Durban is hosting South Africa’s first international poetry festival. HUMPHREY TYLER looked in on the preparations and spoke to Breyten Breytenbach
Young women still warm to poets, especially when they are good-looking. So there are welcoming smiles for Breyten Breytenbach when he enters a tomb-like vault underneath the Sneddon Theatre at the University of Natal in Durban.
There is a green metal box on a shelf on the wall marked “40”. Perhaps a man with a gun will come for it later from Coin Security. But more likely it is empty. There is also a huge poster showing William Shakespeare looking enigmatic.
But the centre of the action is a pile on the floor of black electronic gadgetry with flickering lights and two speakers.
Two young women are working on a sound- track that will be used every night during the Poetry Africa 97 festival at the Sneddon from Sunday May 4. This will be South Africa’s first international poetry festival. Poets are flying in from all over – Nigerian Niyi Osundare, Zimbabwean Chenjerai Hove, Mexican Homero Aridjis, Indian Sujata Bhatt and others. Some of the work will be translated line by line. There will also be drums.
In the workroom under the theatre, with the women hovering around, there is gentle music, then a reflective voice takes over sonorously from the loudspeakers. The voice has a warm assurance. Breytenbach gestures gently. He says he wants the sounds to “clothe” the theatre as the audience comes in. It doesn’t matter if people cannot make out exactly what is being said. The poets themselves will be on stage later.
The young women agree, but one of them is perturbed about the “medieval piece”. It is intrusive. How would it be if they used for the recording just three poets reading their work, not more? She says they could loop the tape and come back again to the start. Breytenbach agrees. “The lights will still be on in the auditorium at the beginning,” he says, “people will be settling down.”
Breytenbach is a remarkable man by any standards. He flowered early as one of the country’s most exciting young poets. He left the country and settled in Paris. At the height of apartheid he shocked Nationalist Afrikanerdom by taking a Vietnamese wife. In terms of apartheid, the woman was, well, technically, non-white.
Later Breytenbach became the world’s most unlikely terrorist, landing at what was called Jan Smuts Airport wearing a beard and heavy spectacles. The political police followed him everywhere. He was sent to jail and wrote rather fabulously about that after they finally let him out, and he went back overseas. He paints and exhibits his pictures in many places. His written work has been translated into many languages.
When somebody asked him where his home is now, he was unsure because he travels so widely. His questioner persisted. “Where is your dentist?” he asked Breytenbach. Breytenbach worked it out. “My dentist lives in Paris,” he said.”Then that is your home,” said the questioner triumphantly. “Paris is your home.”
Breytenbach continues to be peripatetic, but for three months each year now he lives in Durban, as visiting professor at the University of Natal, where he works at the Centre for Creative Arts.
This itself is a remarkable creation, unique in South Africa. Breytenbach has been running creative-writing workshops there for several years now. More recently, a well-known former publisher and also, himself, a poet, Adriaan Donker, was appointed head of the centre. He and Breytenbach came up with the idea of a poetry festival and began asking around. Nineteen poets have accepted invitations to attend, at least seven from South Africa.
Not only will there be readings and performances each evening this coming week at the Sneddon, there will also be workshops, when locals will be able to sit in on discussions among the visitors. They will be talking about writing in exile, for example, and poetry in translation. The meetings will be at various venues.
It will not be a solemn affair. Not all poetry is sad or about love and death; some of it is very funny. One of the funniest poets coming to the festival is Adrian Henri. He comes from Liverpool. “Just like the Beatles,” says Breytenbach. Henri is eloquent and highly entertaining.
I ask Breytenbach how he manages to keep so fit. Does he pump iron? He says no. He jogs and he does some t’ai chi. Also, he says, his wife looks after him very well.
Poetry Africa 97 runs at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre in Durban from May 4 to 10, from 7.30pm every evening. Tickets are available through Computicket at R7 per performance, or phone (031) 304-2753 for credit-card bookings