Poetry and Protest: Remembering Dennis Brutus

DENNIS VINCENT BRUTUS

(1924-2009)

"I AM THE VOICE

CRYING IN THE NIGHT

THAT CRIES ENDLESSLY

AND WILL NOT BE CONSOLED"

Dennis Brutus, South African poet and activist, died on December 26th in Cape Town, age 85. He leaves a legacy of literary and political accomplishments born from his searing verse and commitment to justice.

Words were his weapons. Brutus pushed a radical agenda in both his art and his politics. His greatest import was in fusing poetic purpose and political purpose into the body of his life work. But poetry, for Brutus, was just one instrument of protest, just one of many arenas to wage struggle. He is perhaps best known outside literary circles for his anti-apartheid and global justice activism.

His vision of poetry echoes the Salvadorian poet and revolutionary, Roque Dalton: "Poetry / forgive me for helping you understand / that you're not made of words alone." Brutus’ poetry, "not made of words alone," was part of his articulation against injustice, and that articulation placed the poet within and alongside the struggles of oppressed peoples throughout the world. It was this understanding of the necessary continuity between language and action, between poetry and protest, between body and body politic, that made Brutus one of the world’s most celebrated artist-activists.

Brutus was born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to South African parents who moved back to Port Elizabeth when he was a young boy. His well-known role as a stalwart against sports racism can be traced back to his childhood when, growing up under the apartheid definition of colored, he was restricted to sports competitions in the townships. He studied English and psychology on scholarship at Fort Hare University, a historically all-black institution in the Eastern Cape, graduating in 1948 – the year the National Party came to power and set in place the system of apartheid.

Brutus confronted the institutionalized racism of apartheid through nonviolent and indirect methods. In addition to penning articles and poems (often under pseudonyms, often in underground resistance publications), Brutus chose sports as a cultural lever to campaign for racial justice. In 1958 he founded the South African Sports Association (later the South African Nonracial Olympic Committee), which drew attention to South Africa’s infringement of the Olympic Charter. When they successfully persuaded the West Indies cricket team to cancel a trip to South Africa in 1959, Brutus came under the scrutiny of the apartheid regime.

As a result of his anti-apartheid activities, Brutus was banned from teaching, writing or publishing under the Suppression of Communism Act. In 1963, he fled to Mozambique where he was captured on the border and deported to Johannesburg. He was shot in the back while trying to escape police custody – after recovering he spent eighteen months on Robben Island, breaking rocks alongside Nelson Mandela.

His first collection of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots was published in Nigeria while he was in prison. It won the Mbari Poetry Prize, an award for a black poet of distinction, which he turned down on the basis of racial exclusion. Released from prison, Brutus was placed under house arrest and once again banned from writing or teaching.

In 1966, he went into exile in Britain where he resumed his dual livelihoods of poet and anti-apartheid activist. He was a leading figure in the successful global campaign to expel the apartheid regime from the Olympic Games. For this work, Brutus was nominated in 2007 to the South Africa Sports Hall of Fame, an honor he characteristically declined with a public speech: "I cannot be party to an event where unapologetic racists are also honoured, or to join a hall of fame alongside those who flourished under racist sport….It's time – indeed long past time – for sports truth, apologies and reconciliation."

Brutus moved to the United States in 1971, serving as professor of literature and African studies at Northwestern, Pittsburgh and several other universities. There he introduced African literature into university curriculums and organized African writers organizations with colleagues such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. By 1973 he published his fourth collection of poetry and was an internationally recognized poet. He used his global status as an artist-activist to internationalize the anti-apartheid struggle, broadening the sports boycott to solidarity and economic divestment campaigns.

During this time he also defeated efforts by the Reagan administration, staunch defender of the apartheid regime, to have him deported. Alongside his campaigning, Brutus’ poetry continued to articulate the political necessity of resisting a racist system that brutally gunned down black South Africans peacefully protesting state-imposed passbooks. The incident was a flash point for resistance that he captured in his seminal poem "Sharpeville":

Sharpeville

What is important
about Sharpeville
is not that seventy died:
nor even that they were shot in the back
retreating, unarmed, defenceless

and certainly not
the heavy caliber slug
that tore through a mother’s back
and ripped through the child in her arms
killing it

Remember Sharpeville
bullet-in-the-back day
Because it epitomized oppression
and the nature of society
more clearly than anything else;
it was the classic event

Nowhere is racial dominance
more clearly defined
nowhere the will to oppress
more clearly demonstrated

what the world whispers
apartheid declares with snarling guns
the blood the rich lust after
South Africa spills in the dust

Remember Sharpeville
Remember bullet-in-the-back day

And remember the unquenchable will for freedom
Remember the dead
and be glad
1973

Brutus lectured extensively on the relation between art, politics and social struggles. For Brutus, political liberation could not be separated from cultural liberation. In 1974 he delivered a speech in Montreal, "Cultural liberation and the African revolution": "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."

Channeling Frantz Fanon,,, the postcolonial thinker who called for a second, post-nationalist struggle for liberation, Brutus saw cultural liberation as a process of psychological decolonization that was internationalist in character, entailing "the need to decolonize not merely the body and the state, but the mind as well." The overthrow of apartheid was just one step in a larger struggle for justice in South Africa, and the struggle in South Africa was just one site of resistance against imperialism on the global scale.

It is no surprise then that with the fall of apartheid and ascension to power of the African National Congress, Brutus remained consistent and principled in his fight against injustice. He was highly critical of the neoliberal economic policies adopted by the ANC, accusing the new government of colluding with an imperialist agenda and replacing racial domination with class apartheid.

"As water is privatized, as electricity is privatized, as people are evicted even from their shacks because they can’t afford to pay the rent….the situation becomes worse," he told Democracy Now! "And it seems to me at the heart of the matter is the fact that the South African government, under the ANC…has chosen to adopt a corporate solution." With a firmly free-market ANC in power that had abandoned the liberation principles outlined in the Freedom Charter, Brutus lashed out at his former comrades:

Forgive me, comrades
if I say something apolitical
and shamefully emotional
but in the dark of night
it is as if my heart is clutched
by a giant iron hand:
"Treachery, treachery" I cry out
thinking of you, comrades
and how you have betrayed
the things we suffered for.

August 23, 2000, 3:05am

It was during this post-apartheid period that Brutus’ activism expanded in line with the global justice movements of the international Left. Splitting time between South Africa and the United States, he campaigned for a myriad of economic and environmental justice causes, speaking at the World Social Forum and major protests against the institutions of global capitalism. He was a leading plaintiff in the Alien Tort Claims Act case seeking reparations from multinational corporations that benefited from the crimes of apartheid (among them Ford and GM, which build manufacturing centers in Brutus’ childhood town, Port Elizabeth).

In 1994, Brutus helped launch the 50 Years Is Enough campaign against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and later along with Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, he inaugurated Jubilee South Africa; both movements confront how foreign debt – and in the case of South Africa, illegitimate apartheid-era debt – is leveraged by international financial institutions as an instrument for wealthy nations to maintain control over "Third World" nations.

In a note introducing "The New Monastics," a poem about the movers and makers of global capitalism, Brutus writes "Medieval scholars plotted – or tried to plot – their universe; now Summers, Geithner, Zoellick, Strauss-Kahn, et al have a similar enterprise":

The New Monastics

Tall black-shadowed cypresses
slender beside arcaded cloisters:
thus were monastic enterprises: now with our new doctrines
secular-consumerist we bend
with similar devoutness in service
to our modern pantheon -
Bretton Woods, its cohort deities
- World Bank, IMF, WTO -
diligently we recite
"We have loved, o lord, the beauty of your house
and the place where your glory dwells"
"Amen" we chorus in unison
as ordered by our Heads of State
obediently we traipse to our slaughterhouse
directed by our Judas-goats
Mbeki’s herds tricked out in shabby rags
discarded by imperialist gauleiters
who devised our Nepad subjugation

– ActionAid Economic Justice course,
Kenyan School of Monetary Studies in Nairobi,
November 26, 2007

The principles that radicalized Brutus from a young age – liberation, freedom, justice – remained guiding lights in his eighth decade. Even in his final days, while the corporate and state elites rejoiced with the arrival of the 2010 World Cup, Brutus was protesting forced evictions and interrupting official storylines that sought to sanitize the international soccer stage with myths of sport-stimulated nation building.

Brutus published over twelve collections of poetry, including Poetry and Protest, a 2006 compilation of his poems, verse, memoirs and speeches. Despite the political concerns that occupied a substantial portion of his poetry, Brutus was quick to protest the label of "political poet," saying instead that his poetry was inescapably political because his landscape was political.

He viewed himself as a committed human, and his poetry necessarily reflected and participated in the social struggles that defined the contours of his life. In a 1970 interview, Brutus states that the poet has no obligation to be committed by virtue of being a poet, but rather "we ought all to be committed, because we are people, we’re all part of the same human environment."

And yet it was through poetry that Brutus came to a voice of commitment that combined "the private and the public, the personal and the political." He was a poet equally committed to the craft of poetry as the poem acting in the world. "There is no uncommitted writing," he wrote. "You have to decide which side you are on: there is always a side. Commitment does not exist as an abstraction; it exists in action."

Brutus’ voice will continue to speak and act beyond his body. His life work shows the power of the socially committed artist, a testimony to the twofold struggle of bringing song to principles, and commitment to the creation of beauty.

Remember Dennis Brutus –
remember the unquenchable will for freedom

Remember the dead
and be glad.