuals have agency to resist historical inevitability.
CLAIMS ABOUT RELIGIOUS OR IDEOLOGICAL TRUTH SHOULD BE MET WITH A HEALTHY DOSE OF RELATIVISM