Several paragraphs went missing from Lionel Abrahams’s review of Guy Butler’s Collected Poems last week. After “A major source of pressure and fire in his art is his deep experience of a world afflicted by division,” the review should have read:
Articulating his own dilemmas, doubts and challenging insights, Butler foreshadows aspects of the new South Africa’s struggle to make itself. On a famous recent parliamentary occasion a queue of political-party leaders blithely echoed Thabo Mbeki’s declaration, “I am an African.” Butler could not have joined that choir of continental new patriots. To him the question of how to identify with Africa has always been as profoundly complicated as it is urgent.
The first poem in the book, Servant Girl, employs an image of tension to express the poet’s consciousness of being relatively alien on his familiar turf: “… a Xhosa girl / washing a white girl’s cretonne frocks // and singing a song which seems more integral / with rain-rinsed sky and sand-stone hill / than any cadence wrung / from my taut tongue.”
In On Seeing a Rock Drawing in 1941, he makes obeisance to the mystery and mighty significance of art, but the indigenous orientation of this example somehow excludes him: “My fingers stroke the stone … / I lift it … / then set it down again and go.”
Only thereafter, in the splendid celebratory longer poem addressed to Cradock Mountains, is unequivocal expression given to a sense of personal belonging to this place: “Your grit is in my bones,” he declares.