Breyten Breytenbach died last week at the age of 85, and Afrikaans media and social media accounts were inundated with eulogies, reminisces and confessions of love affairs. His poems and their many musical renditions are being recycled everywhere, chief among them the wistful, “I will die and to my father go.”
He was probably the only truly internationally famous SA poet, admired by both Salman Rushdie and a host of Islamic poets, by Christians and Buddhists, officially anointed with the highest accolades in SA, the US and France, his second country — he died in Paris from complications after a fall.
Lesser rated as a painter, his often autobiographical, surrealist paintings still are in collections across the globe, and when they were combined with words, as in All One Horse, they were fantastically unique, a happening not much found elsewhere in the world. Also underappreciated are his essays and speeches, filled with eloquence and intricate arguments presented in his typically sensuous, surrealism-tinctured style.
In person too, his charisma was overpowering. He spoke a sonorous, pure Afrikaans that made you believe there was a hidden aristocracy in the language from which he was the sole issue, though he was an egalitarian to the bone, his words also carrying the flavours of Boland wineland work or apple picking in Elgin. He was a man of the earth in a literal sense — visitors reported how hard he worked at his homes in Girona, Catalonia and on Goree island off Dakar, Senegal, with his wife, Yolande.
He had his flaws and failings, of course, to fill out the biography of an extraordinary individual. To my mind, though, the picture is incomplete without considering his contribution to the country that SA is today. After falling-outs in the 1980s already with the ANC establishment and its associates among English-speaking liberals, the tendency is to cut him down to what is desired to be his size — as a mere innovator in Afrikaans literature.
Just as I think white people cannot really understand the depredations of apartheid, few black people can understand how difficult it was for Afrikaans-speakers like myself, to cast off the soft stuffings of the white cocoon, the creation of which was the primary purpose of apartheid and its later iterations. Writers like Andre P Brink and Breytenbach sparked that process for many of us.
Brink exposed us to SA’s real but suppressed history and politics directly, providing alternative facts and arguments to help us think our way through to reality. Breytenbach, though, did the more visceral stuff, taking the vast, complex body of ideology and theology on which the apartheid order was based — and much of the wider Western order — by the scruff of the neck and turning it upside down.
Central to it all was Afrikaans, the local creole language made by slaves and white peasants, which Afrikaner nationalists hijacked to become the ultimate justification for perfecting the segregations imposed by the Dutch commercial and British imperial orders. Its major spirits, such as N.P van Wyk Louw had already clashed with Hendrik Verwoerd, but the Sestigers were the ones who saw that a total rejection of nationalism was necessary.
So whereas Van Wyk Louw wrote finely crafted, formal poetry that put Afrikaans on an equal footing with the best in other literatures, Breytenbach turned “free verse”, which at best is a technical description, into a liberatory rallying cry. And when the Calvinist bard-in-a-suit Van Wyk Louw wrote, “dat pyn bestaan is nodig, Heer, (that pain exists is needed, Lord)” Breyten, describing himself merely as “the man in the green jersey”, countered with, “dat pyn bestaan is onnodig, Heer”. And when the dominees intoned in church with raised arms, “ek slaan my oë op na die berge (I raise my eyes to the mountains)”, he blasphemed with, “ek slaan my oë op met ‘n raket (I hit my eyes into the air with a racquet)”.
The establishment responded by ignoring his poetry in school text books and at most universities, thus ensuring that even the most “innocent” of his poems could serve as revolutionary tools. When we set up a literary magazine at the University of Pretoria that published Breytenesque erotics and swear words, and punting the inclusion of his work in the curriculum, we were all expelled.
By then Breyten’s personal life was a running apartheid scandal too. His bohemian sojourn in France had become permanent self-exile when he married Yolande, who was refused a visa to travel to white SA. Her beauty clinched the argument against the regime on another level, as did her Vietnamese aristocratic provenance, which also supplied a linkage to the anti-war movement in the US, 1968 and all that.
Shelley’s phrase “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” comes to mind. Nowadays more wishful thinking than any basis for politics — who on earth still reads poetry? — it comes closest to what Breytenbach achieved. His physical venture into revolutionary politics was short-lived, with his farcical one-man Okhela show ending in his arrest and jailing, though not before he had seduced an air hostess on the plane in which he’d smuggled himself.
In jail he appeared to offer his spying services to the regime in exchange for his freedom, but at a second trial it soon appeared that he was taking the mickey out of the wardens with fantastical talk, in true Breyten fashion, of AK47s in pumpkins, and he was acquitted. Still, the ANC in exile, tied up in labyrinthian internal politics, began to ostracise him.
This treatment led to the second saving of Afrikaans dissidents. I was part of an attempt to set up a version of the End Conscription Campaign called END, “eindig nasionale diensplig”. Naturally we wanted to put Breytenbach on a stage to call on Afrikaner youths to reject national service. But word came that it was not approved: “but Lusaka says ...”.
Some of us rebelled against this too, which saved us from promising careers in the liberation movement. We were alerted to all the germinating ills that would later devastate the country, and merely mirrored the repressive society we wanted to escape from: struggle bookkeeping, secret cliques, cadre deployment, ostracism, blind discipline ... I retreated into journalism where I tried to keep a sense of objectivity, which I found at Vrye Weekblad. By the time of its demise it had become critical of the liberation movement as well as exposing apartheid death squads.
Before that Breyten had been the force, with Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, behind the Dakar meeting between Afrikaner intellectuals and ANC bigwigs, a seismic event in the Afrikaner consciousness, a public crossing of the Rubicon. This was followed by a meeting between writers from both sides at Victoria Falls, in which I took part. Here too, what really gave us common ground were those ANC delegates who after a few whiskies confessed their dislike of MK’s faux militarism. We had yet to learn about the Quattro atrocities.
This middle ground, which Breyten had prepared for us, was the breakthrough for indoctrinated Afrikaner youths who really believed that the Russians were behind it all and for whom an SACP-guided ANC was a bridge too far. Breyten brought sensuous living, a free-spiritedness and open minds to the equation, all embedded in simple, natural, yet hugely creative Afrikaans wordplay. Rather than join the UDF with its contortionist justifications for the terrifying necklacings, Afrikaner youths could go to Voëlvry musical concerts, where Breytenbach was always present in spirit and word.
Breytenbach also shook the establishment by turning down its prime literary prize, the Hertzog Prize. This likewise prepared the way — aided by the sports and cultural boycotts — for Afrikanerdom to make the quantum leap of voting itself out of power in the 1992 referendum, an event that is still underrated as one of the true turning points in our history. Much other water had flowed under the bridge to enable this unprecedented move, but Breytenbach and Brink loomed large.
To be fair, the ANC’s ostracism of Breytenbach was also due to his outright hostility towards the movement ever since his trial. He built up his institute on Goree island into a powerhouse of African thinking, especially in French, and many observers reported how warm his relations with black African intellectuals were. For former liberationists, though, he had little patience, prophesying from the 1990s that SA would go to the dogs.
His antagonism came to centre on the “taalstryd” at Stellenbosch University, where he was a passionate member of the Gelyke Kanse group resisting its anglicisation (I was one too). He placed this in the context of the struggle of minorities across the world for their rights; he advocated for Kurds, Catalonians, Bosnian Muslims and stridently, for the Palestinians. A close friend of his was the great exiled poet Mahmoud Darwish.
In 2005 already he wrote an open letter to then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, published in newspapers across the world, in which he called out the former general for being a cruel, cold-blooded provocateur aiming for the annihilation of Palestine: “Your settlements are armed colonies built on land shamelessly stolen.” Twenty years later, his words apply even more to Benjamin Netanyahu.
In SA, we are starting to really grapple with the issue of minorities. Here Breytenbach is a guiding spirit for many: how to walk the fine line between language as flower bed for the nationalism he despised so much, and language as the only technology capable of transforming the culture of poverty to which the majority is doomed.
Breyten Breytenbach was a great SA. In a society that understood itself better than ours, he would have got a state funeral and all flags would have been flown half-mast. To which he would have offered one of his lines of poetry: “Let the sly bitter ducks shit on my grave in the rain.”
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