Essay Questions

How does Red Doek gain control over her life through arranging her own death?

It can be argued that anyone who commits suicide takes control of their life at its end by determining the manner in which they demise. Red Doek's decision to commit suicide goes much further than that sort of brief mortal agency. By choosing to end her life in the way she does, she not only takes control over how it ends, but takes control over another person's mortality after she passes. Her death stimulates feelings of guilt within a white man. Any sort of control exerted over white people in a country still dealing with the long history of the racial oppression during Apartheid is the rarest victory possible.

What is the significance of the phrase "the ones without names" being repeated so many times throughout the play?

"The ones without names" is a phrase that is spoken twice in the short prologue and then recurs another five times before the play ends. The phrase literally refers primarily to black South Africans buried without markers in a graveyard. On a larger symbolic scale, however, the ones who are not known by names is a metaphor for racism. A key component of systemic racism is that those in power do not view those they oppress as individuals. "The ones without names" is a metaphor for the way that racism creates an ideological rejection of an entire group of people.

What is the symbolic significance of the loaf of bread?

As the two characters begin communicating with each other they begin to better understand their places within society. Eventually, they reach the point of sitting down to share a loaf of bread. This loaf is split equally in half so that each man receives an equal share. The scene in which the men eat their respective half of the loaf is underscored by a nostalgic conversation about how they each liked to eat bread sweetened in different ways when they were children. One spread apricot jam on his bread as a child while the other remembers eating warm bread with syrup poured over it. This is a literal rendering of the idiomatic metaphor of "breaking bread" as a means of arriving at a point where a bond or connection has been made.