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THE POET AS PROPHET
ABSTRACT
Much of the poetry of Dennis Brutus the South African anti-Apartheid freedom fighter
appears to be private, but it often carries a public voice. This arises out of the poet’s conception
of his role as that of granting his articulation to their “inarticulable woe”; his voice to their
“wordless… wail[s].”
The poet-persona plays several roles in the execution of that communal mission. At
times he is the reticent witness who simply lifts up the crucial evidence in the face of Apartheid,
before us, the reader-jury. At other times he is the attorney lending his voice to the cause of the
voiceless and wordless sufferers. Less often, he is also the judge himself who pronounces the
sentence of nemesis upon the often nameless but obvious Opponent of a litigant. In some poems
he also describes himself as a rebel.
The poet-persona is also conspicuous as a freedom fighter and as a Moses who dreams of
returning with his people “out of exile.” Most conspicuous of all, perhaps, is his image or role
as a prophet, a prophet of hope. Then he is not merely the voice, which transmutes his people’s
wails into words, but the seer who foresees and proclaims relief beyond the current pains.
Kontein Trinya Ph.D
Department of English, Faculty of Humanities,
Rivers State University of Education,
Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
Email: kontein@hotmail.com
mobile: 234 80 333 88 489
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THE POET AS A PROPHET: A READING OF DENNIS BRUTUS
To the classical Greeks, the prophet (prophetes) was “an interpreter for the muses and the
oracles of the gods” (New International Dictionary…); he was, "one who speaks for another,"
(New Unger's…). He was more a forth-teller, a proclaimer, than he was a foreteller, a predictor.
To the Hebrews, the prophet was navi, ro’eh, or hozeh, which words generally designated him as
a spokesman (for God), and as a “seer”: one who saw things beyond the domain of natural sight,
or who heard things which human ears would not ordinarily receive. The shades of conception
notwithstanding, both classical Greeks and Hebrews generally conceived of the prophet as one
who proclaimed the moral demands of a just God and corrected ethical and religious abuses. To
both, he was also sometimes a predictor, who announced the future, which also meant warning of
impending danger (Easton’s…).
The prophetic significance of Dennis Brutus the South African anti-Apartheid freedom
fighter resides in the unmistakeable public voice that one hears even in his most private poems.
This arises out of the poet’s conscious conception of his role as that of granting his articulation to
their “inarticulable woe” and his voice to their “wordless… wail[s],” as we find in the poems,
“When they deprive...,” (Stubborn Hope 8, hereafter abbreviated as SH) and “The sounds begin
again” (Simple Lust 19, hereafter abbreviated as SL).
In his public duty, however, the poet does not lose his personal identity, which identity
comes out strongly through the speaking voice, with a human ‘presence’ and a soul that feels.
The ability to maintain this delicate balance makes the poet a more apprehensible, more
‘concrete,’ more reliable witness for the wordless sufferers whose inevitable cause gives strength
to his voice. In a comment to questioning newsmen, quoted in John Povey’s “Simply to Stand,”
Brutus remarks about his ‘constituency’:
It’s a suffering people and a suffering land, assaulted, violated, raped,
whatever you will, tremendously beautiful and I feel a great tenderness for
it. (106)
This passionate identification by the man Brutus with the victims of South Africa’s
Apartheid is similar to that which the “I” in his poetry makes with the sufferers in those creative
works. The contiguity of experiences under (and responses to) Apartheid between Brutus the
poet and the personae in his poetry, seems more than just a convenient coincidence. It stresses
the fact that Brutus’s poetic persona may be identified with the poet himself, or could be
generally spoken of as one and the same with the poet himself. In “Art and the Limitations of
Protest: the Poetry of Dennis Brutus,” Chinyere Nwahunanya shares the same view (19), as does
Tanure Ojaide in “The Troubadour: The Poet Persona in the Poetry of Dennis Brutus” (56). It
would not be out of place, then, to speak of a poet-protagonist in Dennis Brutus’s poetry since it
is possible, in the better part of the works, to speak of Dennis Brutus or his poetic personae
without much distinction between them, especially when we realize also that fictional characters
are a means by which the sentiments of their creators find expression, directly or otherwise,
through what Daniel P. Kunene describes as the writers’ “Affection/Disaffection relationship
with their characters” (100). That also gives us grounds to speak reasonably of Brutus the poet
in terms of evidence from his poetry. In fact, Nadine Gordimer makes the same observation in
Exile and Tradition when she writes:
The themes chosen by the new black poets are committed in the main to
the individual struggle for physical and spiritual survival under
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oppression. ‘I’ is the pronoun that prevails, rather than ‘we.’ But the ‘I’ is
the Whitmanesque unit of multimillions rather than the exclusive first
person singular. (135)
In the poem, “A simple lust is all my woe” (SL 176), the poet-protagonist declares:
Only I speak the others’ woe:
those congealed in concrete [in prison]
or rotting in rusted ghetto-shack;
only I speak their wordless woe,
their inarticulated simple lust.
(my emphases)
As president of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SANROC), Brutus led
political campaigns which, in 1963, resulted in the exclusion of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and
Apartheid South Africa from the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. In the poem which
commemorates his triumph over Apartheid South Africa’s Olympic bid, the exultant narrative
voice (which is evidently that of the poet), prefatorily declaims,
Let me say it
for no-one else may
or can
or will
or dare
........................
(SL 89)
This represents one of the several instances in which Dennis Brutus (or the poet-persona)
not only asserts his public mission but also clarifies his motivations for the role: “Let me say it /
for no-one else may /... / or dare.”
The affinities between poet and persona in Brutus’s poetry appear to be stronger in the
autobiographical “Poems About Prison” (SL 52-71), and especially Letters to Martha, which
derives, according to the poet, “from the landscape of my own experience” (“Letter No. 9,” SL
60), but which he addresses to “some world [that] sometime may know” (SL 68). G. D. Killam
has also appropriately observed that Brutus writes
personal poems which reveal, with poise and dignity, a sensitive man’s response
not only to his personal plight but also to that of others who suffer similar
indignity at the hands of a repressive regime. (90)
The poet-persona plays several roles in the execution of his communal prophetic mission.
Not only do we find him very often as a spokesperson for his people’s inarticulacy but also as
the seer, who sees a sure future beyond the present oppression under Apartheid. He is also a
proclaimer, warning of impending doom to impenitent oppressors. At times he is the reticent
witness who simply lifts up the crucial evidence in the face of Apartheid, before us, the reader-
jury, as in the poem, “Lines on a Wooden Doll,” where he beckons us to
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… look at this wooden doll,
which a child's hand was clutching,
this friendly caricature
of the most helpless, protected by the helpless
which this child
on its guileless path to death
held up to his executioner.
(Silence in Jail 5-6)
In some poems the poet also describes himself as a rebel, as when he states, “I am a
rebel and freedom is my cause” (SH 95), or when in, “I must conjure from my past” (SL 107), he
acknowledges the “mute rebellious blood” in him. The poet-persona is also conspicuous as a
freedom fighter and as a Moses who dreams of returning with his people “out of exile” (“I am a
rebel,” SH 95). Most conspicuous of all is his image as a prophet of Hope. Then he is not
merely the voice which transmutes his people’s wails into words, but the visionary who foresees
and proclaims relief beyond the current crises. As a voice, he speaks for the people. As a
prophet, he speaks to the people, assuaging flagging souls with the vision of the coming dawn.
Often, by means of his “seer’s eyes” (“The Sibyl,” SL 6), this poet-persona is able to see
in one termination, the possibility of another beginning. For example, his eyes frequently watch
the seasons, so that in winter’s deathliness he often sees and announces the promise of summer’s
“fullsome load” (“Between the time of falling for the flowers,” SL 5). In “On the Coming
Victory” (SH 95), also, we hear him announce “the coming light” beyond the ‘grudgingly
lumbering’ “long night” of Apartheid.
Even on as painful an occasion as death, this Prophet of Hope still manages to see the
promise of a renascence. In “At a funeral” (SL 17), a poem whose footnote indicates that it was
a dirge for “Valencia Majombozi, who died shortly after qualifying as a doctor,” we nearly catch
the prophet at his emotional lowest as he laments “For one whose gifts the mud devours, with
our / hope” and tells of “narrow cells of pain defeat and / death”; but even then he manages to
declare: “Better that we should die, than that we should lie / down.” Thus, rather than the
traditional dismal wails ‘at a funeral,’ the occasion becomes an impetus to stir men to arise.
This is the stubborn hope that finds expression as the title of one of his collections.
When Brutus thus enters into the experience of his fellow men and women and gives his
articulation to their ‘inarticulation,’ his voice carries the force of a popular mandate, as in “The
sounds begin again” (SL 19). In those instances, the “I” becomes larger than the individual poet;
it becomes the summation of his people, or, much more, a vicarious voice. That is the
‘ordination’ which endows him with the “seer’s eyes” by means of which he is able to see (or
foresee) and proclaim nemesis on the victimizers, in spite of their apparent present invincibility,
and hope for the victimized, even in the midst of the debilitating darkness. That would seem to
be the case in “This sun on this rubble after rain” when the poet-prophet, as if standing in the
midst of the general devastation, but seeing beyond it, with outstretched hands, proclaims to his
despairing people:
- sun-stripped perhaps, our bones may later sing
or spell out some malignant nemesis
Sharpevilled to spearpoints for revenging;
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and in “Above us, only sky,” when the seer assures:
Peace will come
We have the power
the hope
the resolution
men will go home.
(SL 96)
This unbending vision of hope about a better future underlies the resilience (of the poet as
well as of his people) in the face of the austerities and severe pains that are endured. This
resilient optimism is described by Egudu as “hope which has defied all despair” (Modern
African Poetry... 78); by Abasiekong as “defiant hopefulness” (45); and by the poet himself
severally as “stubborn hope” (“Stubborn Hope,” SH 22), stubborn love (“It is hers, England’s,
seducing charm,” SL 104), “stubborn will” (“Postscripts 2,” SL 68; “Dismay wrenches the
heart,” SL 115), “unshatterable / heart / of resistance” (“Only the Casbah,” SL 140), a “great
patient enduring spirit” (“For Chief – 4,” SL 173), and so on. Even in Silence in Jail, that hope
finds expression in the eponymous poem as a “glorious hope” (1), and, in “A Vehement
Expostulation,” as the “confidence about our future” (9).
This resilient hope, of which the poet-prophet speaks, is better appreciated in the
antithetical context of the turbulence out of which it arises. From the perspective of that
apposition, we would describe this seer’s ‘stubborn hopefulness’ as the undying spirit of the
victimized in spite of an overwhelming deathly oppression; as the hope of future relief which
dims the present woes; as the beacon which shines in the dark, assuring that the shore is no more
far; as a light which shines brighter in the very socio-political darkness which means to enshroud
it. That is the spirit that enables the poet to speak “about inhumanity while still showing how
the spirit can soar and sing” (Speak out 1). That stubborn hope rings in the poet-advocate’s
prayer:
that the day may sooner come
of our unexiling:
of our return.
(“Celebrate the fierce joy of victory,” SL 135)
Stubborn hopefulness is the ability to see (or foresee) a present dying as the promise of a
coming life; a painful burial as the seed-sowing for a bountiful harvest. It is the spirit which
endows the poet with the ability, paradoxically, to see flowers in “variegated sores” (“For a
Dead African,” SL 34), create music out of pain, supplant terror with calmness, enact denial and
privation on the romantic pages of an apparent ‘love letter’ (Letters to Martha), and so on, by all
of which means the poet merely amplifies his message by casting the several horrors of
Apartheid against those many contrastive and paradoxical backdrops of “deceptive calmness”
(“Erosion: Traskei,” SL 16).
By that hope, the oppressed are able to “endure much more and endure...” (Letter No. 1,
SL 54) because that valiant optimistic endurance is an “assertion of faith / ... the indestructible
stubbornness of will” (“For Chief,” SL 170). Stubborn hopefulness is that fighting spirit
personified in Luthuli (“For Chief – 1,” SL 170-75):
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believing men crippled could still walk tall
..................................................................
daring to challenge, refusing to cower
..................................................................
... the [Apartheid] machine breaks you
and you fall
still fighting grimly.
It is the fighting spirit, which questions:
Should one despair
knowing how great the power
how unavailing opposition?
Stubborn hopefulness is the humane reverse of the beastly inhumanity of Apartheid,
pictured, for example, in “More terrible than any beast” (SL 7).
More terrible than any beast
that can be tamed or bribed
the iron monster of the world
ingests me in its grinding maw.
Agile as ballet-dancer
fragile as butterfly
I egg-dance with nimble wariness
- stave off my fated splintering.
It is that “transcendent humanity” (as opposed to Apartheid’s inhumanity) which we often see in
the calm contemplation with which Apartheid’s brutality is answered; the humane resolute
persuasion, fragility, and music with which, contrastively, the brute iron force of Apartheid is
confronted. In fact, stubborn hopefulness is itself also “a kind of fight” (“Stubborn Hope,” SH
22) as well as being a kind of public voice, or public assertion. Truly,
there is a valour
greater than victory:
Greatness endures.
(SL 171)
In the poem, “Prayer” (SL 94), this hope significantly finds expression as a supplication
for “a land and people just and free.” In “Do not think” (SL 163-65), it comes out in the poet’s
ability to see in winter’s deathliness the promise or seed of summer’s Renascence. In the present
“cold and death,” in that poem, the poet is able to see the imminent birth of a new year - an
advent of global anticipation and joy:
.......................................
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(And what right have we to speak of winter
as a time of cold and death?
We can speak of it
who speak in categories
but cannot speak the Creative word)
In the frozen heart of winter
in the frost-white air
the world is full of golden berries,
golden and red and bronze and yellow
as the world prepares for next year’s birth.
When one notes, from the footnote to the poem, that it had been written as a tribute to
Arthur Nortje, another freedom fighter of a poet who had died at Oxford, the image of hope
becomes more specifically significant, and resounds as the ‘seer’s’ perception of Nortje’s death
as the seed for a new birth. Characteristically of Brutus, this death, like Chief Luthuli’s, does not
become the subject of a nihilistic, pessimistic, abnegating dirge, but another occasion for the
hope which defies all despair, which conjures out of death, life; out of pain, resolve; out of an
apparent termination, a new beginning; out of winter’s “frozen heart,” a world “full of golden
berries” and seeds of all chromes “for next year’s birth.” The same sounds of hope are quite
clear in “Into Exile” when we read in the closing lines:
…pain will be quiet, the prisoned free
And wisdom sculpt justice from the world’s
jagged mass..
(SL 95)
In several of his poems, as in the last two cited above, Brutus usually presents, first of all,
the brutalities of Apartheid, and only in the end expresses the vision of hope, as if to state by that
procedure also, that the ultimate hope surmounts the preliminary pains; that that valiant hope
shall write the final lines. This will be noticed also in the poem “The Police are Looking for
Somebody” (from the collection, Silence in Jail), which uses the frequent metaphor of the
vegetation to express the vision of hope:
The police are looking for somebody
he incited the people to demand for better jobs and equal pay
the police are combing the high schools for somebody
he refused to be taught that two and two make five
the police have brought their Alsatian dogs with them
to find the man who screamed: “No racism! No colonialism!”
the police have surrounded the block where somebody lives
who yelled: “Stop working! Strike!”
Somebody hopes to reach the border tonight
nobody knows his name, but the police man road blocks
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somebody is hiding in the back-room of a friend
who is not suspected, but the police roam the township
somebody is lying in hospital and cannot run
he hopes for the best, but the police go through the records.
Somebody is falling from a window
the window is part of a police station
somebody is battered in a windowless room
that room is part of a police station
nobody knows their names
nobody knows how many there are
but next year their names will flower.
(Silence... 8, my emphasis)
One inspiring quality of this “inextinguishable and hungry fire,” this “imperishable
resolve” (“For Chief - 6,” SL 174), which one has called stubborn hopefulness, is the ability not
merely (as we so frequently have previously seen) to conjure strength out of vitiating pain, but to
make of the excruciating intensity of the pain a foundry for forging the gruelling experience into
a ‘Sharpevilled’ weapon of consequent vengeance or retribution. That is the function of the
innocent child’s blood-stained wooden doll which, in “Lines on a Wooden Doll,” becomes not
entirely an object of painful emotional recall, but a powerful, ‘speaking’ legal weapon against the
culprit assassins. We see it in the frequent pictures of wailing wounds which are not tokens of
inflicted defeat but the impregnable and enduring voices invoking litigations upon their
inflictors. In “This sun on this rubble after rain,” it constitutes the apocalyptic ‘song’ of the
bleached “sun-stripped... bones” of the dead which become weapons “Sharpevilled to
spearpoints for revenging.” We see it also in the following lines, still from the poetic tribute to
Chief Albert John Luthuli:
Spirit of freedom and courage
guard us from despair
brood over us with your faith.
Fire the flagging and the faint,
spur us to fierce resolve,
drive us to fight and win.
(“For Chief 5,” SL 173, my emphasis)
The picture is actually clearer in an earlier part of the tribute:
Sorrow and anger stir,
Dull pain and truculent woe,
and bitterness slowly seethes
till fury cauldrons from pain -
(“For Chief 3,” SL 172)
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The image here is culinary; it is of a cooking in a cauldron. The ‘ingredients’ are
sorrow, anger, bitterness, pain, etc., which are being stirred, or more correctly, which are
stirring, and seething in the cauldron. In the end, a dish of retributive fury, prepared from those
several ingredients of pain, is to be served, no doubt, to the ones who had inflicted the pain.
Thus, ironically, the pains intended to destroy, only sharpen and arm with resolve against the
inflictors of the pain. We find a similar vision in “Sherds” (SH 30-31) where the implicit
perpetration of violence on the ‘whole’ of an earthenware, the shattering of it into pieces of
sherds, rather than destroy that fragile whole, only fashions it into many dangerous sharp-edged
weapons, which are the chromatically significant “black crackling blades,” the dangerous
“broken brittle edges,” etc., all “Sharpevilled,” as it were, “to spearpoints for revenging.” Thus
the erstwhile pleasant pottery, by the exterminatory malevolence perpetrated on it, is merely
reduced, nay, multiplied, into many dangerous bits of weapons.
This vision which converts weakness into weapons (which we may describe as ‘armed
hopefulness’) also receives expression in the image of “beetles’ empty cases in the poem,
“Shards”:
- With the images of beetles’ empty cases
thin, sharp-edged and brittle
slim black crackling blades -
sherds!
(SH 30)
The vision of ‘armed hopefulness’ immanent in this image begs a biological clarification.
According to M.B.V. Roberts,
during the early stages of growth [when the insect has shed its cuticle, or,
to use Brutus’s expression in the poem, its ‘empty case’], radical changes
take place in the body: old structures are reorganized and new ones
formed. These progressive changes... must be undergone before the
organism acquires its adult characteristics...; while they are taking place
the organism is referred to as an embryo. (414)
By application of Roberts’s biological information to Brutus’s poetic image, one may
infer the poet’s vision as one which makes of the traumatic hardships an instance of the
necessary transition to a higher stage of development; an instance of the natural state of affairs
for the systemic initiation or commencement of those ‘structural reorganizations’ or ‘progressive
changes’ towards adulthood.
Therefore, although the cuticles (the “beetles’ empty cases”) may conventionally seem
an image of death, they are actually the image of transition, even though a troublous transition;
they are the image of growth, of change, of a new life out of an old death; of hope out of (or in
the midst of) pain. Even their “slim black crackling edges,” from the perspective of ‘armed
hopefulness,’ become the ‘Sharpevilled’ promise of a retributive future.
So, whereas writer-critics like Gordimer would speak of the “symbol of the constant
death-in-life that runs through” the poetry of Black South Africans like Oswald Mtshali
(“Writers...” 135), for Brutus, we would speak, not of symbols of death-in-life but of life-in-
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death; symbols and images of hope rather than of dismay, the intensity of the suffering
notwithstanding.
This pervasive, possessive vision of hope is often presented in terms of several images in
different poems. In “Between the time of falling for the flowers” (SL 5), for example, it is
present in the “lush profusion of the summer’s leaves” which comes after the initial death
pictured in the “time of falling of leaves.” That dying, symbolized in the falling of the leaves,
does not dismay the poet because in it he sees the promise of a new life to come. With his
“seer’s eyes,” the poet is able to perceive in the season-bare “naked boughs” an “elegance,” “a
stripped athletic grace,” an intricacy, even though a “delicate austere intricacy.” That death
becomes, to this “poet of lingering hope and optimism” (Abrahams 49), not the end of the road
but merely the beginning of a new, for he sings of the “subdued assurance of FRESH HOPE
more certain than the BURGEONING of spring / more meaningful than summer’s fulsome
load” (SL 5, my emphases).
The employment of the image of the seasons seems to suggest the poet-prophet’s
prediction that the time of death will pass, and hope will rise as surely as (if not ‘more certainly’
than) the seasons would come, for he sees even in “The end of spring, the start of summer” (SL
5).
In “The Sibyl” (SL 6), this triumphant hope is presented in terms of another seasonal
image: “autumn’s austere nemesis [which] would come to / cleanse [the] opulent decadence.”
In “Erosion: Transkei” (SL 16), it occurs as the “quickening rains” for which the scarred and
wounded land waits. In “...And some men died” (SL 110), we “see” it as the “new sunlight”
which will therapeutically bleach (or heal) the “scab-shanties” to merely “remembered scars.”
Brutus does not, by these several romantic, lambent, vernal images of hope and
renascence deny the excruciation of the South African experience; he merely shows the inner
resolve by which he and his people contain their outer calamities; the fragility with which they
confront Apartheid’s brutality; the active hope which pales their present pains into
insignificance. By those several images, Brutus presents a beauty, a music, which is not only
more glorious than the racist ugliness but contrastively casts it into its proper ugly and
disharmonious perspective.
This frequent projection of paired and simultaneous dissimilarities is Brutus’s
characteristic dramatization, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, of the volatile,
pugnacious antitheses that constitute the South African reality, especially the reality of the
conflict between the agents of Apartheid and the victims of it. It is this violent context which
gives significance to the voice of the people’s prophet, the ‘poet of destiny,’ who, while
faithfully showing the agonies under Apartheid, declares in spite of all, “But somehow we
survive” (“Somehow we survive,” SL 4); who does not belie the ruin and debris and, in some
cases, the defeat, but proclaims resolutely, persuasively, in spite of them:
From the debris of defeat one crawls
emerging debouching on a vaster plain of challenge.
(“At the edge,” SL 122)
“Frustrated” at times, he admits, but not “withered” (SL 4); sighing, yes, but not
despondent; heavily oppressed, but not extinguished, merely heaving under the weight of so
much death (SH 36); tremulous, but still undaunted; thriving in the midst of death, persisting in
the face of odds, expressing not just a personal, persistent optimism but that of a people and
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... a land
whose rich years, unlike England’s, lie head.
(“It is hers...,” SL 104)
It may be possible to read in the poetry of Mazisi Kunene, another black South African
anti-Apartheid poet, such gloomy lines as we find at the end of “The screams”:
……………………………………
A dream that will never come
Because they stare in the night of death.
It may be possible to find in the poetry of Arthur Nortje, yet another prominent Black South
African, and Brutus’s own former student, such pessimistic and disillusioned lines as those
which close his significantly entitled requiemic “Autopsy”:
The early sharpness passed beyond the noon
that melted brightly into shards of dusk.
The luminous tongue in the black world
has infinite possibilities no longer.
(Nortje 189, my emphases)
In Brutus, however, such sombre recalls of memory, as that poem harps upon, become
merely the fire out of which emerges a forged glinting spear, as has been seen in “At a Funeral,”
as well as in “This sun on this rubble after rain,” where the peculiarly perceptive prophetic ears
manage to hear the ultimate song of victory (“our bones may later sing”) beyond the rubble, the
debris, and the bruised and broken bones.
Such a reading of Brutus makes it very difficult to accept Bahadur Tejani’s assertion that
Brutus makes “simplistic conclusions of hope without struggle” (142). It is difficult to agree
with the critic if the assertion should be understood in the sense of being the expectation against
which Lewis Nkosi candidly advises when he states that
we cannot really judge how good the poet Dennis Brutus is by simply
counting the number of guns he has carried to the revolutionary front.
(qtd. in Lindfors, The Blind Men... 22)
We may differ with his tactical approach, but we cannot deny that he is involved in a
battle. In fact, it should be conceded to the poet that he is engaged in a different “kind of fight”
(“Stubborn Hope,” SH 22), with “venomed arrows” of a different sort (“Off The Campus: Wits,”
SL 12). After all, it is not the revolution that makes the poet or writes the poetry. The rhythm of
rifle shots in battlefronts may inspire poetry, but it is not the same as the rhythm of poetry.
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Works Cited
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5.23 (1965): 45-48.
Abrahams, Cecil A. “The Greening of Dennis Brutus: Letters to Martha.” Critical
Perspectives on Dennis Brutus. Eds. Craig W. McLuckie and Patrick J. Colbert.
Colorado Springs: Three Continents Press, 1995. 49-59.
Brutus, Dennis. A Simple Lust. London: Heinemann, 1973. 0.
---. Silence in Jail. The Internet. Web authur: Peter Horn @ Peter Horn. File:
///CI/Downnlod/Dennis Brutus silence.htm (1 Feb. 1996): 1-11.
---. Stubborn Hope. London: Heinemann, 1978.
Easton’s 1897 Bible Dictionary. In Phil Linder. Power BibleCD. Online Publishing,
Bronson, 2000
Egudu, Romanus. Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament. New York:
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Gordimer, Nadine. “English–Language Literature and Politics in South Africa.”
Aspects of South African Literature. Ed. Christopher Heywood. 99-112.
---. “Writers in South Africa: The New Black Poets.” Exile and Tradition. Ed.
Rowland Smith. London: Longman & Dalhousie UP. 1976. 132-51.
Killam, G. Douglas. “A Simple Lust: Selection, Structure, and Style.” Critical
Perspectives on Dennis Brutus. Eds. Craig W. McLuckie and Patrick J. Colbert.
86-98.
Kunene, Daniel P. “Towards an Aesthetic of Sesotho Prose.” Exile and Tradition.
Ed. Rowland Smith. 98-115.
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