Perkins is a professor of twentieth-century American and British literature and film. In the following essay, she considers the importance of language in the play.

At the beginning of Athol Fugard's play, A Lesson from Aloes, Piet Bezuidenhout, an Afrikaner living in South Africa with his wife, Gladys, searches a book on plant species in an effort to discover the name of an aloe plant that he is growing. When Gladys questions his determination, Piet insists on the importance of the task, noting that a child is given a name as soon as it is born and the first thing people do when they meet is to exchange names. Adam, he claims, named his world as soon as he was created. Consequently, he declares, “there is no rest for me until I've identified this.” Not finding an exact match for his “Aloe Anonymous” frustrates him because, he...