| Larry Schwartz |
| A YOUNG woman pauses at the table outside a small restaurant in Cape Town, South Africa, to ask a man hunched over coffee if he is “Meneer Breytenbach”. He assures her he is not. She is not fooled. Moments earlier, I had asked Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach how he had felt in the crowd the previous evening at the opening of an exhibition of oil paintings, watercolors and drawings. “I have a feeling that people expect something of me,” he had said. “There is a curiosity and people expect the unexpected.” A reluctant celebrity of sorts, his face is all too recognisable to compatriots despite his many years in exile. In his mid-’50s, Breytenbach has held exhibitions in Europe for decades. He was in town for the first display of his art in South Africa and release of a new book, `Return To Paradise’, his third dealing with sojourns there. An award-winning poet who came to epitomise imaginative force and integrity in times of stifling authoritarianism, he polarised the Afrikaner literary community. Opponents damned his verse as romantic, blasphemous, radical. Enthusiasts claim Breytenbach’s idiosyncratic verse, its vivid imagery betraying a painter’s eye, invigorated the Afrikaans language. Perhaps it was the distance that gave a freshness to his approach. Mostly he wrote from outside the country, exiled because he had married a Vietnamese woman. Some of his work was penned in prison. He was jailed for “subversive” activities after his arrest at the end of a clandestine 1975 visit to recruit agents for a movement in exile, Okhela. “In a class of two with J.M.Coetzee, far ahead of all the rest,” the British academic R.W.Johnson wrote recently. Breytenbach was soon to return to a Paris winter. His longest stay in South Africa since he boarded a freighter bound for Europe after dropping out of art school in 1959, was when serving more than seven years (two of them in solitary confinement) of a nine-year sentence until his release in December 1982. He had come home at a time when the white Parliament was holding its last sitting, a “New South Africa” being trumpeted at every turn. “This country is going through a mass trauma, a psychological trauma,” he said. “At least for the whites. The blacks too perhaps. Because I think it is difficult for the blacks to come to terms with being within reach of power. At least power of some form. To feel self-assured, not to overact, not to hang back. It’s a difficult adaptation. “But for the whites this weird mixture of optimism and gloom. One feels that for instance if you are not optimistic enough you are letting the side down. As if there is a make-believe about it.” The Cafe Mozart, where he suggested we meet, is next to the gallery, in a street partly closed to traffic. Streets away is the tobacconist Breytenbach first visited as a student in the late ’50s for a special mix of blends for his pipe. Fearing recognition, he nevertheless stopped here for a bag of tobacco on a visit with forged passport in 1975. AN agent for an outlawed organisation founded in exile to further the struggle against apartheid, he had come beardless, posing as a “Christian Galaska”. Security police, aware of his trip even before his arrival, kept him under surveillance, arresting him as he was boarding a plane to Europe. He had settled in Paris in 1961, marrying Vietnamese-born Yolande, in doing so, as he has put it, “stepping over the line of immorality into an illegal mixed union”. For years, the couple was unable to visit South Africa together. He was “white”, she “non-white”. In 1973, they were finally given visas. Ironically this was the year after publication of a poem that has been described as “probably the last straw in his relationship with the South African rulers”. In `Letter To Butcher from Abroad’, dedicated to “Balthazar”, the name of then Prime Minister B.J.Vorster, he goads a torturer to own up to his brutish deeds. “The lot of the imprisoned Russian poet Osip Mandelstam in the ’30s, after his poem to Stalin, parallels what happened to Breyten,” Ampie Coetzee has written. He has no illusions that political change will bring an end to the ugly doings associated with national intelligence or security police. “I think there are certain trades … that are eminently adaptable to whatever regime,” he said. “The fact that some are black and some are white has got nothing to do with anything at all. They will be around like the cockroaches. They won’t fade away.” Breytenbach now prefers not to dwell on the prison experience that he so vividly described in his 1985 book `The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist’. “The years that one lives under the load of being Mr Anti Apartheid or Mr Exile or Mr Ex-prisoner. It gets me. People coming up to you and saying, `play it once again Sam with feeling’. It drives me batty, the damn thing. I’m out of it.” Days later, a local art critic wrote that it was as difficult to assess his works dispassionately freed of the Breytenbach legend as it was to do so with Vincent van Gogh without the knowledge of the severed ear. “Somebody did a very interesting article in `The New York Times’ some weeks ago saying how come you get yourself painted into some kind of horrible corner as some wounded saint,” Breytenbach said. “Perhaps one lends oneself to that. It may be the simple fact of if you come from an Afrikaans background and you are not a raving ideological nutcase, to become involved and then to get caught must have another dimension and the dimension people grasp for is the tragic one of having been sent out to atone for the sins of others or something like that. “I have to watch myself with things like that because sometimes it’s very comforting to feel, `oh my God, poor me’.” Breytenbach concedes “a sense of coming back and being confronted by the fact that you won’t be able to fit back in. And there’s no crying need for you either”. Breytenbach talks of coming back and coming back until, perhaps, he forgets to leave. “I don’t know by now if it’s possible to settle anywhere,” he said when I asked if he would come back home. “I’ve been rootless for so long.” THE SUNDAY AGE, 13-Feb-1994 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 