Gods and Soldiers (42 page)

It is a claim that will probably not stand up to scholarly scrutiny, but it does enable Breytenbach to advance his revisionist version of the Afrikaner pioneer. Whereas in the establishment version these pioneers were white-skinned farmers who, Bible in one hand and gun in the other, trekked into the interior of Africa to found republics where they would govern themselves free of British interference, in Breytenbach's version they become people of inextricably mixed genetic origin who followed their herds and flocks into the interior because they had learned a wandering lifestyle from the Khoi pastoralists. And (Breytenbach's argument goes), the sooner the modern Afrikaner discards the illusion of himself as the bearer of light in the African darkness, and accepts himself as merely one of Africa's nomads—that is to say, as a rootless and unsettled being, with no claim of proprietorship over the earth—the better his chance of survival.

But bastardy, Breytenbach warns, is not an easy fate. It entails a continual making and unmaking of the self; it is necessarily dogged by a sense of loss. “[Yet] it is good to travel to become poor.”
³⁰
Thus Breytenbach links the two themes of his ethical philosophy: bastardy and nomadism. Just as the bastard sheds his self and enters into an unpredictable mixture with the other, so the nomad uproots himself from the old, comfortable dwelling place to follow the animals, or the smells of the wind, or the figures of his imagination, into an uncertain future.

It is against such a background that one must read the gruesome reports in
Dog Heart
of attacks on whites in the countryside of the new South Africa. These stories make disturbing reading not only because of the psychopathic violence of the attacks themselves, but because they are being repeated at all. For the circulation of horror stories is the very mechanism that drives white paranoia about being chased off the land and ultimately into the sea. Why does Breytenbach lend himself to the process?

His response is that rural violence is by no means a new phenomenon. From the old days he resurrects stories of men like Koos Sas and Gert April and Dirk Ligter, “Hottentots” or “Bushmen” who flitted like ghosts from farm to farm sowing death and destruction before at last being tracked down and killed. In the folk memory of brown people, he suggests, these men are not criminal bandits but “resistance fighters.”
³¹
In other words, farm murders, and crimes in general against whites—even the crime directed against the Breytenbachs when their home in Montagu is broken into and vandalized—are indeed part of a larger historical plot which has everything to do with the arrogation of the land by whites in colonial times.

The land, says Breytenbach, belongs to no one, and the correct relation to the land is the nomad's: live on it, live off it, move on; find ways of loving it without becoming bound to it. This is the lesson he teaches his French-born daughter, a child clearly drawn to the wildness and freedom of the country, as he takes her around the sacred sites of memory. Do not become too attached, he warns. “We are painted in the colours of disappearance here . . . We are only visiting . . . It must die away.”
³²

The elegiac tone that suffuses much of
Dog Heart
and distinguishes it from the previous memoirs comes in part from Breytenbach's sense of growing old and needing to begin to make farewells, in part from a Buddhist outlook in which worldly attachments retard the progress of the soul (this is the religious side of his ethics of nomadism), but also in part from a sense that the world into which he was born cannot survive.
Dog Heart
is the first of his prose works in which Breytenbach allows himself to articulate what emerges with intense feeling in the more private world of his poetry: that he comes out of a rural way of life which, despite being based on a colonial dispensation with all its manifold injustices, had become autochthonously African to a remarkable extent; and that in the same moment that the head condemns this way of life and judges it must perish, the heart must mourn its passing. (In this respect Breytenbach is suddenly and strikingly reminiscent of William Faulkner.)

In the tentative and ambivalent reconciliation that has taken place between Breytenbach and Afrikaners of the old breed, it is the Afrikaners who have had to make the greater shift. In losing political power, including control over the public media, the people from whom Breytenbach dissociated himself in 1983 have lost their power to dictate what an Afrikaner has to be, namely, a “white” of North-European descent, an ethnic nationalist, a Calvinist, a patriarchalist.
Dog Heart
speaks for a countercurrent in which fragments of groups in disarray begin to define themselves, and perhaps even to assert themselves, in a new way, cohering this time not around a political philosophy but around a shared language larger and wiser than the sum of its speakers, and a shared history, bitter and divided though that history may be.

Sharing a language, a feel for the land, a history, perhaps even blood, with “my people,”
³³
the people of his Heartland, Breytenbach exchanges words with men and women of all states and conditions. Some of these exchanges disconcert him. The (brown) men who renovate his house treat him (the most celebrated poet in their language!) as a foreigner. Accompanying his brother—who stands as an independent candidate in the 1994 elections—on his canvassing rounds, he hears at first hand the level of brown prejudice against blacks. (His informants may of course be playing games with him: they are as much—or as little—Afrikaner as he, and of the Afrikaner, “stupid but sly,” he himself writes, “my morning prattle and my night tattle are cut from the cloth which suits my interlocutor.”
³⁴

At the dark heart of the memoir lies an event that Breytenbach alludes to several times but never explains. It would appear that at the age of seven he had a choking fit and stopped breathing, that in a sense he died and was reborn as a second Breyten (his very name, he points out, is like an echo; one of his poetic identities is Lazarus). “When I look into the mirror I know that the child born here is dead. It has been devoured by the dog.”
³⁵
So returning to the land of the dog is in a sense a search for the grave of the dead child, the child dead within him.

In the town museum—where the bust of D. F. Malan, Prime Minister of South Africa from 1948 to 1954, has been discreetly relegated to a storeroom—Breytenbach comes upon a photograph of his great-grandmother Rachel Susanna Keet (d. 1915). From the archives he learns that as a midwife she brought most of the children of Montagu, brown and white, into the world; that she lived unconventionally, adopting and raising a brown child who was not her own. He and his wife search for Rachel Susanna's grave but cannot find it. So they take over one of the old unmarked graves in the graveyard, adopting it, so to speak, in her name. The book ends on this emblematic note, with Breytenbach marking out, in the name of his dead ancestor rather than of his living child, the most humble of family stakes in Africa.

Citizen of France, most untranslatable of Afrikaans poets, Breytenbach has published this account of his re-exploration of his African roots in English, a language of which his mastery is by now almost complete. In this respect he follows his countryman André Brink and a host of other writers (including black African writers) from small language communities.

The reason for his step is, one would guess, practical: the market for books in Afrikaans is small and dwindling. Breytenbach certainly does not resort to English as a gesture of fellowship with English-speaking South African whites, for whom he has never had much time. Nevertheless, it is odd to be faced with a book in English that is so much a celebration of the folksy earthiness of Afrikaans nomenclature, that follows with such attention the nuances of Afrikaans social dialect, and that entertains without reserve the notion that there is a sensibility attuned to the South African natural world which is uniquely fostered by the Afrikaans language.

There is a wider body of what I would call sentimental orthodoxy that Breytenbach seems to accept without much reserve. Much of this orthodoxy relates to what present-day cultural politics calls “first peoples” and South African folk idiom “the old people”: the San and the Khoi. In two widely-read and influential books,
The Lost World of the Kalahari
(1958) and
The Heart of the Hunter
(1961), Laurens van der Post presented the San (“Bushmen”) as the original Africans, bearers of archaic wisdom, on the brink of extinction in a world for which their gentle culture rendered them tragically unfit. Breytenbach records moving twilight utterances of nineteenth-century San, while sometimes lapsing into van der Post-like romanticizing as well (“small sinewy men [with] an inbred knowledge of the drift of clouds and the lay of mountains”).
³⁶
But his main aim is to suggest that the old San and Khoi myths live on today in unconscious re-enactments: a woman who bites off her rapist's penis, for instance, is repeating the trick of the Khoi mantis-god. Passages of
Dog Heart
carry a whiff of hand-me-down Latin American magic realism. The case for an unarticulated psychic continuity between old and new brown people is similarly unpersuasive, while the recounting of the myths has an obligatory air about it, as if they are being copied over from other books.

Breytenbach's current political beliefs are spelled out in the essays collected in
The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution
(1996). Insofar as he is still a political animal, his program can be summed up as “fighting for revolution against politics.”
³⁷
In
Dog Heart,
however, his politics is implied rather than explained. Quarrels and antipathies emerge in the form of casual side-swipes: at white liberals, at the Communist Party colony within the ANC, at the Coloured middle class that has found a home for itself in the old National Party (rebaptized the New National Party, and still, after the 1999 elections, holding on to power in places like Montagu), at the “dogs of God” (Desmond Tutu and Alex Boraine) of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, at the new artistic and academic establishment with its stifling political correctness. A brief brush with Nelson Mandela is recounted, from which Mandela emerges in none too favorable a light. Thus Breytenbach keeps the promise he made in
Return to Paradise:
to be a maverick, “against the norm.”

Like Breytenbach's other memoirs,
Dog Heart
is loose, almost miscellaneous, in its structure. Part journal, part essay on autobiography, part book of the dead, part what one might call speculative history, it also contains searching meditations on the elusiveness of memory and passages of virtuoso writing—a description of a thunderstorm, for instance—breathtaking in the immediacy of their evocation of Africa.

 

 

 

SHE LOOKS UP. Smiles. I reach for her.

The jacket my grandmother wears is no longer as red as when my mother first bought it. Then, in those days, when my mother was the age I am at now, we used to stare at my mother as though she was possessed. She would wear it and listen to Bob Marley singing “No Woman No Cry.” Now she says this song is “no longer relevant.” My mother is a school teacher. She uses words like “pedantic.” She can look at Grandmother in the eye and say “pedantic.” At this Gogo just curls her legs further under her and waits for my mother to be sensible. We call my grandmother Gogo. She speaks only one language. Shona. Sometimes, like today, she says “Good morning.” Then she throws her head back and you can see her give you all the luck in the world.

My mother does not mind listening to a remake of “Furuwa.” This is a song we both liked in 1979. It is the story of two lovers sitting on the crest of a wave. The music of the waves is their music, and they are swallowed by crystal showers and the clearest sand where water meets land. Then a deep foam surrounds them. They disappear, beneath it, in the music of their love. They die a happy death. They die like stars falling from the sky. They have been accepted by the great water spirit which blows upon the shimmering fabric of the sea and makes the water ripple in a violent whiteness, then wave follows wave. Neither my mother nor I have ever been to the sea. However, we have no doubt that “Furuwa” is a good song.

When we bought “Furuwa” in 1979 there were many copies of it at Anand Brothers along 6th Avenue and Fort Street in Bulawayo. Now there is nothing like it. We think this is due to independence, which arrived in 1980. Instead, the record seller looks at us blankly and offers us the new music called Di Gong. In a fit of maternal love my mother had placed the only copy of the record in an envelope and sent it to me when I was in boarding school. By the time it arrived it was broken in two. I threw it quickly in the bin and wrote to my mother. My mother says “if something hurts you then move quickly from it. It is like the sun. It is foolish to stare at the sun all day with the eyes wide open.” I threw the record away without looking at it a second time. I wrote to her “Thank you for the waves. The waves have been broken.” I could hear my mother's cry as I wrote that. Her sound was louder than that of the waves. I thought perhaps if I have a child I will call her Furuwa.

When she wants to pay the greatest tribute to Gogo my mother often says “your grandmother taught me to hate lightning.” My mother will not even answer a telephone when there is rain outside. She goes to her bed at the first sign of lightning and covers her body with a thick blanket. If you talk to her she will not raise her head from the pillow but answer in a muffled voice which tells you not to disturb her peace. We all wait for the lightning to go away.