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| André Brink on Afrikaans (article included) [boodskap #37337] |
Di, 28 November 2000 04:54 |
Stefan Andreasson
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This article/interview provides some interesting insights into the
peculiarities of the Afrikaans language in the apartheid setting...
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/03/21/specials/brink-talk.ht ml
***
June 13, 1982 A Talk With André Brink
By GEOFFREY WHEATCROFT
Unlike a musician or a painter, a writer needs a language. Obvious, and
not very interesting, until the question, which language? Our century
is littered with examples of writers who have had to make a choice, to
stick with or to abandon their mother tongue. Conrad and Nabokov
learned to write in English. Almost more poignant than these is the
case of a writer whose language is under threat all around him and who
at the same time is driven away from his language by political rather
than personal considerations. The writer is André Brink; the language
is Afrikaans, the only European language to have taken root outside
Europe and to have developed radically. It is a simplified but enriched
descendant of Dutch, spoken by the children of the Dutch, French and
German settlers who came to the Cape of Good Hope in the 17th and 18th
centuries.
''It's a remarkably exciting language, it's so young and vital,'' Brink
says. ''It should represent much more than a political ideology, but
Afrikaans has been so inextricably tied to an ideology that when the
one goes the other will probably follow. To be realistic I can't see a
long-term prospect for the language at all.''
Outside South Africa, André Brink is the best known Afrikaans writer of
his generation. Inside South Africa, whose ideology he has rejected,
his position is precarious. When his first novel, ''Looking on
Darkness,'' was banned in its original Afrikaans edition, Brink had
''to face the possibility that I might be a writer with no audience.''
Brink was born in 1935 in the Orange Free State. His father was a
magistrate, and the family lived in a succession of towns and villages
in the platteland, the countryside where Afrikaans is spoken. Brink
went to the Potchefstroom University, a narrow-minded Afrikaner
stronghold which was once a Calvinist seminary. Since then he has
earned his living as an academic, teaching Afrikaans and modern
literature at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, in South Cape Province.
In a way Grahamstown, the spiritual home of Englishry in South Africa,
is an odd environment for an Afrikaans writer. The train journey to
Johannesburg takes more than 24 hours. ''I like the pace and excitement
of the big city, but only for a few days at a time,'' Brink says.
''After that I'm glad to be back here, remote from Johannesburg. It's a
nice place, quite different from the villages where I grew up.'' Brink
used to live in a house built by one of the 1820 immigrants from
England, but he has now built himself a new house. He lives there with
his wife and their two children, and a son from a previous marriage.
After college he went to Paris for a time and began to write. By then
he was more or less bilingual in English and Afrikaans. ''My mother
started the practice of speaking only English one day a week, and of
course I read everything I could lay my hands on in English.'' But he
wrote in his native Afrikaans. At the time Afrikaans literature was in
a sorry state; it was provincial and parochial. ''If a book was 'art,'
then it was about poor whites, droughts and locusts.'' By coincidence
several young Afrikaners started to write at the same time in rebellion
against this tradition. They became known as the ''Sestigers,'' men of
the 60's. ''We weren't a conscious school at all. In fact, there were
violent clashes personally. But we all had in common the fact that we'd
spent shorter or longer emancipating periods in Europe. And we all
consciously decided that we were South African writers.'' A sharp
critic might say that the Sestigers' revolt against realism was at
first pretentious and ''experimental.'' Brink himself was writing in
what he describes as ''an existential vein.'' But then, on one trip to
Paris, ''I came to a rediscovery of South Africa.''
The Sestigers were very important to Brink. ''There was this
exhilarating feeling of everyone doing his thing and all fitting into a
sort of historical moment. It became infinitely more than a literary
movement. It involved all sorts of cultural, and eventually political,
choices. Everyone wanted to attack it or identify with it. There was an
incredible surge of enthusiasm among students - it was a generation gap
thing - for being at last able to read something modern in Afrikaans.
And there was an equally strong repressive attitude from the older
generation.''
The older generation, of course, constituted the rulers of South
Africa. Since 1948 the country has not only had a white supremacist
government - it had that before - but has been ruled by militant
Afrikaner nationalism, with its own tribal language. The state tried to
impose that language on other South Africans, with small success.
Two-fifths of the white minority speak English as their first language.
Few of them willingly speak Afrikaans, and the black majority
emphatically rejects it. The great black uprising in Soweto in 1976
began with the attempt to make Afrikaans the language of instruction in
high schools. ''We are not Boers,'' read placards the schoolchildren
carried, but the message might equally have been ''The language of the
conqueror in the mouth of the conquered is the language of a slave.''
That - fine irony - was the slogan of Afrikaner nationalism 80 years
ago, after defeat in the Boer War and during the period of
reconstruction and forced Anglicization.
The ironies go deeper for the radical Afrikaans writer. His language is
rejected on one side by the masses, and on the other side he is
persecuted with peculiar ferocity by ''his own people.'' During the
spasmodic repressions of the 1970's, state violence was directed
against black nationalists and white liberals, but not least against
dissident Afrikaners. One of Brink's closest friends is the Afrikaans
poet Breyten Breytenbach, who is serving a nine-year prison sentence
after a sordid and mysterious political trial in 1975. As Brink
recalls, ''It was all the worse because Breyten is an Afrikaner. It's
the family, the clan reaction. Family quarrels are always the most
vicious kind.
''Finally there was his poem personally attacking (Prime Minister)
Vorster. One shouldn't oversimplify, but the whole thing was certainly
in part a vendetta against Breyten by Vorster. And Kruger.'' Jimmy
Kruger, South Africa's amusing Minister of Justice, said, when Steve
Biko was killed by the security police, ''It leaves me cold,'' and
later added, ''Every man has a democratic right to die.'' When
Breytenbach's parents went to see Kruger, he sent them away, saying
that he would not rest until all the Afrikaans writers were in jail.
Where does that leave these writers? Brink says, ''At the moment, the
immediate threat seems to have been lifted. I don't feel as hounded as
I did a few years ago. For about six months, when I put my children to
bed every evening, I had to do it bearing in mind that I might be taken
away in the night.'' All the same, any dissident in South Africa must
assume that his telephone is tapped and his mail opened.
Brink goes on: ''A young teacher wrote to me - it was the sort of
letter you get from a reader - saying how difficult she found it trying
to teach in such a narrow system and how she tried to give a bit of a
broader view to the kids in her class. Then she came to see me -
obviously she couldn't write again - and told me she'd been visited by
the security police. They said that if the correspondence went on she'd
lose her job, so she would have been stranded. You feel so impotent in
that kind of situation.''
The hostility of Afrikaner officialdom is a particularly heavy threat
for a writer. ''It's frightening,'' Brink says. ''All writers address
themselves in the first place to a specific audience, but an English
writer here can survive by publishing in Britain and America. An
Afrikaans writer, tied as he is to the language and to the publishers
in this country, faces total silence.''
Even before this threat, Brink was turning into a bilingual writer. He
had always been his own translator. Previously he would do his first
draft of a novel in Afrikaans. ''I'd polish it through two or three
versions and then rework the whole thing in English, not just
translating it but really refeeling it in terms of the new language.''
With ''A Chain of Voices'' he goes a step further: ''To create a
variety of distances between the different speakers, I wrote the voices
of certain narrators in one language, others in another.'' Hester, for
instance, wife of the slave owner Barend du Plessis, is an urban
sophisticate from Capetown. ''I found her story went very well in
English.'' As for Galant, the slaves' leader: ''He's rooted in the soil
of Africa,'' and his chapters were written in Afrikaans. Then Brink
wrote his final draft in English, the first time he had done that. And
long after the English version of the book was scheduled for
publication, and a French version too, no arrangements had been made
for an Afrikaans edition. The implication is clear and ominous.
Parallels between the Cape in the 1820's and South Africa today don't
need spelling out. Those slave revolts like the one in ''A Chain of
Voices'' were sparked by rumors of impending emancipation. ''Blacks in
South Africa live in exactly the same situation today,'' Brink says.
''There was the sudden hope triggered by the liberation of Angola and
Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Then the fall from grace of Vorster and the
totally unexpected promises made by Prime Minister Botha, which of
course haven't come to anything. We're at this stage of terrible
frustration at the moment.''
In 1979 and 1980 P.W. Botha made speeches which seemed to promise the
dismantling of at least part of the structure of apartheid. He has now
abandoned almost all the promised reforms. ''I tend by nature to go for
a glimmering of optimism,'' Brink says. ''For a decade I've taken the
line that things are bad, but that there's a whole series of possible
new developments just waiting to materialize. Now I'm slowly veering
toward pessimism. Things have taken a turn for the worst, and last year
was the worst I've ever known, even worse than 1976. There was a sort
of turn in the historical current, a slow realization that nothing was
going to happen. I've kept on believing that we could have a relatively
peaceful change, but, the way things are now, change can only come
through an explosion. And that's terribly, terribly sad. What depresses
me most of all is that if the worst comes to the worst there'll be this
totally unnecessary human waste. Even now, in spite of everything
that's happened, there's still an astonishing reservoir of good will
toward us, even from radical blacks. It's too sad.''
After the explosion, the prospects for Brink's language are not
promising. And yet there are two groups in South Africa who speak
Afrikaans. There are the white Afrikaners, and there are the coloreds.
''That would be the only guarantee of the survival of Afrikaans, if
either blacks or coloreds went on speaking it. Blacks can be ruled out
at this stage. But somebody told me an interesting thing. In '76, when
the students at the University of the Western Cape (the colored
university) joined in the upheaval, there was a total rejection of
Afrikaans there, as the language of the oppressor. But, during the
strikes and boycotts in 1980 and last year, there was a marked return
to Afrikaans - using it as the language of the revolution! It would be
the supreme irony if that was the way it survived.''
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, former literary editor of Spectator magazine, is
working on a book about South Africa.
***
--
/stefan
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