Guest of the ilb 2002
Breyten Breytenbach was born
in 1939 as son of a Boer family in Bonnievale in the South African Cape
Province and grew up in the small town of Wellington. He broke off his
studies in the fine arts and literature which he started in Cape Town
because the politics of Apartheid in his country were no longer
bearable for him. In 1961 he settled in Paris and worked as an English
teacher, started to paint and wrote his first poems in his mother
tongue, Afrikaans. When the ANC was banned, Breytenbach decided to stay
in Paris. He was co-founder of the opposition group »Okehela« which
co-ordinated resistance outside South Africa. His marriage with a
Vietnamese woman was declared as invalid by the South African
regime. In 1975 Breytenbach was arrested with a false passport in his
home country and sentenced to nine years in prison and was only
released in 1982 under international pressure. One year later he took
on French citizenship. Today he lives in Paris, New York, Dakar and
Johannesburg.
Breyten Breytenbach started his writing with
poems, with loose rhythmic verses which link, in their nervous imagery,
mythic religious narratives with the rough South African present day.
These poems are very down to earth, weaved with slang and specialist
language, interspersed with neologisms and grammar from political
speeches. Here Breytenbach’s texts meet his works as an artist which
sometimes appear as visual poetry.
His years in prison which he vociferously
described with an exact view for the repressive structures in the novel
»The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist« (1984) is only a fragment
of the personal experience from which Breytenbach’s texts come.
His picture of South Africa is pessimistic: even
the end of the Apartheid regime can’t hide the miserable social
relationships. Yet his most recent books are characterized by a basic
motif: the return to South Africa. One of these, which came out in
1993, is called »Return to Paradise«. This travel journal, the rhythm
of which is characterized by countless encounters and journeys,
reflects the peace process and the violence, memories of a personal
past and the atrocity of Apartheid. Feverish and polemic, pessimistic
and yet sometimes, in a hidden way, loving, this book is as equally a
lament as the prose collection which came out in 1996 »The Memory of
Birds in Times of Revolution« in which Breytenbach lays bare the
contradictions of exile. Behind the
self-reflection, a network of destruction of the 20th century can be
recognized in his texts, ranging from the National Socialist camps to
the death cells of the Apartheid regime, to the War in Bosnia. In his
book which came out in 1999, »Dog Heart«, Breyten Breytenbach expands
the sombre perspective through a precise and compassionate view on
rural South Africa, on the many eccentrics and drinkers, on the hard
living people and their language rich in nuances.
Breyten Breytenbach
has also gained reputation internationally as a painter. His foremost
surrealist paintings were exhibited in Johannesburg, Cape Town,
Hongkong, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Paris, Brussels, Edinburgh, and New
York, among other cities.
© international literature festival berlin
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