Brutus, Dennis (Vincent)
BRUTUS, Dennis (Vincent)
Nationality: British (South African exile). Born: Salisbury, Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), 28 November 1924. Education: Paterson High School, South Africa; Fort Hare University, Alice, B.A. in English 1947; Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, 1963–64. Family: Married May Jaggers in 1950; four daughters and four sons. Career: High school teacher of English and Afrikaans, Port Elizabeth, 1948–61; journalist in South Africa, 1960–61. Served 18 months in Robben Island Prison, for opposition to apartheid, 1964–65. Left South Africa in 1966. Director, Campaign for Release of South African Political Prisoners, London, 1966–71; staff member, International Defence and Aid Fund, London, 1966–71. Visiting professor, University of Denver, 1970. Moved to the United States in 1971; granted political asylum, 1983. Professor of English, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, 1971–85; Cornell Professor of English literature, Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, 1985–86. Since 1986 professor and chair, department of black community education, research, and development, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Visiting professor, University of Texas, Austin, 1974–75, Amherst College, Massachusetts, 1982–83, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1983, Northeastern University, Boston, 1984. Visiting distinguished humanist, University of Colorado, Center for Studies of Ethnicity in the Americas, Department of English, 1994. Founder-director, Troubadour Press, Del Valle, Texas, 1971. Member of board of directors, Black Arts Celebration, Chicago, 1975. Since 1959 secretary, South African Sports Associations; since 1963 president, South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee; since 1972 chair, International Campaign Against Racism in Sport; since 1975 vice president, Union of Writers of the African Peoples; founding chair, 1975, and since 1979 member of executive committee, African Literature Association; since 1976 member of the editorial board, Africa Today, Denver; since 1984 chair, Africa Network. Awards: Mbari prize, 1962; Freedom Writers award, 1975; Kenneth Kaunda Humanism award, 1979; Langston Hughes prize, 1988; Paul Robeson award, 1989. D.H.L.: Worcester State College, Massachusetts, 1982; University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1984. LL.D: Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, 1989. Address: 2132 Bluebell Avenue, Boulder, Colorado 80302, U.S.A.
Publications
Poetry
Sirens, Knuckles, Boots. Ibadan, Mbari, 1963; Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1964.
Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison. London, Heinemann, 1968.
Poems from Algiers. Austin, University of Texas, 1970.
Thoughts Abroad (as John Bruin). Del Valle, Texas, Troubadour Press, 1970.
A Simple Lust: Selected Poems. London, Heinemann, and New York, Hill and Wang, 1973.
China Poems. Austin, University of Texas, 1975.
Strains, edited by Wayne Kamin and Chip Dameron, Austin, Texas, Troubador Press, 1975; revised edition, 1982.
Stubborn Hope. London, Heinemann, and Washington, D.C., Three Continents Press, 1978; revised edition, Oxford, Heinemann, 1991.
Salutes and Censures. Enugu, Nigeria, Fourth Dimension, and Trenton, New Jersey, Africa World Press, 1984.
Airs and Tributes. Camden, New Jersey, Whirlwind Press, 1989.
Still the Sirens. Santa Fe, New Mexico, Pennywhistle Press, 1993.
Recordings: The Sounds Begin Again, Watershed, 1984; The Writing Life, Watershed.
Other
Editor, with others, African Literature, 1988: New Masks. Washington D.C., Three Continents Press and the African Literature Association, 1990.
*Manuscript Collections: Northwestern University Library, Evanston, Illinois; Schomberg Collection, New York Public Library.
Critical Studies: Introduction to African Literature by Ulli Beier, Evanston, Illinois, Northwestern University Press, 1967; Who's Who in African Literature by Janheinz Jahn, Tübingen, Germany, Erdman, 1972; African Authors by Donald Herdeck, Washington, D.C., Black Orpheus Press, 1973; The Black Mind by O.R. Dathorne, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1974, abridged edition as African Literature in the 20th Century, London, Heinemann, 1976; A Vision of Order by Ursula Barnett, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1983; A People's Voice by Piniel Shava, London, Zed Press, and Athens, University of Ohio Press, 1989; Critical Perspectives on Dennis Brutus edited by Craig W. McLuckie and Patrick J. Colbert, Colorado Springs, Colorado, Three Continents Press, 1995; interview by Lee Nichols, in ALA Bulletin, 23(3), Summer 1997; by Craig W. McLuckie, in Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Source Book, edited by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne, Westport, Connecticut, Greenwood, 1998.
Dennis Brutus comments:
(1970) A lyrical poet; protest elements are only incidental, as features of the South African scene obtrude. Favorite poets: John Donne, Browning, Hopkins.
(1985) My concerns have widened to embrace larger social issues, especially nuclear annihilation and the problems of the third world.
* * *Dennis Brutus's life has been marked by both commitment and controversy. As president of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, he was largely responsible for the exclusion of South Africa from international sports competitions. Brutus began his crusade against apartheid while teaching in South Africa; it resulted in his being banned from teaching, writing, and publishing. In 1964, the year after the publication of his first book of poetry, he was arrested, imprisoned for eighteen months, and eventually exiled. Another battle took place in 1983 when he fought deportation from the United States, where he had been teaching for more than a decade. He was finally granted political asylum after a lengthy struggle during which hundreds of Americans, both other writers and those who shared his opposition to racial injustice, rallied to his defense.
Despite his deep political involvement, Brutus's voice as a poet has been marked from his earliest published work by a tone of maturity and restraint. This can be seen most clearly perhaps in the book he wrote following his imprisonment, Letters to Martha. The volume's title reflects the fact that he was banned from writing anything of a publishable nature and had to disguise his poems as letters to his sister-in-law. His deft understatement, while presenting the harsh reality of life as a political prisoner, makes the message all the more powerful:
And sometimes one mistook
the weary tramp of feet
as the men came shuffling from the quarry
white-dust-filmed and shambling
for the rain
that came and drummed and marched away.
Although Brutus has experienced personal suffering, which has ranged from the physical suffering of imprisonment on the infamous Robben Island—where he was shot in the back while attempting to escape—to the spiritual suffering caused by the atrocities of apartheid and his own exile, there is never a tone of self-pity in his work. He has even found it possible to write gentle love poems, although the hard truths of history may still intrude. In fact, the powerful last line of an often quoted poem from his first collection, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, might be taken as the philosophy the poet has lived by:
Patrols uncoil over the asphalt dark
hissing their menace to our lives,
most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,
rendered unlovely and unlovable;
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender
but somehow tenderness survives.
This is not to say that Brutus is free from anger or even bitterness. Frustration, rage, and great sorrow can be found in his work, but the possibility of redemption, a "splendid Gethsemane," always exists. The world he opposes may be brutal, but his opposition, while strong, is also a celebration of the value of human sensitivity and of individual human lives. His vocabulary is that of a highly educated man, but of one who has not lost touch with the basic reality of ordinary human lives. Thus his tone is both elevated and basic, both passionate and restrained. His literary language is not polite or indirect, however, and he never hesitates to broaden his concerns to include contemporary issues. "We all live on a Three Mile Island/in a sea/which can transmogrify mankind," he says in one poem.
Brutus's poetry from the late 1970s and the 1980s, as seen in the volumes Stubborn Hope and Salutes and Censures, shows a wider concern for the third world, linking Chile, Nicaragua, and other areas of national struggle with the problems of Africa, specifically South Africa. His poem "No Matter for History" takes its title from a statement by Pablo Neruda. Typical of the form of much of Brutus's poetry-free verse marked by cadence and repetition—these lines also embody his views of the inevitability of social democracy and the power of the poet, a power that comes from the people:
in death
the generals festered over him
like blowflies
his voice
sings on,
sings men to resistance,
to hope, to life;
Neruda is dead
no matter.
Brutus has led many lives, worked continuously for social justice, and visited many lands. His work reflects a diversity of experience and continuity of commitment. His poems of imprisonment are not merely an indictment of the injustice of apartheid but also a statement of the enduring power of the human spirit against adversity. His poems of exile, a long and often painful exile that has taken him to almost every part of the world, are charged with hope. Throughout, he has remained a poet of the highest social commitment, yet one who has seldom sacrificed poetry for polemic.