[In the following excerpt, Ayling offers an assessment of the poems in Salutes and Censures and criticizes Brutus for writing poetry without tension.]

Dennis Brutus was already a well known poet and activist by the time in the early 1980s that he came to collect together the occasional writings that eventually appeared as Salutes and Censures. Of the eight previous collections of his poems, three were of major proportions in quality as well as length: Letters to Martha, A Simple Lust and Stubborn Hope, for all their unevenness, have yet a scope and humane compass that make their author a poet whose contribution to South African letters must be taken into account in any future critical assessment and revaluation of that burgeoning literature. It is highly unlikely, however, that the mixed batch of blasts and benedictions that comprise his Salutes and Censures will ever need to be consulted in reaching any final verdict on Brutus' poetic career. Most of these writings were still born, long before they appeared in print. They neither illuminate his thought and art nor add anything of consequence to his stature as poet or even (as he would seem to claim implicitly in this volume) as social conscience for the Third World.

Salutes and Censures gathers together thirty poems on a wide assortment of topics, though with certain significant themes concerning oppression and resistance predominating. A majority of the poems were written in the late 1970s (mostly, from 1977 to 1980) but "After the stubbornly cheerful day" was composed in 1967 and "You may not see the Nazis" was dated 1966-1967. It is strange to find these early works published here; they do not deserve resurrection.

There is in Salutes and Censures abnegation of the self (a conspicuous absence of the first person singular which had been pervasive throughout his earlier prison writings in the 1960s, for instance, and new emphasis on "we" and "us") and virtual elimination of the individual consciousness and of bodily experience, that "unarticulated simple lust" of a people and, necessarily, of himself that Brutus had sought to realize in his early work. The emphasis on "protest, picket, pamphlet" that he had celebrated in his notable Luthuli poems is, however, even more strongly pronounced here. Among tributes or memorial elegies to resisters to apartheid in South Africa and oppression elsewhere, there are poems to Steve Biko (then little known outside his native land when Brutus wrote his tribute), the heroic children of Soweto, a notable executed freedom fighter (Solomon Mahlangu), the newly victorious Sandinista rebellion in Nicaragua, Karen Silkwood and Beatrix Allende, among others. The censures are widely distributed to the masters (and monsters) in power in the poet's native land, and in the United States (where Brutus has lived for many years), Britain and France.

Brutus' very first collection of poems, which appeared twenty years earlier was aptly entitled Sirens, Knuckles, Boots. The same subject matter—encompassing arbitrary arrests, brutal confinement and routine state oppression of a defenceless populace—is encountered in Salutes and Censures, but a comparison of the two is salutary. The earlier volume, as the pithy title suggests, is more sharply focused on particular images, and it is, above all, concrete and specific. Salutes and Censures, on the other hand, is diffuse, abstract (as title and verse), and slackly generalizing; it is more ambitious in its range of reference (the abuses of human rights now embrace North and South America as well as South Africa) but those evils are less vividly realized and the all-pervasive horrors less memorably apprehended. Salutes and Censures as a title honestly suggests the volume's scope and limitations. It acknowledges the public nature to both sides of the experience that are embodied here and, at the same time, reveals the lack of a personal dimension and of what one can only describe as poetic intensity; almost imperceptibly, the tension at the heart of his work has somehow slackened. The imagination is not as actively engaged, as it is in a good deal of his prison writings. The salutes are just that—public gestures rather than strongly felt elegies or passionate commemorative tributes. And the censures, similarly, never rise to the level of true satire; obdurately, they remain little more than downright denunciations, censorious criticism of a mostly abstract and portentous nature. In such a context, the writing, while it appears more wideranging than in the early work, is deceptive even in this regard. It is not, paradoxically, as universal.

Often, the universal in art is achieved by means of the specific, the local, the regional—witness Faulkner, Hardy, Achebe, poets of a particular region, whose major concerns and preoccupations, once deeply explored and actualized in appropriate native speech and imagery, can be seen to have all-encompassing implications and relevance. In Salutes and Censures, Brutus as a public figure reaches for a larger significance in the world as global village; attempting oracular utterance, he succeeds in speaking more as a politician than a poet; certainly, he is more the activist-critic than a true voice of the people—a distinction, that could not as often be made, I think, in Letters to Martha and some of the other earlier verses. The best of that work, though admittedly uneven, combined the private and the public, the confessional and the committed, the sentient as well as the sententious in characteristically individual and arresting ways. The susceptible man and the apprehensive man was discernible in addition to the social critic and reformer; and not only did the two sides of his poetic sensibility not clash, they actively set off and complemented each other. The criticism and social commitment is intensified and reified by the depth of personal involvement and vulnerability exposed in both the pre-Robben Island and the Robben Island periods in Brutus' poetry. The same claim cannot as surely be made for Salutes and Censures and other post-Robben Island verse by him.

Obviously, Brutus has deliberately simplified his later poetic style—usually to emphasize unambiguous straightforward statements, uttered without ornamentation or any kind of poetic diction and with no discernible traces of literary artifice, influence or reverberations. By means of plain unvarnished invocation and reiteration, the poet clearly aims to speak to the oppressed peoples of the world. It is evident that the exile feels compelled to speak, to give utterance to his concerns and fears, to express his solidarity with the oppressed—and, above all, to let them know that. Understandably, direct simple statement seems called for, and it is interesting that Brutus' playwriting compatriot, Athol Fugard, went through a period in the 1970s where he, likewise, placed a good deal of emphasis on similarly didactic expression. A volume of three of his most obviously antiapartheid plays was published under the general title of Statements at this time and the longest of the three appeared as Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act. Yet Fugard never abstracts the language and characterization to serve his message and, in the use of mime and humorous effects, in The Island, he humanizes and individualizes prison life and the horrors of apartheid for the blacks in South Africa.

Brutus, in seeking to serve what he sees as the need to communicate more widely with a largely non-literary public in the Third World, has sacrificed linguistic complexity and individual expressiveness, putting his thoughts and feelings into common speech patterns that, more often used by journalists and politicians, fall into hackneyed images and predictable pronouncements even in a poet's deployment. I am not complaining of the parallelism and repetition, functional elements in much black South African poetry designed for oral delivery (in the work of Serote, Madingoane, Mafika Gwala, for instance), where the poets need to repeat things in a large hall crowded with kids running around and mothers with babies on their backs. It is the pervasive abstraction and lack of particularity that is troubling. From very early in Salutes and Censures we find both: in the first poem, "Salute to Our Allies," we never learn who are "our allies" and who are "our friends," so the salute becomes something of a private message, which surely defeats the poet's apparent intention to reach out to a large audience, world-wide and Africa-wide. Cliches and pedestrian phrases abound throughout. The illuminations of London's West End are "garish pyrotechnics"; England's parliament is

that place of shame
spawner of slavery's systems,
hoarse-throated still with lust
for Africa's rape
they plot fresh perfidy
emerge smiling
dripping their fetter of festering lies
(Brutus, 7).

Certain benedictory elegies are hackneyed throughout, moreover, as in these lines "For the Kent State Martyrs," which would assuredly have been excised from earlier collections by Brutus:

We will remember them
as long as we live

we will remember them
at the rising of the sun
and its going down
we will remember
the martyrs of Kent State
who died in May 1970

For justice they died
for justice here in this place
and for justice in a far-off place
thousands of miles away
they died by the guns of oppressors

And we will remember them
we swear we will remember them
and keep their memory alive
(Brutus, 24).

Occasional poems in this collection do rise above the generally pervasive banality though none, to my mind, entirely surmount it. One of the better examples, written in 1980, is "Robben Island," the last poem to be gathered here. Perhaps, in recollecting a nightmare experience from his prison days almost twenty years earlier and using it for memorial purposes, the verse regains some earlier vivacity:

In a long shot down the rectangular enclosure
stone-walled, with barred windows I find myself
anonymous
among the other faceless prisoners

I see myself again bent on my stone block
crouched over my rockpile
and marvel

I see the men beside me
Peake and Alexander
Mandela and Sisulu
and marvel

All the grim years.
And all the marvellous men
who endure beyond the grim years.
The will to freedom steadily grows
The force, the power, the strength
Steadily grows
(Brutus, 38).

Despite some slackness toward the end of the poem, there is a certain stark objective grandeur about this lyric, like a commemorative statue in granite. Something of an exception among the abstract aridity of this collection, even this achievement is put into its properly minor perspective by comparison with the more moving personal idiom of his early prison poems. Letters to Martha, at their best, can be indelibly commemorative and transcend the individual while yet being firmly rooted in the private and the personal for (as he wrote in letter 5) his verse there sought to "people the labyrinth of self in a manner stoutly resisted in most of his subsequent work. In Salutes and Censures, while eschewing (largely) the personal and private, there is also a commensurate ignoring of the physical—that which, earlier, was vibrantly celebrated as the "body's expression of need" and its vulnerability too—as well as banishing the occasional romantic and lyrical outbursts to be found effectively harnessed as counterpoint to brutal daily indignities in the early verse. One would wish Brutus to return to first principles such as these—perhaps tempered by occasional flashes of humour that existed there too—that, collectively, enlivened the best of his earlier writings. Does the poet not remember his own wise words—acute in self-criticism as well as in understanding the strengths in his work—in the fine interview he gave to Cosmo Pieterse in 1966? There, he said: "I think tension is of the essence of good poetry," and went on to acknowledge that "there is an element of laughter in my work; it may be that I am engaged in a fight but at the same time I find a certain delight in it. I enjoy the fight; and this is where the laughter and the music, the gaiety and the humour come in" (Duerden, 54-5). Tension, laughter, music and gaiety are largely absent from Brutus's later writings though not from his life and personality.

Brutus should himself be saluted for trying to reach out to a large (and largely unlettered) audience, but need one throw out the poetry in the attempt? Of course, greater poets in our period have pursued a somewhat similar path: T.S. Eliot, for instance, in trying to find a place for poetry in the modern theatre became less and less intricate in thought and speech to the extent, finally, that his later plays are hardly poetic drama at all. The sophisticated West End audience that Eliot had in mind is far removed from Brutus's intended readership, but both writers have traversed the same arid terrain. It is questionable whether either man has succeeded in breaking through to a new public for poetry. A strong case can be made out for trying to do so, however, and, in the case of Dennis Brutus's protracted experiment, a final judgement has to be suspended for the time being. The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for the particularly shallow instances gathered together as Salutes and Censures.

Works Cited

Brutus, Dennis. Salutes and Censures. Enugu, Nigeria: Fourth Dimension Pubi. Co. Ltd., 1984.

Duerden, Dennis and Cosmo Pieterse, eds. African Writers Talking. London: Heinemann, 1972.