Alert! Breyten Breytenbach has two new books coming out.
The first, which is already available in South Africa, is called Intimate Stranger: A writing book, and follows in Breytenbach’s habitual genre-defying vein. From the blurb:
Addressed to a young writer, Intimate Stranger is an eclectic and generous work flowing with insight and wit. Breytenbach’s candid and provocative reflections on reading and writing guide without guiding, open mental channels, surprise, and inspire. A stirring glimpse into the mind of an artist, Intimate Stranger is a river of experience and visions, brimming with sleights of tongue and overshifting in mood.
The second - prefigured in speeches Breytenbach gave during his visits to South Africa this year and last - is called Notes from the Middle World, and its anchoring piece is the open letter Breytenbach wrote to Nelson Mandela, published last year in Harper’s magazine, that caused an outcry for its SA pessimism (read Max du Preez’s response to the letter here). From the blurb:
What is the place of the artist and writer in a globalized world? In dialogue with the voices of the dead and the living—Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Nelson Mandela, Barack Obama— internationally distinguished South African artist, activist, and writer Breyten Breytenbach’s new collection of essays traces the collisions between utopia and disaster, political trauma, and the renewal of hope. Notes from the Middle World is a beautiful and heartwrenching book. These essays include a glimpse of a buried language created in the Hunan province by and for women, an open letter to Nelson Mandela reflecting on the perilous state of post-apartheid South Africa, and existential and linguistic explorations. Against the conformity of power, Breytenbach takes readers on a journey through the “Middle World,” an imagined space beyond borders and exile, toward an embracing vision of justice for the “un-citizens” post-modernity has dispossessed.
You can apparently watch a video of Breytenbach reading from Notes from the Middle World at this link - but I haven’t been able to get the clip to play.
Meanwhile, on a related note, an interview with Breytenbach published in French in June has just surfaced online in translation. Called “South Africa: The Grand Disillusion”, it was conducted by Le Nouvel Observateur shortly after Jacob Zuma’s election as president. The interview is wide-ranging and worth the click:
Le Nouvel Observateur: In your new book, Notes from the Middle World, you publish a letter to Mandela for his 90th birthday in 2008. When he came to power in 1994, you had already written an open letter emphasizing that “your loyalty would take the form of a vigilant opposition.” What changed in South Africa between these two letters?
Breyten Breytenbach: The disappointment is on a scale with my own illusions. There is a great bitterness regarding what the ANC (African National Congress), the party in power, has become. The situation is worse than fifteen years ago, when our hearts were full of optimism and we believed in a change towards social and economic justice. We thought ourselves capable of bringing to life Nelson Mandela’s notion of a “rainbow nation”; this meant carrying to term this process that the ANC would promote a veritable South African nation, necessarily hybrid since it is formed of very diverse components. But this process was interrupted, not as much by Mr. Mandela as by his successor, Thabo Mbeki. Nevertheless, although Mandela has left the political scene, he is still wholly identified with the ANC. One day he said that the first thing he would do as soon as he got to heaven would be to ask where he could register for the ANC. Since 1994 and the ANC’s coming to power, many things have changed, of course. We have seen the rise of a generation of politicians, and especially the participation of a population formerly excluded from all forms of political, legal and also economic activity, to a certain extent. But at the same time we have witnessed the deterioration of institutions, the rise of large-scale corruption and the multiplication of broken economic and social promises. The chasm that separates the rich and the poor has become deeper than it was fifteen years ago, with the difference that among the rich, today you will find many of the ANC’s employees.
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