Tug Yourgrau mentions Aeschylus’ Oresteia among the sources that influenced his 1992 stageplay The Song of Jacob Zulu.[1]
Born a white South African, Yourgrau bases his first published drama upon the trial
of Andrew Zondo, a young black man who confessed to killing four shoppers at a
Durban mall by detonating a shrapnel bomb. Dozens of innocent people were also injured
in the incident. Yourgrau’s courtroom drama engages issues of justice and
atonement. It is called by some critics an oresteia.
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| Steppenwolf Theatre (Chicago), production of The Song of Jacob Zulu (1992); from the Theatre's website. |
Oresteias narrate the plight of the House of Atreus in its
critical emergence from the Trojan War. The Rape of Helen precipitated the War;
the murder of Agamemnon punctuated its conclusion. But closure could not come
to the Atreidai until Orestes avenged his father’s homicide through matricide
and endured humanity’s most gut-wrenching dilemma. One young man is obligated
to atone for all the ills of all Tantalus’ posterity. It is the equivalent, in
Greek mythological terms, of one individual’s reversal of the effects of Adam’s
transgression.
Jacob Zulu is Yourgrau’s literary creation, a character whose crime
parallels Andrew Zondo’s. According to his creator, Jacob’s name recalls the
protagonist of Genesis. The character’s parents are portrayed as god-fearing
Christians, the Rev. and Mrs. Zulu staunchly advocating the value of
righteousness and confession. Aside from the Reverend’s advanced social status,
the elder Zulus would scarcely bear any resemblance to Orestes’ notorious
parents, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. The social circumstances of young Jacob’s
upbringing, we learn during the dramatized trial, have created an environment
where the murder of innocents effects somehow a bright day for ending the human
stain of Apartheid.
Yourgrau’s narrative is conceived as a tragedy and constructed
from tragic conventions, as well. A nine-man chorus is comprised of a vocal
group complete with leader and choral responsion. Yourgrau overtly connects the
play’s chorus to the iconic acapella ensemble Ladysmith Black Mambazo. The
chorus participates at key moments throughout the play portraying the sentient
activities of various groups throughout the action. They sing traditional South
African songs as Jacob’s congregations, his high-school class, the guerillas of
the African National Congress who indoctrinate him, and ultimately the
courtroom spectators who must watch him hanged. Clearly Yourgrau heeds
classical Greek tragic form. But two important external coincidences flow into
the fictionalization of the drama: Yourgrau
had developed an emotional attachment to the music of Ladysmith before he wrote
the play, and one of Ladysmith’s founders, Joseph Shabalala, had been murdered
as a result of racial tensions connected to Apartheid.
Against this frightening social backdrop, Yourgrau casts the
tragic narrative of Jacob Zulu as a young man who, though driven under the
rigors of courtroom cross-examination, refuses to bear witness against the ANC
who pressed him to his crime. Rather, Jacob puts his faith in Jesus. “If I
could give part of my flesh to th[e survivors and their families], I would do
it gladly.” But most importantly, he pleads for cessation of retaliation: “I
hope that the South African Defense Forces do not retaliate for these deaths.”
Jacob Zulu mounts the gallows expecting that his demeanor in the docket has
warranted God’s full forgiveness. “I am
not sad, really, because my soul is going to glory. … And I hope that my life
is a lesson to my brother Martin and to all the youth.”
Generous interpretations of The Song of Jacob Zulu conclude that “the Christ-like life and
death of the Orestes figure brings about an end to violence.”[2] And
the play’s choral epilogue articulates the same hope before the empty gallows.
“This is the song of a young man called Jacob Zulu,” the Leader sings, “who
suffered for the sins of South Africa. This is the song of those for whom the
good news of the end of apartheid comes too late.” Chronologically seen, Andrew
Zondo’s 1986 execution anteceded the negotiations by Frederik Willem de Klerk
(1990) and Nelson Mandela’s eventual release and success in the 1994 elections.
The Song’s 1992 premier announced the
“end of apartheid” on the grounds of the 1991 official abolition of apartheid
laws.
Further, Yourgrau’s intro, written June 1993 (in the weeks
after the play closed on Broadway): “As I write this, news reports announce the
setting of a date in early 1994 for free, democratic elections in South Africa.
I wish deeply that this comes to pass — and with a minimal loss of life.
Nine thousand people have died in political fighting in the three years since
Nelson Mandela was freed. A new day may be dawning in South Africa, but the
birth is traumatic, and it is still very possible that the labor pangs will
kill the child. History, I am afraid, will claim many more victims before a
free South Africa comes into being.”[3]
A confessed terrorist, Jacob Zulu’s “Christ-like” lifestyle
may be questioned. And the assessment that Jacob’s confession and willing
execution wrought “an end to violence” is the playwright’s narrative
contrivance. Historical fact may not bear Yourgrau’s connection between cause and
effect.
My critical sensibilities — whatever they are worth — resist
too blithe connection between this narrative and the great Oresteia of Aeschylus. Yourgrau set out “to tell the story of a
young man such as Andrew [Zondo] in the form of a Greek drama, but with an
African twist: Aeschylus set in Zululand.” That intent notwithstanding, Stefan
Tilg’s assessment goes too far when he refers to “Tug Yourgrau’s South African
version [of the Orestes myth], The Song
of Jacob Zulu (1993, a success on Broadway), in which the Christ-like life
and death of the O[restes] figure brings about an end to violence.”
Orestes’ plight is thrust upon him by circumstances well
outside his own actions. Fate has destined him for the role of avenger who must
sully himself with matricide. Jacob Zulu was raised in a respectable family
amidst circumstances that brought him into contact with murderous creatures.
Peers of Jacob, as is true of Andrew Zondo, endured unthinkable oppression and
hardship because of the color of their skin. In Yourgrau’s overarching
assessment the bomber was “an innocent, bright boy whom the fates — in this
case, the apartheid system — ground up and destroyed.” The tales, however, end
differently: Jacob Zulu’s brilliant resolution comes about at some future time;
Orestes’ absolution from blood-guilt
is effected with great suffering and decisively in the lawcourts of Athens.
That is the story of Aeschylus’ Eumenides,
that critical third element in the great dramatic trilogy.
As conceived by Aeschylus, the tale of Orestes is not a
tragedy, in that modern sense — a narrative of a protagonist who is ground up
and destroyed. Rather, the classical Oresteia
is a dramatic production that leads toward a remarkable sea-change, an end to primal vengeance. Within the
narrative confines of Orestes’ dramatic experience, as it is played out for the
audience in the theatre, Orestes endures a three-phase survival from
catastrophic ruin. The cycle of human revenge persists while the savior
is helpless to stop it in Agamemnon.
That cycle brings him into active perpetration in Choephori. And finally, the tragic hero’s needful “suffrance into
truth” snatches Orestes from the brink of personal catastrophe even as Athena’s
ascendancy over Apollo rescues all mankind from the brink of cosmic
annihilation.
Yourgrau’s play emerges hopefully from darkness and moves forward with an
expression of hope, a prayer. Aeschylus instructs the audience that emergence
from that darkness will necessitate cooperation of human endurance and extreme
divine ingenuity.
The structure of Aeschylus affects Yourgrau’s play far more
than the comparison of Orestes to Jacob allows.
Because of the disconnect, I do not think one can really call The Song of Jacob Zulu a “version” of
the Oresteia. Stefan Tilg seems to be
following the lead offered by Kevin Wetmore, whose book The Athenian Sun in an African Sky (2002) presented Yourgrau’s play as such. Yourgrau
admits that his play is structurally related to “the great Greek dramas,
especially Aeschylus’ Oresteia and
Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle” whence inspiration and guidance came. And the playwright does observation that his tale of the Zondo trial is “Aeschylus set
in Zululand.” Yet, if the cosmic magnitude of Jacob’s trial can be compared to
Orestes’ trail at the Areopagus, that is if the critical impasse of Jacob’s
guilty innocence is equivalent to Orestes’, then we must submit to the
playwrights’ conclusions and forgive Yougrau for obliging his audience to
connect the dots between his play and Aeschylus’.
Tug Yourgrau’s Song of
Jacob Zulu is not a great play in the magnitude of Aeschylus in Argos. The
end of apartheid, however, may be as glorious a human event as the judicial
intervention that ended the cyclic violence of the Tantalids. But,
structurally, the glimmering optimism that races through the epilogue of The Song is a pale representative of the
rigorous conclusion worked out by Aeschylus for his 5th-century audience.
Had Yourgrau striven to the same end, I might be inclined to celebrate his
literary accomplishment more energetically. As it is, The Song of Jacob Zulu resonates more as a version of Choephori than as a version of the grand
collective, The Oresteia. In that sense, the play ends with a promise of hope rather than with a celebration of resolution achieved.
[1]
Tug Yourgrau, The Song of Jacob Zulu
(New York: Arcade, 1993), viii-xi. The play premiered in Chicago’s Steppenwolf
Theatre in April 1992, and ran a peculiar course for seven weeks on Broadway in
late Winter 1993. Bruce Weber, “Case of the Vanished Audience,” NYT 7May1993, C4. Weber attributes the
play’s early closure not to artistic problems but to economic factors:
discounted tickets to less affluent clientele undermined word-of-mouth
publicity. Cf. B. Weber, “Author of Jacob
Zulu faces unpleasant choice,” NYT
19 Feb 1993, C2.
[2]
(S. Tilg), s.v. “Orestes” in Reception of
Myth and Mythology, ed. by M. Moog-Grünewald.
[3] Yourgrau, Song of Jacob,
introduction xii.
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