Rest in peace, Breyten
We are deeply sad to say goodbye to Breyten Breytenbach. His poems, paintings, kaleidoscopic memoirs, essays, and novels reveal his lifelong commitment to social justice and human dignity. He moved through the world heartfirst. Breyten died on Sunday, November 24 in Paris, where he emigrated in the 1960s, becoming deeply involved in the anti-Apartheid movement. Author of Mouroir, A Season in Paradise, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, Dog Heart, The Memory of Birds in Times of Revolution, A Veil of Footsteps, Windcatcher, All One Horse, Intimate Stranger, and Voice Over, Breytenbach received the Alan Paton Award for Return to Paradise in 1994 and the prestigious Hertzog Prize for Poetry for Papierblom in 1999 and for Die Windvanger (Windcatcher) in 2008.
“To be an Afrikaner is a political definition,” he wrote in 1985. “It is a blight and a provocation to humanity.” Breytenbach distinguished himself as one of the greatest Afrikaner poets of his generation. As Lawrence Weschler wrote in The New Yorker, “No one elevated Afrikaans to such pure beauty and no one wielded it so devastatingly against the apartheid regime as its exiled poet Breyten Breytenbach.”
The Telegraph writes, “Breytenbach wrote many moving and passionate love poems, but was never afraid of using his poetry to castigate white South Africa. He co-founded the Sestigers movement with André Brink; the aim was to promote Afrikaans as a literary language and use it to speak truth to power. One literary critic described it as ‘a cultural revolt within the heart of Afrikanerdom.'”
Archipelago began publishing Breytenbach’s work in 2008, with All One Horse, a selection of surreal prose pieces accompanied by his evocative watercolors (in his own translation). We brought out his Intimate Stranger in 2010, his genre-defying insights to a young writer, and in 2012 published Voice Over, an homage in poems to his friend Mahmoud Darwish. We also reissued Mouroir, his hallucinatory memoir detailing his years of incarceration and visions of the world beyond.
Lawrence Weschler remembers his dear friend in Wondercabinet: “This past weekend, while I happened to be in London, I was stunned by the news, albeit not entirely unexpected, that Breyten Breytenbach had died in Paris, at age 85, peacefully, in his sleep, his wife of over sixty years, Yolande, by his side. Not entirely unexpected, in that he had been seriously ill for several months, though still somehow downright inconceivable. For how were we all expected to go on without his brimming, capacious, scathing, fierce, soft, gentle, kind, wise and wiseass presence? The answer, as has gradually emerged across the days since, is that somehow we will, because his was an ever-presence and it will not soon fade. I can hear him teasing me, mock-joshingly, as I write . . . his voice is so vital, his vision so clear, his presence so welcome.”
Breyten’s vision and spirit will continue to be a guiding force for us. “Ah, how we miss him,” Weschler writes, “And how he lingers.”