The Dennis Brutus Tapes: Essays at Autobiography (review)

Dennis Brutus had at least one characteristic in common with Bill Clinton: he was a tremendous talker. Whether in informal conversation or in more formal situations such as conferences, Brutus had the rare gift to speak not only in complete, grammatical sentences, but also in coherent paragraphs. Bernth Lindfors's very light editing of these transcripts of tapes recorded in 1974 and 1975 while Brutus was a visiting professor at the University of Texas indicates just how fluently and clearly Brutus articulated and organized his thoughts (2). Although the transcripts are fragments, the structure of each fragment is so clear and the sequencing of the topics is so well conceived that the first section of the book, entitled "Life" and spanning more than 140 pages, presents a remarkably coherent "essay at autobiography."

In one of the later tapes in this first section of Lindfors's collection, Brutus claims to "shrink from the notion of autobiography" (123), because he cannot discern a pattern or unifying thread in his life. Despite that claim, Brutus was a compulsive autobiographer, who used his own experience for political purposes, not only to produce some of the most powerful political poetry of the twentieth century (the Robben Island sequence in Letters to Martha stands out), but also to organize resistance first to the apartheid regime and subsequently to the global apartheid of neoliberal economic injustice. Brutus the organizer—playing key roles in the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), the Stop the Seventy Tour (STST), the International Defence and Aid Fund, the African Literature Association (ALA)—constantly put himself on the line as more than spokesperson, as a kind of flesh-and-blood synecdoche. Brutus's "I" frequently morphs in these tapes into the representative "one," "you," or "we."

His tendency to assume this kind of synecdochic persona while drawing from intensely recalled personal experience fairly consistently put him at odds with less quixotic campaigners. (Brutus in these tapes variously describes himself as "absent-minded," "dreamy" and "naïve.") One of the highlights of the book comes in Brutus's indignant but thoughtful response to a critical review, presumed to have been written by Alex La Guma, of the collection A Simple Lust. Brutus attempts to grapple with three chief criticisms of him and his work: that the work is self-centered; that Brutus is not representative of South African society; and that the high level and Eurocentrism of his Europeanized education lead to a style and diction that cannot speak to the South African masses. Brutus refutes all three charges, presenting evidence from his own work. Picking a very straightforward poem ("I am the tree / creaking in the wind . . ."), he partly concedes the charge of egotism, but argues that "by a kind of extension the 'I' in the poem is the 'I' of all South Africans protesting against the injustice of this apartheid system" (174).

While much of the content of the tapes is already well known, and indeed some of the material has already been published elsewhere, this collection valuably fills out our picture of Dennis Brutus. Nowhere else, for instance, can one learn quite so much detail about his early life, the straitened circumstances of his parents' marriage, and the pain of Brutus's relationship with his largely absent father. Nowhere, too, do we get quite such an unequivocal confirmation of the impact of Catholicism in Brutus's life and poetry. We learn, for instance, how he dared the security police to arrest him for breaking his ban under the Suppression of Communism Act by attending church, and we learn, too, that while in solitary confinement on Robben Island, one of his chief mental supports was Thomas à Kempis.

Along the way, the tapes throw out one or two fascinating potential research topics when Brutus refers to texts that presumably exist but that he has no record of—including his statement from the dock at his trial in 1965, and of material he had...