Amy Biehl

Last night I saw my first theater production in Cape Town at the Baxter Theater at UCT. The play was Mother to Mother, a 1-woman show about the true story of Amy Biehl. For those who don’t know, Amy Biehl was a Fulbright scholar here in Cape Town in 1993 that was brutally killed as an act of racial violence. She was stabbed in the Guguletu township, somewhere it was illegal for her to be because she was white. She was supposed to go home to America the next day. On our brief tour of Guguletu at the beginning of this semester we saw the exact spot on the sidewalk where she was stabbed.

The play is from the perspective of the mother of one of Amy’s killers and is in the form of a letter to Amy’s mother in the states. It was riveting. During the scene in which she vividly describes the actual act of Amy’s murder, I started crying. A lot of you know that I very rarely cry at theater or movies. But just thinking about this girl who must have been so excited to go home and see her family the next day and never quite got there, about the rocks that were thrown at her car, about how many times she was stabbed on that sidewalk, about how scared she must have been, about that phone call her mother received….. the weight of all of that hit me and I just broke. However, the show brought up some really great points, considered many perspectives, and made me evaluate why I felt so strongly about it.  First of all, had Amy Biehl been black, this would not even be a play.  The reason it made headlines is because she was a young white American woman. Had she been a black American woman it would not have been such a big deal. But does that take away from the same terror a black woman would have felt? What if Amy Biehl had been a black South African? Black South African women face situations like this every day. They get beaten every day. They get raped everyday. They feel the same terror Amy must have felt. The reason I personally felt such a connection to the story because I am a young white American woman as well. I can relate. Would this story have hit me as hard if it were about a North Korean woman?

So many perspectives were taken into account. The play briefly questions what the hell Amy was thinking that day; being in a township she knew it was illegal to be in. This is in NO way meant to justify what happened to her, but just to consider that if she had “even 1 ounce of fear” that she may have survived. This is hard to agree with but necessary to understand- we are not invincible. She may have thought she was. Again, this does not make anything her fault, but just considers another side.

I think this a very important work. I wish last night had not been the last night of the production so that everyone else in the program could see it.

The rest of the Amy Biehl story is really fascinating.  It is a very very powerful story of forgiveness. Here is a link to the Amy Biehl Foundation:

http://www.amybiehl.org/