summary essay on tsotsi

Athol Fugard

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Tsotsi: Introduction

Tsotsi: plot summary, tsotsi: detailed summary & analysis, tsotsi: themes, tsotsi: quotes, tsotsi: characters, tsotsi: terms, tsotsi: symbols, tsotsi: theme wheel, brief biography of athol fugard.

Historical Context of Tsotsi

Other books related to tsotsi.

• Full Title: Tsotsi
• When Written: 1960–1962
• Where Written: England, South Africa
• When Published: 1980
• Literary Period: Postmodernism
• Genre: Novel, Realism
• Setting: South Africa
• Climax: Tsotsi dies trying to save the baby he has adopted.
• Antagonist: Apartheid
• Point of View: Third Person

Extra Credit for Tsotsi

Winning Adaptation: In 2005, South African director Gavin Hood adapted Tsotsi into a movie, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Religious Outtake: Athol Fugard’s original notes for Tsotsi include plans for a dramatic scene in which Tsotsi enters a church, threatens a priest, and defiles a cross. This scene did not make it into the published version of the novel.

Jotted Lines

A Collection Of Essays

Tsotsi (Movie): Summary & Analysis

Summary: .

Tsotsi, a gang member living in a township, makes a living mugging and carjacking more affluent people. One day, while hijacking a car, he finds a baby on the back seat and takes him home. Identifying with the baby, he forces a young mother in the township to take care of him. Slowly remembering his own childhood, and his mother who had died from AIDS, he ends up returning the baby to his affluent parents. 

A major success in both South Africa and around the world, winner of the 2005 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, Tsotsi took some risks: it featured no stars, but for the most part young unknown actors, was shot on location in Soweto, and its dialogue is mostly in tsotistaal, a hybrid of languages, such as Afrikaans, Sotho, Zwana and Zulu, spoken in the townships around Johannesburg. At the same time the film sparked much debate and controversy as far as its politics are concerned. 

Tsotsi is based on the novel by the same name written by accomplished South African playwright Athol Fugard. Fugard had started the novel after the 1960 Sharpeville massacre, during which 69 people protesting pass laws restricting the movement of black South Africans were shot by apartheid police. Not published until 1980, four years after the Soweto uprising, during which police shot numerous students protesting the introduction of Afrikaans as the language of instruction, the novel is set in Sophiatown in the 1950s, shortly before this black cultural hub where non-whites could own property was razed to make room for the white suburb Triomf. The film updates the setting: Tsotsi’s mother does not die because of apartheid, but of AIDS, and the baby is not ‘historyless’ (Rijsdijk and Haupt 2007: 38) but has affluent black South African parents, which introduces an entirely new storyline. 

Critics have thus rightfully pointed out that in the film economic apartheid has replaced racial apartheid. The affluent black father is comfortable speaking up against the police and making a claim on the State. Within such economic apartheid, the film explores different kinds of violence, domestic, criminal and systemic (Dovey 2007: 155), but does not necessarily offer possible solutions to the violence. Within this context, the film’s ending is important: Hood shot two versions, one in which Tsotsi escapes and another in which he gets shot by the police, but decided to use neither. Instead the film ends with a confrontation between the affluent black father and poor Tsotsi, leaving ‘the final critique of Tsoti’s violence to contemporary viewers’ (Dovey 2007: 160). But a pirated version with the ending in which Tsotsi is shot by the police circulated widely in South Africa, allowing for a very different reading of the film. 

It may therefore not be surprising that the film has divided critics: South African critics have generally been much harsher with the film, while foreign commentators tend to defend it. Disagreements concern the film’s (un)willingness to critique the state as well as its representation of class, race and gender. Daniel Lehman, for instance, argues that the film critiques the economic and AIDS policies of then President Thabo Mbeki, who encouraged black economic empowerment for a select few but did little about widespread poverty, and who refused effective HIV treatment, which he saw as an ‘assault on … black male sexuality’ (Mark Gevisser quoted in Lehman 2011a: 97). By contrast, South African critics argue that the film legitimises the State, by having fairly sympathetic white cops, by allowing the AIDS issue to be lost in the background of the plot, and above all by insisting on Tsotsi’s positive, but entirely internal change that leaves all the responsibility up to the protagonist, apparently suggesting that individual initiative is enough and that economic, health and other state policies do not have to be changed (see Dovey 2007; Barnard 2008). 

At the heart of these debates is the question of how important – or how unimportant – the film’s relatively conventional, Hollywood-style narrative is. Gavin Hood himself has said that he filmed a classic story of redemption that he thinks has universal appeal (see Archibald and Hood 2006). His camera movements, he suggests, are minimal, driven by characters (Gunn 2009: 49). In classical Hollywood stories, (usually male, white) protagonists drive the plot. In Tsotsi, Tsotsi (a word meaning thug) starts out as a nameless, expressionless character tortured by flashbacks. In the course of the story, as he identifies with the baby (whom he gives his own name), he remembers more and more of his childhood. Emotionally driven flashbacks tell his traumatising story: after his father – who, misinformed about AIDS, would not let his son near his dying mother (though he probably infected her with the virus) – kicks and paralyzes his dog, David, as he was then called, runs away, becoming a homeless child and a nameless thug. While the film tells the story about how Tsotsi, through the baby and by remembering his traumatic past, finds respect and decency, critics have pointed out that such a transformation is both unlikely and problematic. In the film, Tsotis’s maturation, or Bildung, happens all too easily. By contrast, Rita Barnard argues, the novel is a ‘meditation on the sociopolitical preconditions for a coherent subjectivity and narration’, a meditation, that is, on how the apartheid state makes telling one’s story, and thus one’s maturation and social mobility, difficult if not impossible (Barnard 2008: 549). 

More specifically, Tsotsi is part of the gangster film genre. The word tsotsi, possibly derived from the English zoot suit, first emerged in 1930s Sophiatown, and represents an appropriation and transposition of the American gangster into a South African context. Not exactly unlike the American gangsters who often emerged in poor, ethnic environments, the tsotsi stands for mobility, violence, fashion – in short everything poor blacks were not allowed to be under the apartheid regime. As Rosalind Morris has it, the tsotsi ‘invest[s] the township with commodity desire’ (Morris 2010: 99). But while stylishness can sometimes be marshalled for radical politics, as it was for instance in the zoot suit riots of 1943, the connection between stylishness and critique is not always obvious. Barnard complains that ‘gangsterism purely as style … [is] not a real threat to the status quo’ (Barnard 2008: 561). Such stylishness also approaches Tsotsi to film noir, a film movement often noted for its sense of style and fashion, and in this context one could easily look in more detail at the film’s careful use of colours and lighting. 

But fashion and stylishness are not everything. Dovey helpfully points out that from the 1950s onward, there were two different kinds of tsotsis, ‘smartly dressed gangsters who tend to operate on big money from whites or Asians (represented in Tsotsi by Fela) … [and] marginalised boys who operate out of the desperation of poverty and who tend to serve the former kind of tsotsi’ (Dovey 2007: 154–4). Tsotsi/David belongs more clearly to the latter kind, and in this context, it would be interesting to think of another of Hood’s stylistic choices: his widescreen images place faces in landscapes, emphasising how much Tsotsi/ David belongs to the township, as well as the gulf that separates the township from the modern city. Tsotsi/David remains embedded in the landscape, unable to escape the township (Dovey 2007: 154). 

No discussion of Tsotsi would be complete without a discussion of its soundtrack. Many have noted the marked presence of kwaito music by South African artist Zola who also plays Fela in the film. Many of these tracks were pre-existing hits, and Zola’s celebrity was used to market the film and its music (Rijsdijk and Haupt 2007: 33). Kwaito was first developed by gangsters in 1950s Sophiatown, and has been influenced by gangsta rap. Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk and Adam Haupt have argued that the use of Zola’s kwaito music ‘constantly re-affirms a homogeneous black urban masculinity by not offering musical diversity’ (Rijsdijk and Haupt 2007: 36). But kwaito is not the only music in the film, there are also ‘choral arrangements, and … the combination of low bass notes, rattles and percussion that accompany scenes of action or tension in the film’ (Rijsdijk and Haupt, 2007: 31). In the course of the film, we see a shift from the ‘urban, fast-paced, heterosexist, aggressive and lyrically violent music of Zola to the soulful choral style of Mahlasela and Maphumulo’ (Rijsdijs and Haupt 2007: 31). Tsotsi/David’s emotional transformation gets associated with choral themes. 

As becomes evident in this discussion of the film’s music, questions of gender have lurked everywhere in the critical debate surrounding Tsotsi. Rijsdijk and Haupt conclude that the film runs the risk of ‘essentialising conventional gender roles in which women are nurturers and men are violent plunderers’ (Rijsdijk and Haupt 2007: 41). As noted earlier, the upper-middle-class couple is an addition in the film; in the novel, Tsotsi does not hijack a car but encounters a frightened, black woman in a grove and comes close to raping her. The topic of rape has disappeared from the film, although, Dovey reminds us, there was a 400 per cent increase in child rape in South Africa from 1988 to 2003, and that in 2003 children under 12 made up 40 per cent of South Africa’s annual 1 million rape victims, in part because of the myth that raping a virgin would cure HIV/AIDS (Dovey 2007: 157). By contrast, Lehman focuses on the character of Miriam who takes on ‘an increasingly proactive function’, whose encounters with Tsotsi suggest that Hood does not avoid the topic of potential sexual violence (Lehman 2011b: 118). Along with the baby, she nudges Tsotsi toward a less aggressive masculinity, an alternative to the masculine violence also embodied by his father. Not coincidentally, when the film came out, real tsotis objected that Tsotis/David looked too soft and sloppy (Dovey 2007: 153). 

Tsotsi can be located in the context of the postapartheid flourishing of South African films, which often have high production values and run the risk of being ‘Hollywoodised’. The NFVF (National Film and Video Foundation) specifically allocates funding to films that are adaptations of South African literature, which tends to privilege texts by white South Africans. Likewise, white directors have been more enamoured by the themes of reconciliation and redemptions than black or coloured directors. At the same time, Tsotsi also participates in a wave of internationally acclaimed films about gangsters and hoods, including the Brazilian film, City of God (2002) and the AngloIndian film, Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Like these other films, Tsotsi toys with the tradition of neorealism, famous from films such as Bicycle Thieves (1948), which employed non-professional actors, yet, at the same time, the film’s production values and narrative resemble Hollywood melodrama. These different legacies certainly help explain some of the contradictions of the film, which have generated so much debate. 

Sabine Haenni

Cast & Crew:

[Country: South Africa, UK. Production Company: The UK Film and TV Production Company PLC, Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, The National Film and Video Foundation of SA, Moviworld. Director: Gavin Hood. Producer: Peter Fudakowski. Screenwriter: Gavin Hood (based on the novel by Athol Fugard). Cinematographer: Lance Gewer. Music: Paul Hepker, Mark Kilian. Editor: Megan Gill. Cast: Presley Chweneyagae (Tsotsi), Terry Pheto (Miriam), Kenneth Nkosi (Aap), Mothusi Magano (Boston), Zenzo Ngqobe (Butcher), Zola (Fela), Rapulana Seiphemo (John Dube), Nambitha Mpumlwana (Pumla Dube), Ian Roberts (Captain Smit), Jerry Mofokeng (Morris).] 

Further Reading 

David Archibald and Gavin Hood, ‘Violence and Redemption: An Interview with Gavin Hood’, Cineaste, Vol. 31, No. 2, Spring 2006, pp. 44–47. 

Rita Barnard, ‘Tsotsis: On Law, the Outlaw, and the Postcolonial State’, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 49, No. 4, Winter 2008, pp. 541–72. 

Lindiwe Dovey, ‘Redeeming Features: From “Tsotsi” (1980) to “Tsotsi” (2006)’, in Journal of African Cultural Studies, Vol. 19, No. 2, December 2007, pp. 143–64. 

Judith Gunn, Studying Tsotsi, Leighton Buzzard, Auteur, 2009. 

Daniel W. Lehman, ‘Tsotsi Transformed: Retooling Athol Fugard for the Thabo Mbeki Era’, in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 42, No. 1, Spring 2011a, pp. 87–101. 

Daniel W. Lehman, ‘When We Remembered Zion: The Oscar, the Tsotsi, and the Contender’, English in Africa, Vol. 38, No. 3, October 2011b, pp. 113–29. 

Rosalind C. Morris, ‘Style, Tsotsi-Style, and Tsotistaal: The Histories, Aesthetics and Politics of a South African Figure’, Social Text, Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2010, pp. 85–112. 

Ian-Malcolm Rijsdijk and Adam Haupt, ‘Redemption to a kwaito beat: Gavin Hood’s Tsotsi’, in Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2007, pp. 29–46. 

Source Credits:

The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.

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Movie Reviews

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How strange, a movie where a bad man becomes better, instead of the other way around. "Tsotsi," a film of deep emotional power, considers a young killer whose cold eyes show no emotion, who kills unthinkingly, and who is transformed by the helplessness of a baby. He didn't mean to kidnap the baby, but now that he has it, it looks at him with trust and need, and he is powerless before eyes more demanding than his own.

The movie, which just won the Oscar for best foreign film, is set in Soweto, the township outside Johannesburg where neat little houses built by the new government are overwhelmed by square miles of shacks. There is poverty and despair here, but also hope and opportunity; from Soweto have come generations of politicians, entrepreneurs, artists, musicians, as if it were the Lower East Side of South Africa. Tsotsi ( Presley Chweneyagae ) is not destined to be one of those. We don't even learn his real name until later in the film; "tsotsi" means "thug," and that's what he is.

He leads a loose-knit gang that smashes and grabs, loots and shoots, sets out each morning to steal something. On a crowded train, they stab a man,- and he dies without anyone noticing; they hold his body up with their own, take his wallet, flee when the doors open. Another day's work. But when his friend Boston ( Mothusi Magano ) asks Tsotsi how he really feels, whether decency comes into it, he fights with him and walks off into the night, and we sense how alone he is. Later, in a flashback, we will understand the cruelty of the home and father he fled from.

He goes from here to there. He has a strange meeting with a man in a wheelchair, and asks him why he bothers to go on living. The man tells him. Tsotsi finds himself in an upscale suburb. Such areas in Joburg are usually gated communities, each house surrounded by a security wall, every gate promising "armed response." An African professional woman gets out of her Mercedes to ring the buzzer on the gate, so her husband can let her in. Tsotsi shoots her and steals her car. Some time passes before he realizes he has a passenger: a baby boy.

Tsotsi is a killer, but he cannot kill a baby. He takes it home with him, to a room built on top of somebody else's shack. It might be wise for him to leave the baby at a church or an orphanage, but that doesn't occur to him. He has the baby, so the baby is his. We can guess that he will not abandon the boy because he has been abandoned himself, and projects upon the infant all of his own self-pity.

We realize the violence in the film has slowed. Tsotsi himself is slow to realize he has a new agenda. He uses newspapers as diapers, feeds the baby condensed milk, carries it around with him in a shopping bag. Finally, in desperation, at gunpoint, he forces a nursing mother ( Terry Pheto ) to feed the child. She lives in a nearby shack, a clean and cheerful one. As he watches her do what he demands, something shifts inside of him, and all of his hurt and grief are awakened.

Tsotsi doesn't become a nice man. He simply stops being active as an evil one, and finds his time occupied with the child. Babies are single-minded. They want to be fed, they want to be changed, they want to be held, they want to be made much of, and they think it is their birthright. Who is Tsotsi to argue?

What a simple and yet profound story this is. It does not sentimentalize poverty or make Tsotsi more colorful or sympathetic than he should be; if he deserves praise, it is not for becoming a good man but for allowing himself to be distracted from the job of being a bad man. The nursing mother, named Miriam, is played by Terry Pheto as a quiet counterpoint to his rage. She lives in Soweto and has seen his kind before. She senses something in him, some pool of feeling he must ignore if he is to remain Tsotsi. She makes reasonable decisions. She acts not as a heroine but as a realist who wants to nudge Tsotsi in a direction that will protect her own family and this helpless baby, and then perhaps even Tsotsi himself. These two performances, by Chweneyagae and Pheto, are surrounded by temptations to overact or cave in to sentimentality; they step safely past them and play the characters as they might actually live their lives.

How the story develops is for you to discover. I was surprised to find that it leads toward hope instead of despair; why does fiction so often assume defeat is our destiny? The film avoids obligatory violence and actually deals with the characters as people. The story is based on a novel by the South African writer Athol Fugard , directed and written by Gavin Hood .

This is the second year in a row (after "Yesterday") that a South African film has been nominated for the foreign film Oscar. There are stories in the beloved country that have cried for a century to be told.

Ebert's coverage of "Yesterday" and other South African films at the Toronto Film Festival can be found here and elsewhere in the Toronto festival section of the site.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Tsotsi (2006)

Rated R for language and some strong violent content

Presley Chweneyagae as Tsotsi

Terry Pheto as Miriam

Mothusi Magano as Boston

Israel Makoe as Tsotsi's father

Percy Matsemela as Sgt. Zuma

Benny Moshe as Young Tsotsi

Directed and written by

Based on the novel by.

• Athol Fugard

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Grade 11 English

All about english hl for the grade 11 class of 2020, tsotsi – literature essay 1.

Date: 07 April 2020 Tsotsi (yellow)

Discuss the different ways in which characters understand what it means to be a man and/or a decent human. Use evidence from the novel to support your discussion.

Refer to: Gumboot Dlamini Boston Morris Tshabalala Miriam

length: 350-400 words

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What to know about the crisis of violence, politics and hunger engulfing Haiti

A long-simmering crisis over Haiti’s ability to govern itself, particularly after a series of natural disasters and an increasingly dire humanitarian emergency, has come to a head in the Caribbean nation, as its de facto president remains stranded in Puerto Rico and its people starve and live in fear of rampant violence. 

The chaos engulfing the country has been bubbling for more than a year, only for it to spill over on the global stage on Monday night, as Haiti’s unpopular prime minister, Ariel Henry, agreed to resign once a transitional government is brokered by other Caribbean nations and parties, including the U.S.

But the very idea of a transitional government brokered not by Haitians but by outsiders is one of the main reasons Haiti, a nation of 11 million, is on the brink, according to humanitarian workers and residents who have called for Haitian-led solutions. 

“What we’re seeing in Haiti has been building since the 2010 earthquake,” said Greg Beckett, an associate professor of anthropology at Western University in Canada. 

What is happening in Haiti and why?

In the power vacuum that followed the assassination of democratically elected President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, Henry, who was prime minister under Moïse, assumed power, with the support of several nations, including the U.S. 

When Haiti failed to hold elections multiple times — Henry said it was due to logistical problems or violence — protests rang out against him. By the time Henry announced last year that elections would be postponed again, to 2025, armed groups that were already active in Port-au-Prince, the capital, dialed up the violence.

Even before Moïse’s assassination, these militias and armed groups existed alongside politicians who used them to do their bidding, including everything from intimidating the opposition to collecting votes . With the dwindling of the country’s elected officials, though, many of these rebel forces have engaged in excessively violent acts, and have taken control of at least 80% of the capital, according to a United Nations estimate. 

Those groups, which include paramilitary and former police officers who pose as community leaders, have been responsible for the increase in killings, kidnappings and rapes since Moïse’s death, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program at Uppsala University in Sweden. According to a report from the U.N . released in January, more than 8,400 people were killed, injured or kidnapped in 2023, an increase of 122% increase from 2022.

“January and February have been the most violent months in the recent crisis, with thousands of people killed, or injured, or raped,” Beckett said.

Armed groups who had been calling for Henry’s resignation have already attacked airports, police stations, sea ports, the Central Bank and the country’s national soccer stadium. The situation reached critical mass earlier this month when the country’s two main prisons were raided , leading to the escape of about 4,000 prisoners. The beleaguered government called a 72-hour state of emergency, including a night-time curfew — but its authority had evaporated by then.

Aside from human-made catastrophes, Haiti still has not fully recovered from the devastating earthquake in 2010 that killed about 220,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless, many of them living in poorly built and exposed housing. More earthquakes, hurricanes and floods have followed, exacerbating efforts to rebuild infrastructure and a sense of national unity.

Since the earthquake, “there have been groups in Haiti trying to control that reconstruction process and the funding, the billions of dollars coming into the country to rebuild it,” said Beckett, who specializes in the Caribbean, particularly Haiti. 

Beckett said that control initially came from politicians and subsequently from armed groups supported by those politicians. Political “parties that controlled the government used the government for corruption to steal that money. We’re seeing the fallout from that.”

Many armed groups have formed in recent years claiming to be community groups carrying out essential work in underprivileged neighborhoods, but they have instead been accused of violence, even murder . One of the two main groups, G-9, is led by a former elite police officer, Jimmy Chérizier — also known as “Barbecue” — who has become the public face of the unrest and claimed credit for various attacks on public institutions. He has openly called for Henry to step down and called his campaign an “armed revolution.”

But caught in the crossfire are the residents of Haiti. In just one week, 15,000 people have been displaced from Port-au-Prince, according to a U.N. estimate. But people have been trying to flee the capital for well over a year, with one woman telling NBC News that she is currently hiding in a church with her three children and another family with eight children. The U.N. said about 160,000 people have left Port-au-Prince because of the swell of violence in the last several months. 

Deep poverty and famine are also a serious danger. Gangs have cut off access to the country’s largest port, Autorité Portuaire Nationale, and food could soon become scarce.

Haiti's uncertain future

A new transitional government may dismay the Haitians and their supporters who call for Haitian-led solutions to the crisis. 

But the creation of such a government would come after years of democratic disruption and the crumbling of Haiti’s political leadership. The country hasn’t held an election in eight years. 

Haitian advocates and scholars like Jemima Pierre, a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, say foreign intervention, including from the U.S., is partially to blame for Haiti’s turmoil. The U.S. has routinely sent thousands of troops to Haiti , intervened in its government and supported unpopular leaders like Henry.

“What you have over the last 20 years is the consistent dismantling of the Haitian state,” Pierre said. “What intervention means for Haiti, what it has always meant, is death and destruction.”

In fact, the country’s situation was so dire that Henry was forced to travel abroad in the hope of securing a U.N. peacekeeping deal. He went to Kenya, which agreed to send 1,000 troops to coordinate an East African and U.N.-backed alliance to help restore order in Haiti, but the plan is now on hold . Kenya agreed last October to send a U.N.-sanctioned security force to Haiti, but Kenya’s courts decided it was unconstitutional. The result has been Haiti fending for itself. 

“A force like Kenya, they don’t speak Kreyòl, they don’t speak French,” Pierre said. “The Kenyan police are known for human rights abuses . So what does it tell us as Haitians that the only thing that you see that we deserve are not schools, not reparations for the cholera the U.N. brought , but more military with the mandate to use all kinds of force on our population? That is unacceptable.”  

Henry was forced to announce his planned resignation from Puerto Rico, as threats of violence — and armed groups taking over the airports — have prevented him from returning to his country.  

Now that Henry is to stand down, it is far from clear what the armed groups will do or demand next, aside from the right to govern. 

“It’s the Haitian people who know what they’re going through. It’s the Haitian people who are going to take destiny into their own hands. Haitian people will choose who will govern them,” Chérizier said recently, according to The Associated Press .

Haitians and their supporters have put forth their own solutions over the years, holding that foreign intervention routinely ignores the voices and desires of Haitians. 

In 2021, both Haitian and non-Haitian church leaders, women’s rights groups, lawyers, humanitarian workers, the Voodoo Sector and more created the Commission to Search for a Haitian Solution to the Crisis . The commission has proposed the “ Montana Accord ,” outlining a two-year interim government with oversight committees tasked with restoring order, eradicating corruption and establishing fair elections. 

For more from NBC BLK, sign up for our weekly newsletter .

CORRECTION (March 15, 2024, 9:58 a.m. ET): An earlier version of this article misstated which university Jemima Pierre is affiliated with. She is a professor at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, not the University of California, Los Angeles, (or Columbia University, as an earlier correction misstated).

Patrick Smith is a London-based editor and reporter for NBC News Digital.

Char Adams is a reporter for NBC BLK who writes about race.

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Guest Essay

Tired of Sucking It Up as a Climber, I’ve Embraced a Softer Strength

By Beth Rodden

Ms. Rodden is a professional climber and the author of the forthcoming memoir, “A Light Through the Cracks.”

I don’t know what time it was when my husband at the time, the rock climber Tommy Caldwell, finally scrambled over the summit. The sun had risen sometime during the first part of the climb and had set again hours later. I squinted up at him, tired eyes burning as I watched his shadow moving in the beam of my headlight. He had just completed the second free ascent of the Direct Route on the northwest face of Half Dome, a 2,000-foot climb in Yosemite National Park.

We were elite professional climbers, and this was what we did best. Sometimes we made history together; other times I supported him in his feats, belaying and carrying all the gear. Either way, the days were long and hard.

The climber Todd Skinner spent 61 days in 1993 working to establish the Direct Route, then considered the most difficult big wall climb in the world, before reaching the top. On our climb in 2007, our 2 a.m. wake-up, more than 24 hours earlier, hadn’t even felt all that early to me. Sleeping in past midnight? That meant what I was getting up for wasn’t that rad, that hard core. Tommy made it to the top in a day, adding a move that made the climb more difficult than the one Mr. Skinner had pioneered. It felt routine.

Hanging in the middle of Half Dome was an ordinary thing. Ascending ropes with bloody knuckles and a heavy pack thousands of feet off the ground was as conventional to me as grabbing the bananas and apples in the produce section: just part of my day. Climbers pride themselves on being better than normal people. Not just in the “I climbed a mountain and you didn’t” type of way, but in the fabric of how we approach life. How we eat, where we sleep, the stories we walk away with: It’s all better.

By the time I was in my mid-20s, I was a walking archetype of how to succeed in that world because of the belief system I followed: suck it up, persevere, win. I was used to pushing the level of climbing further, used to doing things that no other women had done — and even, a couple of times, things that no guys had done.

I specialized in free climbing, a particular (and particularly challenging) discipline that requires a climber to rely on her gear only for protection from a fall, not for any assistance in moving up the rock. I had free-climbed Yosemite’s El Capitan three times, by three independent routes. Elsewhere in Yosemite, I had established a new route in 2008, Meltdown , that was widely viewed then as the hardest traditional climb in the world, not repeated until 2018. (“Traditional” meaning I depended on a rope suspended by gear I placed myself, rather than on bolts permanently installed in the rock.) For a decade, I had appeared in climbing films and on the pages of climbing magazines. Pushing through the pain, sacrificing my body, shoving my fear away: It’s all what made me better than the rest. I liked being better than the rest.

As we stumbled to the car after that daylong effort on the Direct Route, my arms and legs felt tired, my mouth parched. I was good at this. I didn’t need to eat much food, drink much water. I was a low-maintenance girl. I always got patted on the back for not taking up too much space and being able to suffer with the best of them. There were times when I was climbing that I wept with fear, with fatigue, with regret. But when I did, I tried to hide it. I’d had that instinct from my earliest climbing days, even before I survived a days-long kidnapping during an expedition to Kyrgyzstan. After I made it home (Tommy had pushed one of the armed kidnappers off a cliff — a fall we later learned he had survived — enabling our group of four climbers to escape), I had more than doubled down. Scorning and hiding my feelings, shoving them down, felt admirable to me then. I’d been told it was strength. It felt like strength.

There wasn’t much room for women or feelings at the top of the sport back then. A handful of us were landing on the covers of magazines or vying to be the token featured woman at a climbing film festival, but I learned early on that as good as I was at actually climbing, I needed to be able to suffer to stand out. Climbing through a broken foot? Amazing, here’s a raise. Did you hear how many hours they went without food and water for the summit? Make a feature movie about them. As much as logistics and physical prowess, subscribing to the bravado was part of the job description in climbing. And for years, I was all in.

I can’t say there was one moment, a specific event that made me start to question the “suck it up, Rodden” theme song I had lived by for so long. I got divorced, and eventually remarried; I got injured over and over. After years of injuries I had a child, and that led to relearning my body. Maybe it was the scale of all those changes in my life that forced me to reconsider the way I’d always done things, or maybe I just got fed up with the facade. Why was it noble to climb through cracks on El Cap soaked with climbers’ urine, but leaking while jogging postpartum was something to be ashamed of?

Gradually, I began to question the old mentality. I began to be more open about what I found value in, and learned to share my pain and my fears with friends instead of hiding them behind a perma-smile. I started to be kinder to myself, and to be frank that, as effective as it had been for me and my career, I just didn’t see the point in suffering for the sake of a climb anymore. In letting go of that, I was surprised to find a new kind of strength — something perhaps truer and more durable than the ability to just plow through.

I am still a professional climber, though I haven’t been at the peak of the sport in a very long time. I still have goals, and I still love the feeling of trying hard and succeeding, but I love easy days at the crag with a group of girlfriends just as much. My sponsors have found value in partnering with me beyond the number grade assigned to a climb that I’ve done. Instead, we’ve realized together that none of these topics that have plagued the community for so long will go away if left in silence. Making the sport more inclusive, speaking about the ways that climbing can and should evolve as it grows in popularity, is my current project.

This past winter found me injured and on the sidelines yet again. But this time, instead of hobbling around with a crutch and a cast on my leg or having a finger splinted up, I was carrying a foam pad wherever I went, so that I could easily get into a horizontal position. Ten years after I’d given birth, my postpartum bladder prolapse symptoms had returned. Naturally, people would ask why I wasn’t climbing. Years earlier, I would have been mortified. But now I answered bluntly: “I blew out my pelvic floor .” To my surprise, most everyone would sit down, ask what that meant, how it happened, what the symptoms were, what recovery would look like.

I’m not the only one who’s changed. Climbing has come so far in the 30 years since I started in the sport. Today, instead of getting dropped by their sponsors, women can continue their careers with vigor after having children. Mental health awareness and therapy are widely accepted (which is imperative in a community that experiences so much death and trauma), and now, perhaps even conversations about vulnerabilities like perimenopause and prolapse don’t have to be hidden. I like to think we’re starting to embrace a softer kind of strength. Maybe taking care of ourselves, whatever that looks like, can now be as celebrated as dodging death for a summit.

Beth Rodden is a professional climber and the author of the forthcoming memoir, “A Light Through the Cracks.”

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