by Joyce Nyairo
Nairobi — The death of Dennis Brutus compels us to think fondly of the first generation of modern African poets. Modern, because they wrote rather than chanted in the way many generations of ethnic griots, court poets and orators had done before the arrival of colonialism and literacy.
I first encountered Dennis Vincent Brutus in 1976 when I recited his poem “Today in Prison” at the Kenya Music Festival. Before I could master the poem’s mood and tone I had to look up the meaning of the word “tacit” which sits so innocently in the middle of the second line, but which carries all of the poem’s emotions.
Over the years, I grew to recognise that there was nothing tacit or unstated about Brutus’ poetry or his actions. Indeed, one should never be deceived by the defeat, the implied acceptance that is suggested in the lines “Somehow we survive severance, deprivation, loss” from one of his early poems.
Brutus’ poetry stands at the peak of Africa’s protest literature – a literature that, like him, has very often been written in the lonely precincts of harsh prisons.
Lyrical beauty
Like legendary boxer Muhammad Ali, Dennis Brutus combined poetry, sports and politics. True, much of Ali’s poetry is spoken rather than written, but like that of Brutus it has always amounted to a memorable lyrical beauty that compels people to listen and act; to take a stand against the politics of race.
As president of the South Africa Non-Racial Olympic Committee, Brutus campaigned for the expulsion of South Africa and then Rhodesia from the Olympic Games. The South African government of the day reacted to Brutus’ tireless crusades for racial justice by banning him from political and social activity and in 1963 he was arrested.
A police bullet fired into his fleeing back quickly halted his escape and he nearly died on the street, waiting for an ambulance that would carry a black. After he recovered he was jailed on Robben Island for 18 months. It was then that his first collection of poems, “Sirens, knuckles and boots”, was published in Nigeria by Mbari Productions.
The title of that collection signals Brutus’ trademark attention to soundtracks that define daily existence. Wailing sirens, crackling knuckles and stomping boots constituted some of the terrifying noises that enabled and defined apartheid’s oppression and unrelenting violation of personal freedom and space.
Along with Gabriel Okara and the early Wole Soyinka, Brutus is seen to belong to the transitional phase of African poetry – poets who were distinguished by their clear grasp of Africa’s physical and cultural landscape. Brutus’ poems often compare the continent’s socio-political woes with the figure of an alluring woman.
In “Nightsong: Country” the speaker clings to “soft curves …voluptuous – submissively primal” earth. Radical feminists might well protest at this subordination of the African woman but that might be a tunnel-vision reading of Brutus’ intentions, his sentimental but indestructible commitment to his country.
As early as the 1960s, Brutus’ poetry documented city landscapes – from shanties to skyscrapers – in ways that signalled his affirmation of a hybrid urban identity as a legitimate African heritage that nonetheless needed to be rescued from structural poverty and exclusion as he eloquently pronounces in “A simple lust”.
In “Nightsong: City” fear of violence dogs the “tunnel streets” and the lure of sleep at night places a thin veil on the people’s anger and tension. Travel and return are the other dominant themes in Brutus’s poetry. In “A troubadour, I traverse all my land” he mocks apartheid’s restrictions on movement, inquiry and cross-racial blending. This theme of travel also echoes the poet’s own life of exile and an undying desire to return to the motherland.
Brutus was born in 1924 in Salisbury (Harare) to South African parents. He studied at Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand. In 1966, Brutus fled to Britain, moving to the United States as a political refugee in 1971. He taught at Northwestern University and the University of Pittsburg.
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