Poeta in Vinculis II

Continuing the contrast between personal accounts of imprisonment and fictional elaborations of carceralities, Chapter 3 concentrates on the twentieth century and on (post)colonial contexts. The three authors discussed at length are Brendan Behan, the Irish dramatist; Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian author and ecological activist; and Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet. Whereas Behan’s and Saro-Wiwa’s autobiographical texts, at least on the surface, appear to be quite reliable, i.e. factual, accounts of their imprisonment, their literary work, just like Breytenbach’s, is highly allusive, ironic, and allegorical; they model the carceral experience through distortive lenses of comedy, farce, satire, or parable. The chapter also emphasizes the use of the prison and legal criminalization as major political strategies of discrimination against (ethnic and other) minorities as well as political dissidents.

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

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Die vlugtige taal van vergeet: Die metafoor by Breyten Breytenbach

From his first book of poetry, Die ysterkoei moet sweet (“the iron cow must sweat”, 1964), till his most recent one, Die windvanger (“the windcatcher”, 2007), metaphor has been a central means towards the creation of meaning for Breytenbach. This article will investigate the use of metaphor particularly in this recent book. Theorising will begin at the beginning, at Aristotle’s De Poetica and Rhetorica, where “simile” and “metaphor” are seen as the means toward seeking the relationship between signifier and signified. The poem “New York, 12 September 2001” is the focus of this relationship. Here the fallibility of the word in attempting to represent that tragedy (of the 11th) is illustrated. The theme of the poem is stated in its first lines: “will the hand continue to move on paper/ will any poem ever have enough power …” This article eventually comes to the conclusion that Breytenbach’s use of the metaphor can be summarised in the words of Aristotle: “It is a great thing indeed, to make proper use of the poetical form […] But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor”.

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”).