The Critic in Exile: Breyten Breytenbach and South Africa
Walzer, Michael
This essay forms one of eleven in Michael Walzer's new book The Company of Critics.* Two of the other essays have appeared in Dissent, one on Albert Camus (Fall 1984) and one on Antonio...
...Responsibility implies the freedom to be critical...
...perhaps he feels that the years in prison burned the shame out of him...
...Ten years earlier, when he wrote A Season in Paradise, Breytenbach managed to perform both these tasks, not easily, to be sure, not without radical shifts of emphasis and tone, but without overt self-contradiction...
...SPRING • 1989 185...
...In A Season in Paradise he acknowledges his responsibility and therefore his connection: "What exists in this country has been perpetrated in our—in my—name, in our—in my—language...
...But it may, even so, be a good place for social critics—especially for critics whose people have placed themselves, as Breytenbach believes of his own people, on the wrong side of history...
...his arguments are always provisional...
...Who is it, after all, who supports apartheid...
...Perhaps poetry is easier than criticism, for the poet listens with his inner ear, * The Company of Critics: Social Criticism and Political Commitment in the Twentieth Century, by Michael Walzer...
...9 That last line (from a 1986 interview) is more a joke and a warning than an argument...
...If he was once sentimental about (some of) his own tribe, he at least won't transfer the sentimentality to the tribes his own tribe oppresses...
...In France, he says, he is freed from his roots, detribalized...
...10 The critic must strive instead to create a new awareness among his own people of what is being done in their name...
...Breytenbach is African in a way that Camus never was Algerian, and this identity is no mere construct, worked up for the critical occasion, a poetic invention...
...Ah, but that means that we have to accommodate the notion that our way . . . may be diluted or changed completely . . . since we shall be losing control over the evolution that we become part of...
...This essay forms one of eleven in Michael Walzer's new book The Company of Critics.* Two of the other essays have appeared in Dissent, one on Albert Camus (Fall 1984) and one on Antonio Gramsci (Fall 1988...
...The Communists knew in detail the necessary course of the historical process and the necessary endpoint of the liberation movement...
...And, similarly, to reject apartheid is not an act of treason, though it will be called that by the rulers of the state—who are themselves at war with the great majority of (what Breytenbach calls) their own people...
...You are thus less bound by the nationalist symptoms that these groups may manifest...
...Today the task remains but it isn't clear that time remains...
...Do you think you'll ever return there...
...That isn't quite right either...
...5 But Afrikaans is nonetheless not Newspeak...
...maybe we must, very paradoxically, extend our confidence to the people and whatever mass organizations the people may throw up...
...It is not difficult to imagine the criticism the critic has reaped for that sentence...
...Like exile, clandestinity liberates the dedicated few from their parochial connections...
...Besides, continued commitment may just succeed in being perceived as a form of solidarity and support—by those in . . . transit areas and prisons who need to feel Brevtanbach some human concern in order to survive...
...they choose exile over prison...
...The old 184 • DISSENT must be dismantled in any case...
...But he adds a proviso that has no Camusian equivalent: the problem of their staying can only be solved "within a Black socio-cultural field of reference...
...SPRING • 1989 • 179 Breytenbach of terrorism...
...A South African patriot, yes...
...He may identify with other intellectuals and . . . hit the international circuit...
...Breytenbach is living through, and writing about, the hardest experiences of the social critic: exile, alienation, and defeat...
...Breytenbach has made his own decision: his books, poems, essays are published in South Africa (I cannot find many signs of adaptation...
...Or he may—through his exile and because of his politics—identify with . . . oppressed classes [throughout the world...
...Breytenbach was one more critic reaching for heroism and unwilling, perhaps rightly, to make exile itself a heroic act...
...If he is marginal to the world that apartheid has made, he nonetheless declares himself to be in the mainstream of his own history and his national culture...
...You will then have to decide whether your opposition, which you have adapted in order to survive, now permitted to exist, is not . . . making the totalitarian state stronger by giving it a lark mirror of internal flexibility...
...But he also insists that they can only claim their place in the course of a political struggle whose aim must be to undermine and subvert the place they now occupy...
...Even a minimalist commitment to the adjective seemed to deny the seriousness of the noun...
...It is conceivable," he wrote in 1983 in an appendix to his prison memoirs, "that the present totalitarian state will be replaced by one which may be totalitarian in a different way, and intolerant of alternative revolutionary schools of thought, more hegemonic [since it will have majority support] but minus the racism...
...He must force himself to maintain a dialogue with the inside...
...he is an exile or, as he now says, an emigre, but he is also the most brilliant of South African social critics...
...The vector of all his contradictory impulses is exile, and in exile he finds himself at the end of his rope, a dangling man...
...The takeover seems to him inevitable, the accommodation not so—though he does seem convinced that black rule, whatever its character, will not produce a new apartheid, a mirror image of the present system...
...Though he advocated a unitary and democratic state in which the black majority would come into its own, he thought it necessary for white militants to work independently among their own people...
...Breytenbach had ideas, mostly, about the immediate struggle...
...Rike Vaughan, intro...
...His view of his own people, of the Afrikaners, is even more "fragile and volatile...
...and Afrikaans is a creole language, seventeenth-century Dutch, radically simplified, with Malay and African additions— nothing like Camus's French...
...he can't stop his anger even if he also can't acknowledge the hope that anger Notes ' Breyten Breytenbach, End Papers: Essays, Letters, Articles of Faith, Workbook Notes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1986), p. 74...
...Anyway, he is one of the whitish ones, painfully aware of "the problems of cultural awareness...
...To say no to all that is not to abuse or reject oneself...
...Don't be a preacher or a judge...
...End Papers, p. 32) He is kept alive as a critic by the very extremity of his situation...
...In 1962, he settled in Paris, more a bohemian expatriate than a political exile, and there he met and married a Vietnamese woman, Yolande Ngo Thi Hoang Lien...
...People don't leave South Africa, he says, to find a better climate or to make more money...
...Perhaps a new oppression will follow upon the old...
...It was then, strictly speaking, that his exile began...
...Though its protagonists try very hard to get inside the society they mean to change, clandestinity in politics is oddly similar to detachment in social criticism...
...Critics of Breytenbach have compared him to Camus, unable to make the final break, to give up on his tribe, to recognize, as one of them writes, that "history has passed Afrikaner humanism by...
...His language is Afrikaans, and he is said to be one of the finest poets ever to write in Afrikaans, though the greater number of his poems have been written in foreign countries, out of hearing...
...his pen writes zigzag...
...Set loose from family and friends, from churches, parties, and mass movements, the militants can make their own way, guided only by their private understandings of truth and justice...
...Writing about apartheid from the safety of Paris must have seemed to him morally inadequate, inauthentic, risk free, and impotent...
...Criticism and Exile Can one wage the Afrikaner war of position from Paris...
...And if he is uncensored, unbanned, isn't that a sign that he has compromised himself, that he is being used...
...As it would...
...It's not impossible, I suppose, though no one who has read very far in the literature of exile will think that those are its chief qualities...
...74-78...
...three more followed in the next six years, and the power of his writing was almost immediately recognized by his fellow Afrikaners, who seem ready, perhaps too ready, to value their poets—as if the nationalist cause were served by any genuinely poetic use of the national language, whatever the poems actually say...
...He knows that the critic can only be effective when he speaks "in his language, in his land," and there he sits at ease in Paris, talking French...
...he won't paint pretty pictures of a liberal and democratic future...
...3-31...
...while the critic depends upon an actual dialogue...
...I'm not for one moment attempting to deny the South Africanness, the Africanite of those now ruling...
...Not merely for them (as might have been said of the pieds noirs in Algeria, the largely passive beneficiaries of French dominion), but by them...
...There is in fact no Truth," he told the Dutch PEN chapter a few months after his release from prison...
...And the most self-conscious: He writes with extraordinary sharpness, intensity, and pain about the difficulty of writing from a distance—as he has had to do for most of his life—without daily contact, out of hearing of his own language...
...And then Breytenbach gives up whatever hopes he may once have had for the nation (as a replacement for the working class)—not only his own but the other too: Afrikaner and African alike fall victim to his bitter realism, and he too surrenders his ambition for an activist role...
...But this sort of thing was merely the ugly reflection of an internal struggle...
...Apartheid, he argues, is "an effort to curb the forming of a South African nation— politically, economically, culturally, and therefore also racially —which should be one of the most normal things on earth given our interdependence and mutually hybrid origins...
...A decade and a half later, Breytenbach expressed the dilemma in a prose more lively and inventive than his 1969 poem: I could argue—well, yes, I must blow them out of the bathtub, see, I'm trying to yeast Afrikaner sensibilities from within and therefore I start with the bread we break together, even if only via the basic complicity of the common mumbo-jumbo, I mean, language, I mean, taal...
...Breytenbach's brother, by contrast, is a high-ranking officer in the South African army...
...Breytenbach's own account can be found in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985...
...Now he asserts what I take to be the central theme of his criticism, of his poetry too: "The essential is not elsewhere...
...The Afrikaners are the agents of their own mastery, and the task of the critic is to overmaster the master in their collective self-understanding, to create a new Afrikaner consciousness...
...he cannot choose some other, more suitable country (though he "lives in France...
...Shouldn't he be able, then, to write about the Afrikaners and the state they have made with detachment and objectivity...
...But it is clear from his writing since his imprisonment that he resents the sharing...
...If he SPRING • 1989 • 177 Breytenbach could attend to his preferences...
...South African Whites are African...
...If he had a choice...
...He is only arguing that intellectuals with their correct doctrines ought not to preempt the opposition to nationalism...
...There is no other way...
...I owe this reference to Hermann Giliomee...
...he insists on their place in any future South African state...
...No...
...Writing is one means of resistance, and I want to use Breytenbach's books to explore what the critic can say when he writes from exile and what kind of ties he can maintain to a people whose politics and society he has, more radically than any resident, rejected...
...The very fact of having opted for [clandestine] action usually implies that one has established a certain distance between yourself and the traditional, overt political groupings in your country...
...he wants them to become Afrikaners according to a new understanding of the name...
...Though he doesn't live there, he "hangs in there...
...But no...
...André Brink (London: Faber and Faber, 1980...
...He spent the time talking with family and friends and showing the country to his wife...
...This became a source of considerable anxiety for the poet later on...
...His new identity is South African...
...From suffering comes certainty...
...He must bark all along the borders...
...And he seems to believe, sometimes, that the time for creation is long gone...
...From the left, he is accused of red-baiting—as if "totalitarianism" is a word that must never be spoken by a leftist critic— while writers just to his right, Sestigers, reformers, liberals, worry that he is too eager * This is what distinguishes Breytenbach's exile from Silone's: in fascist Italy, thousands of Silone's comrades were in prison—including, in 1929, his own brother...
...Of course, you do take your language with you wherever you go—but it is rather like carrying the bones of your ancestors with you in a bag: they are white with silence, they do not talk back...
...Writing in 1985, in the "End Notes" to his End Papers (a book that has to be read simultaneously from both ends), he describes the most common form of political escape: "Many of us projected our . .. local marginalism on to a romantic, potentially revolutionary 'elsewhere.' " This is a description, though only a partial one, of his own politics in the early 1970s in which Third World radicals play surrogates for himself and his comrades...
...Exactly what he was supposed to do there had not been very carefully thought out...
...they should participate in oppositional politics, say their piece, and not worry about losing control Breytenbach is in any case an unlikely advocate of correct doctrines...
...SPRING • 1989 • 183 ftsnbach to rush into this different totalitarianism (as he once rushed into prison...
...he won't bind himself to the orthodoxies of the oppressed...
...Maybe," he wrote in 1983, we ought to settle for the slower processes...
...But he won't try to do this with lies...
...As a wandering poet (painter too) and a Parisian expatriate, Breytenbach had already made a decisive break with Afrikaner society— an artist's version of the philosopher's escape: To the best of my powers, I oppose my people: cave dwellers...
...He can't fall silent, as Camus did, for his people are still the masters of their fate—which is also to say that there are policemen, torturers, oppressors, who act in his name, though he does what he can to distance himself: "I am not an Afrikaner...
...Just as I respect the black man trying to improve the dispensation of his . . . people, just so, I believe, will the black man respect me only to the extent that I am prepared to work for the transformation of my community—and not if I attempt to tell him what he ought to do...
...q Reflections on Breyten Breytenbach's A Season in Paradise," Journal of Southern African Studies, 12, no...
...There is rather the continual shaping of something resembling, poorly, provisionally, `truth.' " No doubt, many of the PEN members were looking for something more absolute from 180 • DISSENT a man who had just emerged from one of the modernist versions of hell...
...His claim for his own creative work: "Poetry is SPRING • 1989 • 181 Braytanbach mainstream," makes the same point, perhaps a little desperately, since it seems to insist upon what is obviously (by all the rules of common sense) untrue...
...Mostly, however, he has continued to castigate his native South Africa...
...7 N. P. van Wyk Louw, Lojale Verset, in Versamelde Prosa, 1:166-68...
...he can't give up the hope that his own South African tribe (the one whose language is his "heart-language") will find some way to make its peace with the other tribes...
...Also to continue the struggle...
...for Breytenbach politics itself is deeply problematic...
...he is still a critic, though he no longer occupies a clear-cut ideological position...
...But, Breytenbach argues, it would be a kind of indecency to focus on white rights and white security while the apartheid regime still stands and blacks are taken into custody, Shattered Stoned Hanged Lashed Used Tortured Crucified Interrogated Placed under house arrest Made to slave their guts out Banished to obscure islands till the end of their days...
...Whose interests are served by the ideology of separation...
...In the work of the later sixties and early seventies, this is often expressed in passionate diatribe — sometimes contained within, sometimes exploding, sometimes just replacing his poetry...
...Breyten Breytenbach, "breyten prays for himself," in In Africa Even the Flies Are Happy, trans...
...6 Neil Lazarus, "Longing, Radicalism, Sentimentality: implies...
...Consider the tenses of the verbs in the following lines: "A political 'middle ground' . . . could have been established only were there to be, by now, say two or three thousand White political prisoners...
...Nor are they the chief qualities of Breytenbach's books and essays...
...But this is the romanticism of the secret life, and Breytenbach has a seamier story to tell: How the means corrupt the men, how [clandestine] groups become a law unto themselves, so infatuated with their own analysis, so turned in upon themselves, and so cornered when these analyses prove to be incorrect, that the only way out seems to be [more and more] vigorous forms * There has been considerable controversy about Breytenbach's behavior at his first trial where, under pressure from his family and perhaps disoriented by months of solitary confinement, he appeared apologetic and compliant...
...They leave because of political repression...
...Not quite...
...The book somehow survived the censorship and was published five years later in South Africa, in Afrikaans, with rib _ nth fts___ only minor deletions, at a time when Breytenbach himself was in prison...
...How does the critic "settle for the slower processes" when "slower" is infinitely slow...
...6 Certainly, there have been Afrikaner humanists, and there also exists a tradition of volkskritiek within which Breytenbach may well belong, if only as an extreme case...
...4 Breytenbach, Season in Paradise, p. 154...
...His politics reflect this engagement, as do his repeated attempts, personal and political in motivation, to return to what he describes alternately as the land of death and the garden of paradise...
...he carried with him a terrible burden of guilt and rage...
...His mind is too quick, critical, playful, ironic...
...But connection of this sort is a perpetual torture, and to dissociate oneself, to make the most of one's marginality, is a permanent temptation...
...For he found in the Afrikaner community of the heartland, among farming families far away from the cities, aspirations that he could honestly expound: toward unity and harmony with the land and people of Africa...
...Despite the reiterated theme of his prose fantasy, Om to vlieg (To Fly [1971]), "white is dead," Breytenbach's deepest feelings are still engaged with his "whitish" Afrikaner countrymen, who are very much alive...
...He lives in exile in Paris, where he is comfortable only because anyone can be comfortable in Paris, the city that refugees and expatriates claim as their own: "La France aux Francais...
...More important here are his later reflections on clandestine political action...
...3 Back in Paris in the middle seventies, he had organized a small political grouping more or less parallel in orientation to the Black Consciousness movement of Steve Biko —and opposed to the official line of the African National Congress (ANC), which was dominated, Breytenbach thought, by the Communist party...
...It is also a sign of "hanging in," I think, that Breytenbach is critical of black revolutionaries as well as of white reformers...
...3 Breyten Breytenbach, A Season in Paradise, trans...
...This sketch captures something of Breytenbach's mood (I mean the mood of his writing), but it misses the commitment that lies, improbably, somewhere beyond atheism...
...Being in another country may broaden his horizon...
...nor was he trained for the secret life—though this hardly seems an excuse for the extraordinary ineptness of his conduct...
...8 The Sestigers, the South African avant-garde of the sixties, only lent legitimacy to the regime, he insisted, by their literary protests...
...for when he says, "I am not an Afrikaner," he says it to his fellow Afrikaners...
...The "mainstream" poet-critic has two tasks, Breytenbach argued in 1983: "He is the questioner and the implacable critic of the mores and attitudes and myths of his society . . . he is also the exponent of the aspirations of his people...
...the critic is reconciled at last to a complete atheism...
...I.H...
...Isn't that what "power to the people" implies...
...Does that make him a distanced and objective critic of all the African volke, liberated from the shame and guilt of personal membership...
...they are there [he is writing from Paris] to stay...
...The middle isn't, in his view, a matter of intellectual discovery...
...Subsequent references are in the text...
...Although, therefore, I am no one's delegate but my own and that of my fleas, I cannot and will not dissociate myself from this mess...
...Nevertheless, he hasn't accepted his exile and substituted a more general and abstract commitment for the particular one that he can only barely sustain— "like a dog loving the moon...
...He cannot dissociate himself...
...it is a difficult political creation...
...Breytenbach denounced them in a poem written in 1969, at the height of his own radical fervor—his muse in this case deserting him entirely: manytongued arselickers of the bourgeois...
...It is clear enough that he wants them to be protected...
...The text can be found in Die Suid-Afrikaan, Fall 1986, p. 12...
...4 This is another example of what I call reiterative morality, and it is meant to contrast with the false universalism of the Communists, who were busy "papering over the real problems of cultural awareness" (and telling everybody, black and white, what to do...
...I live in France...
...and yet he is himself involved, if not in revolutionary politics anymore, then in a politics of some sort, the politics of culture, Gramsci's war of position ("yeasting the sensibilities")—and he is determined to be involved on his own terms, responsible for his own actions...
...But when Breytenbach wanted to return to South Africa and receive in person various literary prizes that had been awarded to him, his wife was refused a visa and he was threatened with arrest under the Immorality 178 • DISSENT Act—for living with a woman of a different race...
...I am, however, saying that the opposition is patriotic, coming from within, in the name of the healing of the South African nation...
...What else can a critic-in-exile do...
...Camusian again: "I cannot act differently from what I am...
...he left South Africa when he was twenty for three years of wandering, odd jobs, writing, and painting...
...but still with reference to his own tribe Breytenbach is marginal, dissident, subversive...
...To get through with it...
...the adjective and the noun of Breytenbach's identity (as it then was) were at war with one another: Brevtenbach Afrikaner radical...
...No one in his right mind, Breytenbach concludes, would choose exile, would prefer "to live away from intimate communication with his own people...
...Love and hate, identification and rejection are raised to such a pitch of intensity that A Season in Paradise seems now, looking back, an almost gentle book (by any objective standard it isn't gentle at all...
...The poet-critic speaks to the heart of his people, provides "sense-making interpretations" of the social realities of his country...
...to use the name is to make a political statement...
...I know, don't I, that I need not believe or trust in the possibility of attaining the objective in order to keep moving...
...In 1975, he returned to South Africa under a false name, with forged documents, on a clandestine mission...
...And South Africa...
...Paris est a nous...
...So he says, sometimes...
...Breytenbach's critical strategy—which reflects, I think, his deepest feelings—has been to forge a new identity, not Afrikaner, certainly not French (though, as he says, he "lives in France"), and not alienated and detached either, not yielding to the conditions of exile (though for some writers, he says, "exile can be a country to explore...
...Denis Hirson (London: John Calder, 1978), p. 6. " The phrase "in jou taal, in jou land" is from a speech Breytenbach gave at Stellenbosch University in April 1986—his only visit to South Africa after he was released from prison (he has been refused a visa ever since...
...Nor, again, can he sign up with the organized opponents of Afrikaner oppression, for though he supports their struggle, he does so without the illusions that they require from their supporters...
...Leave that to the judges and the preachers...
...81, 86) Out of prison, Breytenbach renounced secret politics, criticized life in the clandestine cells (which he called "colonies of grave dwellers" —more restrictive, even, than the cave), confined his own activism to his writing...
...it is more like self-knowledge than self-hate...
...If you had to work in your own community, blacks among blacks, whites among whites, then you had also to attend to the actually existing consciousness of the community and not only to the heightened consciousness of your own small group...
...he did not believe that apartheid could be reformed, humanized, liberalized, or made more flexible...
...I don't mean that he is looking now for some small piece of middle ground, equidistant from revolution and reform...
...In fact, the future is radically uncertain, and the longer the apartheid regime lasts, the more likely it is to be bloody...
...He doesn't write in the language of the sun when he denounces the cave dwellers...
...He can't live in South Africa...
...But he also spoke at a conference on Afrikaner literature, drawing a large crowd of enthusiastic students, and denouncing the apartheid regime...
...In A Season in Paradise, he had still used first-person pronouns, even in his harshest sentences...
...True Confessions, pp...
...In any case, his tiny group had been penetrated by the South African police, and he was followed from his arrival in Johannesburg and arrested as he was leaving, along with most of the people he had managed to meet...
...we work with too many uncertainties...
...True Confessions, p. 86) One might say that the most important mass organization thrown up by the Afrikaner people is the National party—and Breytenbach certainly does not mean to defer to the Nationalists...
...Instead, he wrote A Season in Paradise, a strange and beautiful book, haunting poetry and brilliantly inventive prose, intimate memoir, travel diary, political argument, a song of love and hate for his country and its people...
...I know power structures are practically immutable and when broken down they're more likely than not to be replaced by others which are as exclusive and manipulative...
...If there is no struggle, there is no claim: the Afrikaner will have to "trust his black nanny to hold him and not drop him...
...Ah, but how do I avoid the twisting and the bending, the kneeling and the back-stabbing, the compromises, the ethical corruption, in my attempts to "hang in there...
...At one point, briefly, he seems to have thought it necessary to reject Afrikaans too, as if nothing could be said in that language that did not carry oppressive meanings...
...Copyright © 1988 by Basic Books, Inc...
...the Afrikaners have become one of the African tribes, hybrid like all the others...
...Why does he sit in Paris and write about South Africa...
...9 Quoted in Hermann Giliomee, "Apartheid and the Afrikaner Literary Tradition of 'Loyal Resistance,' " paper for a conference on South African politics and writing, Montpellier, France, May 1987, p. 27...
...Small victories of that sort only strengthened the system as a whole...
...2 Quoted in Jack Cope, The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans (Cape Town: David Philip, 1982), p. 168...
...Silone had suffered a political defeat, but he could imagine a continuing struggle...
...South Africa would not be a decent place until "the present power structures are broken down by destroying the very foundations on which they rest...
...Breytenbach describes the purity of thinking, heightened political consciousness, rigorous discipline, and intense loyalty of the band of secret militants...
...These were, however, Leninist ideas—"to regroup the progressive elements . . . into a revolutionary avant-garde" —and they pressed Breytenbach toward a politics as secretive and elitist as that of the party...
...2 (April 1986):177...
...I suspect that he was in headlong flight from his exile...
...But that is likely to be a one-way identification...
...His fellow Afrikaner Andri Brink has suggested that he actually sought arrest in order to expiate his guilt at the hands of his own people...
...We are too fragile and volatile for that...
...We whiter ones," he wrote, "are the scum of a civilization based upon injustices...
...As it is, whites, even white radicals, have made themselves irrelevant to revolutionary politics...
...he isn't trying to establish his credentials among the other tribes or with some international audience...
...All the gods have failed...
...He cannot live there...
...He is one of the whitish South Africans, part of the problem, but nevertheless "there to stay," "a minority whose position will have to be accommodated beyond [the Black] takeover...
...Has this kind of politics ever been successful, he asks,] apart from, in some instances, making it possible for the clandestine activist to come to power...
...Isn't Breytenbach, despite the sentimental insistence that he is "wedded forever to the cause of the South African people," the most extreme case of an alienated intellectual...
...End Papers, p. 205) A serious writer trying to work from within (this double preposition is common in Breytenbach's essays) a people on the wrong side of history can hardly escape self-doubt...
...I could be rhetorical, smart-arsed, and say: I am there...
...But if this is a standard expectation, Breytenbach is committed to defeating it...
...Hanging in There From the beginning of his political involvement, Breytenbach called himself a revolutionary...
...If he is disappointed again and again by his people's failure to produce a specifically Afrikaner resistance, he still can't walk away from them...
...since 1983 Breyten Breytenbach has been a naturalized French citizen, living in Paris, grateful for France's "tolerance of political dissidents," free to travel wherever he likes (though not to his homeland), free to write as he pleases, even "to castigate [his] adopted patria if the need arose...
...To rage at a distant people, to throw daggers at a map: These are not sustaining activities...
...He wants his own people to repeat the repudiation...
...He describes himself again in End Papers for — the critic's identity, his self-naming, is an issue that must be settled if the critical enterprise is to move forward—as "a whitish Afrikaansspeaking South African African...
...Now, however, after seven years in prison, he seems (sometimes) resigned to his exile: Do you see yourself as French...
...How else could I have a say-so...
...Reformers were secret supporters of apartheid...
...Breytenbach's analysis of the ANC can be found in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), pp...
...2 But the more he wrote about politics, the more clear it became that he had not really escaped the cave...
...But the cause is not in any simple sense "correct," his bond is by no means unconditional...
...Few positions are as demeaning as that of the 'fellow-traveller.' " And again, in the same essay, "Black on White," in which he asserts the irrelevancy of white radicalism: "I cannot allow my involvement to be decided by the acceptance or the rejection, the appreciation or the disregard, of my Black compatriots...
...It is his identity that is artificial, the creation of political willfulness, so that today "the tribal ethos of the Afrikaners consists of negation, suppression, withdrawal, and reaction...
...it can still be put to liberating use (and to other uses too: it is "our lithe language of love"), and Breytenbach has in fact continued to use it, describing himself now, whimsically, as the only Afrikaans-writing French poet...
...The effort succeeds, apartheid works, but only by cutting the Afrikaner off from the people of his own country and from "the South African in himself...
...Even more important, he now denies his own guilt—and repudiates every kind of guilt-ridden politics: "Guilt and all . . . [the] breast-beating sentimentalism engendered by guilt—these are out...
...to reject the name is to reject the politics...
...In 1973, the authorities relented (they would soon have reasons to regret that decision) and issued visas to Breytenbach and his wife for a ninety-day visit...
...His view of apartheid was unchanged, but he had a new understanding of strategy and tactics...
...It is a language that the Afrikaners share with the coloreds (people of mixed race), who probably played the larger part in its development: a language that belongs now to Africa rather than to Europe and that invites its speakers to attempt a similar belonging...
...But this is Breytenbach's poetic truth...
...End Papers, p. 228) Exile and Clandestine Politics Breytenbach's original departure was not politically motivated...
...He found, or he thought he found, the South African in the Afrikaner, and he interpreted this as a kind of pre-Nationalist humanism, which a critic attuned to his people might still retrieve— though the time for retrieval was fast running out...
...But any such view involves a perverse judgment of his own poetry, which clearly carries different meanings: anger, reproach, guilt, and, more rarely, hope for the future...
...8 Quoted in Cope, The Adversary Within, p. 173...
...He is himself very restrained in describing the advantages that exile offers to the social critic...
...Now he insists that the injustices are built into the identity...
...Indeed, South Africa today is far closer than the America that Marcuse described in 1964 to a totalitarian society in which "language tends to coagulate into a .. . Brevtenbach manipulated and indoctrinated universe...
...Long opposed to apartheid, he now began to write about it and to construct a political position...
...Volkskritiek will only work, according to the earlier Afrikaner poet N. P. van Wyk Louw, if the critic is closely connected to his people and 182 • DISSENT "prepared to share its shame...
...The temptation takes many different forms, and Breytenbach, one feels, has worked his way through all of them...
...Perhaps he should insist more on the details of "accommodation": how will whites be protected in the new regime...
...For a hostile account, see Martin Garbus, Traitors and Heroes: A Lawyer's Memoir (New York: Atheneum, 1987), pp...
...I have taken many biographical details from Brink's introduction...
...In Breytenbach connection has become desperate...
...Like lovers, critics require some response to their pleas of engagement and concern...
...And speaking as one of them, Breytenbach makes the claim that Camus made for his own people...
...Throughout his visit, he was shadowed by security agents and, in a series of bizarre interviews, invited to spy on exiled dissidents when he returned to Paris...
...He is bound, indeed, to the cause of black political power and ready (today) to recognize the ANC as the mass organization that best represents that cause...
...It is rather like a dog loving the moon" (End Papers, p. 75...
...Breytenbach's critique follows from his new identity...
...How does he sustain a tie to people, country, and culture when all three are hopelessly implicated in an abominable politics...
...Exile is a hard place...
...I shall not rehearse the details of his two trials and seven-year imprisonment (at the end of which he had something to teach prison reformers like Foucault about the value of humane detention...
...The Critic and His Tribe One of the repeated themes of Breytenbach's writing since his release from prison is a simple rejection of his own identity: "I am not an Afrikaner...
...As Camus understood, even people in the wrong have rights and can rightly lay claim to a secure future...
...7 I think that Breytenbach does in fact share the shame, willy-nilly, prepared or not...
...But I must hang in there, hoping to help set off some alarms somewhere...
...It is a real historical product...
...To break through to clarity...
...Breytenbach is a special case, because he did go back to South Africa, not as a critic but as an underground militant, silently, with forged papers...
...In exile, they struggle to maintain the broken tie to the homeland, to resist the deadly silence—"at least as concerns the central problems of your country" —that is the exile's ultimate fate...
...Once one has finished a critique of Afrikaner "attitudes," is there anything left to hope for from Afrikaner "aspirations...
...His first volume of poetry was published in South Africa in 1964...
...5 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), p. 199...
...We can place him in a series: first Marcuse and Foucault give up whatever hopes they may once have had for the working class—and for themselves as movement or party intellectuals, connected to the forces of social change...
...If he is censored or banned, how can he reach the men and women he needs to reach...
...Reprinted by permission of the publisher...
Vol. 36 • April 1989 • No. 2
