Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, Ostende, 1936
To be of
the Middle World is to have broken away from the parochial, to have left “home”
for good (or for worse) whilst carrying all of it with you and to have arrived
on foreign shores (at the outset you thought of it as “destination”, but not
for long) feeling at ease there without ever being “at home”. Sensing too, that
one has now fatally lost the place you may have wanted to run back to. Have you
also lost face, or is the “original face” now unveiled?
Exile?
Maybe. But exile is a memory disease expressing itself in spastic social
behavior: people find it a mysterious ailment and pity you greatly. (J.M.G. Le
Clézio has this evocative definition of exile as “he or she who has left the
island”; the exile, one assumes, leaves the I-land of self to become water
lapping at the continent of we-ness, of belonging.)
Exile
could be a passage and you may well speak of “passage people”. Yet, the Middle
World is finality beyond exile. For a while at least the reference pole will
remain the land from which you had wrenched yourself free or from where you
were expelled. Then, exile itself will become the habitat. And in due time, when
there’s nothing to go back to or you’ve lost interest, MOR will take shape and
you may start inhabiting the in-between.
The
terrain is rugged, the stage bathed in a dusty grey light. It is not an easy
perch. Wieseltier, in another of his barbed aphorisms, says: “In the modern
world, the cruelest thing you can do to people is to make them ashamed of their
complexity.”
One
location of the Middle World is where the turfs of the outcast, the outsider
and the outlaw overlap. It could be a dominion of outers. Is it all shame,
therefore? Not on your life! Listen to this poem written in the year 1080 by a
Chinese world-traveller, Su Tung-p’o, a functionary who had carnal knowledge of
prison and banishment:
A
hundred years, free to go, and it’s almost spring;
for the
years left, pleasure will be my chief concern.
Out the
gate, I do a dance, wind blows my face;
our
galloping horses race along as magpies cheer.
I face
the wine cup and it’s all a dream,
pick up
a poem brush, already inspired.
Why try
to fix the blame for troubles past?
Years
now I’ve stolen posts I never should have had.
(The
translator, Burton Watson, adds that line 3, “I do a dance”, may as well be
interpreted as “I stop to piss”.)
Now let
me draw the line a little more clearly by proposing a very partial and partisan
list of people I consider to be (or have been) of the Middle World; these
well-known names make the night of the nameless ones even darker, of course.
I won’t
touch upon religion or science—the Dalai Lama is there by definition, and
Einstein was surely an uncitizen of MOR — “I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ and
have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate
family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a
sense of distance and a need for solitude”; nor music (Mozart was one and so
was John Cage with his glass silences), or business (I suspect that Maxwell,
the news mogul who became a whale, was also an uncitizen, and Soros may well be
there as philosopher-pirate); nor politics (Mandela, for ever driven into
self-presentation by prison, burnt clean of attachments, may just be of the
Middle World, Trotsky who wore round glasses and a little pointed beard in
order to remember his singular self touched the black walls of this night-land,
and so ultimately did Gandhi, impaled on the flash-knife of not “belonging”
sufficiently).
You will
take me to task for my choices, which depend more on feeling than verifiable
assessment, but my sketchy picture includes: Kundera—for a while before he
became French; Nureyev; Vidiadhar Surajprasad Naipaul—adrift whilst denying it;
Rushdie—neither East nor West but enjoying the party immensely; Bruce Chatwin,
exploring the nomadic roads all leading to death; Homi Bhabha—“we now locate
the question of culture in the realm of the beyond”; Ieoh Ming Pei, the
international architect, and so was Gaudí; Juan Goytisolo; “Saint” John of the
Cross and his girlfriend, Teresa of Ávila; Yeats and Pound and Auden, but not
Eliot.
Erich
von Stroheim, but somehow neither Dietrich nor Chaplin; Edward Said—very
intermittently so; Bei Dao, the Chinese exile poet, is in the process of
getting his uncitizen papers; Brecht, from the time after he returned to East
Germany; Adorno, who relished it, particularly in his late style; Borges—very
nearly, tapping his white cane against the gates; Freud — unwittingly, which is
not so strange because he fancied himself a scientist when he was in fact but
an interesting writer—and probably also Jung; Samuel Beckett, who visualized
the workrooms of Middle Worldliness on stage; Pessoa, populating his head with
alienated explorers of the self, that slippery slope to damnation.
Vladimir
Nabokov, although he tried his best to dissimulate it; Joseph Conrad of the
dark heart; J.M.G. Le Clézio; Henri Michaux—“hell is the rhythm of the other”;
Rimbaud—both as poet and trader; Victor Segalen; the toothless Artaud and the
mutilated Van Gogh, and Cioran, who considered it a shame to have been born,
and Max Ernst and Man Ray and Mayakovsky with the hole in the head, and the
mild revolutionary Aimé Césaire and Lautréamont (Isidore Ducasse), and Django
Reinhardt, and Primo Levi fatally drawn to the downward spiral of the dark
stairwell, and Jimi Hendrix and Tristan Tzara; Leonardo da Vinci, painting
backwards to the unknowable I as if to light.
Faulkner
going down into the thickets of language; Henry Miller, in painful lust, and
his buddy, Larry Durrell; Han Shan the Cold Mountain poet and Gary Snyder his
disciple; the al-Andalus explorers and historians; Elias Canetti; Mahmoud
Darwish—“Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds
fly after the last sky?”; Frantz Fanon and Franz Kafka; Brodsky and Walcott,
angrily; Bessy Head and Amos Tutuola in their worlds of spirits; Cervantes of
the Missing Hand and Goya with the Screaming Mind; Morandi and Giacometti;
Carlos Fuentes but not Octavio Paz and certainly not Vargas Llosa; Frida Kahlo
but not Diego Rivera; the Zapatistas of Chiapas but not the Shining Path
guerrillas.
Pasolini
but not Fellini; Ryszard Kapuściński; Robert Walser—“how fortunate I am not to
be able to see in myself anything worth respecting and watching”; Albert Camus;
Alexandra David-Neel; William Burroughs, maybe Jack Kerouac, but, I imagine,
somehow not Allen Ginsberg; the Chinese wandering monks/artists/poets/exiles;
Gauguin, maybe Degas, probably Bacon with the raw meat of his thinking, and
Matisse, but neither Picasso nor Cézanne nor Velázquez; Billie Holiday, but not
Ella Fitzgerald.
Hannah
Arendt—“I am more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is
possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of
starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances a sense of humor is
of great help.” And so many more down the ages…
Was
Nietzsche of the detribalized tribe? Or was he more German than mad? And of his
acolytes I’d include only Foucault, who had the baldness and the loud taste in
attire so typically uncitizen, and perhaps Deleuze, for he did sport
extraordinarily long fingernails—although he gradually glad-mouthed himself
back to the closed-in compulsiveness of self-indulgent French rhetoric before
throwing his body like a stinking dog carcass out the window; the others
(Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva) remain too rooted in a Jacobin arrogance where
doubt is a cover for self-accretion, they suffer from the blindness of
brilliance and besides, the text of itself (and for itself) being skein
stretching over rotting body, cannot be the Middle World.
Is one
always of the Middle World? It may happen, as in the case of Beckett who walked
in order to fall down, and Paul Celan who never escaped, not even when he
became a bloated dead goose bobbing on the oily blackness of the Seine. But one
may also grow out of it. One is not normally born there, and your children
cannot inherit uncitizenship.
How does
one draw the map of MOR? Wherever its uncitizens are, there the Middle World
is. I don’t have a complete topography because cities and countries may change
their coloring on the map and the forces of conformism are voracious. Once
more, I’ll not argue the nuances. It should be pointed out that Middle Worlders
paradoxically have a sharpened awareness of place (topoï, locus)—as with
nomads, the environment may be constantly changing and one does not possess it,
but it is always a potentially dangerous framework with which you must
interact—and therefore they will know cloud and well and star and fire better
than sedentary citizens do.
Alexandria
was Middle World territory (by the way, the Middle World has nothing to do with
modernity) and so was Beirut once upon a time; Sarajevo belonged before the
pigs slaughtered it to “purity”; Hong Kong was an outpost (the poet P.K. Leung
wrote, in an admirable volume called City at the End of Time: “Ironically, Hong
Kong as a colony provides an alternative space for Chinese people and culture
to exist, a hybrid for one to reflect upon the problems of a ‘pure’ and
‘original’ state”).
Paris
used to be a section of MOR when it still had a proletariat, many of whom were
of foreign origin, living within the walls (by the way, the Middle World has
nothing to do with riches or urban sophistication); Cuba may be of the Middle
World despite its best efforts at being communist; Berlin, still, although it
is now becoming “normalized” as the pan-Germanic capital; Jerusalem, even
though its present rulers try to stamp it with the seal of fanatic exclusivity;
South Africa went through the birth pains, it was close to understanding a
cardinal Middle World law—that you can only survive and move forward by
continuing to invent yourself—but then it became a majority-led and
majority-smothered democracy instead.
New
York, except when it is too close to America; I have heard tales of tolerance
and centER-insouciance from a town once known as Mogador, now Essaouira;
Tangier, where I celebrated my 21st birthday (bird-day) wrapped in a burnoose,
was a refuge despite the closed warren of its Casbah; Timbuktu—how could I
forget that sand-whispering place, and the other holy sites of books that could
only be reached on the swaying backs of camels—Chinguetti, Ouadane, Ti-chit and
Oualâta; Gorée, Sal, Lamu, Zanzibar, Haiti and the other Caribbean islands—most
islands tend to be natural outcrops of MOR.
Palestine
most certainly—“exodus” can be a high road to the Middle World, and what is now
termed the Territories (a euphemism for ghettos and Bantustans, subject to
Apartheid) will breed a new generation of uncitizens.
__________________________________
This
essay is excerpted from The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile
Literature (Pushkin Press, 2020), a collection of poetry, fiction and
non-fiction that journeys through six continents, with over a hundred
contributors drawn from twenty-four languages.
Breyten
Breytenbach Asks What if Exile Itself Were a Home? By Breyten Breytenbach, LitHub, April 1, 2020
Ovid
Banished from Rome, (exhibited 1838) by
J. M. W. Turner
In
Athens in the fourth century BC, most writing was done on fragments of smashed
earthenware known as ostraca. Once a year each Athenian was allowed to
designate a fellow citizen for banishment. The names were written on ostraca
and submitted to the authorities before being counted: the person – usually a
politician – with the most “votes” was exiled for ten years. The name of this
practice? Ostracism.
One way
of thinking of André Naffis-Sahely’s “anthology of exile literature” is as a
vessel pieced together from the stories of the banished. Foreseeing our own era
of mass displacement in 1944, Hannah Arendt noted that “the word exile, which
once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something
simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate”. What do we mean when we talk about
exile today, when more people than ever are being forced from their homes? The
Heart of a Stranger is world history told through the voices of the exiled,
from Sappho and Seneca to Dante and Darwish.
Exile,
they collectively tell us, is not just a constant but one of humanity’s shaping
traumas – shaping as the pickaxe shapes the rock. As Naffis-Sahely puts it,
“civilisation begets exile”. Here, then, are the “relegated” citizens of
ancient Rome alongside the refugees of history’s wars, the political émigrés of
the twentieth century and, flailing in the waters off Lampedusa, the “illegals”
of our own shattered moment.
Last
century’s other great scholar of dispossession, Edward Said, was wary of
literature’s tendency to romanticize what is an experience of violence: “Exile
cannot be made to serve notions of humanism”. In the short essays that
introduce this book’s six chapters, which began life in the poetry journal PN
Review (see p14), Naffis-Sahely echoes Said’s scepticism. There is nothing
intrinsically ennobling, or enlightening, about being deprived of your home.
For most of the world’s displaced, the loss is a bereavement that can only be
absorbed. Even if, like Vladimir Nabokov, you are able to extract value from
the “syncopal kick” of exile, the experience leaves an ineradicable scar.
The
Heart of a Stranger is dominated, like the experience of exile itself, by
nonanglophone writers. Ahmatjan Osman, the Uyghur poet in exile, recalls (in
Jeffrey Yang’s translation of his “Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile”) how “in my
early isolation, I’d often withdraw / homewards into my heart” – memory often
being the last remnant of the exile’s homeland. As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s
ferocious piece “A Colonial Affair!” – describing European settlers in Kenya in
the 1970s – reminds us, exile and imperialism are bedfellows. He calls the
colonists “parasites in paradise”; their only culture is “a ruling-class
culture of fear, the culture of an oppressing minority desperately trying to
impose total silence on a restive oppressed majority”.
In his
essay “Notes from the Middle World”, the exiled South African poet and activist
Breyten Breytenbach describes a limbo – the Middle World – that is also a realm
of spiritual dismemberment. Exile is a “memory disease expressing itself in
spastic social behaviour”. His two-page census of literary “uncitizens” includes
not only Said and Arendt, and not only political deportees, but also W. B.
Yeats, W. H. Auden, Primo Levi, Elias Canetti, Cervantes, Goya, V. S. Naipaul
and Billie Holiday. Exile need not mean expatriation. For the cenobitic Desert
Fathers of fourth-century Egypt, (self-)exile was a “means to purify oneself”,
writes Naffis- Sahely. “If you cannot control your tongue,” cautioned Abba
Lucius, “you will not be an exile anywhere.”
The
anthology format – fragmented, diffuse, disarticulated – is well suited to the
subject: see Marc Robinson’s Altogether Elsewhere: Writers in exile (1994) and
John Simpson’s Oxford Book of Exile (1995). Reading Naffis-Sahely’s collation
is sometimes disorientating: those pieces that aren’t glossed in the chapter
intros – who are you, where and when did you live? – are often hard to pin onto
a real-world timeline or map. It can feel like attending a conference where
half the speakers aren’t introduced. In an afterword (which reads as if it’s
been banished from the front of the book), the editor makes the case for exile
as a stance of defiance, contrary to the cliché of exile as “whiny, withered
husk”, exemplified by Ovid. (Victor Hugo felt the same way about Ovid, “that
cowering cur of exile” banished to the edge of empire – but this
characterization has always seemed unfair to me: he wanted to go home, after
all: wasn’t that the point of the Tristia?) Naffis-Sahely attacks the
“fetishization of privileged cliques who took to ‘exile’ like some take to
resort holidays”. Said would have agreed, but it feels excessive to call James
Joyce “sickeningly self-satisfied” for settling in Trieste, albeit temporarily.
The Desert Fathers went to the wastes of Egypt not merely in flight, but in
pursuit of a kind of sacred alienation. Their vow of “exile, poverty and
endurance in silence” finds an echo in Joyce’s famous “silence, exile and
cunning”. As Hugo, self-exiled in Guernsey, wrote, “Exile is not a material,
but a moral matter”. What’s clear from the fragments in this anthology, so lovingly
and purposefully arranged by Naffis-Sahely, is that the pity we feel when Adam
and Eve are kicked out of Eden isn’t for them – it’s for us all.
Syncopal
kick : On the trauma of exile. By William Atkins. The Times Literary Supplement, October 25, 2019.
Caspar David
Friedrich, Der Wanderer über dem
Nebelmeer, 1818
Towards
the end of this wide-ranging and absorbing collection of poetry and prose
written by and about people living away from their places of birth, we find
what seems as good a definition as any of exile. Describing the ‘Middle World’
or ‘MOR’ (his name for the place), South African Breyten Breytenbach suggests
exile
itself will become the habitat. And in due time, when there’s nothing to go
back to or you’ve lost interest, MOR will take shape and you may start
inhabiting the in-between.
This
idea of exile as an uncertain space, somewhere almost numinous, appears again
and again throughout this anthology, which stretches from Biblical times,
through Ancient China, Greece and Rome, to the age of colonisation and finally
to our own times. Poems represent more than half the pieces; unsurprising, not
just because the collection is compiled by a poet, but also because the sense
of exile as a dream space is perhaps best evoked through verse. Writing in
1839/40 about a Poland that no longer existed as a political entity, poet Adam
Mickiewicz states:
I have a
country, homeland of my thoughts,
where my
heart has innumerable kin:
a land
more fair than what I see before me
The
prose sections do afford poignant moments, specifically the reportage-style
memories, such as Ethiopian Martha Nasibú’s account of her itinerant childhood
– enforced by the Italian authorities. It is the poetry, however, that for me
best grasps the in-between ‘habitat’ of exile. In his afterword Naffis-Sahely
makes clear his decision to feature ‘non-Western poets who deserve far more
attention in the English-speaking world than they have thus far received’: he
has no interest in what he calls ‘the fetishization of privileged cliques who
took to “exile” like some take to resort holidays’, and names Stein, Hemingway,
Pound and Joyce as absentees from his book. ‘If you’re going to stare into a
mirror, you might as well do that at home, especially if you are fortunate to
have one’, he says. And when you read ‘Iraq’ by Adnan Al-Sayegh, it’s difficult
to disagree. A poem of eleven lines, written by a poet who escaped a death
sentence in his homeland, captures the sense of ‘exile’ far better than
hundreds of pages of prose that doesn’t address the exile state:
Iraq
disappears with
every
step its exiles take
and
contracts whenever
a
window’s left half-shut
and
trembles wherever
shadows
cross its path.
Maybe
some gun-muzzle
was
eyeing me up an alley.
The Iraq
that’s gone: half
its
history was kohl and song
its
other half evil, wrong.
(Translated
from Arabic by Stephen Watts and Burgui Artajo)
West
Camel reviews The Heart of a Stranger . An Anthology of Exile Literarute ,
edited by André Naffis-Sahely.
European Literature Network , September 30, 2019.
Breytenbach
is world-famous, especially as a poet. He has already published sixteen hundred
poems. Words that recur most often are moon, angel, wind, darkness, murmur,
seam, crown, death. At least, that is my impression as a translator of his work
for the last forty-four years: now for a real statistical study. Huge flocks of
birds flit through his verses, too. With his blessing, I gladly interpret these
flying creatures and according to a landscape a bird might become a blue tit, a
shearwater or a kite.
It has
become a ritual: each year on his birthday, the 16th of September, Breytenbach
writes a text in which he observes himself getting older. What will 16
September 2019 yield?
His
latest poetry bundle, Op weg na kû (On the road to kû, Cape Town: Human &
Rousseau), appeared in February 2019. The collection is composed of zen poems,
interspersed with drawings and photographs. Breytenbach the poet goes out
walking every morning, armed with a camera to capture unusual, everyday scenes.
In this bundle, these are often small, dead birds.
On the
way to kû, that condition or state where there is nothing, the poet professes
his constant worry for what lies ahead, after life. The titles of his poems are
eloquent: fluittaal as ars moriendi (whistle language as dying art), Mehr
Licht! Mehr Licht (More light! More light), die woord word dood (the word is
deadened), van die lewe na die dood (from life to death), die dood is ’n
oordrywing (death is an exaggeration), bring doodgaan ooit verlossing? (does
dying ever bring salvation?)
Sage –
guerrilla – prisoner
In these
contemplative poems we rediscover Breytenbach the sage. In Paris, he had
formerly been a pupil of the famous guru Deshimaru (1914–1982); his first
bundle in 1964 already featured poems about ‘in-spiration’ and ‘ex-piration’.
The website Zen Deshimaru teaches that in kû there is neither matter,
experience, action, consciousness, colour, sound, thought, knowledge, illusion,
birth, death, suffering nor benefit. This ability to empty the mind later
helped Breytenbach endure two years of solitary in Pretoria prison.
Many
Afrikaners cherish the image of Breytenbach the guerrilla, ‘as photogenic as
Che Guevara and Leila Khaled’. During enforced exile in Paris, he encountered
Solidarité, a network founded by the political activist Henri Curiel
(1914–1978) to help clandestine militants across the world, which once counted
the Indonesian-born Dutch writer Adriaan van Dis (b. 1946) among its members.
Gilles Perrault’s book, Un homme à part (1984, Barrault) devotes beautiful
passages to the friendship between the old resistant from Egypt and the young
South African. Breytenbach founded a small association, Okhela, mounting strong
evidence against the apartheid regime. In 1975, during a secret mission in
South Africa, he was arrested and sentenced to nine years’ incarceration.
Breytenbach
the prisoner sketched an outline of himself in The True Confessions of an
Albino Terrorist (1984, Taurus) and Mouroir: Mirror Notes of a Novel (2008,
Archipelago Books).
White
power so desired to break Breytenbach the rebellious son that he spent two
years in solitary confinement. After a second trial, quietly and without forced
confession, he was transferred to a regular prison where he was put to work in
the warehouse. The warden there encouraged participation in sports and lent him
a tracksuit, which is how he was able to meet Kobie Coetsee, then Minister of
Justice, who was negotiating a prisoner exchange with several countries. Breytenbach
would be released before the end of his sentence.
Painter –
philosopher
As
prolific as the poet, Breytenbach the painter paints incomplete characters.
From a debut with drawings in black pen, he eventually moved on to portraits
and self-portraits in colour. In a strange reversal of history, some of his
works were removed when radical students denounced the colonial past at the
University of Cape Town.
In his
bundle Op weg na kû (On the road to kû) we see two angels mating on a
mountaintop, Leonard Cohen with a falling bird of prey and a writer with a
machine that rattles off words, above which hangs the mask of a snowy owl.
Breytenbach
the philosopher developed the concept of the ‘middle world’. Four books that
mix essays, fiction and poetry express what he thinks. Dog Heart. A Travel
Memoir (1999, Harcourt Brace) is about reconciliation and identity, crucial
issues in South Africa. This wording hits the spot: ‘Only Afrikaans makes the
Afrikaner an Afrikaner’. The man continually on the move departs here from the
principle that it is not possible to make progress if one forgets where one
comes from. Intimate Stranger (2006, Archipelago Books) is about writing and
the writers who form a diaspora. L’Empreinte des pas sur la terre (2008, Actes Sud) considers his love of
movement. Notes from
the Middle World: Essays (2009, Haymarket Books) brings into focus the space in
which tolerant and intelligent minds can transcend all boundaries.
Public
figure - political militant – orator
During
apartheid, Breytenbach was a public figure. In Paris, he found himself
constantly approached to explain the harsh reality in South Africa, since the
media preferred the impertinent opponent over the more predictable ANC
delegates who did not speak French. Breytenbach’s great contribution to
resolving the conflict was bringing together for the first time South African
intellectuals in Dakar in 1997. Thanks to the talent of the late lamented
Frederick van Zyl Slabbert, the support of Abdou Diouf, then president of Senegal,
and Danielle Mitterand’s France Libertés foundation, white South Africans were
able to meet the intellectual leaders of the African National Congress (ANC) in
exile. It was the first step in the dialogue that would lead to democratic
elections in 1994.
The
Dakar meeting was decisive for Breytenbach, who became a true pan-African
militant, both co-founding and for a long time leading (2002–2010) the Gorée
Institute/L’Institut Gorée to consolidate democracy and development in Africa.
Encounters on this island off the coast of Dakar, a symbol of slavery, and
elsewhere on the continent aiming to dismantle the barriers between Anglophone,
Francophone and Lusophone countries prompted him to set up the Pirogue (canoe)
collective, to publish a beautiful, multilingual yearbook, Imagine Africa.
The
success of Breytenbach the writer goes together with an exceptional charisma:
Breytenbach the orator can bring an audience into rapture. I have seen him at
work in various places. In Paris at the Maison de la poésie, inclining
attentively towards the asker of a question. And in Johannesburg on a winter’s
evening at the house of writer Dominique Botha, in the select company of
intellectuals including Achille Mbembe. It is often his diction that people notice,
more than his ideas, because Breytenbach does not speak with a rolling /R/ like
most Afrikaners. In Wellington, the village of his childhood, he can tell jokes
all night.
Furious
Breyten
Breytenbach has more strings to his bow: professor, polemicist, curious
traveller. He has taught creative writing at New York University. He likes to
pack his texts with quotes. Meanwhile, I’m no longer certain whether it was
Wittgenstein who said that poetry, like mathematics, was for the youth. In
South Africa he does not stop raging. Even before Mandela became president, he
was already warning him about the corruption of some of his comrades; today he
still regularly denounces the shortcomings of South African democracy. The
politics that seek to curtail the use of Afrikaans at university infuriate him.
Like a bird, he is always flying off his bough to scour the world for striking
images.
The man
who has been a role model for two generations of poets writing in Afrikaans is
now being studied at university. He does not use heteronyms to lead his many
lives. Yet he has invented several pseudonyms, variously signing texts as Jan
Blom or Jan Afrika, and he has also had fun corrupting his name to Breyten
Breytaintain, the galley crook B. Breytenmud, or even Breyten Barkoutside.
The poet
wanders between four homes and gallops across our blue planet, a stream of
poems issuing under his hooves. Returning to a phrase of Matisse, who urged his
hands to paint until song bursts forth, in 2017 he published an anthology, Die
singende hand (The Singing Hand, Collected Poems 1984–2014, Human &
Rousseau), under the same title in different languages. Call it unity in
diversity.
The
Rebellious Lives of Poet-Painter-Activist Breyten Breytenbach. By Georges Lory.
The Low Countries , September 16, 2019.
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