Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  The titles of the Paradise books cast an ironical glance at Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer. ‘This region of damnation’, Breytenbach calls South Africa in Return to Paradise. ‘I am looking at the future and it chills me to the bone.’ The revolution has been betrayed; cliques of middle-aged men are bargaining for their slice of the cake while on the ground their followers fight on mindlessly. The new order on the point of emerging – ‘more broadly based hegemony but [the] same mechanisms and same sadness’ – is not what he fought for. If his own ‘whimpers for an impossible revolution’ are utopian, it remains the right of the poet to imagine a future beyond the dreams of politicians, to have his prophetic say in the future. He even has the right to bite the hand that has fed him.3

  At a more down-to-earth level, the story of the 1991 visit includes poetry readings in noisy halls where the audience does not understand the language and comes only to inspect the oddity named Breytenbach; perplexed reactions from old comrades-in-arms (‘But aren’t you ever happy? Now that we’ve won, can’t you rejoice?’); incomprehension and hostility when he asserts that his role in the future will be, as in the past, ‘to be against the norm, orthodoxy, the canon, hegemony, politics, the State, power’. These are sentiments which do not go down well in a country that has, as he observes dryly, slid straight from pre-humanity to post-humanity. (pp. 160, 196, 158)

  He uses the book to lash out, in anguish and bitterness, in all directions: against white liberals, against the South African Communist Party and ‘more-doctrinaire-than-thou’ bourgeois Leftists, against former associates like Wole Soyinka and Jesse Jackson, and particularly, for their treatment of him when he was in jail, against the ANC itself:

  Not only did the ANC withhold assistance from my dependants, not only did they disavow me, but the London clique of bitter exiles intervened to stop any manifestation of international or local support for my cause. They blackballed and maligned me, abetted by well-meaning ‘old friends’ inside the country. Even Amnesty International was prevailed upon not to ‘adopt’ me as a prisoner of conscience. (p. 123)

  The plague that Breytenbach pronounces upon all parties – a condemnation in which, despite the pungency of the language, there is something wild and out of control – makes up the less interesting half of the book. Its best pages address a more intimate and more fundamental concern: what it means to him to be rooted in a landscape, to be African-born. For though he has spent almost all his adult life in Europe, Breytenbach does not feel himself to be a European:

  To be an African is not a choice, it is a condition . . . To be [an African] is not through lack of being integrated in Europe . . . neither is it from regret of the crimes perpetrated by ‘my people’ . . . No, it is simply the only opening I have for making use of all my senses and capabilities . . . The [African] earth was the first to speak. I have been pronounced once and for all. (p. 75 )

  What he means by saying that Africa allows him to use his senses and his capabilities fully is revealed in page after magical page as he responds to the sights and sounds of ‘the primordial continent’. As a writer, Breytenbach has the gift of being able to descend effortlessly into the Africa of the poetic unconscious and return with the rhythm and the words, the words in the rhythm, that give life. He is aware of the gift. It is not an individual matter, he insists, but is inherited from his ancestors, ‘forefathers with the deep eyes of injured baboons’, whose lives were spent in intimate relation with their native landscape, so that when he speaks that landscape he is speaking in their voice as much as his own. (pp. 4, 27)

  It is this very traditional, very African realisation – that his deepest creative being is not his own but belongs to an ancestral consciousness – that gives rise to some of the pain and confusion recorded in Return to Paradise. For though Breytenbach may recognise how marginal he has become in what is nowadays on all sides, with varying degrees of irony, called ‘the new South Africa’, and may even enjoy dramatising himself as the one without a self, the bastard, the ‘nomadic nobody’, or, in his favourite postmodern figure, the face in the mirror, a textual shadow without substance, he knows that ultimately he owes his strength to his native earth and his ancestors. (p. 74) Thus the most moving passages in the book tell of visiting his father’s deathbed, renewing friendships, making peace with his brothers, taking his wife to the old places of Africa.

  II

  Dog Heart, Breytenbach’s 1999 memoir, confines itself to a tiny area of South Africa, a region of the Western Cape province dubbed by him ‘Heartland’, and within it to the town of Montagu, not far from his birthplace, where, as he records, he and his wife buy and restore a house for their own use. The economy of this area is based on viticulture and fruit farming; but in recent years Montagu itself (population 23,000), a town of some charm blessed with hot springs and a spectacular setting, has become a haven for retired people, artists and craft-workers. Demographically it is unrepresentative of the country as a whole. Whereas two-thirds of the national population is black (we will brave the minefield of racial terminology in a moment), the people of Breytenbach’s Montagu are overwhelmingly brown or white; though nationwide Afrikaans is the mother tongue of only one person in seven, in Montagu it predominates; and, in a country whose population is skewed towards youth (nearly half of it is under the age of twenty-one), Montagu is a town of ageing people: the young have migrated to the cities in search of work.

  Crude though they may be, these statistics should alert us against taking Dog Heart for what it is not and does not pretend to be: a report on the state of the South African nation in the 1990s. Breytenbach’s Heartland is not a microcosm of South Africa; Dog Heart has little to say about politics or black—white relations on a national scale. What it does report on, with intimate attention, is power relations between white and brown in the countryside.

  Who are Breytenbach’s so-called brown people? The seeming innocence of the appellation conceals problems not only of anthropology (culture, genetics) and history (who holds the power to call whom what, and how was that power won?), but of a conceptual nature too: what does it mean to be neither black nor white, to be defined in negative terms, as, in effect, a person without qualities?

  For that is how brown (or coloured or Coloured – with a C the term still carries apartheid echoes; with a c it is more or less neutral) people were defined under apartheid legislation. The category Coloured was meant to pick out the descendants of unions between people (usually men) of European (so-called Caucasian) descent and people (usually women) of indigenous African (usually Khoi – the term ‘Hottentot’ is no longer polite) or Asian (usually Indonesian slave) birth. But in practice it captured many others besides, of genetically diverse origins: people of ‘pure’ Khoi – or indeed of ‘pure’ ‘African’ descent – whom circumstance had led to adopt a European or European-derived name and language and lifestyle; people who through endogamy had retained a ‘purely’ Asian, Islamic identity; ‘Europeans’ who for one reason or another had dropped through the net of ‘whiteness’ and were leading ‘mixed’ lives.

  Though apartheid legislation assumed a system of classification watertight enough to allocate each individual South African to one of four categories (white, Coloured, African, Indian), the basis of the system was ultimately tautological: a white was defined as a person of white appearance whom the white community accepted as white, and so forth.

  The most conceptually sophisticated resistance to classification came from ‘coloured’ quarters: if there was no ‘Coloured’ community prepared to concede that it had pre-existed its creation by apartheid, then, logically, there could be no community criterion of ‘Colouredness’. Throughout the apartheid years the status ‘Coloured’ was, across almost the entire range of people whom it implicated, accepted, so to speak, under protest, as an identity forced upon them. Insofar as there is or was a ‘Coloured’ community, it was a community created by the common fate of being forced to behave, in the face of authority, as ‘Coloured’.

>   It is this history of contestation that Breytenbach calls up when he writes of ‘brown’ people: a history of two or three million South Africans of highly diverse ethnic and social origins first compelled to conceive of themselves as a community, even (in one of the loftier predictions of apartheid historiography) as ‘a nation in the making’; then, in 1994, entering into a dispensation in which, while the old race laws were abolished, racial distinctions had nevertheless to be kept alive to make possible the social-engineering measures known in English as ‘affirmative action’ and in Afrikaans, more bluntly, as ‘putting right’. ‘First not white enough, then not black enough,’ they complained, not without reason.

  The issue of whether there is or ought to be a category between black and white is not unique to South Africa. The rights of ethnic or cultural minorities in the multi-ethnic nation state constitute a critical issue worldwide; debate is rife in Latin America and other corners of the postcolonial world on the politics of mestizo identity. In South Africa this ferment has prompted people excluded from the ‘natural’ identities of black and white to explore cultural identities for themselves entirely divorced from the set of options offered by apartheid – identities that link them to a precolonial past and even to a history older than that of ‘black’ South Africans. Archaeological researches push the date of the migration of ‘black’ Africans, speakers of Bantu languages, into the territory of the present South Africa further and further back in time, but no one proposes they have been there as long as the primeval hunter-gatherers of the dry south-west, the mythical heartland of Breytenbach’s ‘brown’ people.

  III

  Being called, in 1973, ‘a bastard people with a bastard language’ jolted even those Afrikaners sympathetic to Breytenbach. But in the years that have passed since then, bastardy – or, more politely, hybridity – has become a fashionable term in cultural history and cultural politics. Revisionist historians are busy rewriting the story of the Southern African colonial frontier as a zone of barter and exchange where old cultural baggage was shed and new baggage taken aboard, and where new identities – even new racial identities – were tried on like clothing. For adventurously minded Afrikaners, laying claim to a dark ancestor now holds considerable cachet (Breytenbach himself is not immune to such self-fashioning).

  Thus, half a century after the National Party came to power vowing to preserve at whatever cost the Christian Aryan identity of the Afrikaner, the wheel has come full circle: the intellectual vanguard of the Afrikaans-speaking sector, nervous of the name ‘Afrikaner’ so long as it carries its old historical freight of racial exclusivity, yet unable to offer a better one, proposes that it represents instead an embryonic, genetically hybrid, culturally syncretic, religiously diverse, non-exclusive, as yet unnamed group (‘people’ remains too loaded a term) defined (loosely) by attachment to a language – Afrikaans – of mixed provenance (Dutch, Khoi, Malay) but rooted in the African continent.

  Breytenbach makes a large historical claim for his Heartland region: that during the time when it was part of the colonial frontier it bred a restless, nomadic, mongrel type of Afrikaner, without the social pretensions of farmers from the neighbouring, more settled Boland region, where the economy had been built on slave labour – a being, in fact, not unlike the alternative Afrikaner just described.

  It is a claim that will probably not stand up to scholarly scrutiny, but it does enable Breytenbach to advance his revisionist version of the Afrikaner pioneer. Whereas in the establishment version these pioneers were white-skinned farmers who, Bible in one hand and gun in the other, trekked into the interior of Africa to found republics where they would govern themselves free of British interference, in Breytenbach’s version they become people of inextricably mixed genetic origin who followed their herds and flocks into the interior because they had learned a wandering lifestyle from the Khoi pastoralists. And (Breytenbach’s argument goes) the sooner the modern Afrikaner discards the illusion of himself as the bearer of light in the African darkness, and accepts himself as merely one of Africa’s nomads – that is to say, as a rootless and unsettled being, with no claim of proprietorship over the earth – the better his chance of survival.

  But bastardy, Breytenbach warns, is not an easy fate. It entails a continual making and unmaking of the self; it is necessarily dogged by a sense of loss. ‘[Yet] it is good to travel to become poor.’4 Thus Breytenbach links the two themes of his ethical philosophy: bastardy and nomadism. Just as the bastard sheds his self and enters into unpredictable mixture with the other, so the nomad uproots himself from the old, comfortable dwelling place to follow the animals, or the smells of the wind, or the figures of his imagination, into an uncertain future.

  It is against such a background that one must read the gruesome reports in Dog Heart of attacks on whites in the countryside of the new South Africa. These stories make disturbing reading not only because of the psychopathic violence of the attacks themselves, but because they are being repeated at all. For the circulation of horror stories is the very mechanism that drives white paranoia about being chased off the land and ultimately into the sea. Why does Breytenbach lend himself to the process?

  His response is that rural violence is by no means a new phenomenon. From the old days he resurrects stories of men like Koos Sas and Gert April and Dirk Ligter, ‘Hottentots’ or ‘Bushmen’ who flitted like ghosts from farm to farm sowing death and destruction before at last being tracked down and killed. In the folk memory of brown people, he suggests, these men are not criminal bandits but ‘resistance fighters’. (p. 136) In other words, farm murders, and crimes in general against whites – even the crime directed against the Breytenbachs when their home in Montagu is broken into and vandalised – are indeed part of a larger historical plot which has everything to do with the arrogation of the land by whites in colonial times.

  The land, says Breytenbach, belongs to no one, and the correct relation to the land is the nomad’s: live on it, live off it, move on; find ways of loving it without becoming bound to it. This is the lesson he teaches his French-born daughter, a child clearly drawn to the wildness and freedom of the country, as he takes her around the sacred sites of memory. Do not become too attached, he warns. ‘We are painted in the colours of disappearance here . . . We are only visiting . . . It must die away.’ (p. 145)

  The elegiac tone that suffuses much of Dog Heart and distinguishes it from the previous memoirs comes in part from Breytenbach’s sense of growing old and needing to begin to make farewells, in part from a Buddhist outlook in which worldly attachments retard the progress of the soul (this is the religious side of his ethics of nomadism), but also in part from a sense that the world into which he was born cannot survive. Dog Heart is the first of his prose works in which Breytenbach allows himself to articulate what emerges with intense feeling in the more private world of his poetry: that he comes out of a rural way of life which, despite being based on a colonial dispensation with all its manifold injustices, had become autochthonously African to a remarkable extent; and that in the same moment that the head condemns this way of life and judges it must perish, the heart must mourn its passing. (In this respect Breytenbach is suddenly and strikingly reminiscent of William Faulkner.)

  In the tentative and ambivalent reconciliation that has taken place between Breytenbach and Afrikaners of the old breed, it is the Afrikaners who have had to make the greater shift. In losing political power, including control over the public media, the people from whom Breytenbach dissociated himself in 1983 have lost their power to dictate what an Afrikaner has to be, namely, a ‘white’ of North-European descent, an ethnic nationalist, a Calvinist, a patriarchalist. Dog Heart speaks for a counter-current in which a fragments of groups in disarray begin to define themselves, and perhaps even to assert themselves, in a new way, cohering this time not around a political philosophy but around a shared language larger and wiser than the sum of its speakers, and a shared history, bitter and divided though that history may be.


  IV

  Sharing a language, a history, a feel for the land, a history, perhaps even blood, with ‘my people’, (p. 60) the people of his Heartland, Breytenbach exchanges words with men and women of all states and conditions. Some of these exchanges disconcert him. The (brown) men who renovate his house treat him (the most celebrated poet in their language!) as a foreigner. Accompanying his brother – who stands as an independent candidate in the 1994 elections – on his canvassing rounds, he hears at first hand the level of brown prejudice against blacks. (His informants may of course be playing games with him: they are as much – or as little – Afrikaner as he, and of the Afrikaner, ‘stupid but sly’, he himself writes, ‘my morning prattle and my night tattle are cut from the cloth which suits my interlocutor.’) (p. 175)

  At the dark heart of the memoir lies an event that Breytenbach alludes to several times but never explains. It would appear that at the age of seven he had a choking fit and stopped breathing, that in a sense he died and was reborn as a second Breyten (his very name, he points out, is like an echo; one of his poetic identities is Lazarus). ‘When I look into the mirror I know that the child born here is dead. It has been devoured by the dog.’ (p. 1) So returning to the land of the dog is in a sense a search for the grave of the dead child, the child dead within him.

  In the town museum – where the bust of D.F. Malan, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1948 to 1954, has been discreetly relegated to a storeroom – Breytenbach comes upon a photograph of his great-grandmother Rachel Susanna Keet (d. 1915). From the archives he learns that as a midwife she brought most of the children of Montagu, brown and white, into the world; that she lived unconventionally, adopting and raising a brown child who was not her own. He and his wife search for Rachel Susanna’s grave but cannot find it. So they take over one of the old unmarked graves in the graveyard, adopting it, so to speak, in her name. The book ends on this emblematic note, with Breytenbach marking out, in the name of his dead ancestor rather than of his living child, the most humble of family stakes in Africa.