I have just been making a follow up and reading poems written to express feelings about life under apartheid in South Africa by some South African poets themselves. One is spoilt for choice – Mongane Wally Serote, Lindiwe Mabuza, Dennis Brutus and others.
I became particularly focused on Dennis Brutus’s well known, very widely read and intriguing book of poems called Letters to Martha.
Apartheid is an Afrikaans word for ‘separation’ – literally, ‘separateness.’ Apartheid was used to describe the discriminatory political and economic system of racial segregation which the white minority imposed on non-whites in South Africa. It was implemented by the governing party, the National Party of South Africa, from 1948 until democracy in 1994.
Apartheid was based on the notion that whites are a superior race while Blacks and other non-Caucasians are inferior races that exist only to serve the white race. The apartheid policies were strict in what was termed ‘separate development.’ The white race lived in its own areas while Africans were relegated to the reserves and the ‘townships.’ The townships were basically squalid high density areas. In the true sense of events, there was no separate development. There was the development of the white communities and underdevelopment of the African communities.
Resistance to apartheid, which took place throughout the period, from its inception in 1948 until democratisation in 1994, included demonstrations, protests, strikes, political action and eventually armed resistance and the poetry in question captures some of these. The poets in question were actually activists against apartheid. Their anti- apartheid activism is well expressed in their poems.
Dennis Brutus was born in the then Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, of South African parents. Educated at Fort Hare College and the University of the Witwatersrand, he taught for 14 years in South Africa and participated in many anti-apartheid campaigns, particularly those concerned with sports. The South African government eventually banned him from attending political and social meetings and made it illegal for any of his writings to be published in South Africa.
In 1963, Dennis Brutus was arrested for attending a sports meeting bent on having South Africa banned from the Olympics due to its racism. When released on bail, he fled to Swaziland and from there tried to make his way to Germany to meet with the world Olympic executive committee, but the Portuguese secret police at the Mozambique border handed him back to the South African security police. Realising that no one would know of his capture, he made a desperate attempt to escape, only to be shot in the back on a Johannesburg street. On recovery he was sentenced to 18 months hard labour on Robben Island.
His first book of poems, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots (1963), contains what readers have termed difficult poetry. On close reading, you find them employing many of the standard poetic conventions. This was highbrow poetry— tight, mannered, formal, and sometimes formidably difficult.
Schooled in classic English verse, Brutus attempted in these early days, to compose multi-levelled lyrics that would challenge the mind. These poems are sufficiently subtle and intricate as seen below in the poem, ‘Somehow We Survive’:
“Somehow we survive
More terrible than any beast
that can be tamed or bribed
the iron monster of the world ingests me in its grinding maw:
agile as ballet-dancer
fragile as butterfly
I eggdance with nimble wariness
-stave off my fated splintering
Somehow we survive
and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither
investigating searchlights rake
our naked unprotected contours;
over our heads the monolithic decalogue
of fascist prohibition glowers
and teeters for the catastrophic fall;
boots club the peeling door.
But somehow we survive severance,
deprivation, loss.
Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark
hissing their menace to our lives,
most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,
rendered unlovely and lovable;
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender
but somehow tenderness survives.”
Then, Denis Brutus frequently sought to achieve ambidextrous idioms that allowed him to make a political and an erotic statement in the same breath. It was during this early phase in his career that he wrote nearly all of his most complex verse.
However, the months he spent in solitary confinement and prison on Robben Island, caused him to go on a soul-searching exercise. He began to reconsider his poetry and his attitudes toward creative self-expression, and resolved thereafter to write simple, unornamented poetry that ordinary people could comprehend immediately.
His Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968) contains brief, simple statements deriving from his experiences as a prisoner. The diction is deliberately conversational and devoid of high poetic devices. Instead of seeking to express two or three thoughts simultaneously, Brutus was striving to say only one thing at a time and to say it directly.
Each poem in there is supposedly a prisoner’s letter written to a lover or a relative out there called Martha. We also access this by reading Martha’s letters. You could say that each letter is an artistic diary.
These ‘letters’ snoop into the mind of the prisoner and access all the psychology that goes with being captured and kept somewhere without freedom.
In the very first poem, you learn that on being sentenced to prison, the political prisoner goes through many varied emotions running through him like “sick relief, apprehension, vague heroism, self pity…” The lines are short, the words are simple and the floor is jagged:
“After the sentence
mingled feelings;
Sick relief,
the load of the approaching day’s
apprehension –
the hints of brutality
have a depth of personal meaning;”
The persona is on a trip full of uncertainties. In these poetic short letters, the persona quickly learns that in prison, any sharp object is valuable as a weapon and when other prisoners wield such a weapon, all you feel is the sense of being vulnerable. Prisoners keep sharp objects everywhere including the rectum, for use in the future when necessary.
In this environment of sexual starvation, one also comes across the dangers of being sodomised by fellow prisoners. You read on in trepidation as the persona expects to be violated. However, the rigours of prison are such that the mind loses guard and there is total annihilation of the prisoner that in some cases, some prisoners actually ask other prisoners to sodomise them as one finds in poem/letter 7:
“Perhaps most terrible are those who beg for it,
who beg for sexual assault.
To what desperate limits are they driven
and what fierce agonies they have endured
that this, which they have resisted,
should seem to them preferable,
even desirable.
It is regarded as the depths
of absolute and ludicrous submission.
And so perhaps it is.
But it has seemed to me
one of the most terrible
most rendingly pathetic
of all a prisoner’s predicaments.”
In line with that, some prisoners start to parade themselves as prostitutes for favours and for security. One such prisoner is actually nicknamed Blue Champagne. He would sleep with several men in one night. He is other men’s woman. And with time, he switches over to become a man to other men.
Dennis Brutus further indicates that since little or no information is released from prison, the family of the prisoner out there struggles to survive without the breadwinner. But it is said that their biggest pain comes with not knowing what is exactly happening to their own relative inside prison. Meanwhile, the prisoner continues to hold on to anything that reminds him that he is still being remembered and cherished by his own people out there:
“The not-knowing
is perhaps the worst part of the agony
for those outside;
not knowing what cruelties must be endured
what indignities the sensitive spirit must face
what wounds the mind can be made to inflict on itself;
and the hunger to be thought of
to be remembered
and to reach across space
with filaments of tenderness
and consolation.”
It is this poem, letter 9, that (maybe) spells out clearly the purpose of these letters to one Martha. The persona actually says:
“And so,
for your consolation
I send these fragments,
random pebbles I pick up
from the landscape of my own experience,
traversing the same arid wastes
in a montage of glimpses
I allow myself
or stumble across.”
Indeed, Martha is being let into the confidence of the political prisoner. But at some point, the persona says prison affords the individual opportunity to realise that the company of other humans is supreme to the extent that the mind may start to work. Cut off from the outside, the only contact is with inmates and warders.
The persona that Brutus employs reveals, however, that there are occasions when even this precarious relationship can be constructive. In the tenth poem, he concludes that:
“It is not all terror
and deprivation, you know;
one comes to welcome the closer contact
and understanding one achieves
with one’s fellow-men,
fellows, compeers;
and the discipline does much to force
a shape and pattern on one’s daily life
as well as on the days
and honest toil
offers some redeeming hours
for the wasted years;
so there are times
when the mind is bright and restful
though alive:
rather like the full calm morning sea.”
Letter 16 indicates that eventually one surrenders to the idea that one is a convict and the acceptance starts to run deep and all the decisions one starts to make are based on that acceptance.
Letter 17 talks about how, when one is locked up, ordinary things like the sky, the clouds and the birds “assume new importance” that you wonder if people at home ever appreciate this.
This collection of poems as in “A Letter to Basil” is an exercise in understanding the role of fear in eventually bringing defeat to the individual. Prison is a set up that is meant to terrify the individual and to force him to divert from the route of rebellion and questioning. The prison is physical but the grey concrete walls become part of the individual’s consciousness. In so many ways the mind of the prisoner starts to dramatise the coldness of the concrete walls and a certain death. No wonder in one of these poems, individual prisoners start just to pray without being asked to.
When he finished his term in prison, Brutus was permitted to leave South Africa with his wife and children on an “exit permit,” a document which made it illegal for him to return. He lived in London from 1966 to 1970, where he worked as a teacher and a journalist. In 1970, he took a position as a visiting professor of English at the University of Denver for a year, after which he moved to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
After he left South Africa, Brutus continued writing. His poems in Poems from Algiers (1970), Thoughts Abroad (1970), and A Simple Lust (1973), are nostalgic pieces recalling the beauties and terrors of his native land. In the summer of 1973 Brutus visited the People’s Republic of China to attend a sports meeting. He is impressed by Chinese haiku and this results in the collection of poems called China Poems (1975).
Brutus’s later collections, Strains (1975), Stubborn Hope (1978), and Salutes and Censures (1980), contained poems written over a span of years and thus in a variety of poetic idioms. But in his later verse he appeared once again to be moving toward a balanced position, this time between the extreme density of his complex early verse and the extraordinary economy of his nearly wordless Chinese experiments.
Brutus died of prostate cancer on 26 December 2009 at his home in South Africa. He is survived by two sisters and eight children. He is ranked amongst key African poets who are studied across African universities alongside Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Jack Mapanje, Musaemura Zimunya, David Diop and others.
Memory Chirere
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