English Literature

Dennis Brutus was the son of Anti-Apartheid movement. He was imprisoned for several years, he was banned from writing poetry, yet the artist strove on. He was born in Zimbabwe(then Rhodesia). He was raised in South Africa. He encountered racism and racial prejudice everywhere he turned. This troubled and raged him. Apartheid might have fuelled the poet in him.

He was imprisoned in 1963, the year when “Sirens, Knuckles and Boots” was published. He wrote “Letters to Martha and other letters from South African Prison”, when he was no longer allowed to write poetry. “A Simple Lust” (1973), “China Poems” (1975), “Stubborn Hope” (1978), “Salutes and Censures” (1982) and “Airs and Tributes” (1989) are his other works.
Though passionate and emotive, there is yet an elegance in the restrain he uses in the words. He gets the feeling across without ever being melodramatic. The misery, the pain, the frustration are evident and yet he never uses a word unnecessarily.  Given below is one of his poems, read it and you will know what makes this man’s poetry so unique.

Somehow we survive

Somehow we survive

and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither.

Investigating searchlights rake

our naked unprotected contours;

over our heads the monolithic Decalogue

of fascist prohibition glowers

and teeters for a catastrophic fall;

boots club the peeling door.

But somehow we survive

severance, deprivation, loss.

Patrols uncoil along 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.

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