In 1975, after more than a decade of exile in Paris, the "whitish" (his term) Afrikaans-speaking poet and painter Breyten Breytenbach returned to South Africa incognito in order to help organize white resistance to apartheid. Arrested and convicted, he spent seven years in prison, two of them in solitary confinement. It is probably thanks to this involuntary sojourn—a story told with freshness and modesty in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1985)—that we now have End Papers, a collection of 50-odd addresses, analyses, poetico-political fragments and essays by Mr. Breytenbach, together with extensive notes on their occasions.

International publicity helped get the author out of prison, and since his release and return to France in December 1982 he has stayed in the spotlight. For obvious reasons, he has been a fixture at PEN, Unesco and anti-apartheid conferences around the world, where on the evidence of this book he has acquitted himself stylishly, and with more political acumen that one might have predicted from his verse.

Even the most legitimate outrage has its ruts, but Mr. Breytenbach avoids most of them. He is drawn to uncomfortable topics: the likelihood that "reform" measures will only reinforce apartheid, and the relations between black and white resistance writers (white writers must choose "absolute solidarity with their Black colleagues, even without any recognition from the latter").

In his reports on the conference circuit, Mr. Breytenbach drops some names (he describes to the blind Borges the latter's new medal, eats spaghetti with Sophia Loren and Ugo Tognazzi, shares prison anecdotes with Lev Kopelev, the original of Solzhenitsyn's character Rubin in The First Circle). And his excursions into travel writing, which go with the same territory, are not always worth the detour ("Berlin the scarred … Rome eternally seductive"). To his credit, however, Mr. Breytenbach tends to be self-conscious about such lapses, as about the other ironies of being a prison-produced celebrity whose least word on sundry matters is suddenly publishable.

One of these ironies is that although he became newsworthy by virtue of having physically "been there," his chosen subject is often the meaning of not being there, of feeling displaced from the revolutionary center as a white, and even more as an exile and an artist. Mr. Breytenbach strikes the same chord again and again, making the book resound with his ambivalence. Fearing that his location and vocation make him irrelevant to, or even a betrayer of, the South African blacks who are "chucking the stones they cannot eat," he makes an eloquent appeal for solidarity.

Less explicitly, however, he also glorifies that same treacherous irrelevance as a precondition of poetic lucidity and an antidote to tyrannies old and new. For a poet to be in exile, he says, is to be cast off from his people and language; an Afrikaans-speaking writer in an English-speaking world knows the disadvantages of being cut adrift. Yet he also has special reasons for arguing that literature demands detachment from the language (and values) of the tribe. Thus certain questions remain, vexing the prose into nervous animation. Is his marginality a sign of artistic sterility or vitality? Is it a model of proper, permanent opposition to authority or a mark of political impotence?

Mr. Breytenbach's problem may be simply his definition of art, or rather the (conference-induced?) urge to define it. In sections like "Poetry Is" and "I Write," he scrolls slowly through mutually contradictory concepts: communication, silence, memory, forgetting, propaganda, pollution, survival, rape. The listing is a subversive act, for it suggests that all answers to Sartre's question "What is literature?" have become equally possible and equally meaningless—even if Sartre's call to engagement remains. At any rate, what is most interesting in Mr. Breytenbach's own writing is not the familiar celebration of art as a bastion of individual autonomy against the state, but his timely experiments with cultural interaction, bastardization, mutation. The mixing of cultures answers apartheid in its own terms.

Breyten Breytenbach recently returned to South Africa on the occasion of an award for YK, one of the volumes of poetry he wrote while in prison. It is tempting but premature to interpret this gesture as a judgment on his own attraction to the esthetics of exile. In any event, his act can only add to the interest of End Papers, whose drama lies in literature's scramble after history at its most dramatic.