Here's to a voice

‘your letter is delightful, larger and lighter
than thoughts of a flower when the dream
is the earth of the garden,
...
I fled to your letter, to read
that the small orange tree is a mass of white blossoms
opening with the sun,
...
as your letter opens
there is an unfolding of sky, of word from the outside’

(Extract taken from ‘Your Letter Is Delightful’, Breyten Breytenbach 1984, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Emmarentia, Jhb: Taurus, p 348. Photograph, by Philip de Vos, scanned from the back cover of my copy of Dog Heart)

In Standard Five, our class teacher – the woman who led us through each day – was also our Afrikaans teacher. She was the closest thing to a witch I’ve ever encountered, in looks and in manner. She scared us to death. For many years, I disliked that language intensely. It sounded so harsh, and though I didn't articulate the thought at the time, looking back the main things it seemed to express were disdain and cynicism, weariness and impatience. But then sometime in the late 90s I chanced upon a TV documentary on Breyten Breytenbach, in which he slides from English into Afrikaans and back again (as he also does here), and suddenly Afrikaans sounded wonderful – warm and courteous, at once mysterious and graspable. Since then, two friends have confirmed the impression.

Without Breytenbach (also without my two friends and one or two of the other Afrikaans-speaking people I’ve chatted with), I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the humour or the whimsy or the colloquial flavour of phrases like ’n helse fout and ’n engel uit die blou hemel (funnily enough both uttered by chefs in two issues of Taste), the latter of which Breytenbach seems to have had in mind too, for when ‘the showers abate and heavens suddenly expose a silk-blue underlayer’, the narrator of Dog Heart sees ‘angels walking hither and thither up there’ (Breyten Breytenbach 1998, Dog Heart, Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, p 105).

And without him, we would have the pleasure neither of thought-provoking ideas like 'When a language dies, the dead die twice', nor of poems such as the above-quoted one. There are many things to appreciate in that poem in print, but perhaps it achieves its full impact when spoken, as Breytenbach does here.

He’ll be launching his new book of essays, Notes from the Middle World, at Boekehuis, Auckland Park next week, 4 March, at 6:00. There’s also an interview with him about this book here.

The writer

(Illustration by Rico Schacherl 4 Feb 2010)

Jean-Baptiste is being painted, in miniature. The image is to be reproduced on the back cover of each copy of his latest crime novel, The Bloodiest Rose. As he poses, pretending to be hard at work, he contemplates his successful career with something close to despair. He is living a bit of a lie. While the artist hums, and squints at him, he softly sinks into a cherished reverie, in which he stands at the centre of an admiring circle, the acclaimed and unabashed romance novelist who does not hide behind a nom de plume.

Detective Inspector Duchamp, JeanBap’s protagonist, is a loner, given to blunt, cryptic statements and the occasional moral stance. Men envy his insistent smoking and drinking, his lack of remorse and his silent suffering of chronic wind. Women, with no foundation, love him too. Each one believes that were he a real person – by the ultimate twist of fate, should he turn out to be real – she will be the one to break down his defences.

They have no basis for this conviction, that is, other than sixth sense, which if it came to it would turn out to be accurate. There is indeed a heart – warm and strongly beating – beneath both Duchamp and JeanBap’s impassive exterior.

As a child, secretly encouraged by the women in his family, JeanBap wrote little stories of love and tragedy, short-lived joy and untimely death.
‘Like Romeo and Juliet,’ his mother would sniff, putting down his latest offering.
‘Sadder!’ his aunt pronounced.
Or ‘Like that Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ his mother would chortle.
‘Funnier!’ his aunt proclaimed, dropping her knitting.
JeanBap would lower his head modestly and suck his pencil.

His father, involved not at all, exerted a powerful influence nevertheless. Should he have discovered his son’s favourite subject matter, there would have been hell to pay. Scorn would have dripped. JeanBap knew this without ever being told, and as he grew into the role of creator of the Duchamp cases – texts even his father admitted to enjoying on the rare occasion he had time to read – he, his mother and his aunt kept quiet as quiet can be. For his childhood yearning developed too, and over the years he has written copiously of the affairs of the lovely Dominique, former Duchesse de Deauville, under the pseudonym Jeanne Bécu. Which brings us to this day, and JeanBap’s despondence.

A fundamentally honest man, he is made tense by guilt. He wriggles in his seat, and yawns a great anxious yawn. The artist has to ask him to settle down.
‘Just relax,’ he tells the author. ‘Be yourself.’
Myself? JeanBap ponders. Do I know who that is?
But yes, he answers himself. It’s easy. You’ve always known.
So, he decides, one day, soon, I will stand up among my gathered devotees and say, I am Jeanne Bécu. I am the creator of your beloved romance series, les affaires de coeur de Domi.

It’s a decision he makes now for perhaps the fifth time in as many years, but it feels brand new.

What's out there so far

(Design reproduced from the original by Jesse Breytenbach, with her kind permission)

The eye of the mind, the eye of the heart

In moments of ecstatic illumination,
brief and rare, but memorable,
it can be pitch dark and it wouldn't matter.
Seeing becomes perceiving
and evidence becomes understanding.
You don't need your eyes for that;
you could walk blindfold through an unfamiliar room
stacked with crystal glasses and not break a thing.

Moments like those,
when they do occur,
seem so illuminating that they make you think you see
everything else just as clearly, for a while.
But they're deceptive
as the afterimage of a flash lighting up your retinas;
and before you know it,
you're once again clumsy even in broad daylight
and spilling secrets as if you were drunk.

(First published in Carapace 62, March 2007; and then in A Look Away Issue 7, Quarter 4, 2007)

After as is before

When you go,

silence will fall with the rain

so soft and heavy it's

evident only when a drop

strikes a leaf,

strokes each place in me that is yours,

landing on gestures that

have people pinpointing parallels that

we know for what they are;

such is the power of assumption.

When you go,

I will lose and find and lose again,

I will find and lose and find again

in a process I've learned

can be endured,

can be the reward of endurance.

One way, I am here because of you.

And I'll remain, in a way because of you.

We know each other for who we are;

such is the power of belief.

When you go,

you will have known, perhaps best,

that there'll be at once so much

and nothing more to be said.

And in the ceremony of tears I will

stand and feel your falling

with the silence,

with the rain;

and be forever traced,

borne and bereft.

(First published in New Contrast 142, June 2008)

The weak spot

There is a place for him in her heart.

A weak spot

like a sprained wrist that

years later

gives way under an impromptu handstand.

(First published in New Contrast 143, September 2008)

Rest for the third eye

I want the sleep I used to have

when the fall was shorter

and the rise longer;

supreme sense of comfort in each -

a taste craved by the mind.

Tongue stilled,

silence gained.

A shift

to which gravity is beside the point

and thus is neither plummet nor ascension

but something in between -

a kind of suspension.

Movement enacted by thought in the vast velvet sea.

A kind of meditation, humbly meant.

Yet I continue to lie awake.

(First published in New Contrast 147, Spring 2009)

At table we met

At worst, and rarely,

you reached down into my throat

and pulled me inside out,

spreading every visceral element on the table before you,

pointing and identifying,

presuming the past, pronouncing the future.

At best, and much more often,

you opened the curtains,

your hands warm as the sun,

your gaze fixed on me.

From you, I received the gift of successive awakenings to joy,

invaluable breakfasts.

Burned but simmering,

you frog-leapt over the present and into the future,

asking what if again and again,

with the false certainty that a question sometimes brings;

trying to create what you had imagined,

trying to capture what you had created.

You didn't want information,

you wanted to be spoon-fed.

Like a child with Asperger's,

for you each morsel had to be laid out on the plate just so,

else the entire meal was inedible;

the whole less than the sum of its parts.

This is the role we sometimes play:

to be another's mistake.

We cannot help but learn from the lesson ourselves,

and if we're lucky

there is good in the good and good even in the bad;

and though the fairytale ends in nothing like happily ever after,

what comfort there is

just in the after;

what nourishment there is

in successive simple meals.

(First published in New Contrast 148, Summer 2009)