Izak de Vries
Izak de Vries leaves footprints while talking to a Nomad (or someone who looks like him) on the new book by Breyten Breytenbach, called A veil of footsteps (memoir of a nomadic fictional character). The first nomad to respond identified himself as Breyten Wordfool (BW).
 A Veil of Footsteps (memoir of a nomadic fictional character) Author: Breyten Breytenbach
Date: 2008.
Publisher: Human & Rousseau
EAN: 978-0-79814927-3
Iz: Dear Breyten. No, sorry, let me get this right. Dear Fool. Dear Wordfool. Dear Fool of Words. Dear Fool of many Words. Dear Wordy Fool. Shall we agree that you have a life worth interviewing you about?(1)
BW: No, not really. Whose life do you want to interview? To be foolish I could add: what is “life” and what “interview”? Maybe we could agree that life is an on-going interview with the impossibility to understand it, with the imponderable and inchoate flickering of consciousness. As for the life of the person who wrote A Veil of Footsteps – it is an open book and has been so from book to book.
Iz: But what’s the point? Just as Larry King could not connect with the Dalai Lama,(2) I now have no way of forcing dog turds out of your mouth. I cannot shine lights into your bird eyes. I cannot scream Céline Dion into your cat ears. I cannot tie your angel wings behind your back and waterboard you. How, in the name of death who art in heaven, will I gaggle more than mere exchanges of emptiness out of you?
 BW: By talking to me. I agree that we really try and talk to one another, all of us in all sorts of situations – but it skims along the surface, it is tangential and more of a convention than an understanding. The point is that “communication” is a ritual, like grooming or like the bird whose song encapsulates complex codes relating to the needs for survival singing into the void. These exchanges of emptiness make us believe we are alive. Or worse, that there’s a reason and a sense to it.
Iz: To be eaten by birds. To write. To die in your own wordshit. To die because of writing. These are statements. To die and stop being a nomad in the middle world. Add a question mark, then that is a question.
BW (and BB): Yes to all of the above. One writes in order to stop. One also knows you cannot stop until you have written enough. To stop? But isn’t that just using life so as to get to death? Fancy, spitting like that in the mother’s milk! But of course the words are birds that were there before you came along, or before that puny awareness of what you call an “I” came about, and they will eat or smother you. One ethical position could be: to make yourself attractive enough so that the words, as birds and as shit, may sing you into obliteration. Shit sings.
Iz: I cannot help you. I am the Reader. I am De Vries. The Freeze. Not Simon Snow.(3) I cannot be your undertaker. I cannot fill your intestines with balm. Ek kan jou derms probeer uitryg. Like a monkey that has been wounded I can undo you, pull your intestines out into the open. I can try and expose the fool behind the veil. I can suspend you in the middle for a while longer so that the greedy eyes of LitNet vultures … I can, because the Wordy Fool allows me to.
BB: Yes again. More fool he. As I am oats I cannot hold the pigs responsible for eating me. The dance (“communication”) is about movement, exorcism, delimitation, forgetting, the trance, the necessity and the cruelty of pairing – and not about conveying “understanding”.
Iz: Many years ago Breyten, or a similar fool, killed Mr Elixe.(4) It was a messy business. Half burnt, his stinking body was left to rot in a shallow grave near the Cape seas. Poor, foolish Breyten. Did he not know that the spirit of the murdered would come looking for him? Did Birdman, with memories as long as his beak, forget that Africa, the continent of imagination, is a spirit world? A world in which the souls of the dead move freely amongst those who still want to end their lives? The nomad and the spirit of Mr Exile. That last fragment forms an inquest, a line plucked from the LitNet Truth Commission. A double statement of double identity. Of a plucked bird. Of a naked bird with no identity. What is the question. Full stop.
 BW: So sometimes what has been written will not go away? Breyten does not really know much, although he puts up a good pretence. Is that why he writes so endlessly and in such riddles? He will talk a dog out of the bush! In Japan a process has been developed for compressing excreta into a substance as hard and as glittering as precious stones, and these stones are much sought after as jewellery by the glitterati. I believe in the renaissance, though. I’m glad you dug up Comrade X Elie from his grave at Vlakplaas by the sea along the Strandfontein road, so that we can toyi-toyi some more for greater justice.
Iz: The veil. A statement. The statement. The beard. The illegal immigrant. Europe, middle world. Middle. Middle East. Caught. Being caught. Illegal! False Passport! Bad photo! The veil has become a political statement. I say.
BW: Yes, and Salome was a white slave girl with acne. The quintessential Middle World people are now the Palestinians, robbed of their land and their means of survival and subjected to repeated acts of state terror. The West has always lived by a culture of impunity. Nowadays it is called the global War against Terrorism. Its gatgabba is the liberal free market.
And while we look the other way and collectively pretend we have been “liberated” on this continent, that our leaders are brave and honest freedom fighters, thousands upon thousands are throwing themselves into the sea or trying to hide under the tarpaulins of trucks to get the hell out. The “people” are now illegal. So when do we tear down the façade of legality and so-called legitimacy of the cruel and vain bastards who “rule” over us? “Tear down, thy vanity!/ Tear down, I say.”
Iz: The wordy Fool has read Dante. The foolish word hiding behind a veil knows the middle is here. Is present. Is. Iz right now. The Wordfool wants to be off, to die, to go beyond. We’re all headed that way, nomad. Hell is a station full of prospective travellers.(5)
BW: Which reminds me of Virgil warning Dante as they’re about to set off for the Underworld: “Ons staan oppie stasie en die fluitjie willie blasie.” Henri Michaux said hell is the rhythm of the other. I think Jean Genet made of that, simply, hell is the other. Perhaps there is a certain comfort in the fact that we’re all together heading the same way, feet first. The words know full well they’re of the elemental eternal present when they appear, carrying the past in them as so many presences echoing our collective passing.
Izak: Dear Breyten: What’s the use of having a double if that person cannot live in your place?(6)
BB: Exactly! Which is why you have this fool responding to your questions.
Iz: You prick. You double-crossing deceit-filled Wordprick. You wannabe fool. You want to be them? You want to join the throngs of them who flee from Africa, flee from poverty, who drown, who are caught with drugs, who sell their bodies?(7) You think rewriting history, mirroring the past, will erase the hero? You really think the man you carried with you in Return to Paradise is dead?(8) You still believe the shit story about being called by Mandela, of using it as a cover to kill the birdlike angel that haunted you? You prick. You are us. In the Middle. Middle-class, middle-aged. Even Middle-coloured, like most Afrikaner-Africans. We are not golden, we are not black. Many of us would not even be “coloured”. Look closely, deceitful rewriter of history. You are not a poor, black fugitive from the future. You are a fool who spent years behind bars for chasing a dream! You cannot kill the spirit world, my friend. Elixe will be your handler until the day we scatter you all over the continent of imagination.
 BB (and BW): Eina! I take it all kinds of holes can be pricked in the above assumptions? Like, “hero”??? Or “middle-aged”??? As for “spirit world” – I’m not sure we’re talking of the same place. And the “them”? And the “us”? Whew! Two quotes are struggling for expression: Rimbaud’s “je est un autre” apart from the obvious “alienation” also implying that he is inhabited by the other, has become the other, and Brother Marx vociferating he’ll be damned if he were to join a club that would have someone like him as member. What on earth makes you think I’m rewriting history? What “history”? What is, is; what was, was.
Madlala Makhaza: I want to ask a question to Jan Afrika.
Iz: Fokof. What are you doing here? It is my interview.
JA: I’m here! Give the man a chance. Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here.
Madlala Makhaza: Shame. Look at Iz, exposed. Forget him. I have a question to Jan. Afrika. Blommekind. I, Madlala, was born in the 1990s. A post-revolutionary. I was born a grown-up. I was born a student, a dreamer. I worked the townships around Pietermaritzburg, I fell in love with freedom. I danced with a hard, stiff prick on the white beaches of Durban in the arms of beautiful black girlfriends. I marched next to the dear ladies with their black sashes (not veils), constantly looking out for IFP bullets. I was named. My name was bestowed on me by the township dwellers. I thought I belonged. I now sit in the mirror, looking at Iz, the Wannabe Wordfool who thinks he is clever enough to imagine a conversation with you. How does Jan Afrika deal with Breyten the Big Wordfool’s desire to belong to the continent of imagination?
BB: Maybe he says, “al dra ’n aap ’n goue ring …”. But no, he will say, as I do, that your continent of the imagination is as real, has always been as real, as the “reality” we live in. He will repeat that the only way to be free of attachment is to be totally engaged, that the only objectivity is to be part of (as if one had a choice!), that all things are true at all times even if some things may be more true than others from time to time, that it is not necessary to believe something will succeed before trying to do it, that we live as we are when we are, that you must never regret the “illusions” of the past because we will always do it all over again given what we knew then and given our belief that it is worthwhile struggling for justice. He will, furthermore, remind us of the intimate correlation between being and the need to imagine ourselves. It may be called the human condition. He will point out that Africa is dying because of a lack of imagination and that imagination is an ethical concept, because those who rule and exploit and plunder us – and “them”! – (in the name of “freedom” and “revolution”) are committing or condoning the ultimate blasphemy against imagination: that life (including the individual human life) does not mean anything, is worthless. As if there were any alternative to it! Then JA will remark that both you and Madlala Makhaza are plenty clever enough to imagine conversations with whomever you want to, and that if BB were clever he wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. And finally, Breyten and the Wordfool and Jan Blom and Picaro and Bourema Diarra and Bian Tong and J-L Borges and all the other drinking buddies join Jan Afrika in hoping with glasses lifted high you didn’t just get to do the long-arm dance with the black beauties, but also proceeded to the bittersweet paso doble. What is there to regret?
Iz: Sorry, Wordfool. It happens. The doek I wear slips and the gin appears. Hy’s my doekom. Never allow facts to spoil outrage.(9) But Madlala has a point. It is nice to feel: “I am a brother. I belong.”(10) Please see this as a question.
BB: Because we are different you are my brother.
Iz: Okay. Bernard Holland(11), like the Buddha, gave us reason to believe we are God. From the chaos we can create a Big Bang. Wordfools around the world do that. I too try. Any tips from Old Dog to Young Puppy lustily yapping at the Big Dog’s shadow, hoping to attract the muses? (WordMouth does teach Creative Writing.)
Breyten Buitebrak: The Buddha also said, if you find me on your way kill me. The Creative Writing I “teach” is always rooted in the work brought to the table by the younger writers. Show me! I heard you have written a very good book … My only tip will be: keep twalking! And bark as far and wide while young, especially also against the shadows; territory has a way of getting smaller as you age.
Iz: In “Fragments from a Growing Awareness of Unfinished Truths”(12) the Fool began to come to terms with being an Afrikaner, and then he said: “As in a Breughel painting we must see to it that everyone in the procession makes it home …” This same Country Bumpkin(13) from down under found himself in New York on 9/11. And he remembered a story. And he imagined, or bought, a pumpkin. To remind him of home, the pumpkin was for 16 September, his birthday. “What home?” the Country Bumpkin’s wife and daughter asked. What would the Wordfool answer?
BW: That “home” is where the head is laid down for the night.
Iz: The veil did not hide the tears of the pumpkin. Because of that, the pumpkin’s Bumpkin found himself splayed and harassed by fascist New York cops. I don’t know what the question is, but I do know that I am uneasy about the march of the fascists, leaving their heavy boot prints on the buttocks and necks of anyone who dares to question their Imperial Oily Dreams.
BB: America is indeed a fascist country where, and from where, with unfathomable innocence in the name of “American values” and with the purpose of promoting and imposing “American interests” huge numbers of people are exterminated. Read Chomsky.
Iz: Does it not help the nomad to know that he had once died as a child? (I won’t tell the story here.) Or is that part of being in the Middle?
BB: Ja, I seem to have slipped through the cracks very early. The problem is that one forgets so much from one death to the other.
Iz: There is a database of great Africans on the internet. Someone, a poet, is listed there as “Breyten Breytenbach”. The website’s final words on Breytenbach are: “His is not the direct ideological onslaught nor the quick and easy answer, but the delicate scalpel of a neurosurgeon constantly engaged in a search for the mad spots on the brain of the human species.”(14)
BW: It sounds like a description of the Hieronymous Bosch painting called “A fool operating for reason”, or something like that. Breyten Breytenbach is a prick. It doesn’t surprise me that he’s also a coward walking around with a knife like an American or a Mongrel.
Iz: BirdBrain has never been able to keep his beak shut. We saw angry open letters to Mandela flowing from his feathers. There was a public spat with his old buddy, Van Zyl Slabbert. We heard him screech about the Middle East. Most recently, days ago, he shat all over the pillars of Afrikanerdom for not condemning the video made by four Free State Afrikaners. (The entire video was about humiliating black people – some old enough to be the mothers of the white boys who made the video.) What next? An open letter to Showerhead Zuma? Or is Zuma not worth the ink? If not, what then?
BB: Please use the funny man’s full name – Comrade Zumafabitch, the friend of Speedy Supermouse Sarkozy and all the other French arms dealers. Has it not struck you that nobody ever answers these constructive missives? (Except for a few lost souls on LitNet, no one takes any notice.) My next letter will be to Professor Brink, the late Rectum of Schelmbos University, to ask if I can come and teach Afrikaans-medium double in that British university he now runs. And after that I want to launch a petition to plead for forgiveness of the sins of the Afrikaners, past, present, future and überfuture.
Iz: Imagine Africa. That was on the T-Shirt the Breytenfool wore to the launch of this book. It was on the armbands, made by the Noble One(15), worn by the Nomad. Just weeks ago I attended a concert by Ismael Lo. When he sang “Afrika” 12 000 people rose to their feet and joined him. I had a glimpse … Imagine Africa. It echoes the work of the Goree Institute. An active surfer can find pictures of Breyten walking next to George Soros, imagining Africa. What shall the Reader do to imagine Africa?
BB: Say loudly and clearly, in actions as well, that the problems of Africa can and will only be solved by Africans; that the young African – if given the opportunity to season his mind by exposure to the most challenging practices and concepts of our time – can hold her and his own against anybody in the world; that the nation states we have been bequeathed are unworkable and that our elites are murderously corrupt; that identity politics is the cesspool of self-pity; that liberation movements failed and betrayed and Zimbabwe’d us so that we now live in an ideological void where only greed and the other morbid phenomena of death-dealing societies thrive; that there are close and fertile connections between politics and development and creative culture; that the future of the continent lies with the women; that we have to reinvent accountability and resolutely do away with impunity … That we have to dream in our languages, if only to eradicate the mealie-mouthed cliché-infected claptrap speaking of badly assimilated imperialist “values”.
Izak: Finally. If Breyten Breytenbach could imagine Africa, and make it true: What is Africa going to look like?
BB: An integrated continent of generosity, creativity, civil and civic responsibility, and economic justice. A continent that would have developed its own, sustainable modernity far away from Western “universalist” models serving only the interests of the masters. A continent that knows its primary richness is its diversity of cultures. A continent whose people will stop blackmailing and whitemailing one another and the world with political correctness and the “blame-us-on-history” syndrome. A continent that will understand the sense and the importance of the public good. A continent that will stop begging and stealing and where the totalitarian confusion between nation and party will be abolished and where prancing will be confined to the catwalks of fashion shows. A continent where the ancestral spirits are alive, certainly, to dance with. A continent that will never ever again accept second-class world citizenship and will be neither the playground for Western phobia nor the dumping ground for Chinese junk. A continent that will respect and celebrate life – the life of the planet. A continent that will plant crops and feed itself. A continent that will eradicate small arms. A continent that will be the guardian of the past, the pasts, and the custodian of the future. A continent of profound métissage. A continent where no racism will be tolerated – and by that I also mean the racism and the humiliation of poverty.
Endnotes
(1) Vide p 103, for those academic fools who do not want to believe me.
(2) P 21
(3) The Wordy Fool keeps promising us a novel about Simon Snow, the gravedigger.
(4) See “The Lines have fallen unto me in Beautiful Places” in The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution.
(5) The last sentence is not mine, it was shat out by a bigger fool than I; see p 113.
(6) P 121
(7) To the curious, the academics and the security police who need to decipher our coded message of dreams: Read this question together with the chapters “Mirror Note 1” and “The wetbacks”.
(8) Return to Paradise was the final of three exile books. In it a character called Mr Elixe / Exile or something similar, kept popping up.
(9) P 177
(10) P 184
(11) Vide p 253.
(12) In The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution
(13) See “16 September”. Vultures who are too old, too young, too lazy or too fat to understand the intertext (yea, the Little Fool knows that word), should kindly read an early story by one Breyten Breytenbach called “Fascistiese pampoen”. (Vir Afrikaans, sien “16 September 2001” in Die windvanger.)
(14) http://people.africadatabase.org/en/profile/2181.html
(15) Yolande created beautiful beadwork around the theme “Imagine Africa”.
References
Breytenbach, Breyten. 1993. Return to paradise. Cape Town: David Phillip.
Breytenbach, Breyten. 1996. The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau.
Breytenbach, Breyten. 2007. Die windvanger. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau.
Breytenbach, Breyten. 2008. A Veil of Footsteps (memoir of a nomadic fictional character). Cape Town: Human & Rousseau.
Reageer: webvoet@litnet.co.za
| Respond: speakeasy@litnet.co.za
|
