Breyten Breytenbach, arguably South Africa's most gifted poet-activist, read some of his poetry last Thursday at the launch of Al-Mawrid Al-Thaqafi at the Townhouse gallery. Gamal Nkrumah interviews him Breyten Breytenbach survived apartheid, but is palpably uncomfortable with the New South Africa. His mouth moves furiously and his eyes open wide when he speaks of his beloved homeland. "Cowardice should be a human right," he quotes East Germany's Heinrich Mèller. "Expectations are so high of ourselves and other people," Breytenbach explains. His expression is sleepy, soulful and seductive, and he speaks in soft tones. "[Such high expectations] become a form of moral intolerance of ordinary human beings, a form of tyranny." Breytenbach, poet, writer, painter and activist, is hero material, but will vehemently deny "the charge". Though he has no political ambitions, and never had any, he is a political animal. He spent more than seven years in apartheid South Africa's jails, two of which in solitary confinement. "I remember when I came out of prison it made me very tired to be with people," he says. "Even now, when I go to South Africa I find it an effort to find common ground." After the demise of apartheid, Breytenbach remained outside South Africa, resisting the temptation to return from exile. He lives in a "middle world", a sort of no-man's-land, "a world beyond exile. You're no longer an exile, but you're not exactly part of the new place either." He speaks of a sense of "rootlessness" -- a feeling he says is shared by artists, activists and political commentators as diverse as Cavafy, Franz Fanon and Edward Said. "They share certain attitudes to notions of state and power. They were living in a world that partakes of different cultures." Breytenbach is sceptical about the term "Rainbow Nation" enthusiastically applied to the New South Africa and which is supposed to signify the beauty of multi-racial co-existence. "I never liked the term, it worked for [African American veteran civil rights leader] Jesse Jackson, it will never work for South Africa." "Africa needs to find its way, to find its own dignity from within," he laments. Breytenbach is highly critical of the way South African post- apartheid politics is heading. "We reverted to ethnic politics. Minorities are painted out of the political picture. Beyond liberation they become politically irrelevant. It's not discrimination, it is the inevitability of history." All the same, he does not want to be "mischievously misunderstood". Dog Heart (1999), the last part of an autobiographical trilogy, is partly about his return to his roots. He was born in the Little Karoo, an arid region of the Western Cape that had historically witnessed the most intimate mixing between the indigenous Khoi and the European settlers. His grandfather was a sharecropper; his father, a constructor worker. The Little Karoo was traditionally the land of poor whites, "the Rednecks of South Africa", he explains. He paints a discordant picture of the past. His great grandmother Rachel, a midwife by profession, adopted a black son according to some, and had a black lover according to others. A different version simply says that she had a black servant boy. The crux of the matter is that the family history is one of deception, he wryly points out. "The country is changing too fast: I have difficulty keeping up with the changes," he says. At the same time, Breytenbach was never quite at home with certain fundamental aspects of white South African culture that are not overtly linked to racism and apartheid. "I'm not very South African in many ways. I cannot get excited about rugby; that's a culture I cannot share with white South Africans," he explains. He warns that "new converts are always more fundamentalist" than the old guard. "New dogs always bark louder than the old ones," he says tongue-in-cheek. He is unhappy about many facets of life in contemporary post-apartheid South Africa, deeply frustrated with the slow pace of change in certain areas of vital social and political importance. "The danger we face in South Africa is to stop re-inventing ourselves. We tend to forget how very much cut off from the rest of the continent South Africa has always been." The country, he says, is an "artificial construct". Apartheid, he explains, was a process of social engineering. Liberation, too, is an act of social engineering. Of all his epithets -- poet, writer, painter and activist -- he seems most comfortable with poet. In Africa even the Flies are Happy: Selected Poems (1964-1977) is a good introduction to South Africa's most celebrated bard. Next in line, though different in spirit, is Lady Love: Of Love and other Poems. Breytenbach says he warms to poets from around the world and especially to those with whom he shares a commitment to a cause. He first met the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in the early 1970s at a poetry festival in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He speaks fondly of his encounter with Darwish, and angrily of his brief sojourn in Palestine. Palestinians, he says, have been cruelly turned into scapegoats. Palestine is the whipping boy of the Middle East; the Palestinian cause, the bleeding heart and soul of the region's politics. His mentors are a motley lot. The Ancient Chinese "great thinker" Tzuang Tze in whose works Breytenbach discovered "what it is to be alive" and from whom he learnt the art of "not taking oneself too seriously" is curiously the first mentor he mentions. There is also Henri Curiel, the legendary Jewish- Egyptian communist who was gunned down in Paris in 1978 under mysterious circumstances. Breytenbach had known Curiel well and admired the man who devoted his life to the cause of the liberation movement in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. "Curiel was my mentor in a very direct sense," Breytenbach says. "He taught me the techniques of underground struggle." Exiled by Egypt's King Farouk in 1950, Curiel, like Breytenbach, had made Paris his home. Breytenbach feels a special kinship with black South Africa's celebrated Ezekiel Mphahlele whom he calls his "surrogate father". In his autobiography Afrika My Music Mphahlele wrote: "I have always believed that the democratic ideal should accommodate political dissent." The sentiment holds true for Breytenbach. Breytenbach confesses that he does not automatically identify or sympathise with all other anti-apartheid writers. He knows his limitations as a writer all too well -- like his mentor Mphahlele who, in a poignant passage from Afrika My Music, wrote: "Even as I mumble to myself I am aware writers don't make revolutions ... Creators of serious imaginative literature are engaged in a middle class occupation ... It does not matter if we write about the concerns of the common man ... We are not read by him. Politicians and financiers run our world, not people who play with images and symbols .... yet we keep writing." "Writers do not resolve conflicts," Breytenbach says. "They do not have the power. Nor are they more clever than other people at understanding the nature of the conflict and thus the solution to the violence." But, Breytenbach is also aware of the salutary power of the pen. "[Writers]," he says, "can point at the ambiguity of human nature. We are all torn between anger and pity. Writers can help us remember." Breytenbach might not aspire to political office either in his native South Africa or in his adopted France, but he has his finger on the political pulse of the African continent. "The point I am trying to raise about the way Africa interacts with the rest of the world," he told participants at a conference in Berlin recently, "is that the real conditions, the environment itself is created more by the availability of arms and the presence of feral armies and, only too often, mercenaries, as also by the legal or illegal business interests of oil and precious wood and diamonds, than by the goodwill of foreign governments and international institutions." Breytenbach's relationship with South Africans in general is curiously ambiguous: "I always engage a part of them, never the whole," he says. So too his relationship with other South African literary giants. John Coetzee, Breytenbach describes as a "fine craftsman, a master of what he does". "But," Breytenbach quickly adds, "I don't like his more recent works." Breytenbach believes that Coetzee's works are far more political than those of other more ostensibly high-profile political writers like the first South African Nobel literature laureate Nadine Gordimer. "She writes about the political atmosphere and the discourse. But Coetzee is far more political. His works are set against the background of the interaction between man and the land -- the existential anguish," he clarifies. "I'm not interested in the private problems of a university professor," he says in reference to one of Coetzee's latest works. For Breytenbach, Coetzee's earlier classics like Waiting for the Barbarians and In the Heart of the Country "had a much wider resonance". Breytenbach feels most comfortable reciting his poetry in Afrikaans even though he prefers to write his political prose in English. "Afrikaans is a bastard language. Afrikaans is not a European language," Breytenbach stresses, explaining that the language contains traces of French, English and German as well as antiquated 17th century Dutch. He describes his mother tongue as a "tainted language" with "Creole roots". It was the language spoken by sailors from diverse parts of the world -- people who spoke Malay, the languages of Madagascar, South Africa's indigenous Khoi and Bantu peoples, and even Arabic. They were the captives and bondsmen and women of the Portuguese, Dutch and English slavers and colonial settlers. "English, too, is the biggest bastard language," Breytenbach adds. Born on 16 September 1939 in Bonnievale, South Africa, Breytenbach enrolled at University of Cape Town and left South Africa in 1960 and settled in Paris in 1962. He fell in love with and married a Vietnamese, Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien. He was promptly imprisoned for his sacrilegious choice of nuptial bliss, arrested in 1975 under apartheid South Africa's Immorality Act which made interracial marriage a crime. He had, moreover, returned that year to South Africa under a false passport and, so, was also charged under the terrorism act. He was incarcerated in a cell two metres by 1.5 metres in Pretoria's maximum security prison. His imprisonment enriched, and reinforced the political tendency of, his writings. In prison Breytenbach "saw life differently". A painter as well as a poet, and famed for his surreal paintings of animal and human figures, often in captivity, he says he became more conscious of colour in prison. He speaks of "the humiliation and the crude brutalisation of prison life", of the awful sense of "slowly going mad". Breytenbach became a naturalised French citizen in December 1982, a year later than the Czech writer Milan Kundera who shot to fame with the publication in 1984 of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Today he divides his time between three continents -- Africa, America and Europe. He teaches at the Graduate School of Creative Writing, New York University. He is associated with the departments of English and Drama in the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Humanities. He is also the co-founder of the Goree Insitute, Dakar, Senegal -- an institution that promotes democratic unity in Africa. "I often think of my friends who stayed behind in South Africa. I'm lucky that I left," he says without guilt or recrimination. "I sometimes wonder: Could I have been more effective at home than in exile?" This question is one of several posed in his prison memoirs, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, a work which in some sense is a postscript to the liberation struggle. A Season in Paradise (1976), Return to Paradise (1993) and Dog Heart (1999) highlight the strong connection between language and landscape in Breytenbach's prose. They also express his abhorrence of the apartheid system and his bitter disappointment with his post-apartheid homeland.
