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Poetry & Protest:  A Dennis Brutus Reader                                                

Edited by Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim.  Chicago, IL, Haymarket Books.  2006.  414 pp.  ISBN 1-931859-22-1.  Flat spine.  $16.00. 

 

Poetry & Protest is essentially a collection of poetry and essays written by Dennis Brutus, who was once banned from writing and publishing and arrested for doing so in South Africa.  Brutus is a South African poet, essayist, professor, and human rights activist.  He is now in his 80s and, from the book-cover photograph, looks Caucasian with long, straight, scraggly white hair.  In actuality, he was labeled “colored” in accord with apartheid law and at one point would not have been permitted to join the African National Congress, which once only allowed blacks to become members.  Brutus describes himself as a staunch individualist:  “But when I was in South Africa, in a very large South African community—and a very narrow one, with a terribly ghettoized mentality—one of the ways I managed not to become ghettoized myself, so that I never became the typical subservient black man or, for that matter, the typical rebellious and frustrated black man, but something in between, was because I said, ‘In fact, I am a citizen of the world.’ […] And this meant that one transcended a local patriotism.”

            In his youth, Brutus was arrested, escaped, shot by the police through the back and intestines, captured, and imprisoned at Robben Island with Nelson Mandela in the 1960s.  This alone would make excellent subject matter for poetry and other writing.  Eventually, Brutus was exiled and spent time in Britain and the USA, amongst other countries, and became a “key political actor in the history of the anti-apartheid struggle,” in the words of editors Sustar and Karim. 

            For some reason, many of the poems in this volume fail to affect, leaving me wondering what “world-class poet” really means, the term used by the editors to designate Brutus.  Such terms tend to be vacuous in today’s world of literature.  Wouldn’t it be best to simply not use them and let the reader decide whether or not a poet is good… or bad?  Many of the poems come off as verbose, if not academic, as if their purpose were merely to flaunt the poet’s ability to use high vocabulary in tediously, long descriptive lines.  Compare them to the potent, much less wordy poems, especially the prison poems, of another African poet, Kenule Saro-Wiwa. 

            Perhaps it is Brutus’ exile into the comfy [or almost comfy, for he was harassed during the Reagan administration with threats of deportation] and well-remunerated world of American universities and lecture circuits that somehow softened his critical edge and passion, and “academized” his verse.  His poem “Exile, exile” illustrates the point. 

            In an untitled poem, Brutus seems to forget about the comfortable university positions he held in America, as well as the lucrative lecture invitations.  It oozes with primal, if not simplistic, anti-American disdain. 

 

The home of the brave

and the land of the free

to massacre:

 

the land of liberty

and freedom of choice

of subjection for others:

 

the land of plenty

and quality education

for people of quality:

 

Amerika the beautiful

cesspool.

 

            Another untitled poem illustrates what the easy life of recognition can do to a poet. This poem, however, does resound with a definite, though sad, element of truth. 

 

Off to Philadelphia in the morning

after blueberry pancakes U.S.A.

with silver images of people

wrestling the racial problem

flickering on my retina-screen;

 

outside the shark limousines glide

past neons, glass and chrome

on 42nd nudies writhe

their sterile unproductive lust;

 

off to Philadelphia in the morning

to rehearse some moulded and half-singing words,

remouth some banal platitudes

and launch-lodge some arrows

from a transient unambitious hand,

a nerveless unassertive gripe.

 

            Perhaps the best poems in the volume are the earlier ones that recount Brutus’ incarceration at Robben Island (e.g., “On the island,” “Robben Island sequence,” and “Endurance”).  Another untitled poem is one I shall be quoting, at least the last two lines.  In fact, the editors quote it in their introduction.  As for those lines, I’ll have to send them to the college president of an HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) where I used to teach.  She’d declared at one of her numerous faculty meetings that everyone should get rid of his or her old baggage.  I’d challenged that statement, arguing that old baggage could in fact be useful for creativity and democracy. 

 

I must lug my battered body

garbage-littered

across the frontiers of the world,

recite my wear-shined clichés

for nameless firesides,

and fidget, a supple suppliant, for papers

in a thousand wooden anti-rooms;

wince, in the tense air of recognition

as the clean-limbed, simple and innocent grow hostile;

—in my baggage I bear the ticking explosives

of reproach, and threat, and challenge. 

 

            Brutus is perhaps best when devoid of heavy vocabulary descriptions and metaphors [e.g., “How are the shoots of affection withered at the root?/ What lops the tendrils that reach out/ and what blights the tender feeling buds?”).  Note, for example, “And remember/ the men on the island/ on strips of matting/ on the cold floor/ between cold walls/ and the long, endless night.”

            Clearly, what will probably please the reader most in this volume is not the poetry per se, but rather the essays, both personal and political.  “Literature and commitment in South Africa” and “The Artist as Political Activist” are of particular interest.  In the latter, Brutus notes how much he was influenced by the poet Auden. 

 

When I became politically active, I quit writing poetry.  Because I couldn’t stand the way that poetry is just literary, you know, out of touch with reality.  I didn’t feel I could go on writing poetry.  I actually quit.  And then an interesting thing happened.  While teaching W.H. Auden, a major English poet, I observed in him the ability to merge the private and

 

the public, the aesthetic and the political.  And I went back to poetry, because I saw a way that you could make a political statement, simultaneously and honestly—you know, it’s not manufactured sloganeering.  This is genuine poetical expression, which merges political comment with personal comment, including love lyrics.

 

            In that essay, Brutus also notes how he rejected a literary prize he’d won for poetry.  It was a contest held by a radical literary journal based in Paris and open only to poets of African decent.  “So I wrote a critique of this, and said poetry is not about ethnicity.”  

            What will also probably please the reader is Brutus’ incessant desire to put truth above all else.  “I say, if you see something that is wrong, don’t be polite.  Don’t be nice to us.  If you think something is going wrong you have an obligation to give us your solidarity, but it has to be critical solidarity. […]  We must go forward, but to a genuine democracy, not a cosmetic one which will please the corporations.”  Indeed, what will please the reader is that Brutus is not a blind follower of any orthodoxy, organization or leader, including Mandela, who he criticizes on at least several occasions.

 

Mandela came out of Robben Island announcing, “The people are going to own the wealth of the land.”  Three months later he was meeting with the Chamber of Business saying “We wouldn’t dream of nationalizing the coal mines.  We wouldn’t dream of nationalizing the banks or the diamond mines.”  The same man said this.  South African businesses emerged virtually unscathed.  

 

            “Those who want to preserve the remnants of apartheid are white, but also black,” states Brutus, who is careful in his diverse essays not to paint a black and white simplistic view of the state of affairs.  He is critical, harshly and rightfully so.  “Those blacks like Buthelezi [a leader of the Zulu nation] who benefited from apartheid are anxious to see some of it retained, and indeed, they’d like to see their own apartheid enclaves.”  “The [black] politicians are riding in Mercedes limousines with chauffeurs, and they are so comfortable.  This is the same city [Cape Town] where one-third of the population lives in slums […].”

            The reviewer definitely recommends Poetry & Protest not only because of its historical pertinence, but also for its literary content and wisdom. 

                                                                                                                                                                                         —The Editor