Abstract
It would be hard to overestimate André Brink’s importance to South African letters and wider culture over the past half-century or more, an importance inseparable from his relationship to Afrikanerdom and the Afrikaans language. International recognition came from his writings in English — he wrote most of his novels in both Afrikaans and English — but within South Africa he tended to write and speak as an Afrikaner, and from this position he was able to play a major role in the transformation of the country from a racist state to a democracy.
Aside from anything else, Brink’s energy and productivity were astonishing. By my count he published 45 novels, 25 in Afrikaans and 20 in English — 19 of the latter partnered by an Afrikaans version (States of Emergency [1988] appeared in English only, while six of his early Afrikaans novels remain untranslated). But that is only the beginning. In Afrikaans, he also wrote 14 plays, six travel narratives, 10 academic monographs, and around 15 other miscellaneous works. In 2005 he edited a new edition of the Groot Verseboek, the ample volume that has been the standard anthology of Afrikaans poetry for several decades. Four more academic monographs were written in English, and with J. M. Coetzee he edited A Land Apart (1986), an influential anthology of South African writing. In 2009 he published his autobiography, ’nVurk in die Pad/A Fork in the Road, in both languages. And then there were the translations into Afrikaans: at least 60 works from around the world in a number of languages (he knew six or seven besides his mother tongue) received his attention, from Shakespeare to Hans Christian Andersen, from Henry James to Lewis Carroll, from Cervantes to Kenneth Grahame. That is only the books; the journal essays, contributions to collections, magazine and newspaper articles, and other shorter pieces must run to two or three hundred.
How did he do it? And how did he not become a machine or a monster? For he was far from being either. He travelled incessantly, taught for most of his life (for nearly 30 years at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, then at the University of Cape Town), enjoyed the company of leading writers and academics around the world, and was constantly accepting invitations to give lectures and readings. He edited the most important Afrikaans literary journal of the 1960s. He played a significant role in South African politics. And he was generous and supportive in fostering the talents and careers of others.
The journal Brink edited was called Sestiger (“Sixtier”) and it was as one of the “Sestigers” that Brink came to prominence, fired by his exposure to existentialism and much else in Paris in the years 1959 to 1961, and stimulated by his intense relationships with a few like-minded Afrikaans writers, notably Jan Rabie, Etienne Leroux, Bartho Smit, and Dolf van Niekerk. Others in the group included Abraham de Vries, Chris Barnard, and the only member who was not white, Adam Small; and loosely attached were Breyten Breytenbach, Hennie Aucamp, Elsa Joubert, and Karel Schoeman. Afrikaans literature was extraordinarily lucky to have such an ensemble of talent working in fruitful, if not always peaceful, collaboration, and luckier still (though the Afrikaner establishment didn’t think so) that its members saw their task as one of challenging the political, religious, sexual, and cultural orthodoxies that dominated thinking and stifled creativity in the world they had grown up in. While South African literature in English was not evincing much awareness of cultural and philosophical developments in the rest of the world, and writing in the indigenous languages was thwarted by the iron hand of apartheid, Afrikaans was for these years a cauldron of formal experimentation and literary independence.
Perhaps the most talented of all the writers around Brink, though she was never fully a member of the Sestigers, was Ingrid Jonker. Her death by drowning at the age of 31 was an inestimable loss to Afrikaans poetry: the frequent comparisons made with Sylvia Plath may be trite, but they give some sense to lovers of poetry in English of the scale of that loss. Jonker’s name will always be linked with Brink’s; they had a torrid relationship in the early 1960s, and she was undoubtedly one of the major influences and inspirations of his career, though he had 50 more years to live and write when she died. Among Brink’s last books to be published was Black Butterflies (Jonker, 2007), a new translation into English of her poetry which he undertook in close collaboration with Antjie Krog, and before he died he completed work on a collection of their letters, slated to appear in 2015. One of the chapters of A Fork in the Road is entitled simply “Ingrid”.
Sexual explicitness was a major weapon in Brink’s onslaught on the conservative Afrikaner establishment. On his return from Paris — having published three relatively conventional Afrikaans novels — he announced his break from the norms of Calvinist sexual morality and the traditions of Afrikaans fiction with Lobola vir die Lewe (1963, “Bride-price for Life”); and sex was also at the heart of Die Ambassadeur (1963), the first of his novels he wrote in English as well as Afrikaans (The Ambassador, 1964/1985; later called File on a Diplomat, 1967). The next novel marked his most extreme break with the conventions of the novel form: Orgie (1965; “Orgy”) was designed to be read sideways, the visually fragmented text running down from what would normally be the left-hand edge of the book. After another sexually explicit novel which gave the censors headaches but was finally passed, Miskien Nooit (1969, “Perhaps Never”), came the work that marked one of the most important turning points in Brink’s career: Kennis van die Aand (1973), which became, in English, Looking on Darkness (1974/1984). Sex is still important in this novel, but now with heightened political significance: it takes place between a white woman and a black man and leads to the deaths of both of them, victims of the insane cruelty of apartheid. Kennis van die Aand was the first Afrikaans novel to be banned by the censors, breaking an implicit promise to writers in that language, and it pitched Brink into an overt oppositional stance he was to relish (and be reviled for) for the remainder of the apartheid years.
From this point on, Brink wrote both Afrikaans and English versions of his novels (with the one exception mentioned earlier), usually not translating from a complete novel but working on both together, sometimes beginning in one language, sometimes the other. The two works that result are never identical. One particularly telling example is Houd-den-Bek/A Chain of Voices (1982), which tells the story of a slave revolt on three Cape farms in the 1820s through the voices of the protagonists. Brink found that while one character would demand to be voiced in Afrikaans at the first stage of composition, another would demand English; only later was he able to produce two complete novels in the two languages.
The variety of form and of content in Brink’s novels is remarkable, but there is a consistent thread. Whether revisiting South Africa’s troubled past (he was fascinated by the early years of European settlement at the Cape and by the legends of the indigenous peoples) or representing its equally troubled present, he continually championed ideals of freedom — sexual, political, and creative — and attacked intolerance, bigotry, and hypocrisy. He wrote novels employing tried-and-trusted realism and novels that played with fantasy, metafictional self-consciousness, and various kinds of formal complexity. It was an example of the former that made a particularly strong impact on South African readers, ʼn Droë Wit Seisoen/A Dry White Season (1979), the story of an Afrikaner whose eyes are opened to the injustices of apartheid, written after the murder in custody of the black leader Steve Biko; and 10 years later Euzhan Palcy’s film version (1989) gained the attention of an even larger international audience and played an important part in alerting the world to the criminal policies of the South African government.
While writing with unstoppable energy, Brink was also actively involved in South African, and increasingly global, cultural, and political developments. At home he was continuing to teach, an activity which meant a great deal to him and for which he was highly respected. One mark of his intellectual generosity that stands out for me was his response to the rapidly growing reputation of his younger colleague John Coetzee in the 1980s. He could have been forgiven for resenting the global fame accruing to someone who had published only two or three novels while, for the most part, keeping his head down in the many battles raging around him in South Africa, in contrast to Brink’s own almost hectic productivity and activism. On the contrary, however, Brink acknowledged early on Coetzee’s achievement, and was always ready to praise his work. He did Coetzee the honour of taking the title of one of his novels, The Rights of Desire (2000, Donkermaan in Afrikaans), from the younger writer’s Disgrace (1999).
As a supporter of the ANC and a highly suspect character in the eyes of the authorities, Brink had many brushes with the South African security apparatus during his career, some of them recounted in A Fork in the Road. In 1987, during the secret negotiations that led to the end of apartheid, he joined a group of South Africans, mostly Afrikaners, who travelled to Dakar to meet an ANC delegation led by Thabo Mbeki. “It was,” he writes, “the first true glimpse of a New South Africa. […] It had become attainable, whatever the odds” (Brink, 2009: 367). On their return to Johannesburg their passports were confiscated and their luggage tampered with; Brink’s copious notes on the trip went missing. He relates, with some self-satisfaction, that having foreseen just such an eventuality, he had left a complete set of photocopies with his publisher in Paris on their stopover; they were despatched in a diplomatic bag from there in time for Brink to use them in a number of public meetings.
Among his numerous writings, it is his novels on which Brink’s future reputation will depend. Is it possible to make an objective judgement on their quality, to weigh their merits against the work of, say, Nadine Gordimer, Breyten Breytenbach, or Karel Schoeman? Or, in a broader arena, Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, or Margaret Atwood? This seems to me the wrong question — at this moment, at least — because my sense of Brink’s achievement in his fiction is inseparable from my sense of his commitment to the best possible future for the peoples of South Africa, a future still needing to be fought for at the end of his life. This commitment gives life to every page he wrote, and renders purely aesthetic judgements beside the point.
An email I received from a former student the day after Brink’s death brought this home to me. She wasn’t a very vocal contributor to our class discussions of South African fiction, and I don’t recall her comments when the set text was A Chain of Voices. Her own background, as a young British Muslim woman, always in a headscarf, must have been poles apart from Brink’s and that of his immediate community of readers. Although we’d had no contact over the 10 or so years since that course, she was writing now because, on hearing of Brink’s death, she could think of no one else with whom to share her grief, such had been the novel’s lasting effect on her. There are thousands of lives that have similarly been altered, to the good, by André Brink’s extraordinary creative achievements.