1.2. What message comes out strongly in the drama you covered? (What insights/life truth do you come to after reading the drama) . (1)

Identity and Its Formation

The main protagonist of Fiela's Child grapples with his identity, questioning his name, his origins, and his very existence. After being taken by the census men, Benjamin/Lukas struggles to adapt to his white family, longing for the comfort and care of his adoptive black parents. His inability to adapt and integrate into the van Rooyen household seems to be rooted in his self-definition of being a Komoetie and being black. This demonstrates that one's sense of identity is less tied to physical markers, like race, than to where one feels at home and loved. Despite being amongst other white people who are supposedly his blood relations, it takes a while for young Lukas to adjust to the role of a white child, such as the instinctive way in which he calls Elias “master” as the "colored" people of South Africa did in this time period.

As the story unfolds, Matthee underscores how one’s identity is ultimately independent of one’s race. After a bout of uncertainty and anxiety at the end of the novel, feeling completely unknown to himself, the young man decides to be Benjamin—because it is clear he is not a van Rooyen of the forest and it is clear that it is the Komoetie family where he has always felt most like himself. His realization that he can choose who to be first comes into his awareness while living and working at the seaside, where he is finally at a distance from both of his families. There, although he is still confused, something begins to shift within him. The landscape of the cove stirs up old childhood memories of playing with toy boats on the river at the Long Kloof, reminding him of the joy he experienced living at Wolwerkraal and thus planting the seed for his later decision to return there as Fiela and Selling's son.

After Benjamin discovers that Barta has lied and that he is not truly Lukas, he undergoes a sort of existential crisis, where he feels completely at loss as to who he is. This is reflected in one passage where the use of rhetorical questions, repetition, and ellipsis cements his anxiety and uncertainty. However, his tone changes as he realizes that his identity is self-determined:

Who was he? What was the good of asking? There was no answer ... Still, he was someone. He was somewhere. Not in his legs, not in his arms, not in his body – wait! He walked slower. He was in his body. It was like a revelation. He was in his body – and bigger than his body too: he stretched as far as the horizon, to the blue of the sky. He was trapped within a body but at the same time he was free. Lukas van Rooyen and the seaman were dead, but he was alive and he could be whoever he wanted to be. From deep inside him surged a feeling of power that frightened him.

The use of the words “whoever” coupled with the diction and imagery of freedom as escaping the constraints of the physical self reinforce the author's idea that the individual is free to forge his own identity. Through the expansion of Benjamin’s inner self, the reader is aware of his transformation into the liminal self, free to make his own decisions and choose his path in life.