Anthony Akerman on why he’s one lucky bastard

Picture the scene: It's a crisp Monday autumn afternoon in Jozi. The soon-to-be 76-year-old Anthony Akerman is seated at a table on the patio of the Johannesburg Country Club in the leafy 'burb of Auckland Park.

The playwright and his wife, singer and performer André Hattingh, have been members of the club for a number of years and regularly frequent it on Mondays (pizza-special day).

The relentless midday sunshine necessitates a move to a shaded table. (He forgot to don or pack a hat before leaving the house). Once shielded from Helios' unyielding rays, Akerman is ready to discuss Lucky Bastard, his authentic, astute and amusing memoir detailing his experience of being an adopted child. 

Told by his adoptive parents when he was 10-years-old, the information had an effect on the boy which mimicked a magnitude 9.5 on the psychological Richter Scale.

Recounting memories of growing up in Durbz, years of sturm und drang at the elite Midlands' boarding school Michaelhouse, his days as a student of English and drama at Rhodes University, director-training at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, living in exile in Amsterdam from 1975 to 1992 and his 21st century present, Akerman — a friend of Athol Fugard, dedicated diary-keeper and possessor of a memory that skriks vir niks — takes the reader on a genealogical journey as he delves into his past as a means to discover who he is. 

(PS: Judging a book by its cover would be a flaming faux pas, for a smoker Akerman is no more.)

Let the conversation commence.

Talk me through being a lucky bastard.

I wanted the word “bastard” in the title because it's got a slight shock effect but also because it's a stigma that you've been stuck with. I encountered the word when we were studying King Lear and the “evil” guy in King Lear, Edmund, is a bastard.

I'd also played around when I'd been reading a lot of the literature on adoption. I came across the term “genealogical bewilderment”. It was a nice term, it appealed to me. I thought “Genealogically Bewildered Bastard” doesn't roll off the tongue, and sales and marketing wouldn't go for that. 

It was André who came up with the title. At first I thought, 'Wow, that's great, “Lucky Bastard”. I went on to Google and checked if there were other books with the title “Lucky Bastard”. The only thing I came across was a porno movie and I thought, 'That guy got lucky in ways that I've never got lucky”.

Subsequently I found there are quite a lot of books with the title “Lucky Bastard”, but there's no copyright on titles and many books have the same title. I'm very happy with the title, because I am a bastard and I have been very lucky. The book's not about licking wounds and saying, “Oh, how terrible my life is”.

Sisonke Msimang's advice to her memoir writing students is “to write from your scars, not your wounds”. Do you agree with that statement?

It makes sense. I had never thought of that before but if you were feeling deeply, if your wounds were open and suppurating and wet wounds, I think it'll probably be anger that could come through. My book's not an angry book, I'm not angry with anybody in the book. I think when your scars healed, you kind of know what they are and what caused them, but you're not in pain, you're not writing from pain. I think that sounds like very sage advice. 

On the topic of wounds: you draw extensively on Nancy Verrier's The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. What was it like reading Verrier's work?  

When I started out looking into adoption, I wrote a radio play about it. That's 25 years ago or something. At that time I was reading a lot of the literature that was available. The “primal wound” she refers to is the wound inflicted when a baby is separated from his or her birth mother. That primal wound is there and those scars are deep. There is lasting damage done by that because you are stuck, in a way, without even knowing it. I'm sure there could be adopted kids who were never told, and might manifest some of the symptomatic behaviour adoptees have.

I don't know whether somebody told me this had happened to them or whether I'd read about it, but their parents died. They were in the attic going through all the boxes and discovered papers to say they were adopted. The parents weren't there to confront, to ask “Why have you done this? Why did you never tell me the truth?”.

I've been rereading my book over the weekend, to refresh my memory of what I've put into the book. Particularly in the introduction, or the preface, I write there was quite a lot of that research about how they've looked into the mother-baby unit that happens when the child's in utero; that the child, separated from its mother at birth, could identify its mother from pictures. That is extraordinary. There is this very primal thing and it's a primal wound. So that's true.

You refer to adoption texts you drew on while writing the book, while also mentioning fictional adoptees and orphans: from Wuthering Heights' Heathcliff to the story of Moses to the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata to Dickens' Oliver Twist. How did your approach to reading fiction, or myths, change after finding out that you were adopted?

I had never realised, when studying Wuthering Heights, whether it occurred to me that Heathcliff was adopted. He was a foundling, kids who were abandoned. Now everybody's talking about the Door of Hope, and it's going through the courts, but in those days people would leave a baby on the church steps and you'd be found by the parish and looked after by the parish.

Literature is full of adoptees or orphans who would suffer from the same sort of thing if they didn't have an origin story, didn't know where they came from.

Would you have begun to wonder, or mull over “who are my parents” or “where are my parents” if you hadn't read Oedipus Rex?

That wasn't so much the shock. The shock was thinking, “Oh my God. I don't belong to anybody around me”. My family explains a lot of things, but on the other hand, they bloody well lie to me. I think I was deeply resentful about that, particularly because my parents always said, “Never tell lies”.

When I realised Oedipus killed his father and married his mother because he didn't know they were his father and his mother, then you start realising, “Oh my God, who could my parents be?”.

I was a fairly aggressive, tearaway young boy on a motorbike, riding with a motorbike gang, and if some old toppie had got in my way, you could have tuned him skeef, saying “I'll f**k you up” or something. But it could have been your father.

It was possible Oedipus Rex made me start thinking about it and I fantasised about who my parents could be. I had a certain kind of angst about inadvertently doing something to somebody who I was related to.

Over the years, you've kept, and saved, diaries, newspaper clippings, photos and even emails. How does the archive help when writing about your life, specially quite a disjointed life? 

I kept photos and photo albums and I was very keen on them, as I had a camera when I was 11. Most of my life I've taken photos and kept photos, and my dad had photo albums, so that's also handy. On mum's side of the family, there wasn't that kind of repository; they didn't have the money for photographs.

I remember when I had a bust-up with Leslie [an ex-girlfriend] when I was about 20 or 21. She broke my heart and I was so angry. I had a pile of letters. First, I burnt them all in the rubbish tip at the back of the house. Fortunately, two letters survived that I found when I came back to South Africa, and one of the letters I quote from in the book. But I realised after that it was a very stupid move to destroy evidence, or whatever you'd like to call it.

I wouldn't throw away a letter from Athol Fugard. No way.

My dad was a doctor and he used to get diaries sent every year from pharmaceutical companies. I was given a diary when I was in standard 5, and I wrote stuff in it, very mundane shit, and some guy, the bully in the class, grabbed my diary,

He stood on top of a desk and read it to the whole class and I thought, “I'm never going to put anything down in writing again and commit to writing because you can have it held against you”. 

What has helped with the writing of this is I have a good memory and I rely on my memory, but memories can be deceptive.

If any of the stuff that's said about how things happen, I wrote it down and it was pretty fresh in my memory. That also helps when you write something down that afternoon, like when I went for the interview at the embassy for getting my visa, I came back after that and I sat down, opened my diary and I wrote for two hours. I put down everything I could remember.

Then, because I thought at the time this could be an interesting short story, and however many years later, I've got the stuff there, I can draw on the resource. I know it's true, I'm not making it up.

I'm sure there's always a bit of fiction in autobiography, or memoir. Like there is in theatre if you write a play about historical characters  

When your parents, abruptly, shared the news that you and your sister Gill were adopted (as they couldn't have children of their own), your first response was “they lied to me”.

I remember that indelibly. 

You instantly wondered “was I unwanted?”.

The interesting thing is that goes together with shame, because I felt less than when I suddenly realised I was not their real child' And then I thought “Hang on. Who else knows?”.

At first I didn't tell anyone, so I was complicit in the lie. Mum and dad would have thought, “That's kind of cool, the less we talk about these things, the better”. When I sent my dad the script of the radio play about adoption I wrote, he found it very difficult to read. He wrote back to me, or he said to me on the phone, “It was a very difficult time”. And that's the first time he'd ever said anything like that to me about their sense of failure, perhaps, and that adoption was a second-best option for them.

There's pain on every side because the birth mother has that as well. I was resentful, but I was complicit in keeping the secret. 

You write about the narratives adopted children create for themselves regarding their origins. Can you elaborate on its significance and the stories you created for yourself, about yourself?

You feel a bit lost without an origin story; its genealogical bewilderment because you don't know where you come from. If your father's in a psychiatric hospital because he murdered people, you can think “Have I inherited that?”. That's why you fantasise, particularly if you have more of an inclination towards the creative side of things and you're more imaginative. You will make up stories. I don't know what my sister would've done. She never talked about that much, but I think it damaged her as much as it damaged me in different ways.

You experienced a second sense of abandonment when your parents sent you to Michaelhouse, and write frankly about the misery you associate with the school.

Writing is always going on a particular journey, and it's a world of discovery. You discover things as you go along also, like when you're writing a play; that creativity takes you by surprise at times.

It's the same when you're writing something like a memoir because I suppose it's quite narcissistic fiction: you're writing about yourself and you're thinking about yourself. I was thinking about those years at boarding school and because it's so deeply imprinted on you, that abandonment thing, because you're going to repeat patterns.

At a subconscious, preconscious level, it all happened. Then you get sent away to this boarding school, which was isolated. Back then Michaelhouse was a bit like a Victorian orphanage, an awful place, with cold showers and everything.

I was very rebellious and had a very undistinguished career at the school. I was self-sabotaging and attention-seeking because there was an authoritarian system in the school and that I didn't like. On the other hand, I realised it was that I had been abandoned. It was while writing the third or fourth draft of the book when I started to question “How did I react? Why did I behave that way? 'Why did I behave like that? What did I hope to achieve?”. Because a solo fight against a system like that, you're not going to win.

It also was around that time when you shared, “He's not my real dad”, after a disagreement with your parents. Was that the first time you voiced that?

 Yes, and the one and only time. I was really angry and resentful.

I suppose I was about 15 or 16. That must have been very hurtful to him. I spent a lot of time trying to make amends for that because I realised how hurtful it was. Though I wanted to hurt him. They were sending me to this f***ing terrible school.

You extensively, and honestly, write about your many failed relationships, recounting the memory of Lesley who, when she suspected she might be pregnant, suggested adoption as an option. One of your reactions was “no child of mine will ever be adopted”.

That was my sentiment then. I didn't know how I was completely out of my depth. I was so young, and it was the first regular sexual relationship I had with somebody. I was 20, 21 and she was 18. It was just as reckless to say, “I'll marry you”.

I thought adoption was so terrible. I couldn't have put up a child for adoption. But the last thing I wanted was to have a child.  

I didn't like babies, I thought they were stupid and that sort of stuff. As a boy, it didn't ever appeal to me and I think part of it could be probably because of being adopted. I think my sister Gill was the opposite. She said to me she wanted to have kids so she could know people who are biologically related.

That's so the antithesis to you?

Yes. 

The main, or sole, reason you wanted to find your birth mother, Vera Farnham, is because she was the only one who knew your origin story.

I wasn't looking for a parent, I wanted to solve the mystery. I found out what my other name had been on September 1 1987: Peter Farnham. What a mind f**ck.

I was amazed dad kept that from me, he knew my name all these years. Because the adoption laws had changed, he felt he could tell me. Then I was also a bit wary. Should I tell him I'm going to do a trace for my birth mother? I do know they did feel threatened by it and anxious at times.

I waited for a whole year, really as a courtesy to Gill [who traced her biological mother and learnt she died]. She was the first one who made the inquiries and then I made the inquiries. I was prepared for anything, really.

I read Debbie Harry's memoir. She was adopted. She wrote to her birth mother who wanted nothing to do with her, so there was that fear.

You refer to your adopted parents, Phillis (or Paddy) and John (or Ponto) as mum and dad throughout, yet never called Vera “mum”?

No. I did in early letters, I referred to her as my mother. She became a bit anxious just before I was coming back to South Africa and said, “Please, call me Vera”.

My mum and dad always remained “mum” and “dad'”. There was no confusion. I did have a good relationship with Vera but she had major issues.

I think she was a bit of a narcissist as well, because it was always about her. “Don't tell people who you are because I care about my reputation”. how ridiculous is that? A woman of 70 doesn't want people to know she'd had a child out of wedlock when she was 19. In the 2000s. Please. 

You spoke to Vera for the first time on her 61st birthday, yet you don't describe her voice, whereas you do describe your biological father, the esteemed viticulturist and winemaker Douglas Green's voice, which I found intriguing. 

I have no idea why. With his voice, I was a bit surprised: he had a laugh like my uncle, and quite a high-pitched voice. Vera grew up pretty much Afrikaans. Her voice, her accent, was hard to describe.

What would you say to someone considering adopting?

It's fantastic that you do. I know why people would do it and think it's very helpful for parents to understand kids would want to know where they come from.

I've had people who were adopted, or people who have adopted, who read the book and who thank me for it. I think if you understand the kind of problems your kids could be going through, it can help you to navigate the problems. My rebelliousness was textbook behaviour of adopting. My parents wouldn't have known that. 

It would be wrong of me to say people wouldn't do it because they're scared of what they'd find. It might be true and other people might really care. Not all adoptees are the same.

I'm a curious type, and it's been a fascinating story and reconstructing the story and thinking about the new ancestry that I had.

Would you consider children of adoptees as honorary adoptees?

Yes, because you also don't know part of your history.

In the worst-case scenario, there's some disease that might skip a generation and I almost feel you'd be entitled to that information; you're being deprived of the information.

There's a part of your origin story you don't know, and it might be fascinating and you might find you've got relatives out there who you get on extremely well with. I've had some very good connections with people who are family, and the only reason I know is because they're family. I wouldn't have my sister in my life if it wasn't for this, or my beautiful niece, Ella.

For the grand finale, when can we see a stage adaptation of Lucky Bastard?

Oh God, I would have no idea how to do it.

Encore.