Breyten Breytenbach Research Articles

The Pan-African Gorée Institute at Thirty: A Tribute to Breyten Breytenbach and the Power of the Imagination

Abstract Amid mounting assaults on political freedom and self-determination – both on the African continent and further afield, the work of the Pan-African Gorée Institute for Democracy, Development and Culture in Africa is more urgent than ever. This article reflects on the first thirty years of the Institute’s existence. It pays special attention to gorin’s creative projects, developed under the motto ‘Imagine Africa’, and reflects on South African poet Breyten Breytenbach’s formative role in the establishment of gorin’s cultural activities. The article concludes with a call for renewed engagement with gorin’s pan-African democratic endeavours.

Draft-dodgers in 1980s South Africa: Styles of Liminality and Lostness

Summary The subject of analysis in this article is oral testimony delivered by five white men who resisted conscription to the apartheid army in the 1980s. The argument, underpinned throughout by its focus on a liminal mode of being expressed by these men both during apartheid and subsequent to its demise, is set in motion by outlining the socio- historical context that framed the interviewees’ complex stances of resistance. The argument proceeds by paying close attention to transcripts of interviews that were conducted from 2010-2013, and thereafter applies concepts considered useful for the interpretation thereof. These additions to the interpretative framework include Stewart Motha’s concept of liminality as applied to Antjie Krog’s writings and experiences, as well as Minesh Dass’s notions of white liberalism and lostness. Attention is also paid to the ways in which Donald McRae narrates his memories of resistance to conscription. McRae’s narration of his resistance stands as a counterpoint to the modes of resistance articulated by the interviewees. The argument concludes by applying Breyten Breytenbach’s ideas of the Middle World and the uncitizen to analysis of the testimony.

Peter Abrahams and the Bandung Era: Afro-Asian Routes of Connection

ABSTRACT This paper reads Peter Abrahams’ writings on Africanness in the context of exchanges between anti-colonial thinkers in the Bandung era, spanning the period from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. It examines the output of the Afro-Asiatic Writer’s Association (AAWU) through Lotus, a quarterly journal that brought together work by artists and thinkers such as Abrahams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Yahya Haqqi, Breyten Breytenbach, Ousman Sembene, Chinua Achebe, and Thu Bon, among others. Abrahams’ contributions to Lotus, among his other writings, reflect on the transnational by yoking cultural production and politico-economic conditions. In doing so, Abrahams insists on constructing the transnational through models of solidarity that unsettle self–other binaries and attempt to map cultural as well as financial capital along a South–South axis. He highlights problems with modernity and its cultures that are particularly productive to explore as we grapple with notions of transnationalism. Abrahams reminds us of the importance of attending to race relations as well as imperial relations by examining the economic disparities they involve instead of approaching them as abstracted romances of a black homeland or of an exotic Africanness.

Michele LevyAnna's Dance: A Balkan Odyssey

exile from Florence. More often, exile is the focus but not the fate of the author. There is an excerpt from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, for example, and Longfellow spells out the tragic fate of Acadie’s Evangeline, severed from her Gabriel: “Thus did that poor soul wander in want and cheerless discomfort, / Bleeding, barefooted, over the shards and thorns of existence.” Ample pages are devoted to tales of exile outside the Western canon. From ancient China, we get Du Fu, “Dreaming of Li Bai” (trans. Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping): I’ve swallowed sobs of the lost dead, but this live separation is chronic grief. From the malarial south of the river no news comes of the exiled traveller, but you visit my dream, old friend, knowing I ache for you. Are you a ghost? No way to tell with the long road between us. The admirable effort at inclusion widens further with later twentieth-century and contemporary selections, including passages recounting (admittedly still “political ”) cases of Iraqi, Uyghur, South African, and East Timorese exiles. Along the way, geopolitical hotspots emerge, among these of course ancient Rome, medieval Europe, twentieth-century European fascist states, and the Soviet Union—including exiles both into and out of, as well as those internally displaced within it, as exemplified in this excerpt from the poem “Homesickness,” by Marina Tsvetayeva (trans. Boris Dralyuk): I do not care what faces see me bristle like a captive lion, or out of which society I’m quickly forced into my own fenced realm of silent feelings. I’m like an iceless polar bear — just where I fail to fit (won’t try!) and am belittled, I don’t care. A variety of genres and forms extends from traditional essays, poetry, fiction, and theatrical writing as far as Kaveh Bassiri’s alphabetical list, “99 Names of Exile,” which includes such entries as castaway, deportee, impure, pariah, and resident alien. Another interesting take comes in an essay by Breyten Breytenbach outlining his concept of the Middle World, which Naffis-Sahely characterizes as “an elusive transnational cultural space that lies beyond one’s origins and even one’s exile from one’s origins.” Naffis-Sahely is candid about having consciously omitted several hundred exilic writers from this volume, for better or worse. Auden, Brecht, and Neruda are some of the authors he loves but could not “afford to feature in these pages.” Others he has omitted because he deems their exile too comfortable, like “resort holidays”—including , puzzlingly, Ezra Pound—or because he finds their state of exile “sickeningly self-satisfied ,” naming Joseph Brodsky in particular. Yet others are omitted whose exile he doesn’t think was handled sufficiently seriously by the author, among these Ovid, whom he says “spent much of his time weeping, sighing, and penning servile poems which he hoped would restore his good fortunes in the capital.” Such reasons for omission can only invite criticism and debate; ideally, it can motivate a more exhaustive approach in the future. Naffis-Sahely is not only editor but also translator of numerous passages in this volume, from ancient Greek, French, and Italian. He is joined by a platoon of other translators. Translation is the reagent by which this anthology ultimately catalyzes something greater in aggregate. These ninety -nine selections, carefully curated, provide a focused, crafted narrative, composed of many voices, which ultimately offer up to the engaged mind a universal shape of exile, for perhaps the first time. This is surely its greatest value—on a topic, moreover, that seems once more on track, sadly, to command only wider attention in the coming years. Andrew Singer Trafika Europe of Western actors to be diminished in this perspective; unfortunately, the portrayal of Lawrence is both feeble and implausible. Not that that is the biggest problem. On one occasion Lawrence is trying to photograph a Bedouin woman, who “ran away, her heart angrily pounding at the site of the stranger taking pictures of her people.” A long list could be made of insouciant errors like “site.” It would include “pours” for “pores,” “predication” for “prediction,” and a comment about “the ferry of battle.” The translation seems so slipshod that one hesitates to...

Breyten Breytenbach’s Revolutionary Aesthetics

This article takes a retrospective look at the literary production of the South African writer and painter, Breyten Breytenbach. It argues that the revolutionary quality of this controversial author’s texts is to be found in the form his writing adopts, that is to say in the texture of his syntax and the power of his metaphors, rather than in the content of his novels, poems, short stories or essays.

A Poetic Voice in the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Holland: Remco Campert and Breyten Breytenbach

Abstract This article discusses the Dutch poet Remco Campert’s involvement in the anti-apartheid movement in Holland by focusing on his magazine Gedicht (1974-1976) and his poem dedicated to the imprisoned South African writer Breyten Breytenbach. Campert’s international engagement is part of the actions undertaken by the Breytenbach-committee and other Dutch initiatives which tried to maintain public interest for the case of Breyten-bach’s imprisonment.

Refreny uchodźcze w poezji Nelly Sachs

W artykule badam, jaki zespół przesłanek konstytuuje się w twórczości niemieckojęzycznej noblistki oraz w jaki sposób autorka sprowadza do wiersza zraniony świat. Interpretuję jej utwory związane z wątkiem uchodźczym. Czytam jej neurotyczną poezję także w obrębie współczesnego dyskursu nomadologicznego i postrzegam jako drogowskaz ku językowi solidarności. W twórczości noblistki z 1966 roku można dostrzec zapowiedź stylistyki współczesnych wierszy uchodźców (m.in. Breyten Breytenbach czy Ashur Etwebi), buduje się wspólnota artystyczna osób pozbawionych domu. Artykuł zamykam konkluzją związaną z wykorzystaniem poezji w edukacji na rzecz pokoju.

“Writing is travelling unfolding it’s own landscape.” A discussion with Breyten Breytenbach on A Veil of Footsteps

This discussion of A Veil of Footsteps (Memoir of a nomadic fictional character) resulted from my reading of the manuscript – initially entitled Word Bird (On the peripatetic art of writing an I) – in August and September 2007. Breyten Breytenbach’s comments on my initial responses to the manuscript led to the idea of giving the conversation a more formal structure. I invited Breytenbach (based in New York at the time) to a discussion via e-mail. The agreement was that he would have the chance to read the final text and to remove anything prior to publication. He answered all my questions and added slight modifications to one or two answers once the conversation had been completed, but removed nothing. The discussion lasted a month (October 2007), was interrupted and then concluded in February 2008. Other than the addition of a bibliography and endnotes, it has not been modified. I was concerned, at the time, about the reception in South Africa of a work that breaks so many rules. A Veil of Footsteps, simultaneously playful and serious in a characteristically Breytenbach manner, is riddled with pitfalls and my aim was to point one or two of them out with the hope that critics would then move on to the more challenging aspects of the work. The discussion took on its own momentum however and due to its length and nature I decided to withhold it at the time of the publication of A Veil of Footsteps.

De creatieve bewegingen van een vrije geest: aantekening over het contrast tussen Breytenbach’s integrale werkwijze en de gefragmenteerde perceptie van zijn werk

Breyten Breytenbach’s multiple and many-sided work ranges from poetry, fiction, drama and essay to drawing, print and painting an cultural reasearch and activism. He has always emphasized that his varied activities and expressions are essentially one integrated art of living and thinking. However, the public and critical perception of Breytenbach’s work tends to ignore its fundamental interconnections, reducing it to loose, fragmented aspects.

Die leser in Breyten Breytenbach se tronkpoësie

Breyten Breytenbach is the most important prison writer in the Afrikaans literary tradition. This article briefly places his prison writing against the background of national and international prison writing before going on to investigate the way in which the reader is represented in his Afrikaans prison poetry. Research about prison writing points out the importance of communication with the outside world for the prisoner. To the prisoner who is also a creative writer, writing is one of the most important means of establishing contact with the outside world. Amongst the large number of poems in Breytenbach’s body of prison poetry which depict an attempt to communicate with the outside world, there are several in which the addressee is explicitly referred to as the reader. The focus of this investigation thus falls on that which reception aesthetics refer to as a”text-internal reader” or “explicit reader”, directly or indirectly addressed in the text. The investigation shows that the poet-narrator in Breytenbach’s prison poems is very conscious of the reader’s role in the concretization of the poem. Several poems from Breytenbach’s body of prison poetry, collected in the anthology Die ongedanste dans (“The undanced dance”, 2005), are analysed to show different facets of the poetnarrator’s relationship with the reader. Some of these analyses describe the poet-narrator’s circumspect approach to the reader and the explanations and instructions given to the reader. Other analyses focus on the poet-narrator’s attempts to manipulate references to time in order to create the illusion of simultaneity with the reader. Further analyses show that the prison writer’s emphasis on the anonymity and absence of the reader can be related to philosophical representations of signification while at the same time being grounded in the material circumstances of Breytenbach’s imprisonment. It is also shown that some of the poems depict the reader as being complicit in creating the circumstances in which the prison poet finds himself.

Die inkerende waarneming

In this article the relation between Breyten Breytenbach’s paintings and poems is discussed focusing on images relating to vision, seeing, looking and eyes. Based on the interpretation of selected paintings, of which some are used on the covers of the volumes of poetry and a number of poems, the conclusion is reached that the same poetics and ars combinatoria underlie painting and writing in Breytenbach’s oeuvre. Seeing, writing and living are opposed to blindness, non-vision, silence and death. In die windvanger (“the wind catcher”) similar motifs are used but the emphasis is changed as the ability to see is more markedly associated with insight and an attempt to understand.

Die “ek” in (‘YK’): Die desentralisasie van die subjek in Breyten Breytenbach se digbundel (‘YK’)

In Breyten Breytenbach’s poetry the “I” is complex. “I” and “you”, the writer and the reader, are not represented with constituted meanings but as signifiers and as part of language production. This article reflects on the development process of the writer as the textual “I”, the “I” narrator in the poetic text – the “I” of language that is not homogeneous or constant. The text is regarded as a pluriform in dialogue (often incomplete) with a variety of texts, the writer and his text, the texts of the reader and the texts of society and history. The author discusses the decentralisation of the subject in Breytenbach’s poetry with respect to his prison collection (‘YK’), and especially the poem “nekra” (a neologism recalling “necro”).

Zen Communist: Breyten Breytenbach’s view from underground

In an interview after his release from prison, Breyten Breytenbach describes himself, at the time he became involved in underground politics, as a Zen Communist. He returns occasionally to this interaction of Marxist ideas of social revolution and Buddhist ideas of non-attachment, but never attempts to explain the resulting synthesis systematically. Indeed, for Breytenbach, being a Zen Communist is to resist systematic positions, to accept contradiction as a constant source of surprise and invention disruptive of all systematic thought. This paper examines how this interaction of Marxist and Buddhist ideas and practices has informed Breytenbach’s politics in three contexts: his initial exploration of a radical philosophy of history in his poetry (“Bruin reisbrief”, “Brown travel letter”); his role in the underground politics of Okhela in the 1970s; his reflections on politics and social change in his prison and prison-related writings. Key words: Zen communism, anti-apartheid movement, liberation, dialectic.

Om tuis te gaan in styl: Territoriumskepping in Breyten Breytenbach se ’n Seisoen in die paradys (1976) en Dog Heart (1998)

This article is a study of how Breyten Breytenbach deals with the idea of home in his autobiographical prose, how he experiences home and how he constructs it. Although I hope that the argument will serve to give a new perspective on any of Breytenbach’s texts that deal with questions about the nature of home and the construction thereof, I only refer to ’n Seisoen in Paradys (A Season in Paradise, 1976) and Dog Heart (1998). The article uses concepts of Deleuze and Guattari to show how Breytenbach writes his home, and especially how his constructions of a home in his self-writings are products of a certain style of writing.

True Confessions, End Papers and the Dakar conference: A review of the political arguments

As a social critic Breyten Breytenbach published two books of political commentary and political analysis during the mid-1980s without the opportunity of engaging with commentators at home. While True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist is part autobiography and part searing comment on prison life, End Papers is a more detached dissection of the major political and cultural issues confronting South Africa. Breytenbach was now one of the respected international voices on the political crisis in South Africa. The violent break-up of apartheid had changed Breytenbach’s social criticism. In the place of the earlier rejection and denunciation had come a willingness to engage and reason with his audience. The Dakar conference of 1987, which Breytenbach co-organised, offered an ideal opportunity for this. The conference was given wide publicity and was seen by some as the catalyst that broke the ice for the negotiations between the government and the ANC two and a half years later.

Murder your darlings: Breytenbach, die dood en die vrou

The poet Breyten Breytenbach establishes a very specific relation between death and the art of poetry, a relation which is affirmed and elucidated in his literary essays, to such a degree that one could refer to his poetics as a death-conscious aesthetics. This is a position that is not wholly uncontroversial, especially in the light of feminist critique viewing the coupling of creativity and death as a male preoccupation that is almost always pursued to the exclusion and elimination of women. It becomes even more problematic when death is expressly linked to the woman, as Breytenbach often does, and this article views the poet’s linkage of death, women and art against the backdrop of theoretical stances and the development of cultural viewpoints in this regard.

Breyten Breytenbachs poëzie in Raster

From 1969 until 1972 the South-African writer and graphic artist Breyten Breytenbach published 29 poems, prose texts and three drawings in the Dutch experimental periodical Raster (first edition: 1967). H. C. ten Berge, writer, poet and Raster's main editor, attributed Breytenbach an unusually prominent position in his magazine. In the Dutch language area of the late sixties and early seventies, Breytenbach was mostly known for his political engagement within the anti-apartheid movement. Ten Berge, however, also praised his work for its formal and experimental aesthetic qualities. According to Ten Berge experiment and engagement are related to one another in a very unique way. By examining the position of Breytenbach in Raster, the paper presents a documentation of the exceptional literary relationship between Breytenbach and Ten Berge, as well as their shared interest in certain motifs in poetry, the use of a specific metaphoric language (e.g. perception of nature and body) and a common belief in the power of poetic language.

“Straddling Languages”: Aspects of the Translational and the Transnational in the Work of Afrikaans Authors Breyten Breytenbach, Marlene van Niekerk and Antjie Krog

SummaryThis article proceeds from the vantage point that the “transnational” and the “translational” are important concepts when discussing the processes of cultural literary signification taking place under the various conditions of displacement and migration the world has witnessed throughout the course of history. The article explores the notion of “translational literature” (as defined by Waïl Hassan) as a means to mediate between different languages and to connect cultures. Translational texts foreground, perform and problematise the act of translation by “straddling” two languages in their construction and presentation. The article proceeds from the vantage point of texts written in the minor language Afrikaans, but constructed and presented in such a way that they include or reach out to other languages. The focus falls on the way in which texts by Breyten Breytenbach (Oorblyfsel/Voice Over 2009), Marlene van Niekerk (De sneeuwslaper 2009, Die sneeuslaper 2010) and Antjie Krog (Mede-wete 2014, Synapse 2014) try to straddle the divide between Afrikaans and languages such as Arabic, English, Dutch and Xhosa. It looks at the way in which these texts stage the act of translation as a way of declaring solidarity with other cultural groups, exploit the connection with other languages to revitalise Afrikaans and also demonstrate the failure of translation.

“Kleng jaa tjeng tjang” – Julia Kristeva and the Transformation of Everyday Language

SummaryThis article examines the role of linguistics in the work of the French psychoanalyst and professor of linguistics Julia Kristeva and shows how she has developed Lacan's theory of the relation between mother, child and language further. Her unique contribution favours the inclusion of the semiotic chora in the relation and focuses on a type of language used by the child when inside the womb that is characterised by pulsating rhythms. Finally, I will show how this theory is put into practice in the clinic itself. Kristeva's project is to address the problem of “the relationship between language and bodily experience” (Oliver 2002: xx) and to show how the bodily drives manifest themselves in language. To argue aspects of Kristeva's views on linguistics, I will refer to a poem by Breyten Breytenbach called “Die tweegeveg” (The duel).

Hybridische zelfpositionering en performance in Breytenbachs reisverhalen

This article focuses on the hybrid self-representation and liminal self-positioning of Breyten Breytenbach as presented in his twotravelogues, Return to Paradise (1993) and Dog Heart (1998). Firstly, the form of travel writing is shown to be a suitable genrefor the manifestation of a nomadic or ‘travelling’ subject. Secondly, his liminal self-positioning toward Afrikaner society reflects theproblem of identity in post-apartheid South Africa, as well as the writer’s performance of a future agency for rehabilitating thecollective self within a new South African community. Breytenbach is seen to manifest his cultural identity on the one hand, whileattempting to position this identity within the multicultural society on the other. Key words: autobiography, BreytenBreytenbach, hybridity, identity, self-positioning.