A precautionary note: at the beginning of his book about his prison years, The true confessions of an albino terrorist, Breyten Breytenbach gives a list of his nicknames, pseudonyms and (possibly) code names, and then adds: “If there is one thing that has become amply clear to me over the years, it is exactly that there is no one person that can be named and in the process of naming be fixed for all eternity …. Isn’t that the whole process of our being, this looking for a name?”i With this in mind, here is a brief account which teases out only a few strands of Breytenbach’s highly complex and often elusive life.
*
South Africa, February 1973. Breyten Breytenbach, at the age of 34, has been away from his country for 13 years, most of that time living in Paris. Now, in the company of his Vietnamese wife, Yolande, he has arrived back in his native province of the Western Cape. Like a desiccated sponge, he is soaking up the atmosphere and loving it. Yet, he is about to make many people uncomfortable, if not intent on revenge, by publicly dropping a verbal bombshell.
Photo: Naomi Bruwer
On his first night at his parents’ home, in a small town by the sea, he notes in his diary, later to become the book A season in paradise, that “the room is filled with deliciousness and the roar of the waters, and outside the voices of my people hum; our people, carrying, cradling us with their voices”.ii He writes these lines in his mother tongue, Afrikaans, listening, with a mixture of delight and relief, to that same language being spoken out in the street.
This linguistic connection between him and the people around him is one he has been starved of during his 13 years of self-imposed exile in Paris. There, he has painted as often as possible the words he himself has marked on the studio wall, in Afrikaans: “Work since the night comes closer.” Apart from producing colourful, figurative and at times tortured images, he has written poetry, also in Afrikaans, knowing that the people among whom he has been living, and even his wife to whom he addresses one love poem after another, cannot understand his words in the original. Here are the opening lines of one of those love poems:
hoe vaak was ons hier tussen koeltes op die vloer
die reuk van terpentyn en van vuur
die doeke is wit want die oë is leeg
die afsydigheid van die nag
en die maan ’n glimlag buite iewers
buite sig
die dae vergaan soos seisoene by die ruite
’n wolk, ’n gesig, reënblare, dié gedig,
ek wou my afdruk op jou laat
ek wou jou brandmark met die vuur
van alleen weesiii
In English, this reads as follows:
how drowsy we were here wrapped in coolness on the floor
the smell of turpentine and fire
the canvases white to our empty eyes
the indifference of the night
and the moon a smile outside
out of sight
days fall apart like seasons at the panes
a cloud, a face, leaves of rain, this poem,
I want to leave my print on you
I want to brand you with the fire
of solitudeiv
This poem, filled with a soft, sensual music that Breytenbach ekes out of the often spare, tightly resistant syllables of his language, is intensely visual in his painterly way. It also points to his constant, itching restlessness, ending with these lines: “alone through you I must refuse myself/ through you alone I find I have no harbour/ in a burning sea”.
By 1972, when “hoe vaak was ons” was published, Breytenbach had gone underground against the apartheid regime, joining Okhela (Zulu for “spark”), a very small Paris-based group intending to be a part of the banned African National Congress. If he thought the South African authorities were unaware of his activities, he was mistaken, and not for the last time did he reveal how poor a player he was of any illegal political game.
But what he most probably did know about was the effect of his (relatively few) undiluted political poems, notably one, published in the same collection as the love poem quoted above, and addressed to the prime minister, Balthazar Johannes (John) Vorster. Portraying Vorster as a torturer who has killed one of his victims, he asks, “does your heart not stiffen in your throat/ as you grasp his lifeless limbs/ with the same hands that caress the secrets of your wife?”v
A more personal reason for Breytenbach’s anger towards the apartheid government concerned his own wife, Yolande, who was legally considered “non-white”, since she was Vietnamese. As a result, in 1965, when Breytenbach was nominated for the first of a multitude of literary prizes in South Africa (as later elsewhere), Yolande was refused a visa, her marriage to Breytenbach stamped as “mixed-race” and therefore illegal. Eight years later, at the end of 1972, the Breytenbachs were finally allowed into the country, but only for a period of 90 days – 90 clearly being a symbolic number at the time, since, by law, political prisoners could be held for 90 days without trial.
The official intolerance towards Yolande and Breytenbach had deeply affected him, and no doubt fuelled what he had to say at the University of Cape Town’s annual Summer School in February 1973. Among the people in the audience of about 800 were several members of the controversial “Sestiger” group, Afrikaans writers of the 1960s determined to break with the traditional tenets of their predecessors. Breytenbach nonetheless accused them, like the rest of his audience, of being “mummified”. He went on to tell them – 21 years before the majority of people in the country were to get the vote – that “the salvation of (South Africa) … is almost exclusively in the hands of your black and brown fellow countrymen”.vi He then added:
We are a bastard people with a bastard language …. In that part of our blood which comes from Europe was the curse of superiority …. We made our otherness the norm, the standard – and the ideal. And because our otherness is maintained at the expense of our fellow South Africans – and our South Africanhood – we feel threatened. We built walls. Not cities, but city walls. And like all bastards – uncertain of their identity – we began to adhere to the concept of purity. That is apartheid. Apartheid is the law of the bastard.vii
Breytenbach’s talk received a standing ovation. But how did the members of his audience really feel about his contention that “our literature, no matter how clever sometimes, is largely a product of our stagnation and alienation”?viii Could they have taken much comfort from his statement that “our nature is one of bastardy. It is good and beautiful thus. We should be compost, decomposing to be able to combine again in other forms”?ix
Whatever the case, displeasure at high levels of the state soon made itself felt. Less than a month later, while still in the Cape, Breytenbach was summoned by the secret police, who told him in no uncertain terms that not only did they know all about him, but they could arrest or expel him at any moment, or prevent him from returning to South Africa ever again.
None of this, apparently, detracted from his deeply emotional attachment to the country, what he would later term his “incurable nostalgia”.x A season in paradise, a kaleidoscope of reactions to the political and social state of the country, gives details of personal events during this visit as well as the words of his Cape Town speech, and includes a number of poems. One of them refers to his father, the town in the Cape where his parents lived and his own death.xi It begins like this:
I will die and go to my father
in Wellington on long legs
dazzling in the light
where the rooms are heavy and dark
where stars perch like seagulls on the rooftop
and angels dig for worms in the garden
And it ends:
Come with me
as I go in my death to my father
in Wellington where angels with their worms
fish fat stars from heaven;
let us die, decompose and be merry:
my father has a large boarding house.
*
Afrikaans is today the mother tongue of some 12% of 64,5 million South Africans, spoken mainly by a portion of the white population and by the so-called coloured people of slave (mainly Malay) and indigenous Khoi and San origin, the majority of whom live in the Western Cape. It was, in the past, a language of key political significance, after the National Party – which legally crystallised apartheid and imposed it on the country between 1948 and 1994 – was brought to power, at a time when only whites had the vote in South Africa on a wave of Afrikaner populism.
Afrikaans was, however, officially recognised as a language, rather than a dialect, only in 1925. Writers working in Afrikaans, thus adding to its stature, were particularly valued by the regime. They were considered to be the scribes of their embattled tribe, most of whose highly conservative members bristled with pride concerning their identity, at the same time feeling threatened both by the black majority and by the power of British capital. An Afrikaans-language writer who radically questioned the legitimacy of Afrikaner power was considered to be the worst of traitors.
This was Breytenbach’s case, especially when he decided in 1975, despite what he had learned from the secret police two years earlier, to return illegally to South Africa, under a false name, in order to extend the network of support for his underground activities. Not only was he himself tracked from the start of his journey, but along the way he unknowingly alerted the secret police to his link with several local political activists he came into contact with. He was arrested and put on trial, receiving a sentence of nine years, later reduced by the authorities to seven.
He was allowed to write in prison, on condition that he gave his work to his jailers. Over those seven years, he produced some 400 poems. In one of them, “your letter”,xii he tells Yolande:
your letter is delightful, larger and lighter
than the thought of a flower when the dream
is a garden,
as your letter opens
there is an unfolding of sky, word from outside,
wide spaces
Then, referring to the fact that at one point he was in a cell adjoining those destined to be hung the next day, accompanied at night by the singing of their fellow prisoners, he goes on:
I slept in green pastures
I lay on the ridge of the valley of the shadow of death
during the last watch of the night
listening to those condemned to die
being led through tunnels in the earth,
…
how they sing
those who are about to jump from light into darkness
those who will be posted to no destination
terror fills me at the desecration
Released in 1982, Breytenbach returned to Paris, his vision deeply marked by his experience of incarceration. South Africa, he wrote, was a country “whose cities were linked by arteries … to make travel easier between one prison and another”.xiii Soon, he began working on the account of his years as a prisoner, published as The true confessions of an albino terrorist.
At the end of this book, he deepened his thoughts on the nature of his mother tongue. Afrikaans, he writes,
was born in the mouths of those – imported slaves, local populations – who had command of no European tongue and who needed to communicate in a lingua franca among themselves; who had to be able also to understand the master. Not for nothing was it referred to as “kitchen Dutch” for so long. In its structural simplification, it was influenced by the language spoken by the Malay slaves; in its vocabulary, by those of Khoi-khoi and blacks. One can trace to some extent the proliferation of diminutives, the gifts in sound and meaning, the repetitions – so typical of Creole evolution.xiv
Some years later, in response to that statement and others like it, I wrote: “Using the same energy with which he berates his people for their asphyxiating ideology, Breytenbach elbows his way out of the narrow, historically false definition of what it means to be an Afrikaner.”xv
Breytenbach’s position was a revelation to me as an English-speaking South African, one for whom Afrikaans was first and foremost a blunt-edged weapon of oppression and propaganda, the leaden language which the regime wanted to impose as a medium of instruction on black schools, sparking the violently repressed revolt of schoolchildren in the township of Soweto and then throughout South Africa in 1976.
“We (Afrikaners) bring you the grammar of violence/ and the syntax of destruction”, Breytenbach wrote from prison on hearing of the 1976 events.xvi I found it a source of refreshing amazement that he should fill his language not only with acerbic political awareness, but also, elsewhere, with sensuality, opening windows to an unpredictable, gaudy imagination, contrasting luminous vision with streaks of darkness and a constantly assailing sense of mortality, absorbing precepts of Zen, invoking Shiva:
I want to have a god who reeks of sperm and garlic,
who crashes through mountains and waters, fallible and cruel
and human and hideous, exquisite as a pomegranate tree
in the silver night, fat and elephant-headed,
a warrior, a mistress, a hermaphrodite, a god with a shadow
and dew on her shoulders, who sits for days on end
high in the poplar tree counting flamingoes in their flight
causing the grass blades to rustle where she walksxvii
*
By the 1980s, Breytenbach was well known in South Africa for his social and political commentaries, expressed with his customary blend of piercing analysis and acidic irony, daring metaphors, vulnerability, dreamy idealism and a good dollop of narcissism, topped with a sharp dose of irreverence. He expressed deep scepticism concerning the negotiations for a new dispensation between 1990, after Nelson Mandela’s release, and 27 April 1994, when for the first time in the country’s history democratic elections were held.
“Some South African writers,” he said in a newspaper interview, “believe they smell the fragrant aromas of the new republic of peace, but in reality they smell the perfumed buttocks of politicians digging for power. We can only save ourselves by strengthening the democratic institutions of a civilised society and by firmly limiting politicians to their role as servants of the community, thus counteracting their natural tendency to prey on the labour of society.”xviii
He engaged in one full-blown polemic after another over the need to protect Afrikaans in “post-apartheid” South Africa, where there were now 11 official languages, as a result of which English was becoming an even more predominant lingua franca, and where one Afrikaans-language university after another was beginning to use English as the language of instruction.
Recognising that there were neo-Nazi extremists among those pleading the same cause as he was, he said in another newspaper interview: “You must not be ashamed to fight for Afrikaans. Just because the fascists have pissed in the water in our midst does not mean that we may no longer take the word water in our mouths. … Language is the magic fibre of minorities or majorities: language is the mirror in which your breath finds a recognisable face.”xix
By the turn of the twenty-first century, when the euphoria and relief triggered by the new dispensation in South Africa was well over, and deep political disillusionment had set in, one national, political icon apart from Archbishop Desmond Tutu still remained relatively intact, and that was Nelson Mandela. In 2008, the year of Mandela’s 90th birthday, Breytenbach wrote him (and not for the first time) a highly critical, published letter.xx Recognising him as “a liberation hero who did not renege on his commitments to freedom from oppression and justice for all”, he nonetheless stated:
I find it obscene the way everybody and his or her partner – the ex-presidents and other vacuous and egomaniacal politicians, the starlets and coke-addled fashion models, the intellectually challenged and morally strained musicians, the hollow international jet set – treat you like some exotic teddy bear to slobber over.
He goes on to wonder whether Mandela has taken full cognisance of the extreme daily violence and corruption in the country. And then: “Why do we call ‘national democratic revolution’ the process by which the state and all its institutions – and, by extension, its culture and economy – become the feeding trough for the party and its cadres?” he asks, before concluding:
We must cling to the notion of a utopia (call it “clean and accountable government” or “common sense”) as justification and motivation to keep on moving and making a noise. For the mind has to be allowed to dance, even with death, if we want to stay it reverting to despair and narcissistic self-love. To survive, we must assume the responsibility of imagining the world differently.
*
Breyten Breytenbach is of virtually unparalleled stature in South Africa’s contemporary Afrikaans-language literary landscape. His writing output was vast, including memoirs, short stories, essays and plays. Some of his homemade words have entered everyday Afrikaans speech. His poems are read in schools and universities, quoted in speeches, reproduced in anthologies; they have been turned into several CDs’ worth of songs.
It is noticeable, though, that his work, and more particularly his poetry, sometimes has a negligent side to it, as if he did not want to reread a poem after a first draft, as if even a second draft would have been an unbearable constraint, as if the speed of creativity – the act of almost offhandedly or altogether recklessly freeing himself of his words – had been sufficient. This tendency can be set against JM Coetzee’s comment, made in 1985: “A feature of Breytenbach’s poetry,” he says, “is that it stops at nothing: there is no limit that cannot be exceeded, no obstacle that cannot be leaped, no commandment that cannot be questioned. His writing characteristically goes beyond, in more senses than one, what one had thought could be said in Afrikaans.”xxi
In 2014, during “the Week of the Afrikaans novel” at The Hague, the public had the opportunity to vote for “the most beautiful Afrikaans poem of all times” (if it is in any way possible to decide on such a thing), and a poem by Breytenbach won the vote.xxii Here is its first verse:
Allerliefste, ek stuur vir jou ’n rooiborsduif
want niemand sal ’n boodskap wat rooi is skiet nie.
Ek gooi my rooiborsduif hoog in die lug en ek
weet al die jagters sal dink dis die son.
Kyk, my duif kom op en my duif gaan onder
en waar hy vlieg daar skitter oseane
en bome word groen
en hy kleur my boodskap so bruin oor jou vel
In English, this reads as:
My love, I am sending you a red-breasted dove
since no one would shoot a message that is red.
I throw my red-breasted dove high in the sky and I
know all the hunters will think it’s the sun.
Look, my dove rises and my dove sets
and where he flies oceans sparkle
and trees turn green
and he colours my message in brown across your skin.
*
Breytenbach died at the age of 85, on 24 November 2024, entering what he once named “the final prison where all memory goes dark”.xxiii The poet Antjie Krog said of him:
Breyten Breytenbach’s work and his life have shifted an enormous tectonic plate in Afrikaans literature. … Without his shoulders, many of us would not be able to write. I will miss immensely the poetic sound of his voice, his preposterous view of Afrikaners, his irritated belchings on LitNet (an online South African literary platform) and the delightful brilliance of his snide tongue.xxiv
Endnotes
i Breyten Breytenbach, The true confessions of an albino terrorist, London, Faber and Faber, 1984, page 13.
ii Breyten Breytenbach, A season in paradise, London, Jonathan Cape, 1980, translated by Rike Vaughan, page 56.
iii Breyten Breytenbach, Skryt, Amsterdam, Meulenhoff-Nederland Poetry-International, 1972, page 34. Poem untitled.
iv Breyten Breytenbach, In Africa even the flies are happy: Selected poems 1964-1977, London, John Calder, 1978, translated by Denis Hirson, page 59.
v Skryt, op cit, page 26 (my translation).
vi A season in paradise, op cit, page 154.
vii Ibid, page 156.
viii Ibid, page 158.
ix Ibid, page 156.
x Breyten Breytenbach, A return to paradise, Cape Town, David Philip, 1993, page 1.
xi This translation is from In Africa even the flies are happy, op cit, page 77.
xii Breyten Breytenbach, Judas eye, London, Faber and Faber, 1988, page 92, translated by Breyten Breytenbach.
xiii Breyten Breytenbach, “Propos détenus”, afterword to Feu froid, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1983, a selection of Breytenbach’s poems translated into French by Georges Lory.
xiv The true confessions of an albino terrorist, op cit, page 353.
xv Denis Hirson, White scars, Johannesburg, Jacana 2006, page 78.
xvi This line is from “The struggle for the taal” translated in In Africa even the flies are happy, op cit, page 93.
xvii This poem is untitled. Originally in Lotus, Cape Town, Buren-Uitgewers, 1970, page 87. The translation appears in In Africa even the flies are happy, op cit, page 37.
xviii In the South African newspaper Die Burger, 16 November 1993. Reference from Erika Terblanche’s informative article in Afrikaans, “Breyten Breytenbach (1939-2024)” on the internet platform LitNet, https://www.litnet.co.za/breyten-breytenbach-1939/.
xix In the South African newspaper Die Beeld, 17 July 1993, cited by Erika Terblanche, ibid.
xx “Mandela’s smile”, Harper’s Magazine, December 2008, https://harpers.org/archive/2008/12/mandelas-smile/.
xxi JM Coetzee, “A poet in prison”. In Social dynamics: A journal of the Centre for African Studies, University of Cape Town, 1985, volume 11, no 2, pages 72-5.
xxii This untitled poem is from Lotus, ibid, page 81, translated by Dominique Botha.
xxiii From Breytenbach’s poem “For Françooi Viljoen”, in Judas eye, op cit, page 52.
xxiv In the South African newspaper Die Beeld, 25 November 2024, cited by Erika Terblanche, ibid. Antjie Krog’s translation.
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