Suzy Bell On show in Durban
Totally disarming in tweety-bird yellow, casual cotton shirt teeming with tiny fish, a Zulu beaded choker resembling a Smartie box of colours, brass bangles, and a genteel, generous-hearted demeanor – that’s our poet/playwright/artist, Breyten Breytenbach.
Being the Buddhist he is, if you swing the conversation to China, Tibet and Deputy
President Thabo Mbeki, be prepared to pluck the porcupine quills from your face.
So here’s the “special little message” from Breytenbach to Mbeki, “who is on such friendly terms with the Chinese leaders”, hisses the poet: “Tell them to get the hell out of Tibet. Apply the same criteria to China as we wanted to be applied to us. The abuse of human rights is totally unacceptable. What’s happening in Tibet is a tragedy of historical proportions as we are sitting by this quite systematic extermination of a culture which is an enrichment to the totality of humanity. It’s cultural genocide.”
The poet continues to froth: “The fact that South Africa is producing and selling arms to the rest of the continent …”He shakes his head in disgust. “We are providing the arms for the next generation of people who are going to commit genocide. Let’s not fool ourselves, Kader Asmal is talking bullshit. We have become morally obese, morally obscene, and we think the fact that we have been victims would protect us from the inequity of what we are doing – that’s absolute crap … I don’t care how many times Nelson Mandela says we need this foreign income, we don’t need this. We don’t have to make our living that way.”
Once the flush has drained from his silver-bearded face, Breytenbach’s voice drops an outraged octave to a whisper: “Sorry, sometimes I get carried away.”
Breytenbach is not someone who “knuckles down to the rampant rainbowism”. Of course he does speak in sombre tones of the edgy quality of South Africa, with its “horror stories, its beautiful escapes of euphoria from time to time” – and this is what he suggests probably soaks into his work. “It’s not intentional, it’s not like, let me give these bastards the idea that South Africa is like sticking something up the bum of an angel.”
He lives what appears to be a charmed life, swanning between Paris, Catalonia, the West African island of Gore and the Cape. And he’s just brought out his latest volume of poetry, Papierblom, and of course everyone is afroth over his play, Boklied.
Well, it’s about time, really. After being imprisoned for seven and a half years (1975- 1982), he admits that he was “pretty much screwed up” before he went into prison, “and I certainly came out pretty much screwed up when I left”. But whenever Breytenbach talks about prison-life now, he bristles with black humour: “I was working in the general store, so I was on the original gravy train and yes, every lunch-time they used to take us out and show us the angels they’d impaled in the courtyard.”
He says it was like being in an old Marx Brothers movie. “Quite hilarious, the characters one meets. I have fine memories, some of them quite grotesque. The warders used to wake us up every few hours throughout the night to check we hadn’t committed suicide.
They’d shine a torch through the window to see if we were still alive. One particular warder was very bored, so he engaged in conversation. But I saw him always looking at his watch, and all of a sudden he would break off the conversation and rush away. One day I asked him why he did this, and he explained that his commanding officer warned us that he [Breytenbach] can turn anyone into a communist within five minutes. He told me that each time the conversation reached four minutes 55 seconds, he had to break off before he became a communist.”
The prison memories are as surreal as his work, and surely the best therapy for
Breytenbach is to re-invent himself through his art. It’s a process that has generated stark imagery that whiffs of magic. But there’s a disturbing edge in his work that sees angels sitting on spikes, eyes gouged out, mouths sewn up, men with wings (drowning, not flying), men with chickens’ heads or goats’ heads, bandaged bodies with anguished blue faces, often a bird, maybe a fish, a pig, a horse or a dog.
Yet don’t try to simplify the symbolism or mythology in his work: “Birds, dogs, horses and monkeys and fish, I now notice, must have meaning. Let’s say they must have connotations,” he admits, “but I don’t think for me they have the accepted connotations.”
Breytenbach doesn’t exactly pooh-pooh the validity of Jungian imagery or the Freudian approach, he simply “recognises it”.
Breytenbach doesn’t believe in the power of symbols. Instead, he’s all for the power of the mighty metaphor. “I don’t ever intend painting in code. Painting for me is a language, and I’m talking about the vocabulary of painting – the colours, the textures, the rhythms, the spaces, the dissonances, the silences. But of course it would be naive to suggest that one can paint an impaled angel and not expect people to want an explanation. Well let me explain to you” -he chides, amid chuckles, mimicking a gravelly Afrikaans accent -“it’s like stubbing your toe when you’re getting into the motorcar, it is painful. Have you ever stubbed your toe? Well that’s what it feels like. Now they’ll know what it feels like for an impaled angel!”
On show, there are drawings Breytenbach did while in prison, and there is a substantial amount of recent work. Some are original watercolours, some prints and some prints are transformed with watercolour – “It’s like painting by numbers,” he jokes.
But it wasn’t funny when the prison drawings were used as evidence against Breytenbach in his second trial, “o prove I was continuing to be subversive and trying to overthrow the government by subversive means. Looking at the drawings, I think that is very funny indeed. The drawings were then smuggled out. Because of the court case we managed to get some of them back, but some were stolen by the warders, which is a nice thought, as they must be sitting there looking and thinking, ‘Now I wonder what the hell this means?'”