SOURCE: "Resisters," in New York Review of Books, Vol. XL, No. 20, December 2, 1993, pp. 3-6.

In 1960 Breyten Breytenbach left his native South Africa to live in Paris, where he wrote poetry and painted. There he fell in love with and married a woman of Vietnamese descent. Interracial marriages being illegal in the South Africa of those days, he could not return home with his wife; he refused to return without her.

In 1972, in a gesture of conciliation toward the Afrikaans intellectual community, which was troubled by such treatment of a man who had in the meantime become widely acknowledged as the leading poet of his generation, the South African government granted Breytenbach and his wife visas for a brief visit. During this visit Breytenbach gave an uncompromising address at a writers' conference: it is because Afrikaners are a bastard people, he said, that they are obsessed with racial purity; apartheid is the law of the bastard. As for the future of South Africa, that lay in the hands of black South Africans: the task of white intellectuals could only be to work for the transformation of their own community.

In furtherance of this goal, Breytenbach returned to South Africa on a forged French passport to recruit sympathizers to an organization dedicated to sabotaging military and industrial targets. Because of incompetence and perhaps even treachery among his ANC associates, he was picked up by the security police, put on trial, and given a long sentence, of which he served seven years.

In 1980, while he was still in prison, his book A Season in Paradise appeared, first in the Netherlands, then in the English-speaking world—a memoir of the 1972–1973 visit interspersed with poems, reminiscences, and reflections on the South African situation (it includes the text of the address mentioned above). The title A Season in Paradise casts an ironical glance at Rimbaud's Une Saison en enfer; Breytenbach's new book, Return to Paradise, carries the echoes further ("this region of damnation," he calls the country now)—in fact, as he explains in a preface, the two Paradise books are meant to be read together with his prison memoir, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, as an autobiographical triptych addressing a chapter of his life now closed, a chapter during which he struggled to grasp the nature of his links to the landscape and history of the continent on which he was born.

Return to Paradise is casually organized, as was the earlier book. It is a loose narrative of the journey he made in 1991, again accompanied by his wife, through F. W. De Klerk's "reformed" South Africa, intercut with horror stories from South African newspapers and with flashbacks to visits to other parts of Africa.

Breytenbach—who is now a French citizen—had visited South Africa several times in the 1980s—visits hemmed in by official obstructionism—so what he sees in 1991 does not come as a complete surprise to him. Nevertheless, as he remarks after a tour through the killing fields of Natal province, where, in a landscape of unsurpassed beauty, ANC and Inkatha adherents daily slaughter each other with gun and spear, "I am looking at the future and it chills me to the bone…. The land is awash in blood."

If the future holds not interracial harmony but interethnic and internecine warfare without end, then where did it all go wrong? At whose door does the fault lie?

In part Breytenbach blames the present state of affairs on the ANC's policy of "making the townships ingovernable," in part on the Zulu leader Gatsha Buthelezi, waging a stubborn, clandestine war for his share of the spoils; but he identifies the ultimate source of evil as elements in the white state that have decided. "If we have to be brought down we shall topple the pillars of Babylon with us." These elements, "niched within the shadowy reaches of occult structures and operations and secret funds," pull the strings that control the daily may-hem, "like mad dogs who go on biting even without orders to do so."

This is not an original analysis. Whoever it may have been who fired the first shot, the bloodletting today is being carried out by ANC-affiliated youth beyond the control of family or party leadership, by Buthelezi's irregulars battling against what they see as the marginalizing of the Aulu people, and by agents, some from ultra-right organizations, some within the state security forces, operating directly or through proxies to create as much chaos as they can. Nor can Breytenbach offer an account of what is happening on the ground any more vivid—or more appalling—than what he quotes from the daily newspapers.

If there is anything surprising about Breytenbach's views, therefore, it is that he seems to regard the spectacle of cliques of middle-aged men negotitating their slice of the cake while their followers fight it out as a betrayal of the promise of the revolution. "We are too pusillanimous to make the Revolution, to abort it, then to use the corpses as stepping-stones to the masters' table of shared power." "This is the new [South Africa] … more broadly based hegemony but [the] same mechanisms and same sadness." One is tempted to ask: What does Breytenbach expect from politicians? Is politics not about making deals?

In a preface to the English-language edition dated 1993, Breytenbach grudgingly moderates his lament that the revolution has been betrayed. "In order to sleep soundly the dream must be devoured," he concedes in a sinister metaphor, hinting that the state selects the best children, the revolutionary dreamers, to sacrifice first.

He moderates his lament but does not withdraw it: the new order he sees emerging is not the order he fought for. While he is not so naive as not to recognize that his "small whimpers for an impossible revolution" are utopian, he refuses to yield up the right of the poet to imagine a future beyond the capacity of politicians and so to have a prophetic say in the future—even the right to bite the hand that has fed him.

What, besides the wasted prison years, has Breytenbach given up to the revolution? He has been dragged into the factionalism, intrigue, and backstabbing of exile polities. He has also been part of the anti-apartheid circuit, attending conferences, making speeches, giving readings. Return to Paradise allows only glimpses of what this circuit entailed: among other things, holding his tongue when he saw funds from Western philanthropists being cynically ripped off; not antagonizing venal African dictatorships' where to have the most elementary freedom of movement he had to pay off the thugs assigned to guard him.

We get a fuller picture of the poet's life on the 1991 visit to South Africa, also paid for by a foundation: readings in noisy lecture halls where the audience doesn't understand the language and comes only to inspect the oddity named Breytenbach; perplexed responses ("But aren't you ever happy? Now that we've won, can't you rejoice?" asks an ANC comrade). His hosts react with incomprehension and hostility when he asserts that his role in the future will be as it was in the past: "To be against the norm, orthodoxy, the canon, hegemony, politics, the State, power…. Man is the enemy of the machine"—sentiments which do not go down well in a country that has, as he observes dryly, slid straight from pre-humanity to post-humanity.

The message Breytenbach brings with him on his tour is that the world is losing interest in Africa the Beggar Continent. "To Europe Africa is only a mass of human matter making a mass sport of dying." South Africans, spoiled by decades in the international spotlight, will have to learn to be self-sufficient. What he does not add, but might have, is that American and European foundations are no longer going to pay for South African intellectuals to congregate in exotic locales and talk about their visions of the future. In more ways than one, Return to Paradise signals the end of a certain road, not for Breytenbach alone but for left-leaning South African intellectuals in general: unless they are able to find a role for themselves that gives them critical (and economic) independence from a government they will have helped to bring to power, they will be absorbed into an establishment, become part of an orthodoxy.

So the spirit in which Breytenbach concludes his autobiographical triptych is by no means one of tranquility. On the contrary, he uses Return to Paradise 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 ("whenever a head of state beckons he will comply") and Jesse Jackson ("each time the camera looked his way he was on his feet with clenched fist held high and a pious tear in the combative eye; when the camera swung away he was back to supercilious boredom"), and particularly, for its leaders' 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 black-balled 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.

Of the ANC leadership, only Nelson Mandela is singled out for praise. To Mandela, as seen on a ceremonial visit to France, Breytenbach devotes several pages of close and even affectionate attention:

His mind seemed totally unshackled, freed from fear and small considerations, so that he could speak it directly (in contrast to Mitterrand's, which is infinitely devious, or that of De Klerk—maimed by apartheid—which has to juggle with the unsaid and the need to emit double messages)…. Only the lips in repose betrayed him—severe, dark, aloof, bitter. It is the mouth which sometimes says more, and more eloquently, than the voice can; lips close over the unsayable: This cannot be spoken about, so why bother?

But the plague that Breytenbach pronounces upon all the parties to the South African conflict—a judgment in which, despite the pungency of the language, there remains something wild and out of control—makes up the less interesting half of the book. His 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 Breytenbach has spent almost all his adult life in Europe, he is not 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.

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." An immensely gifted writer, he is 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. This faculty of his is not individual, he insists, but is inherited from his Afrikaner ancestors, "forebears with the deep eyes of injured baboons," whose lives had been spent in intimate relation with their native landscape, so that when he brings forth that landscape in words he is speaking in their voices as much as his own.

It is this very traditional, very African realization—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 of Return to Paradise. For though Breytenbach may recognize how marginal he is in what is nowadays on all sides, and with equal irony, called "the new South Africa," and may even enjoy dramatizing himself as the one without a self, the bastard, the "nomadic nobody," or, in his favorite postmodern figure, the face in the mirror, a textual shadow without substance, he knows that exile blunts feeling and that ultimately he owes his strength to the earth and the ancestors. 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—the good angel who has watched over him through so many tribulations—to the old places of Africa.