Do I have a muse? Well, I don’t know if this is an adequate answer, but I suppose my muse is the people of South Africa. I’ve often said that the little — or maybe the lot — I know about loving and hating was taught me by South Africa. Now that’s a big debt. When you owe that much to a situation that has shaped your conscience, your heart, your whole life, you’re profoundly indebted.
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AF
Athol Fugard
Playwright, director and actor
South Africa · 1932–2025
Arts and letters
About
South African dramatist whose plays, most of them set in and around Port Elizabeth, examined life under apartheid. His first major work, The Bloodknot, opened in Johannesburg in 1961 with a racially integrated cast; legislation prohibiting such casts was passed shortly after it closed. His passport was confiscated by the South African government from 1967 to 1971.
3 answers
That is true. That one little corner of South Africa, Port Elizabeth and its immediate surroundings, is a region that I know like the back of the hand that holds my pen as I write about it. I can stand on a street corner in Port Elizabeth, look at anybody and put together some sort of biography. I know where they come from, where they’re going. I have a feel of the textures of their life. If I stand on a street corner in New Haven, which is a place I’ve gotten to know as well as any place outside of South Africa, I am still at a total loss to identify the people passing me on that street.
Recorded
Lloyd Richards, Interview conducted in front of an audience at the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street YMHA, New York, The Paris Review, Issue 111, Summer 1989, 13 October 1985
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