Interview by Joseph Roberts

Ann Mortifee was born in Zululand, South Africa and moved to Canada as a child. As a teenager in Vancouver, she began singing with the legendary Josh White, and after successfully auditioning to sing in the first run of George Ryga's play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe, she recognized the power of the arts to influence social awareness. Known throughout the world for her passionate and honest performances, Ann has released more than 10 CDs, written four musicals, and several ballet and film scores. She received the Order of Canada and the YWCA Woman of Distinction Award in 1992 for her outstanding contribution to the healing and performing arts in Canada.
Ann Mortifee presents the world premier of Into the Heart of the Sangoma at the Arts Club Theatre Company, 1585 Johnston Street, March 9 to April 8. Call Ticketmaster, 604-280-3311 or the box office, 604-687-1644. www.artsclub.com
Common Ground: You're coming back to the stage. How does that feel?
Ann Mortifee: It feels wonderful to be back. Throughout my career, I have come and gone from music. Each time I've left the theatre, I have been able to take the time to go deeper with life. I live by the ocean and I'm a very tidal person. There's a moment when I've saturated the wave I've been riding and I have to retreat back into myself to go deeper to see what else is there.
CG: What have you been doing the last 15 years?
AM: I brought up my son. I moved to Cortes Island and built a beautiful house by the sea. I've worked throughout Europe with the dying. I created The Trust for Sustainable Forestry. And the latest thing I've written is the CD Into the Heart of the Sangoma. I'm now presenting the play of the same name.
CG: How did you come to write this play?
AM: When I wrote When the Rains Come, a musical that was my statement in support of the end of apartheid, the day it opened, as the lights were going up on the stage in Vancouver, men and women were lining up in the morning sun in South Africa to vote in the first free election. So my musical was magnificently obsolete on the night that it opened. However, I learned from that experience that power lies not necessarily in what the world sees of our work, but that our dreaming also has a profound effect on what happens in the world. Each thought goes out, for better or worse, into the collective dream we are creating together. There were millions of people along with me who were dreaming, as well as working, toward a free South Africa, and all helped to turn the tide.
CG: How has that experience affected the show you are staging at the Arts Club?
AM: Into the Heart of the Sangoma really started with When the Rains Come. One of the main characters was a Zulu Sangoma. I was having dreams about her for some time. She became very real to me. Two years after writing Rains, I read a book by Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, the head spiritual leader, or Sangoma, of the Zulu nation. I saw that I had written things in Rains that were actual Zulu myths and stories, of which I had had no previous knowledge.
It was through this that I returned to Africa to find Credo Mutwa. I had no idea where he was, but I asked everywhere I went. No one could help me find him. Finally, I found myself out on a game reserve one night with my little machine recording the night sounds. (You hear that on the CD.)
An elephant herd passed by and the matriarch stopped and turned and walked towards me. She lifted her trunk and waved at me and I lifted my hand and waved back. I mean, I'm sitting there with this huge being looking down at me. I could have been trampled at any moment, but I had this interface with her that totally changed me. As I was weeping and telling her how grateful I was, the full moon rose up behind her.
When I went to sleep that night, I relived the whole thing as if I was there again, except instead of her standing alone, the old black woman is there. And she said to me three times, "Go to Shamwari tomorrow." I woke up and wrote down the word, wondering what it meant. The next morning, I asked the game warden if he knew what it meant and he said it was a private game reserve about 30 minutes away.
Well, I got in my car and went there. I'd been looking everywhere for Credo Mutwa, and while I'm out on the reserve in the jeep, I see a little piece of paper that said, "If you're interested in seeing a traditional healing village, ask your guide about it." I told the guide I was interested and to tell me about it, and he said, "Oh, I don't suppose you've ever heard of Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa?"
The next thing you know, I'm in the healing village and there's an old Zulu woman who has been expecting me. She read the bones for me and I got drawn into a healing ceremony with her. I ended up in an eight-hour initiation ceremony in the middle of nowhere with six women. It was absolutely extraordinary.
When the dancing and singing started, I was feeling a little shy, but then I said to myself, "This is such a blessing; just receive what's being given and be grateful." And at that moment, I suddenly leaped to my feet and started to sing and dance. I knew all the songs. I knew all the steps. I knew when to move and when to stand still. I just got totally in line with these women and I danced with them for eight hours, non-stop.
At a certain point, the grandmother stopped and said, "Now you sing for us." So I sang the song I'd been making up while driving and walking through Africa. It's the first song on the CD. She stopped me and said, "Who taught you this song?" "I just made it up," I said. She said, "You have not. That is the song we Sangomas sing when we go to spirit and call upon Nomkumbuluwana." And then they all started singing it with me.
At the end of my days in the village with the Sangomas, I was given a little piece of paper and it turned out to be Credo Mutwa's phone number. When I finally met Mutwa, he asked me to tell him about the sangoma of my dreams. I said, "Her name is Eskowe." He got me to say the name three times, then asked what she looked like. I said, "Her eyes are strange; one of them is white and the other one is black."
"Which eye is white?" he asked.
"It's the right eye," I said.
"And what do her legs look like?"
"Well, her legs look like the trunks of a tree."
And he said, "That woman is my grandmother. Her name was Eskowe. She had a cataract in her right eye, which turned it completely white and she had elephantitis, which made her legs look like tree trunks. My grandmother told me she was sending someone to me. I just did not expect it to be a white woman."
I couldn't believe it. The Sangoma that I had created in When the Rains Come, the Zulu woman who appears in my dreams, this woman was Credo Mutwa's grandmother!
Later, he said that his grandmother had a gift for me, but I had to tell him what it was or I could not receive it. He asked me several questions and somehow I knew all the answers. It all seemed so natural, as if we were having a simple conversation, and yet there I was, somehow knowing the answers to questions that were completely unknowable by any logical means. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I simply said what came into my thoughts. Even as I am saying this now, I wonder how often we are intuiting things that are true, but we doubt ourselves. It was like being in a dream, and yet it was more real than most of the encounters that I have with many human beings in my daily life.
It turned out that the gift that Mutwa's grandmother wanted me to have was her central divining bone, her most important and sacred relic. Before her, it had belonged to her great-grandmother, who had the same name. Ever since receiving this gift, I have felt a deep responsibility to discover why this bone has come to me and what it might require of me. I do know that the play and the CD of Into the Heart of the Sangoma, both with a central theme that questions dreams and reality, are my first tentative steps to make a gesture with Eskowe. It's a rich experience.
CG: What has helped you in your inner journey?
AM: One thing that has helped me tremendously on my journey is discovering that the body has a very deep knowing of its own. We need to be in the body to access that wisdom. In the West, we tend to live in the mind, not in the body. What I love about shamanic wisdom, such as the work of Credo Mutwa, is that the connection to the land, the body, the ancestral root, is emphasized. If we can learn to listen to the body, by learning to feel deeply, we can become awake to the moment, here and now.
There is a hunger that goes deep into the soul. We despair, and even though we know we're not alone, we feel alone and at times we feel hopeless. I have grown to understand that our dreaming makes a difference. It is still difficult for me to actually believe some of what has happened in the last years, but the truth is that the dreams I was dreaming have come true. There are beings we can't see who care deeply about us. These are dangerous times. If our dreams can help turn this ship around, then we need to be conscious about what we are dreaming. I sometimes feel a great despair about all that Hollywood is pumping into the collective. Those of us who can dream a better dream, a kinder dream, should get to it. When I was with Mutwa this year, asking him for clarity on all that is happening, he listened and listened, and then he started to laugh, "You Western people! You want to understand everything. Some things you cannot understand. You can only sit in wonder. There are things that happened to me as a boy that I am only now beginning to understand, and there are things that, to this day, are a complete and absolute mystery."
Our culture is so male dominated that it's all about what you can understand, see, explain, or know. So we don't have the ability to sit for any length of time in a state of not knowing. We cannot tolerate the suspense of what's going to be on the next page. We put ourselves through incredible anxiety trying to figure out what we're supposed to know. We don't understand the value of process. We have to learn to love the process.
CG: Your mother died recently. Do you feel her presence?
AM: I do. Whether it is my wishing that she be still with me, or whether I am actually feeling her presence from beyond the veil, how can I be sure? But I now understand why so many cultures in the world value ancestral worship. My very cellular structure is not me at all. It is not personal. My urges and gifts and limitations in this body belong to the genetic tree from which I have grown. I am the fruit of a long lineage.
Perhaps our very desires and hungers are the unresolved urges of our ancestors. I am my mother as much as I am my father. I need to embrace them both and all my other ancestors that live on within me. Having lost both of my parents, it is easier to feel their presence within.
When I was creating The Trust for Sustainable Forestry, there was a point when I was sitting at my father's desk, realizing that before him the desk had belonged to my grandfather. My grandfather had worked tirelessly to create the Umflozi Game Reserve in Zululand. His passion was the conservation of land as habitat for animals. I realized that I was passionate about the same thing, and I said to myself, "Perhaps this isn't my urge at all. Perhaps this is my grandfather's unfulfilled continuing desire to see that animals have space to survive." It's all so interesting. CG: How has music helped your awakening?
AM: It has been the place where I have done my deepest dreaming. It has led me forward, always. When I look at When the Rains Come, I am living now what I wrote then. I wrote about a Sangoma creating an amulet underneath the light of the moon. She's carving a bone that is eventually given to Emily, the woman in the play. And what do I have around my neck, but the very amulet that I wrote about then. I didn't realize at the time that it was prophetic. Another thing in that play was that the two main characters, Emily and Kenyele, knew each other and cared deeply for one another when they were younger. They were separated from each other for 20 years, became strong in their own right and finally met one other when they were older. This is another synchronicity, as I am now with a man who I first met, sang with and became friends with when I was much younger, and then we didn't meet again for many years. And many of the qualities I wrote about in their relationship are also paralleled in our relationship. I believe that what we dream intensely appears later in our lives in some way.
CG: Are you comfortable with people knowing who this man is?
AM: Sure.
CG: So the fact that I saw you in Banyen Books with Paul Horn doesn't need to be kept under wraps?
AM: Not on my account. I feel extremely blessed to be with a man of such depth and beauty. Both of us have chosen to follow the deepest urgings of our spirits and to follow music where it has wanted us to go, rather than where the lure of fame or fortune would dictate that we should go. Our careers have run parallel in many ways to one another. It is an absolute joy to be sharing this leg of the journey with a man of such quality.
CG: Do you feel a presence when you're singing?
AM: When I first step on the stage, it's like surfing, swimming to catch a wave. You have to work to get there, but once you do, it grabs you and you don't have to do another thing. It carries you the rest of the way. It's like riding the current in the river. There's a moment, and then, poof, I'm gone, and it's happening by itself. Some days, the current is more powerful than others; sometimes it's less powerful, and sometimes you miss the wave altogether and you have to go by remote control. Hopefully, you're good enough and talented enough and you've had enough years to be able to get away with it, but you know you're faking and it's a horrible feeling. But if you catch the wave, then it's effortless and there's nothing like it in the world.
The second song I ever wrote was called I'm a Hollow Reed -- Play Me. That's what it's like. You become an instrument and it takes you where it wants to go and you find your voice able to do things it can't usually do in rehearsal. It is a beautiful encounter with mystery.
CG: How can we help Africa?
AM: There are a million ways to help. First we have to recognize that Africa is our root. If the root of the tree is so ill, it's telling us something very important about the whole of humanity. And our root is very, very sick. And the fact that we don't care is heartbreaking. These are our ancestors, our brothers and sisters. This is where we come from. The people of Africa are dying at a phenomenal rate, equal to a tsunami hitting the shores of Africa every two weeks. That's how many people are dying from AIDS. Why aren't we running toward them with open arms? Why don't we notice this unbelievable devastation?
We can all do something. I have been involved with Shivon Robinsong and the Gettin' Higher Choir of Victoria with what we call The Kapasseni Project. We took on a little community in Zimbabwe. On June 2 and 3, we're celebrating the tenth anniversary concert of our relationship with that community. We've been raising $10,000 to $25,000 a year. We've built wells, a six-room school, a health clinic and planted orchards. We've actually made Kampasseni into a community that has hope. We have a vested interest in what happens. We know the names of the people who live there and that really helps. We can all find a place to contribute something. Whether it's the Stephen Lewis Foundation or Unicef, there are a million ways we can help.
CG: Any final words?
AM: The real need is for each of us to do our own deep healing work so that we are capable of showing up in our lives, moment by moment, in a good way. The more present we can be in our bodies, the more we are able to hear the still small voice within that tells us which way to go.
It is not only throwing up our hands and saying, "Thy will be done." It is just as important to be able to take a stand and say, "Thy will and my will are one." And I will to do something, no matter how small, to alleviate a little bit of suffering today. We can't change the world, but we can, as Mother Teresa said, do "small things with great love."