03 Sep 2009
Breyten Breytenbach… For three generations of young South Africans even the shadow of a whisper of the name felt like a forbidden fruit. Writer Fanie de Villiers (1956) remembers discovering Breytenbach’s poetry when he was a student at the University of Pretoria. “It was like a blow in the stomach … radically different to anything I had ever read! He wrote from another world, about another world, and yet he was steeped in his mother tongue. He used it so powerfully!”
Wits academic Michael Titlestad (1964) grew up in Verwoerdburg. His Afrikaans teacher, meester Grobbelaar, did something unusual: he made the boys read Breytenbach’s poetry. “The shock of those surreal texts in Verwoerdburg with its military base! It had an enormous impact.”
For poet Danie Marais (1971) there was no way of not knowing about Breytenbach. His name was everywhere. Staunch Nationalists saw him as ‘Public Enemy no. 2’. Some considered him even worse than Mandela: not only a “communist”, but also a “verraaier”, who had been jailed for terrorism and who had ridiculed volk and taal.
“I remember how astonished I was to read the man’s tender love poetry, when what I really expected to find was a Che Guevara of letters,” says Marais. “I fell in love with his lyricism, his rich otherwordly imagery and dark romanticism – the intoxicating mixture of sexuality and a poetic death wish.”
South Africa’s most important living poet started his artistic life fifty years ago –as a painter. “Painting taught me about the physical importance of texture, colours, silences, resonance, patterns, structure and perspective, synchronism and dissonance... of words. It made me aware of the materiality of the medium. On top of that, many of my poems are just little pictures. Painting continues to inform my approach,” explains Breytenbach in an email.
Young Breyten grew up in rural Western Cape. In 1960, he packed his bags and boarded a Portuguese ship that took him as a fourth class passenger to Europe, where he ended up in bohemian Paris. Life there, I suggest, must have been an epiphany for a young artist whose encounters with la vie bohème had been restricted to Cape Town.
“Epiphany? Maybe,” muses Breytenbach. “Youth is always the high point of ecstasy, no? Yes, I certainly bathed in the general atmosphere of Paris as movable feast and laboratory of inventiveness, experimentalism, transgression, new thinking (with Camus probably finally more influential than Sartre) - and all of these linked to avant-guard political internationalism and to theories of transformation. We were poor but happy (to quote Hemingway.) It was a true privilege to walk the same streets and drink in the same bars as Beckett and Giacometti and Ionesco, to count among one’s friends artists and writers and runaways from Russia and Argentina and Mexico and Cuba and Morocco and Mali and Holland and Denmark and Brazil and, and...”
Breytenbach soon got rid of his Afrikaner cultural baggage. In Paris he met the Vietnamese Yolande whom he married. Additionally he developed a serious interest in Buddhism, which would inform his world view and writing – trying to solve the unsolvable. In Paris he joined the community around teacher Sensei Deshimaru.
“He eventually died of cirrhosis of the liver. I used to enjoy a whisky with him every morning after meditation. It appealed to me because of its teachings of non-attachment and of being responsible, oneself, for doing away with the self; also, beyond ethics, because of its aesthetic. I could imagine no greater freedom. It feels ever more important to me. I sense that my dreams and my work are a continuous deepening of meditation practices.”
Paris, Buddhism and exile widened the gap between Breytenbach and his fatherland. Progressive forces saw him as a faraway friend, while his conservative compatriots considered him a traitor, certainly when he was arrested in 1975 as a member of the white revolutionary cell Okhela. He was sentenced to nine years imprisonment, of which he served seven, manically writing.
After his release, he took on the persona of the cynical outsider which he coupled with the knowledge of the insider. While his contemporaries André Brink and Nadine Gordimer remained ANC supporters for a long time, Breytenbach is a freethinker, too much of an anarchist to join any political party. Last year the American magazine Harper’s published his scathing open letter to Mandela, in which he lambasts the ‘Mandela industry’ and his country of birth.
‘Love/hate’ barely captures his fraught relationship with South Africa. Nowhere is home for Breytenbach. Like a modern nomad he moves between Paris, Senegal, New York and South Africa, an inhabitant of what he calls the “middle world”. He’s a man without a fixed abode who observes the destruction and beauty around him with a feeling of impotent anger and wonder. At the same time he’s a prisoner of his language and of his memories of this odious country that he turned his back on half a century ago.
Asked if he can describe his deeply ambiguous relationship with South Africa, Breytenbach answers: ‘Probably not succinctly. What is clear though is that I was always, and remain, an outsider for all practical purposes - bringing with it the inevitable misunderstandings, seizures of involvement and concern and rejection. South Africa has always been a land of tremendous ‘vigour’, but also one of enduring shit. It is, by and large, parochial and hypocritical - accounting, largely, for its endemic corruption. It also has an enduring strain of nearly limitless cruelty - in its mad constructs like apartheid and crude greedy capitalism (and now affirmative action) as also in the personal and inter-personal violence. Morally it is a failed state.”
He fought bitterly with English South African critics, who butchered his latest novel A Veil of Footsteps and find him arrogant and whimsical. Breytenbach: “I admire the work of J.M. Coetzee and I’ve had the good fortune to meet a number of good English language South African writers - Zakes Mda, Njabulo Ndebele, Jo-Anne Richards, Gus Ferguson and several more. But by and large SA English language writing is the expression of marginalized imperialist subjects, of colonial snobs and dolts.”
The Afrikaans scene doesn’t offer solace either. “I’m an oddity among Afrikaans writers, a detribalized and probably decadent uncle that has to be humoured sometimes when he brings inappropriate presents while gaudily dressed, but not part of the daily discourse. And I really am out of touch with what’s happening in the writing. (For instance, I have no understanding of the obsessions with God and religion and church and homosexuality and grovelling guilt and kindergarten sexual fantasies and political obsequiousness.)”
“But then,” he continues, “the Afrikaners no longer exist as a recognizable, autonomous entity. We are of the generation who witnessed the passing of a people and now, inevitably, also the agony of a language. There is no question of right and wrong in the matter, no historical inevitability or whatever - just stupidity and cowardice.”
In September he’ll turn seventy, still adding to that extraordinary oeuvre of thousands and thousands of pages that can be laid as a skin over his life, a fearless expression of his attempts to solve the unsolvable.
“I’m sure that I've since many years been a caricature of myself and of what (I imagine) people like myself are supposed to be like. Luckily I’m getting to be too old to know when I'm repeating myself. Let’s say the muse and I have grown old together, but in my dim eyes she still remains as sexy as ever. But also, I (whoever that I is or has been) have always experienced writing and painting as process, as other formulations of breathing. You could say I’m like the worm who believes he has created the world just because he ate and eats his own environment.”
CV
1939 Born in Bonnievale
1958 Studies at Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town
1960 Leaves for Europe
1962 Marries Yolande
1964 Publishes Die ysterkoei moet sweet
1973 Calls the Afrikaners “a bastard people” and Afrikaans “a bastard language”
1975 Arrested for ‘terrorism’ and sentenced to nine years imprisonment
1982 Released
1984 Refuses to accept the Hertzog Prize
1984 Publishes The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
1987 Takes part in the Dakar negotiations with the ANC
2007 The Breytenbach Center opens in his parental home in Wellington
Heroes/influences
According to friend/poet Charl-Pierre Naudé: “I would say his structuring influences were the surrealism of painters like Magritte and the fantasies of someone like Henri Rousseau. He also appears influenced by Lucebert, the Dutch poet. But a main influence seems to be the kontrei language of his particular Afrikaans region, the Boland. I see a lot of Boerneef in Breyten.”