Breyten Breytenbach Research Articles

Die spel van assosiasies in en om 'Die verlossing van die beeld' van Breyten Breytenbach

The play of association in and around 'The liberation of the image' by Breyten Breytenbach This analysis focuses on the conjunction of memory and imagination, which is an important impulse in, and key to, Breytenbach’s work. The play with language and with associations, the foregrounding, in the short story, “Die verlossing van die beeld” (Breytenbach, 1983) with its metafictional title and apparently divergent motifs (rain/water, watch, onion, the death and burial of a grandfather) acts, as it were, as an invitation to the reader to become a co-player. The reader ventures on a search for traces, intertextual links within the Breytenbach oeuvre and for already acknowledged influences such as Surrealism (which in turn casts some light on the strange title of the story) and the Eastern philosophies such as Zen and the even older Taoism. The analysis also takes into account the context in which “Mouroir” was written, namely Breytenbach’s term in prison (1975-1982). Seeing that the writer had to hand in his manuscripts to the jail authorities regularly, he might have decided, consciously or by intuition, to hide some thoughts and feelings behind a screen or a mask, in, for example in “Die verlossing van die beeld”, a lighter tone and irony.

Genocide, war crimes and the West: history and complicity

* Contents * Part 1: Overview * 1. Introduction: Genocide, War Crimes and the West - Adam Jones * 2. Shades of Complicity: Towards a Typology of Transnational Crimes against Humanity - Peter Stoett * Part 2: Genocide, War Crimes and the West * 3. Imperial Germany and the Herero of Southern Africa: Genocide and the Quest for Recompense - Jan-Bart Gewald * 4. Genocide by Any Other Name: North American Indian Residential Schools in Context - Ward Churchill * 5. The Allies in World War Two: The Anglo-American Bombardment of German Cities - Eric Langenbacher * 6. Torture and Other Violations of the Law by the French Army during the Algerian War - Raphaelle Branche * 7. Atrocity and Its Discontents: U.S. Double-Mindedness about Massacre, from the Plains Wars to Indonesia - Peter Dale Scott * 8. Bob Kerrey's Atrocity, the Crime of Vietnam, and the Historic Pattern of U.S. Imperialism - S. Brian Willson * Document 1 * (1) Inaugural Statement to the Russell Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal (1966) -- Jean-Paul Sartre * 9. Charles Horman et alia vs. Henry Kissinger: U.S. Intervention in 1970s Chile and the Case for Prosecutions - Mario I. Aguilar * 10. The Wretched of the Nations: The West's Role in Human Rights Violations * in the Bangladesh War of Independence - Suhail Islam and Syed Hassan * 11. Indicting Henry Kissinger: The Response of Raphael Lemkin - Steven L. Jacobs * 12. Crimes of the West in Democratic Congo: Reflections on Belgian Acceptance of Moral Responsibility for the Death of Lumumba - Thomas Turner * 13. In the Name of the Cold War: How the West Aided and Abetted the Barre Dictatorship of Somalia - Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi * 14. The Security Council: Behind the Scenes in the Rwanda Genocide - Linda R. Melvern * 15. U.S. Policy and Iraq: A Case of Genocide? - Denis J. Halliday * Documents 2 & 3 * (2) Criminal Complaint against the United States and Others for Crimes against the People of Iraq - Ramsey Clark * (3) Letter to the Security Council (2001) - Ramsey Clark * 16. The Fire in 1999? The United States, Nato, and the Bombing of Yugoslavia - David Bruce Macdonald * 17. Collateral Damage: The Human Cost of Structural Violence - Peter G. Prontzos * Part 3: Truth and Restitution * 18. Institutional Responses to Genocide and Mass Atrocity - Ernesto Verdeja * 19. International Citizens' Tribunals on Human Rights - Arthur Jay Klinghoffer * 20. Coming to Terms with the Past: The Case for a Truth and Reparations Commission on Slavery, Segregation, and Colonialism - Francis Njubi Nesbitt * Document 4 * 4) Declarations on the Transatlantic Slave Trade - World Conference against Racism: * Part 4: Closing Observations * 21. Afghanistan and Beyond - Adam Jones * 22. Letter to America - Breyten Breytenbach * Index

Writing as Resistance: Life Stories of Imprisonment, Exile, and Homecoming from Apartheid South Africa, and: Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid (review)

Part 1 Detention and Imprisonment Chapter 2 The Worlds of Dentention and Imprisonment Chapter 3 Rewriting the Prison, Rewriting the Nation Chapter 4 The Body and/in Space Chapter 5 Legal and Literary Narrative on the Space of Death Part 6 Exile and Homecoming Chapter 7 Situating Exile: Post-Colonialism, Globalization, Nationalism Chapter 8 Exile as a Space of Death: The Individual (William Bloke Modisane) and the Organization (the ANC) Chapter 9 Exiles, Migrants, Expatriates: The Life Stories of Breyten Breytenbach and Dan Jacobson as Creative Journeys Chapter 10 Home and Homecoming Part 11 Witness Chapter 12 The Witness: Imprisonment and Exile as Symbol

"Ek is nie meer een van ons nie": Breyten en di volk. 'n Verkenning van die sikliese ritme en die terugkerende motiewe in die openbare reaksie op Breyten Breytenback

The Afrikaans poet-intellectual, Breyten Breytenbach, has been an active participant in South African public life since his debut in 1964. His artistic and political choices draw upon a culture and a politics of resistance based in the past, present and future. Over four decades he actively contributed to the polarization and expansion of cultural and socio-political debate in South Africa. Against this background the article explores the cyclical rhythm of approval and rejection that characterizes the relationship between Breytenbach and the Afrikaner people. Recently his dissident voice in local cultural and political discourse has been silenced following the results of a "people's poll" by a leading Afrikaans newspaper. The investigation contextualizes this watershed event by tracing key reception debacles in Breytenbach's career and highlights recurring motifs and the manipulative role of the Afrikaner press. These events include the reception of the Paris based poet's debut, Die ysterkoei moet sweet (The Iron Cow Must Sweat) (1964); the granting of a literary award and the ensuing refusal of a visa to his Vietnamese wife, an event that exiled the author (1965); his first visit to the country and participation in a "Sestiger" (Afrikaans authors of the 1960s) literary event (1973); his arrest, trial under the Suppression of Terrorism Act and subsequent imprisonment (1975); his release from prison and return to settle in Paris (1982); his return to South Africa to receive a literary award (1986); the reception of his first art exhibition, Painting the Eye (1994); the reception of his first play, Boklied (Song of the Goat) (1998); the reception of Die toneelstuk (The Play) and the subsequent opinion poll (2001); and the debacle that followed his decision not to publish for a wider Afrikaans readership and to disseminate his poems privately to a few friends (2002).

A Visit to Buchenwald

Editor's Note: Breyten Breytenbach—poet, painter, prose writer, and political activist—was born in the Western Cape province to an Afrikaner family. Educated in art at the University of Cape Town, he early chose, in the face of the apartheid regime, exile, leaving South Africa in 1960 and settling in Paris in 1962. Here he began his dual career as a painter and writer, his poetry in Afrikaans early winning him recognition as the leading poet of his generation. During a clandestine return to his homeland in 1975, he was arrested, charged under the Terrorism Act, and spent seven years in prison (the first two in solitary confinement). Under the bizarre terms of his imprisonment, he was allowed to write (for the prison censor); his manuscripts were returned to him after his release in 1982. They formed the beginning of his ongoing experiments in the mixed genre of memoir, fiction, travel journal, and lyric. Much of his later prose has been written in English. Although he and his wife are still based in Paris, he was invited to join the faculty at the UCT, has recently taught at NYU, and is associated with the Gorée Institute in Senegal. His memoirs, like his poetry, establish strong ties between landscapes, language, and memories (both political and private). The following account of his visit to Goethe's Weimar and Hitler's Buchenwald will appear in a work still in progress.

Die spieël as blinde mond: die poësie van Breyten Breytenbach

The mirror as blind mouth: The poetry of Breyten Breytenbach The representation of reality, the word and the relationship between signifier and signified is the main theme of this article. In the poetry of the Afrikaans poet, Breyten Breytenbach, representation and “reality” are concerns constantly reflected on. The poem “drome is ook wonde” (“dreams are wounds as well”) can be read as a central “ars poetica” of Breytenbach’s work. Although it is a love poem it can also be read as literary theory, but not the same kind of theory as in, for example, Horace’s or Alexander Pope’s work. The poem discussed in this article does not deal with poetry as such, and what poetry should attempt to do; it is a presentation, the poetics being its representation. Breytenbach theorises an “epistemology of reading” in which the intuitive faculty of the reader – more than the cognitive – will guide the creation of meaning, and where the signifying value of the metaphor is beyond logical meaning. With the awareness of the impossibility of portraying reality by means of the poetic word, the mirror and mirror image acquire a meaningful function. For Leonardo (see Gombrich, 1986:5) the mirror was the painter’s master; the artist is the maker of mirrors, and then also the maker of dreams. The creation of a second reality, however, has boundaries because of the limitation of the poet’s medium. The creation then becomes more meaningful than the imitation, the presentation than the representation. After the analysis of Breytenbach’s poem one may come to the same conclusion as Lyotard (1984:81) concerning postmodern aesthetics which “ … allows the unpresentable to be put forward only as the missing contents; but the form … continues to offer to the reader … matter for solace and pleasure”.

Die tekstualisering van die liggaam in Lady Anne

Summary One of the central themes in Antjie Krog's seventh volume of poetry, Lady Anne (1989), is the portrayal of the body. Several poems focus on the female body, the body as a writing instrument (in support of Cixous's famous dictum), the interaction between the male and female body, the body as textualised object and the body of the Other. Interestingly enough, Krog does not opt for the traditional maternal metaphor for the writing process but employs obvious phallic metaphors to convey her poetic inclinations. Her preoccupation with the body and bodily metaphors is an intertextual response to that of Breyten Breytenbach. In Lady Anne the focus is in particular on the body of the Other(s) encountered at the Cape by the historical subject, Lady Anne Barnard. Finally, it is shown how the poem “jy word onthou vanweë ...” is a culmination for all the perspectives on the body in the text as a whole.

Mapping a heartland Breyten Breytenbach's ‘Zone of Bastardisation’ in Dog Heart

The article takes as its point of departure the trope of revisionist cartography as it features in postcolonialist theories of the geographical and conceptual de/reterritorialisation of postcolonial cultures. It analyses the way in which Breyten Breytenbach returns to the formative topography of his childhood and maps his Western Cape “Heartland” in Dog Heart (1998). The article shows how his conception of identity in terms of topography and writing in terms of nomadism finds expression in the rhizomic narrative structure of Dog Heart: its narrative of 67 sections grows by a process of agglomeration, developing into different directions and concretising from time to time into anecdotes, episodes and passages of reflection. In a hybrid text that draws on local cultural memorabilia and mementoes, Breytenbach presents his “Heartland” as the original South African zone of bastardisation where he can deterritorialise the South Africa of apartheid and reterritorialise it in terms of the true mongrel character of Afrikaner culture and the Afrikaans language.

The verbal and visual mirrors of postcolonial identity in Breyten Breytenbach's all one horse*

Summary This paper explores Breyten Breytenbach's repeated reference to mirrors and mirror images in both his verbal and visual texts and asks how they are engaged by the author to tease out the complexities informing the formation and representation of personal identity. It argues that Breytenbach postulates the mirror as a model space where personal identity is at once instated and contested through the inevitable interplay between the real subject and its reflected other. An analysis of some of the portraits reproduced in All One Horse: Fictions and Images (1990) serves to illustrate concretely how the mirror is incorporated into Breytenbach's texts to evoke in his readers a sense of the paradoxes informing personal identity.

Aspekte van die outeursfunksie in Antjie Krog se <i>Lady Anne</i> (1989)

Aspects of the author function in Antjie Krog’s Lady Anne (1989) The purpose of this essay is to investigate the Foucauldian notion of the so-called “author function” in Antjie Krog’s seventh volume of poetry, viz. Lady Anne (1989). It is an attempt to show how the notion of the death of the author (Barthes) links up with this theorisation of Foucault. Furthermore, it is also an attempt to indicate the characteristic features of the so-called “author function” in the late eighties in Afrikaans poetry, especially with regard to the conflict between aestheticism and political ideology in poetic expression. Focus is also placed on the role of the author’s name within the discursive framework of what is regarded as “Afrikaans literature”, as well as the author’s interaction with other authors within that discursive framework, in particular, Breyten Breytenbach.

‘In an Attempt to Erase’: Breyten Breytenbach’s Prison Writing and the Need to Re-Cover

‘In an Attempt to Erase’: Breyten Breytenbach’s Prison Writing and the Need to Re-Cover

'A white fly on the sombre window pane': The construction of Africa and identity in Breyten Breytenbach’s poetry

This article explores the way in which the construction of Africa interacts with the construction of identity in the poetry written by Breyten Breytenbach. On the one hand, Breytenbach’s use of the name Jan Afrika, his attempts to emphasise the African-ness of the language Afrikaans as well as the construct Afrikaner indicate a desire to locate his origins in Africa and fix his identity in relation to Africa; on the other hand, it is clear that he constantly problematises the idea of a stable identity. Imposing a narrative on Breytenbach’s poetic oeuvre, it becomes clear that the ‘story’ of his poetry coincides with the order of events in his personal life and that his construction of Africa interacts with and determines the construction of his own identity. In conclusion it becomes clear that Breytenbach locates himself against the background of Africa from which he derives his sense of self, but at the same time takes the position of the nomad, exile, migrant or outsider because it provides him with a unique perspective and the possibilities of transgression and renewal.

South Africa in the Global Imaginary: An Introduction

What I want to write about is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures—the glorious bastardisation of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil. . . . And everywhere is exile; we tend to forget that now. The old ground disappears, expropriated by blood as new conflicting patterns emerge. Breyten Breytenbach, Dog Heart, 

Tradurre e Tradire: The Treason and Translation of Breyten Breytenbach

This essay argues that Breyten Breytenbach's use of the English language to write his prison memoir True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1994[1984]) represented a kind of linguistic treason consistent with Breytenbach's legally defined treason against the apartheid state. While Breytenbach himself has been dismissive of the cultural productivity of his work, especially of the youthful rebelliousness of the work associated with the so-called Sestiger movement, the treason/translation of Confessions blazes a trail for a new politics of Afrikaans by insisting on the language's genuinely local,thoroughly hybrid nature. Well in advance of the birth of the new South Africa in 1994, Breytenbach undermined racialist notions of Afrikaans (whether as some sort of Herderian Sprachgeist of the white Afrikaner Volk or as the language of the white oppressor) and offered ways of conceiving Afrikaans as a defiantly impure language of local and national dissent (neither black nor white, neither traditionally African nor Europeanly modern) pitted against global and international systems of an anglophone world order.

The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution (review)

Breyten Breytenbach is obsessed with reflection. Mirrors haunt his work. 1 Consider Mouroir (London: Faber, 1984), subtitled "Mirrornotes of a Novel" one chapter of which is named "Book, a Mirror." Even the book's French title, referring to the place where one is taken to die, enticingly echoes the English word "mirror," and the first piece in his recent collection, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, is "Writing the Darkening Mirror." Towards the end of this book, he even talks of learning that "the mind can be a mirror to nothingness" (161). But it is important to recognize the additional meanings of reflection aroused by Breytenbach's work: "the action of bringing back from a state of anger or estrangement," "return," "relation, connexion," "deep or serious consideration," "remembrance" (OED).

BOOK REVIEW: Dominic Head.J. M. COETZEE. Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Dominic Head's new book on J. M. Coetzee is compact, useful, and in many ways original. Like all the previous full-length studies of Coetzee's [End Page 214] work, this text presents readings of the novels in a chronological sequence, with a chapter devoted to each novel: a format determined, in this case, by the aims of the Cambridge series, which requires an overview of each author's entire oeuvre. However, Head's work (while occasionally dry to read) is more than a critical exercise or primer. While his focus is largely on Coetzee's novels (up to and including The Master of Petersburg), Head sets the fiction in dialogue with Coetzee's critical essays--both those collected in Doubling the Point and the more recent ones gathered together in Giving Offense. The connections he makes are frequently inventive (as, for instance, when he uses Coetzee's essay on Breyten Breytenbach to illuminate the treatment of confession and dialogue in The Master of Petersburg).

The Many ?Spaces? of the African Writer: The Meeting of African Writers in Durban, South Africa, 2?7 March 1998

In March 1997, a group of South African writers was invited to a writers' festival in Djibouti, where they were able to exchange ideas with some of their counterparts from francophone Africa. success ofthe Djibouti experience led to the conception of a more elaborate follow-up that took place 2-7 March 1998 in the South African port city of Durban. Tagged The Time of the Writer and placed within the contentious thematic ambit of commitment, the festival was organized jointly by the Centre for Creative Arts of the University of Natal in Durban, the local Alliance Francaise, and the Johannesburg-based Institut Francais d'Afrique du Sud (IFAS). Apart from literary manifestations, the organizers included a num? ber of art exhibitions in the program in order to highlight the interface text and image. caliber of the invited writers and the discursive poignancy of the debate topics clearly underscore the significance of the meeting at this particular point in the evolution of African literature. From the francoph? one side of the linguistic divide came Tierno Monenembo (Guinea), Abdelkader Djemai (Algeria), Abdourahman Ali Waberi (Djibouti), Idris Youssouf Elmi (Djibouti), and Edouard Glissant (Martinique). anglophones included Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa), Farida Rarodia (South Africa), Zakes Mda (South Africa), Marguerite Poland (South Africa), Barbara Trapido (South Africa), Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe), Lettie Viljoen (South Africa), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), and this writer, also from Nigeria. well-choreographed dance to which the invited writers were treated on the opening night at the Elizabetii Sneddon Theatre, University of Natal, drew powerful attention to the idea of space in a postmodern, global capitalist context. Performed by the Siwela Sonke Dance Company before a capacity crowd, the dance, appropriately titled Shifting Spaces, Tilting Times, took the audience through the mutations that our physical, urbanized space has undergone in the twentieth century. These mutations have resulted in a certain geography of chaos, forcing the subject to deploy such weapons as hybridity and multiculturalism in the bid to negotiate his survival within a certain existential impasse. Using appropriate visual effects and background architectural devices ranging from huts to modern skyscrapers, Shifting Spaces subtiy brought out the familiar theme of the manichean binarism between tradition and modernity that has been responsible for many of the tensions in our existential space. A note of warning undergirded the performance: our inability to resolve these con-

The production of culture: a case study in South African literature

This article examines translation in the context of the socio-political processes in society, framing translation as a(n) (un)creative and (un)productive process. -For material the article draws on the editorial and translation decisions made with respect to two of the works by the South African writer, Breyten Breytenbach, who was imprisoned under apartheid. The object of the study is to observe, within their broad socio-historical context, the effects of institutional and socio-structural relations in the movement of the Breytenbach text(s) from manuscript stage to (sometimes several stages of) publication and from there through translation to republication. The article concludes by reflecting on the relation between ideological apparatuses (both state and institutional) and text, and its effect on translation and publishing.

Die teen(s)woordige-So en die nomadiese ‘Tonneltoerusting by die lees van Breyten Breytenbach’

In this article an attempt is made to develop a concept: the teen(s)woordige-So (present as-such), which has a two-fold nature. On the one hand it grows from the philosophical dimensions of the work of Breyten Breytenbach, and on the other, once it is identified it can be used as a method for reading his work. But in order to determine the “environment” of the concept three main elements are investigated in this article. The first is the notion of the rhizome, the second element is identified in/as the Zen Buddhist concept of Tathata or suchness, and the third revolves around an investigation of Jean-Luc Nancy's treatment of the notion of presence in his work The birth to presence. It is argued that both these concepts (i.e. suchness and presence) portray something of a condition of continuous birth or becoming and that this “sense” of the world finds specific expression in the literary work of Breyten Breytenbach. It is also proposed that the expression Breytenbach gives to the condition of presence and suchness opens a nomadic territory, or nomadic understanding of the world which has a political meaning. S. Afr. J. Philos. Vol.19(3) 2000: 279-297

J.M. Coetzee (review)

Dominic Head's new book on J. M. Coetzee is compact, useful, and in many ways original. Like all the previous full-length studies of Coetzee's [End Page 214] work, this text presents readings of the novels in a chronological sequence, with a chapter devoted to each novel: a format determined, in this case, by the aims of the Cambridge series, which requires an overview of each author's entire oeuvre. However, Head's work (while occasionally dry to read) is more than a critical exercise or primer. While his focus is largely on Coetzee's novels (up to and including The Master of Petersburg), Head sets the fiction in dialogue with Coetzee's critical essays--both those collected in Doubling the Point and the more recent ones gathered together in Giving Offense. The connections he makes are frequently inventive (as, for instance, when he uses Coetzee's essay on Breyten Breytenbach to illuminate the treatment of confession and dialogue in The Master of Petersburg).