You Could Go Further: Remembering Breyten Breytenbach

Essays in the “Remembrances” series pay tribute to poets who have died in the past year.

Breyten started every class in a similar way: smiling, looking around, he’d say, “Hello everyone, good to see you. I was at an exhibition at the Met over the weekend and I saw…” or “I was talking to Lawrence Weschler at the launch of […] and it reminded me of […].” Then he’d read a poem, like Mahmoud Darwish’s “To Describe an Almond Blossom”:

Yet if a writer could manage in a fragment
to describe almond blossoms, fog would recede
from the hills, and a whole nation would say:
This is it! 
These are the words of our national anthem.

At the time, I thought of these moments as mere preambles, but now I understand they were integral to his project. The poems he read out and the launches he mentioned were almost always by poets from outside the Anglosphere, or by English-speaking poets from marginalized communities. He talked about them to open our baby-poet eyes to the light of the wider world.

I remember the susurration of his South African accent, the extraordinary handsomeness of his youth still evident in his 70-year-old self, his leonine white hair combed back, the Nehru jackets with stand-up collars worn over T-shirts with the map of Africa behind a Pan-African slogan, his rainbow scarves. I was 38 at the time, easily 10 years older than most students. It was autumn 2010, and this was my first real workshop. I’d only attended community writing groups before. I was excited and insecure. Others had been through BFAs in the northeast and were already fluent: “The anaphora here is doing good work, but I wonder if you might look at your enjambment?”  

Part of me dismissed the shop talk, but it also irked me that I didn’t know how to use it. At the time, poetry, for me, was already in danger of becoming a means to an end—the next fellowship, or university job, fulfillment of an inchoate desire to “be seen,” a salve for some wound or inner lack—whereas I sensed that for Breyten poetry was a way of being, an adventure. I respected his singlemindedness, a kind of purity, and felt drawn to that.  

In the 15 years that have elapsed since Breyten’s class, I’ve learned that there’s no lasting satisfaction in the po-biz and that I have to keep fighting against my own ego to find the elusive duende that Breyten seemed to believe in. I suspect that Breyten wasn’t interested in formal poetry without heart or mystery. He was interested in risk, what might be called the “Dionysian,” or what Robert Graves described in The White Goddess as the way, “reading a poem, the hairs will bristle.”

After eight weeks of workshop, Breyten emailed about our last month of classes. His tone, as in many of his emails to us, was casual and affectionate:

24 November: No class. Preparing for the slaughter of the gobbler birds. 1 and 8 December: We go through the editing and putting together of Tongue of the World. I may also invite a young outside poet who is working on a website project of the same intention to come and join us, and perhaps as well a poet/painter from Tunisia who has just completed a book of texts and images.

Several weeks earlier, we’d started exchanging exemplary poems for Tongue of the World, Breyten’s idea for a kind of underground, universal anthology of poetry that might communicate to a wider public, beyond cleverness and shows of technique. Holding court at the head of the long table, he said, chuckling, “Imagine if you could have a kind of chapbook in airport lounges or hotel rooms—you know, on the nightstand beside that ubiquitous Bible, right?” Then he went on to imagine out loud, “the kind of person who has never read poetry, reading Lorca, Szymborska, Akhmatova, Aimé Césaire.” I didn’t realize at the time that he was riffing on Joseph Brodsky’s idea that “books should be brought to the doorstep […] like milk in England […]. At the very least, an anthology of American poetry should be found in the drawer of every room in every motel in the land, next to the Bible.”

Preparing for the shortlist, apart from exchanging poems by Monica Youn, Eavan Boland, Bob Kaufman, and others, we also emailed rengas to each other. I’m struck now by Breyten’s egalitarian spirit, as he joined in with one of his own, “The Goat Memory,” which ends: “Hear me bleat in the night / against the smoke / of distant places.”

In our penultimate class, Breyten had said, “Ja, bring something to drink for the last class. We won’t be workshopping. But, something stronger than that energy drink, that bloody ice tea, eh, Richard Prins?” His lips indulged in an attractive plosiveness as he said “Prins.” He side-eyed Richard, and grinned, and Richard cackled, his tall floral can of Arizona beside him.

At the start of the last class, Breyten took a magnum of red wine out of a tote bag and plonked it on the table among our normal-sized bottles. It was a Bordeaux, I like to think. The bottle was hilariously large, as if it had priapism, and he shared it round in paper cups, then went into full-on raconteur mode. He’d been kicking back for at least half an hour and was talking about his cottage in Catalonia, near Girona, when I interjected something about the Barri Gòtic in Barcelona, trying to assert that I also knew a lot about the locale. Breyten’s eyes slid over me. He gave the merest nod and continued his ramifying digression. 

For three hours he ranged across the byways and walking trails linking poetry, Buddhism, politics, history. I realized that for the last 14 weeks he’d been listening carefully and sensitively, holding space, leaning forward, nodding. Now he seemed to be withdrawing from his teaching persona.

Though I didn’t know it then, Breyten’s contract as NYU Global Professor hadn’t been renewed and in mid-December he departed for Europe and Africa for good. We tried to keep the ball rolling on Tongue of the World, and got as far as voting on the contents of a chapbook, but it soon petered out only to resurface a year or two later as Tongue: A Journal of Writing and Art, edited by Breyten’s former students, the poets R. A. Villanueva, Adam Wiedewitsch, and Colin Cheney.

Looking back, Breyten had looser boundaries than the other professors, evident in the way he’d email some of us risqué jokes, and in his gentleness when a depressed student—a recent graduate who still hung out in the Lillian Vernon House—wandered into class, weeping quietly. He treated her arrival as natural, saying, “Here, Alice, sit here, beside me,” then went on with the class, periodically checking in with her. He reminded me of my Irish mentors, the poets James Liddy, John Liddy, and Pearse Hutchinson, whose most teachable moments took place anywhere but the classroom. But it was in that monumental monologue that I really saw Breyten detaching from officially sanctioned notions of what a teaching poet looks like. Breyten was going back into the wild—unless he had always been wilder and looser than I’d known. For the rest of the class, Breyten rode further and further into the sunset, riding very slowly.

I can’t imagine that the thought of getting slapped on the wrist for not teaching through our last class would have given him a second’s pause. After all, was he not the dissident who, living in Paris during the Vietnam War, had married Yolande, of Vietnamese descent, and been denied reentry to South Africa under the country’s Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act and the Immorality Act? This was also the same man who’d been imprisoned for high treason by the apartheid regime, after entering the country incognito to try and recruit white dissidents for a new branch of the ANC.

For Breyten, writing and activism were one. He helped organize the famous 1987 Dakar conference on Gorée island, one of the meetings that led to the end of apartheid. He also co-founded the Gorée Institute, whose literary arm, the Pirogue Collective, oversaw the three-volume anthology Imagine Africa (Archipelago, 2011, 2014, 2017).

Breyten wrote poetry in both his native languages, English and Afrikaans, and is celebrated for having wrestled the latter back from the oppressor, calling Afrikaans “A unique tongue that in many ways is a kind of expression, the sedimentation of several centuries of hybridization.” He also wrote several plays and works of nonfiction. While in prison, in addition to completing several volumes of poetry, Breyten wrote Mouroir, an experimental, genre-defying work that has been described as a docu-dream or dreamlike/nightmarish prose work. With its unusual landscape format, its thick brown paper cover bearing a crêpe-like, tactile quality and an appropriately dark Rothko image, Mouroir has a special resonance for me, because it was launched the winter I was in workshop with Breyten. The book’s opening sentence is an implicit statement of purpose: “Now, in retrospect, it is difficult to remember exactly how or precisely when it happened.” The “it” is never defined. Instead, the various sections of this “mirror novel” function like a series of fractals, with images of disquiet, strangeness, and beauty that are peeled back to reveal ever deeper and stranger landscapes with hallucinatory clarity:

There the transparent glimmer of coloured glass panes set into the door fell over him, the Rouault blue, the wine rosé, the evening ochre—and was reflected in his eyes so that, between the lashes, these seemed to have small windows.

Or, more sinister: 

he stood there listening for something—perhaps the sound of […] the ping-ping and the clackety-clack of steel balls on a pin-table, or the slow tearing sound (like orgasm) of a mirror breaking with the likeness still captive in it.

I barely knew Breyten as a person, or a poet. What I did know was his teaching persona. I was confused by the way he taught. Where he facilitated, guided, left space, I wanted him to be prescriptive. In bowling terms, I wanted gutter guards while Breyten offered freedom. I wanted him to say more—and he certainly did talk, but he was more interested in us discovering our own thinking about poetry and how to critique it, than in telling us how to go about it.

One thing Breyten said frequently was: “You see, David [or Jan, Sarah, James, Eric, Ben, or Lizzie], the older I get, I feel that often it’s a case of not going far enough: with an image, a metaphor, or how a work in general is imagined.” Stroking his chin, he’d look down, intense. Then he’d meet your eye and conclude, “Ja, you could go further here.”

Not long ago, I found myself saying the same thing to a student. She had written a poem about taking the boat train from rural Ireland to London, as a little girl, when she’d thought that the train would transform into an amphibious vehicle at Rosslare port. There were sections of this track in her poem, but it wasn’t continuously laid, the child’s point of view interrupted by adult exposition. I told her: “Years ago, a teacher of mine used to say, ‘one of the problems is that we don’t go further.’ Why don’t you use the image of the train-boat all the way, do it in a kind of yellow submarine?” In the next draft, as the train took a deep breath and dived into the sea, I could see that my student had understood, and gone as far as she’d needed to go.

The way this idea has taken root inside me makes me realize what I owe Breyten, and reminds me of the ways that people persist in us—as if life were a caravan route along which the things we have learned are carried, so that the traces of those who have been important to us travel alongside us.