The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution (review)

The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution: Essays on Africa, by Breyten Breytenbach. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996. 169 pp.

Breyten Breytenbach is obsessed with reflection. Mirrors haunt his work. ¹ Consider Mouroir (London: Faber, 1984), subtitled "Mirrornotes of a Novel" one chapter of which is named "Book, a Mirror." Even the book's French title, referring to the place where one is taken to die, enticingly echoes the English word "mirror," and the first piece in his recent collection, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, is "Writing the Darkening Mirror." Towards the end of this book, he even talks of learning that "the mind can be a mirror to nothingness" (161). But it is important to recognize the additional meanings of reflection aroused by Breytenbach's work: "the action of bringing back from a state of anger or estrangement," "return," "relation, connexion," "deep or serious consideration," "remembrance" (OED).

Breytenbach is one of the people portrayed in Lawrence Weschler's book Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). Indeed, exile is one of the important factors in his life and career. (Dissidence is another.) In one of the many moving passages in The Memory of Birds, Breyenbach writes:

Exile has brought it home to me that I'm African. If I live in Europe most of the time, it is not as a participant but an observer, an underground activist for Africa. My pale skin and my Western garb make it possible for me to 'pass for white'. But my heart beats with the secret rhythms of that continent which seems to have sunk below the perception horizon of the North. At night I go out to scribble on the walls of the old imperial cities: Africa lives! (46-47)

In 1959, at age twenty, Breytenbach left South Africa, eventually settling in Paris, where he intended to become a painter. And become a painter he did, though he is more widely known and acclaimed as an author. Examples of his paintings can be found as cover illustrations on the dustjackets of the American hardback editions of his books End Papers (1986), a collection of essays, and Judas Eye and Self-Portrait/Deathwatch (1988), a double collection of poems. I also have in my possession a Dutch volume, published in Amsterdam, containing some of Breytenbach's essays as well as paintings and drawings (Uit de Eerste Hand, 1995). I'm enticed by his use of color, but on the whole, I prefer Breytenbach's writings to his visual works.

Breytenbach became an anti-apartheid activist, officially returning to South Africa for a short stay in 1973 (a journey, or what he called a "Nocturnal Intrip," that he documented in the ironically titled A Season in Paradise [1980]), going back again surreptitiously in 1975, where he was "arrested, convicted of 'terrorism,' and imprisoned for seven years, two of them in solitary confinement," as we are informed on the back cover of the US paperback edition of his account of these experiences, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1983). The previously mentioned Mouroir, another record of this sojourn in hell, was written during his time in prison.

"Mentioning Africa," Breytenbach writes in The Memory of Birds, "instantly brings to the fore either one of two discourses. Seen from the outside, from the north (which is also the norm), the thinkthing resembles a kind of big black bag into which everything disappears" (124). Thinkthing. Let your mind savor for a moment that example of Breytenbach's incisive wordplay and its affinity to the title of the chapter in which it appears," Africa on My Mind," and that chapter's theme, Africa in the mind--as subject, as object, as imaginary. Another instance can be found much earlier in the book, when Breytenbach muses, "Maybe life is one long flashback. (I'd be inclined to call it a blackflash)" (3). Blackflash. This is what...