Syringa Tree (Gien)

The Syringa Tree
Pamela Gien, 2006
Random House
254 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375759109

Summary
In this heartrending and inspiring novel set against the gorgeous, vast landscape of South Africa under apartheid, award-winning playwright Pamela Gien tells the story of two families—one black, one white—separated by racism, connected by love.

Even at the age of six, lively, inquisitive Elizabeth Grace senses she’s a child of privilege, “a lucky fish.” Soothing her worries by raiding the sugar box, she scampers up into the sheltering arms of the lilac-blooming syringa tree growing behind the family’s suburban Johannesburg home.

Lizzie’s closest ally and greatest love is her Xhosa nanny, Salamina. Deeper and more elemental than any traditional friendship, their fierce devotion to each other is charged and complicated by Lizzie’s mother, who suffers from creeping melancholy, by the stresses of her father’s medical practice, which is segregated by law, and by the violence, injustice, and intoxicating beauty of their country.

In the social and racial upheavals of the 1960s, Lizzie’s eyes open to the terror and inhumanity that paralyze all the nation’s cultures—Xhosa, Zulu, Jew, English, Boer. Pass laws requiring blacks to carry permission papers for white areas and stringent curfews have briefly created an orderly state—but an anxious one. Yet Lizzie’s home harbors its own set of rules, with hushed midnight gatherings, clandestine transactions, and the girl’s special task of protecting Salamina’s newborn child—a secret that, because of the new rules, must never be mentioned outside the walls of the house.

As the months pass, the contagious spirit of changesends those once underground into the streets to challenge the ruling authority. And when this unrest reaches a social and personal climax, the unthinkable will happen and forever change Lizzie’s view of the world.

When The Syringa Tree opened off-Broadway in 2001, theater critics and audiences alike embraced the play, and it won many awards. Pamela Gien has superbly deepened the story in this new novel, giving a personal voice to the horrors and hopes of her homeland. Written with lyricism, passion, and life-affirming redemption, this compelling story shows the healing of the heart of a young woman and the soul of a sundered nation. (From the publisher.)

The Syringa Tree has also been adapted to TV film in 2002.

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Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—Johannesburg, South Africa
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Obie Award for Best Play and Performance; Drama
   Desk Award for Performance; Outer Circle Award for
   Performance; Drama League Honor—all for 2001 for the
   stage version of Syringa.
• Currently—lives in California

Pamela Gien was born and raised in South Africa. She is the recipient of the Obie Award for Best Play 2001. She currently lives in the United States. The Syringa Tree is her first novel. (From the publisher.)

More
The Syringa Tree had its world premiere at ACT in Seattle, followed by a two-year run in New York. Gien has since travelled around the world, including London and Cape Town, performing the play, astonishing audiences with her adept portrayal of such diverse characters, and moving them deeply through the raw emotions and profound insights contained within the story.

As both a writer and performer of The Syringa Tree, Pamela Gien won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Solo Performance, a Drama League Honor, a nomination for the John Gassner Playwriting Award, and the Obie for both Performance and Best Play 2001. She shares these awards and her deepest gratitude with Matt Salinger, her producer and Larry Moss, her director.

She has also appeared in film in Men Seeking Women with Will Ferrell, and The Last Supper starring Bill Paxton, Jason Alexander, Charles Durning, and Ron Perlman.

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Book Reviews
Novels can be large, hardy vehicles, capable of surviving lackluster maintenance and neglected fine-tuning while still carrying readers to someplace worth visiting. This version of The Syringa Tree conveys, as pale fire, some of the brightness generated by Gien’s stage performances. Her original concept—to illustrate the breathtaking cruelty and lunacy of apartheid by detailing its effects on a small number of black and white characters—remains effective. A child’s bewildered response to the injustices inflicted on people she knows and loves seems entirely appropriate; only adults could have believed that apartheid made any practical or moral sense.
Paul Gray - New York Times Book Review

A spare, yet poetic account that steadily works its magic on the reader as both a portrait of individuals, and a country, in the tumultuous time of apartheid.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A gorgeous, hopeful, heartrending novel.... This uncommonly moving, deeply humane novel nearly dances in a reader's hands with the rhythms and the colors, the complicatedness and the inimitability of southern Africa.
O, The Oprah Magazine

(Based on the one-woman stage production.) South African writer and actress Pamela Gien's new one-woman play, The Syringa Tree, is the tragic story of two South African families—one black, one white— and the complex love they share, even as race stands between them. While this isn't unexplored territory, what makes this production a standout is Gien's impressive performance in creating 28 fully realized characters on a sparsely decorated stage. Through her expressive movements and creative vocalizations— most startlingly in rapid-fire exchanges between six-year old Elizabeth and her redoubtable, deep-voiced South African caretaker—Gien single-handedly fills the stage with the people, music and verdant countryside of South Africa.

Gien's dazzling performance only enhances the simple emotional power of the tale. What we see through the eyes of six-year-old Elizabeth, her black caretaker and the others who populate this story is that apartheid was not only fought in the frontline political struggle broadcast around the world, but also in the closely knit circles of families, in the intimacies of individual relationships and in the quiet but fierce struggles of personal conscience.
Time Magazine

Six-year-old Lizzie Grace sits in the syringa tree in her South African backyard whenever she's troubled. From there, she watches her Afrikaner neighbors and the black workers her part-Jewish family employs. Although her parents an always-busy doctor father and a depressed mother have tried to insulate themselves and their staff, it is impossible to shield Lizzie from the racism that permeates daily life. Indeed, as the meaning of apartheid unfolds, Lizzie struggles to understand racial laws that force her nanny to carry work papers and hide from the police. Through her eyes, readers see South African townships and experience the indignities that provoked underground resistance movements. Although the protagonist is occasionally cloying, this is part of the book's charm. Nonetheless, there are spots where the child's perspective weakens the text and leaves the reader hungry for more. For example, Lizzie's grandfather is murdered by a Rhodesian rebel, but the reason for this political crime remains unclear. South African-born Gien, who created this novel from her Obie Award-winning play of the same name, here illuminates a shameful history of a country by highlighting the juxtaposition of race, anti-Semitism, and class privilege. Highly recommended. —Eleanor J. Bader, Brooklyn, NY.
Library Journal

(Adult/High School) Six-year-old Lizzy is present when her doctor father secretly delivers the baby of her nurse, Salamina, in a white suburb of South Africa in 1963. It becomes Lizzy's special responsibility to keep the infant hidden from the police as well as from the Afrikaner neighbors. As the irrepressible child grows, it becomes more and more difficult to keep Moliseng hidden, and she is sent to the slums of Soweto to live with her grandmother. At the age of 14, she is killed by police as she leads other children in a final defiant and heartrending gesture, proclaiming her freedom. The narrative is told from the point of view of Lizzy, who grapples with the conflicting social, political, and religious values of the times and with her mother's depression. She finds comfort, if not answers, in the distracted attention of her father, the unconditional love of her nurse, and her own Syringa tree with its sweet-smelling blossoms. Readers will be carried away by lyrical descriptions of the sensual beauty of the veld and will experience the heartache of the characters as their lives are torn apart by the violence of the period. The story is as compelling and enlightening as Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, and the writing is evocative of that classic work. —Jackie Gropman, Chantilly Regional Library, Fairfax County, VA
School Library Review

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Discussion Questions
1. The novel is set in South Africa during the time leading up to apartheid. The story is told from the point of view of a six-year-old girl for most of the novel. How does this affect the way you perceive the situation in South Africa?

2. Lizzy thinks, even before Moliseng is born, that it is her dire responsibility to protect and save her loved ones. She literally thinks her mother is “kept alive by her exceedingly good behaviour.” Why has she come to believe that her actions and thoughts will direct the fates of others?

3. Both Eugenie and Salamina are maternal with Lizzy. How are Lizzy’s relationships with them similar, and how are they different?

4. Family is a major force in Pamela Gien’s story. How does Lizzy understand and how does she feel about her mother, her father, and her grandfather? How does she understand/feel about Salamina and Moliseng? Does Lizzy perceive them to be equal members of the family? Is she aware of any differences?

5. Lizzy is raised by an atheist parent. How do you think this helps or hinders her in her chaotic environment? What of her credo: “Oh no nothing will happen God won’t let anything happen”?

6. Compare Lizzy’s two ‘siblings.’ Moliseng plays a large role at the beginning while John comes to fruition as a character much later in the story. Why do you think this is? Is it significant that she refers to Moliseng as “the speck” and to John by his real name?

7. Why do Lizzy’s parents choose to risk so much by allowing “the speck” to stay at their house?

8. What is the role of Moliseng’s character in the story? Think about her relationship to Lizzy, her social position, and her status in the world. What about Loeska? What is her role in the story? Do Moliseng and Loeska symbolize anything beyond their individual characters?

9. Why does Lizzy want to be friends with Loeska so desperately?

10. Why is the book named after a tree in the Grace family’s back yard? Think about its description in the novel, physical and otherwise, and about trees as symbols in general. Think about what goes on in and around this tree, and the spirituality it evokes.

11. Dr. Milton Bird tells Dr. Isaac Grace that Eugenie’s depression is “unrelated to circumstance.” Do you agree?

12. Why does Lizzy bludgeon the chameleon in her backyard?

13. Why was Grandpa George murdered? Why did the murderer steal Grandpa George’s medals?

14. Why do you think Salamina leaves? Why does she do it secretly, in the night, and not say goodbye?

15. Why does Lizzy finally return to Africa?

16. How does the book’s tone change throughout the novel? What factors provoke the change?

17. The themes of displacement and disappearance surface over and over again in the novel, both on personal and cultural levels. Who really is lost and who is gone? Who is trying to forget and who is forgotten?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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