Join The Haymarket Forum for a unique evening:
Poetry and Protest A Celebration of Art and Activism with Dennis Brutus
Brutus's new book, "Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader" (http://cbsd.com/detail.aspx?Inventory=18018 ) is being launched at the event by Haymarket Books (http://www.haymarketbooks.org).
with special guests: * Dennis Brutus * Deepa Fernades, host of WBAI's Wake Up Call! (http://wakeupcallradio.org/) * The Bread is Rising Poetry Collective (Carlos Raul Dufflar and Angel Martinez) * Brian Jones, star of Howard Zinn's Marx in Soho (http://www.marxinsoho.com/) and other special guests....
Saturday January 21, 2006 at 7 PM
Free and Open to the Public at: 16 Beaver Group 16 Beaver Street, Fifth Floor
Directions: Take the 4/5 to Bowling Green, the N/R to Whitehall, the 1/2 to Wall Street, the J/M to Broad Street, or the A/C to Broadway
Sponsored by: Haymarket Books, Center for Economic Research and Social Change, 16 Beaver Group
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Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader Edited by Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim © 2006 by Lee Sustar and Aisha Karim Published by Haymarket Books www.haymarketbooks.org
Permission is granted by the authors to reproduce this material for nonprofit and educational purposes. Please include full publication details when excerpting.
Introduction Dennis Brutus's "Ticking Explosives"
"The struggle continues": This well-known slogan of the left certainly characterizes Dennis Brutus's life's work. Shot by the apartheid South African police in 1963 and imprisoned for eighteen months alongside Nelson Mandela, Dennis Brutus was exiled from his homeland for twenty-five years. It was during this exile that he burst onto the international stage with a simultaneous debut as a world-class poet and effective political organizer, who led the successful campaign to expel apartheid South Africa from the Olympic Games. Four decades later, Brutus continues to organize, speak, and write with the aim of global social transformation. Through this period his politics and poetry have continued to be welded together. Thus, the selection of articles, speeches, and interviews in this book, spanning half a century, not only document struggles of the past, but also inform the perspectives for those to come. Also included is a substantial selection of Brutus's poetry, much of which has been long out of print despite the widely acknowledged literary significance of many of the works included in this volume.
Brutus's work consciously contends with the dilemma of the artist-activist. In a characteristically untitled poem, we see a poet complaining: "I must lug my battered body" across the globe, reciting "wear-shined clichés" of poetry.1 The poem ends with the poet claiming: "in my baggage I bear the ticking explosives/of reproach, and threat, and challenge" (10-11). If these "ticking explosives" are the words of reproach that the poet carries in his luggage, and if this luggage is at the same time the very body of the poet, an act of superimposition has taken place: by the end of this poem, the body of the poet and the words of reproach-the poetry-have become one. To put it another way, the word and the act, history and the text, politics and poetry, have melded together to the extent that they have become indistinguishable. In this sense, Brutus's poetry is representative of contemporary Third World writing. If there is a generalization that can be made about such literature, it is that its creation is itself a political act. And Brutus belongs to that tradition of contemporary Third World writers whose writings have consciously grappled with the inescapably political nature of such literature. Another of Brutus's poems overtly gestures towards this superimposition of literature and politics as a historical necessity: "In a country which denies that men/ and women are human. /the creative act is an act/ of dissent and defiance" (1-5) and of the "assert[ion] of one's/ Humanity" (8-9).2 The very act of writing under apartheid, then, becomes an act of resistance.
Our aim, here, is to trace, in microcosm, not only the continuity between literature and politics, but also the process of broadening of social struggles. In other words, this work explores how a national movement against apartheid broadens itself into the movement for global justice, and what place an individual life, on one level, and literature, on another, may have in this expansion of social struggle. Accordingly, this volume is also an oral, documentary, and artistic history of decolonization, national liberation, anti-apartheid, and global justice movements, told through the work of Dennis Brutus as an oppositional figure and a grassroots participant in those struggles. In this respect, Brutus's position recalls another participant in such struggles, Frantz Fanon, whose essays in the National Liberation Front (FLN) newspaper, El Moudjahid, mobilizing for the struggle against French rule in Algeria, warn of what awaits the decolonized countries. Fanon calls for a second, post-nationalist stage of struggle, which, in contrast to the nationalist stage, would be internationalist in character.3 Brutus's struggles, in keeping with the Fanonian tradition, do not stop after liberation from apartheid in South Africa, but continue and are broadened into the movement for global justice, or, in South African President Thabo Mbeki's phrase, against "global apartheid."
It is this process of the expansion of struggles-and their connections with Brutus's political and literary work-that we wish to document in this book. Although, as with any narrative, chronology is integral to Brutus's story, we have prioritized thematic over chronological organization; we have followed chronological order only insofar as it helps highlight the development of Brutus's work as an activist-poet. Accordingly, the book consists of three parts that deal, respectively, with the conditions that made for the radicalization and emergence of the poet-activist, the necessary intertwining of cultural and political liberation, and the possibility of a national movement maturing into a global struggle. Each part begins with a memoir, based on a series of interviews conducted between April 2004 and September 2005 by Lee Sustar.4 These memoirs establish Brutus as a key political actor in the history of the anti-apartheid struggle, and as chronicler, storyteller, strategist, and analyst of the movement. The memoirs record a life inextricably linked with the political struggle and with many of its leading figures including, most notably, Nelson Mandela, whose transition from a twenty-seven-year imprisonment to the South African presidency symbolizes the dignity and resolve of the liberation movement. These memoirs introduce and provide the organizational principle, and the historical crux, for each of the three parts.
In addition to the memoirs, we have included a range of documents: essays on sports and apartheid; speeches at historical occasions; and interviews that explore the complex interplay between literary texts and social movements, culture and politics. Each part concludes with a selection of poems that engage with the thematic concerns of the respective sections. We see the poems, here, as that realm of culture that is indispensable to, and inextricable from, the political: the poems provide that space in the imaginary where Brutus's social and political concerns are thought through and find artistic expression.
The poems are selected for each part of this volume not necessarily because they were composed during the historical period in question, but more importantly because these poems, even when composed years later, deal with the historical events and concerns of that period. For example, in Part 1 we juxtapose the poems written in prison, "Letters to Martha," with poems written later-"Still the sirens,"-about the experience of repression and imprisonment. This juxtaposition produces stark results when, in Part 3, we put "Train Journey," written in 1968, side by side with "Picture of a young girl dying of aids," written in 1991. What is produced is not only a picture of the tragic continuity of life under apartheid, but also the premonition of a questionable liberation. Similarly, the juxtaposition of two poems-"In a country that denies that men and women," written in 1989 and ostensibly about apartheid, and "Mumia," written in 1999-poignantly brings together the experience of apartheid with the post-civil rights struggles of African Americans in the United States. The result is a vision of internationalization of the anti-apartheid struggles. In this way, poems are presented to the reader in the framework in which Brutus produced them-as integral to, and enactments of, political struggles.
Part 1 includes Brutus's account of growing up in one of South Africa's "colored" ghettos under apartheid-surrounded by the kind of poverty that, as Brutus points out, has persisted in the post-apartheid era. His writings about race, sports, and apartheid included here highlight the contradictions between sports' notion of fair play and apartheid's institutional white supremacy. Brutus's powerful account of imprisonment on Robben Island, never before published, and edited specifically for this volume by Aisha Karim, details both the horrors of a sadistic prison regime as well as the efforts by political prisoners to maintain a measure of dignity and respect.
For Brutus, who was introduced to socialist politics as a young man by South African followers of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, the struggle to overthrow apartheid became one element in an even greater endeavor. "The significance of the Southern African liberation movement is that it goes beyond resistance," he said in a 1974 speech:
It is not resistance to oppression; it is not even liberation merely in the sense of freedom to govern yourself. It has penetrated beyond that to an understanding that what we are engaged in is a struggle against imperialism. It is not a local, nor even a national struggle. We see ourselves as an element in the global struggle against imperialism. This seems to me the truly revolutionary element in our struggle for cultural liberation.5
It is this concern with the relationship between politics and culture that forms the basis of Part 2. Divided into three sections, this part details Brutus's launch into the world of international sports, literature, and politics. First, we deal with Brutus in exile: operating from Britain and then from the United States, Brutus led the successful campaign to expel racist South Africa from the Olympic Games. This material focuses on Brutus's involvement in the sports world, including a memoir that details how Avery Brundage, head of the U.S. and International Olympic Committees, was pressured and maneuvered into expelling from the Games both South Africa and the white minority regime in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). A selection of letters and documents provide insight into the campaign to isolate apartheid sports, an effort that involved activists and athletes internationally, including such well-known figures as boxing champion Muhammad Ali, tennis great Arthur Ashe, and baseball pitcher Jim Bouton.
Second, we chronicle Brutus's emergence as a poet and a pivotal figure on the literary and academic scene. Among the articles and speeches included are Brutus's remarks to the first Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers in 1969, where he spoke as a representative of the Southern African liberation movements. This section also includes selections of Brutus's own writings on literature, as well as an interview on poetry and art conducted by Bernth Lindfors, a leading critic of African literature and close collaborator of Brutus's. These documents and poems, covering an era when social movements had a far-reaching impact on the academic world, remain signposts for those seeking to understand art in its historical and political context-more specifically, art as an inextricable part of social movements. This section also documents Brutus's central role in the African literary scene that he helped to establish within academia as a teacher of English literature; his collaborators have included such luminaries as the Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka and the Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiong'o.
The dramatic and bitter last phase of the anti-apartheid struggle in the 1980s concludes Part 2. Included are documents from Brutus's successful campaign against a deportation order from the adminstration of President Ronald Reagan. The effort to deport Brutus came as he played an increasingly high profile role in the movement to compel U.S. corporations to divest from holdings in South Africa. Several of Brutus's speeches and articles from this period are included here, among them pieces detailing U.S. and Western economic, military, and political support for the apartheid regime.
Part 3 covers the post-apartheid years. It includes Brutus's speeches, interviews, and poems that trace the rise of the global justice movement, which developed as the international Left contended with a new world order after the Cold War. In the post-apartheid era, Brutus helped to initiate campaigns against the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. These campaigns laid the cornerstones for the global justice movement and the annual gatherings of the Left at the World Social Forum. The selections in Part 3 underscore the continuity between the liberation movements of previous generations and those of today. These selections record Brutus's activism; for example, his support for such activist groups as the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, formed to stop service cutoffs to poor residents. Included here are articles and speeches by Brutus on why he was among the protesters at two high-profile international events hosted in South Africa: the United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban in 2001 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002. These articles and poems demand reparations from companies that profited from apartheid, trace the continuity between the anti-apartheid struggle and the struggle for racial equality in the U.S., and attempt to envision the possibility of a different world.
While Brutus sees the Group of Eight industrialized countries, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund, as institutions forming the core of the world system and its problems, he also becomes equally critical of the post-apartheid South African government, which he views as having collaborated with an imperialist agenda:
where we marched against the oppression of a minority racist regime in the past, we now have to march against the people we put in power. The people who were elected to serve us, are now serving instead the World Bank, the IMF, and the whole corporate global agenda. And so we are now in the position once again, of having to march. And some of us will be beaten, and some of us will be jailed, and some of us may end up in prison, as I did on Robben Island [prison], when I broke stones with Nelson Mandela many years ago.6
Many of Brutus's former comrades, now part of the post-apartheid government, have responded to these criticisms harshly. Essop Pahad, a minister in President Thabo Mbeki's office and member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) who once worked with Brutus in the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, criticizes Brutus for having "disappeared without trace from the anti-apartheid struggle many years before 1994, and re-emerged in the last few years to hurl invective at the democratic government and programs for Africa's recovery." Pahad continues:
However, to the extent that on some issues such as eradicating global inequality, we may agree, perhaps there is hope for cooperation. Welcome home Dennis the Menace! Hope this time you will stay, the better to appreciate that we cannot not allow our modest achievements to be wrecked through anarchy. Opponents of democracy seek such destruction. But if you intend once more to leave for demonstrations elsewhere, we can only retort: et tu Brute! Good luck.7
Such a dismissal of Brutus's contributions to the anti-apartheid movement, however, contradicts the historical record as laid out in this book and elsewhere. More significantly, Pahad's criticisms of Brutus reflect an irreconcilable difference between the internationalism that Brutus has always upheld and the African National Congresses's (ANC's) view of national liberation in South Africa-the achievement of a non-racial government-as an end in itself. On the one hand, Pahad stresses the possibility of "cooperation" between Brutus and the "democratic government" of South Africa on the issue of "eradicating global inequality." But on the other hand, Pahad seems to ignore the possibility that Brutus's "leav[ing] for demonstrations elsewhere" might be part and parcel of this fight against global inequality-and that Brutus's continued activism in South Africa and his challenges to the ANC government are part of that same struggle for global justice.
Indeed, it is precisely Brutus's ability to mesh the political and the cultural, the local and the global, that prompted the acclaimed South African novelist Nadine Gordimer, in a tribute on his eightieth birthday, to characterize Brutus as "a freedom fighter who never thought it necessary to give up being an intellectual, but combined both in the campaign that has been his life so far and there is no doubt will be as long as he is with us." Commenting on Brutus's move to extend the national into an international struggle, Gordimer continues: "His passion for justice in our African continent has now long extended to the whole world where the abyss between rich and poor countries grows instead of closing."8
Editorial note: Dating Brutus's poems Dennis Brutus seldom titles or dates his poems. When he does provide the date of composition, we have included it next to the left margin; those dates need to be seen almost as part of the poem, as significant to the valence of the poem. As such, these composition dates stand in as the last lines of the poems. The dates on the extreme right are the original publication dates.
Aisha Karim and Lee Sustar Chicago, Illinois January 2006
1 This untitled poem begins with "I must lug my battered body." The subsequent in-text line numbers refer to this poem, included on page 126 in this volume. Henceforth, we will identify all of Brutus's untitled poems by their first lines. 2 These lines refer to the untitled poem, "In a country which denies that men," included on page 370 in this volume. 3 These essays are collected in Frantz Fanon, Toward The African Revolution: Political Essays, ed. Francois Maspero, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1967). See especially the essay, "The Algerian War and Man's Liberation," first published El Moudjahid, No, 31, November 1, 1958, also in Toward the African Revolution. 4 Dennis Brutus reviewed and approved all interview texts as Lee Sustar edited them for clarity. 5 See page 199 of this volume. 6 See page 359 of this volume. 7 Quoted in Patrick Bond, "Geopolitics of the Johannesburg Protests," September 2, 2002. Available on the Znet Web site. 8 Nadine Gordimer, "Tribute to Dennis Brutus: Brighter Than Their Searchlights," Illuminations 20 (August 2004), 34-35.
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TRIBUTES
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Fatima Meer, Professor, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban (first official biographer of Nelson Mandela)
Denis, we thank you for your 80 glamorous years, a considerable part of them spent leading us in our fight against the injustices that was and still is unleashed upon us.
We know your disappointments and we salute you and applaud you for bringing them to our notice. I hope you are spared some score more years to correct the ways that still remain. I am with you in the fight that still remains and I need your commitment and your energy and your integrity.
Live on wonderful soldier, live on for South Africa, for all those who continue to be oppressed and deprived and impoverished throughout the world.
Live on Denis in spirit, if not in body.
Live on, dearest compatriot.
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Trevor Ngwane, Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee, Johannesburg
unkonka wefusi umakad' ebona inkunzi emidwayidwayi okudala beyidwanguza yehlula izinhlamvu zamaphoyisa ezomoya yehlula amaBhunu esiqhingini igagu umlom' omnandi umlomo ishoba lokuziphungela mfoka Bhaduza uthembeni na? ngoba ozakweni bomzabalazo sebephenduke amambuka badla izambane likampondo kodwa indima singakayiphethi elikaMthaniya kaNdaba lisaphethwe zinyoni mana njalo qabane lamaqabane nwele zimhlophe isina muva liyabukwa oMandela bagiya bakushiya enkundleni kanti baphosisile umgidi awukapheli umzabalazo usaqhubeka ithemba alisobe labulala Dennis Brutus uyiqhawe lamaqhawe uyingonyama mana njalo ukhule uze ukhokhobe ubambelele ngezindonga
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Center for Economic Justice, Alburquerque/Johannesburg
What makes Dennis Brutus so unique as an activist and as a human being, is that he has been an inspiration and a source of spiritual strength to so many of us worldwide who are struggling to make the world a just place, including all of us at the Center for Economic Justice. Struggling for justice and humanity is hard work; it is full of setbacks, heartbreak, and loss. It is precisely at the hardest points in our struggle that we think of Dennis. We are inspired by how he keeps doing the most important work in the world with a smile and with kind words for everyone. We are amazed at how strong his spirit is after everything that he has seen and suffered through, especially the betrayal of the hopes of the South African people by persons he had always regarded as comrades. We love you, Dennis!
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Bill Fletcher, TransAfrica Forum, Washington
Dennis Brutus stands as a tribune of the dispossessed. His willingness to speak out on all cases of injustice, and side with the oppressed makes him the type of person we all wish to emulate. His perseverance, dedication and eloquence have made him not only a hero for the South African freedom struggle, but for all those who struggle for social justice.
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Patrick Bond, University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society
Dennis Brutus has a home and struggle everywhere there is injustice. Poetry and Protest is unquestionably amongst the most important of the several dozen political biographies South Africa has been blessed with since the early 1990s, because it is a story of a uniquely courageous and principled militant, who more than anyone from this country, bridges the global and local, politics and culture, class and race, the old and the young, the red and green. He is the emblem of solidarity with all other people oppressed and environments wrecked by capital and elites.
Here in Durban, his battle against the New Partnership for Africa's Development at the African Union summit in July 2002 - which included losing a shoving match with a police horse - helped inspire our next generations to fight against Nepad and the UN's pro-privatisation World Summit on Sustainable Development the following month in Johannesburg. By serving as senior diplomat, strategist and problem-solver for Jubilee South Africa this past decade, Dennis put the phrase *apartheid reparations Yes!* on the political map, and struck fear in the hearts of the world's largest banks and corporations. As a guru of the Social Movements Indaba - the SA independent left's primary national coalition - he often soothes tensions and achieves compromise amongst our fractious socialist, autonomist and other radical folk. As a former national sports figure and today an 81-year old fire-breathing ever-travelling rarely-pausing no-compromising activist, he is simply our *model*. As a principled socialist, he is despised by the neoliberal bloc that runs South Africa, and by the World Bank's flack-catchers who know him as a critical threat to their funding sources in municipalities, universities and the world's largest pension funds. And by continuing his role as a world-class poet, Dennis shows that we can have both our bread and roses.