COPYRIGHT AND CITATION CONSIDERATIONS FOR THIS THESIS/ DISSERTATION
o Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.
o NonCommercial — You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
o ShareAlike — If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.
How to cite this thesis
Surname, Initial(s). (2012) Title of the thesis or dissertation. PhD. (Chemistry)/ M.Sc. (Physics)/ M.A. (Philosophy)/M.Com. (Finance) etc. [Unpublished]: University of Johannesburg. Retrieved from: https://ujdigispace.uj.ac.za (Accessed: Date). (i)
A TENT OF BLUE AND SOULS IN PAIN
CREATIVE RESPONSES TO PRISON EXPERIENCE WITH EMPHASIS UPON EXISTENTIAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPIDCAL ELEMENTS WITHIN SELECTED SOUTH AFRICAN PRISON WRITINGS
by
ROSEMARY ANNE FOLLI
DISSERTATION
submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
ENGLISH
in the
FACULTY OF ARTS
of the
RAND AFRIKAANS UNIVERSITY
MAY 1994
Supervisors: MR DIGBY RICCI MS IRMGARD SCHOPEN PROFESSOR ALEX POTTER (ii)
DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to my dearfriend
The Honourable Mr Justice Richard Goldstone
Ceaseless Campaigner in the Cause of Justice and Rights for Political Prisoners Detained Without Trial (iii)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I wish to express my thanks to my supervisors, Ms Irmgard Schopenand Mr Digby Ricci. Unfortunately for me, but most fortunately for her, Ms Schopen left to take up a Fullbright Scholarship in the United States while I was in the middle of this project. Nevertheless the few meetings which we did manage to conveneproved to be highly fruitful and productive.
I would like to extend a very special word of thanks to Mr Ricci, who agreed to assist me during the absence of Ms Schopen, "for friendship sake and for interest sake", and for his expert and constant advice and interest. Thank you also to Professor Potter and to my colleagues for their encouragement and support.
A special thankyou goes to Valerie Oddy, who typed this dissertation with great patience, care and skill, and also to Corrie Marucchi, my husband's secretary, who lightened my load in every possible way, so as to give me extra time for this dissertation.
Finally, my express gratitude belongs to my whole family for their 'support, especially to my husband, Edo, who listened constantly to my ideas and progress with patience and forbearance, and who also cheerfully conducted many shopping .. expeditions for me when time was pressing.
,, (iv)
ABSTRACT FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTERS OF ARTS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE AT THE RAND AFRIKAANS UNIVERSITY
TITLE
CREATIVE RESPONSES TO PRISON EXPERIENCE WITH EMPHASIS UPON EXISTENTIAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS WITHIN SELECTED SOUTH AFRICAN PRISON WRITINGS
This dissertation aims to examine the nature of the unique creative response to the prison experience. Different modes ofartistic expression will be analyzed to show that there is no single literary response to incarceration, and to demonstrate the truth of Oscar Wilde's assertion that "technique is really personality".' To this end, autobiographical and existential elements inherent in selected prison writings will be the main focus of this study, since the concern of both the autobiographer and the existential philosopher is with the dynamic, emergent personality.
The totalizing prison situation is totalitarian in essence, since this kind of prison regime assumes responsibility for all aspects ofthe imprisoned human being, its aim being to annihilate the individual self. In the face ofthis threat, a human being often feels the need to assert his humanity and selfhood. The creative response can provide a means of reinstating the self.
The autobiographer, who concentrates upon the 'becoming' self, must needs be a philosopher, existential in essence, in the search for the 'autos', the self, in relation to the 'bios', one's life. This is realized through 'graphe', language, which enables the writer to probe his/her depths and order his/her disparate experiences into some kind of balance, merging past and present. The fragmented world of the prisoner particularly lends itself to creative expression as the writer attempts to impose some order upon his/her broken life. ,,
1 Oscar Wilde, Intentions, p.212. (v)
A critical study of the selected texts will concentrate upon the features and strategies of the autobiographical genre which reveal the dynamic, evolving personality, and which enable the self to reconstitute itself in the face of external attempts at annihilation.
Recent studies in the field of prison literature have been undertaken by Michelle Aarons and by Mildred Andersen. Aarons focuses upon prison conditions and upon the cathartic possibilities of the creative response. Andersen examines the autobiographical response to the prison situation by writers "who have been
acknowledged as having literary merit. "2 My study, with its focus upon the imprisoned artist, will also reveal these elements, but, unlike the works researched by Aarons and Andersen, it will attempt to establish a link between the autobiographical response and the existential need tocommunicate, as the imprisoned artist searches for his 'autos', his becoming self, in his re-creation of his 'bios', his life, past and present, in his art.
Background readings for this dissertation have included theoretical works on the autobiographical genre which give insight into the nature ofimprisonment, and some which give a fuller understanding of the term 'existentialism'. These include works by Roy Pascal, James Olney, and Wayne Shumaker on the autobiography; Erving Goffman on Asylums, and Michel Foucault on the Birth of the Prison; and works by existential philosophers such as Albert Camus, Victor Frankl, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The concepts gained from such readings will be applied during a close, critical analysis of the selected prison texts written by Herman Charles Bosman, Jeremy Cronin, and Dennis Brutus.
I'
2 Mildred Andersen, Autobiographical Responses to Prison Experience, p.vi. (vi)
A TENT OF BLUE AND sotns IN PAIN (Oscar Wilde, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol")
CREATIVE RESPONSES TO PRISON EXPERIENCE WITH EMPHASIS UPON EXISTENTIAL AND AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS IN SELECTED SOUTH AFRICAN. PRISON WRITINGS
" (vii)
CHAPTER 1
1.1 STRUCTURAL OUTLINE OF DISSERTATION
1.2 BASIC MEANING OF 'AUTOBIOGRAPHY'
1.3 ELEMENTS COMMON TO THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GENRE
1.4 THEAUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THETOTALINSTITUTION
1.5 THE EXISTENTIAL NEED FOR SELF-AFFIRMATION AND MEANING
1.6 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER-PHILOSOPHER
CHAPTER 2 HERMAN CHARLES BOSMAN COLD STONE ruG
CHAPTER 3 DENNIS BRUTUS A SIMPLE LUST
CHAPTER 4 JEREMY CRONIN INSIDE
CONCLUSION 1
CRAPI'ER ONE
1.1 STRUCTURAL OUTLINE OF DISSERTATION
The purpose of this dissertation is to examine a selectionofcreative responses to the prison experience in the South African context, with special emphasis upon the existential and autobiographical elements inherent in these writings. To this end, a brief examination of the meaning of the word 'autobiography' will be made.
The essential characteristics and problems of autobiography as a genre will then be outlined. Thereafter, a survey of prison as a 'total institution' will be undertaken in order to show that the primary aim of such a structure is the annihilation of the self. In this context, the writing of an autobiography may be seen as an existential exercise to reassert the self. An examination of various prison writings and writing strategies will then be made in order to offer examples of different responses to the prison experience, and to show that prison life creates an existential crisis within the individual, who must then make some attempt to reconstitute the self in these abnormal conditions. According to Jane Watts, writing has "the power to reverse the process of self-alienation. "I
The main tenets ofexistentialism will then be summarizedwith a view to establishing a link between the key concepts of autobiography and those of existentialism.
Finally, the prison works of Herman Charles Bosman, Dennis Brutus, and Jeremy Cronin will be analysed to reveal their existential and autobiographical elements. This selection has been motivated by the desire to explore prison writings from different kinds of prisoners, in this case, a common-law convict jailed for murder, and two political prisoners incarcerated for their steadfast commitment to the anti Apartheid liberation struggle. This choice has also been made to show a variation of treatment in different kinds of institutions, here, Robben Island and Pretoria
1 Jane Watts, Black Writers from South Africa, p.28. 2
Central Prison, but ultimately to demonstrate the truth of Breytenbach's contention that all "prisons are pretty much the same".2
1.2 BASIC MEANING OF 'AUTOBIOGRAPHY'
James Olney, a noted autobiography theorist, divides the word 'autobiography' into three components: 'autos', meaning the self; 'bios', signifying life; and 'graphe', denoting the act of writing." Autobiography, he says, is the"most ... self-conscious of literary performances" (p.4). For Olney, then, the focus of the autobiography is upon the self, the 'autos'. Indeed, he states explicitly that it is the '''autos', the 'I', that ... determines the nature of the autobiography" (p.21).
Olney's emphasis upon the 'autos' indicates his belief in the supremacy of 'self in autobiographical writings. Similarly, Jane Watts maintains that the autobiography is the tool by which writers can search for their "'inward moral being' ..• establish their identity [and] work out ... the dimensions oftheir existence" (Watts, pp.113-4). It is, she maintains, the vital means by which man can "most fully realize the existentialist demand that he makes of himself and thereby assert his freedom" (Watts, p.1l4). Autobiography, then, is a mode through which lost seltbood can be rediscovered and reconstituted, an act of opposition to forces which aim to destabilize and depersonalize the human being, and to extinguish the self.
Nancy Wroblewski contends that "form and order is conferred upon the individual's life through the autobiography".4 It is, she says a "vehicle for making [a] chaotic world ... more comprehensible, more orderly, more meaningful" (p.70). For Weintraub, autobiography is an "instrument of self-clarification".' Such a
2 Breyten Breytenbach, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, p.339. 3 James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, see p.6. 4 Nancy Wroblewski, The Autobiography, p.13. S Karl Weintraub, The Value of the Individual, p.27. 3
concentration on the self inevitably involves a re-examination and re-assessment of one's past life. For Wroblewski this involves a process of "remembrance,
recollection, reconstruction, and re-creationII (p.9), which, for "autobiography proper", must consider the "totality of a life, not just one aspect of it" (pp.6-7). Robert Sayre concurs that the autobiography must convey "a sense of the writer's whole life and experience" (quoted in Wroblewski, p.6). A writer's prison experiences, however, by virtue of their very circumscribed and abnormal nature, cannot possibly encompass the entire life of the author. What emerges, according to Paul Murray Kendall, will be "a true picture of what, at one moment of the life, the subject wishes, and is compelled to reveal of that life" (quoted in Wroblewski, p.36). Prison writings can be fitted into the autobiographical mould if one accepts the viewpoints of such prominent autobiography theorists as Weintraub, Shumaker, and Pascal. According to Weintraub(quotedin Andersen), an important requirement of autobiography is that it encompasses "a significant segment of life" (p.19). For Shumaker, "the typical autobiography is a summing up, a review of the whole life or an important segment of it" (my emphasis).6
Pascal states that "autobiography proper ... involves the reconstruction of the movement of a life, or part of a life. in the actual circumstances in which it was 7 lived 11. There are, he asserts, "manyautobiographicalwritings that limit themselves to one particular experience or group of experiences (my emphasis) that bare the core of the personality" (p.12). Using these definitions, one can agree with Andersen that "prison writings of any length, despite their characteristically restricted nature, clearly belong to autobiographyII (p.19), and conclude that autobiography need not contain the 'whole' life of a person. It can also consist of an "Autobiographical moment"! that has great significance for the author.
6 Wayne Shumaker, English Autobiography, p.103. 7 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, p.9. 8 Karl Weintraub, "Autobiography and Historical Consciousness", Critical Enquiry, YoU, p.822. 4
1.3 ELEMENTS COMMON TO THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL GENRE
The focus of the autobiographer lies upon his/her self, "an examination of the self ...as a sovereign integrity", asserts Sayre (quoted in Wroblewski, p.3). Pascal remarks that "its centre of interest is the self' (pascal, p.9), the emerging, dynamic self "as it is becoming"." An examination of the autobiographical genre shows certain recurring features, all of which are concerned with the inner essence of the writer.
These common elements are summed up by Andersen:
[The question of] truth and fiction, the difficulties of portraying the self, the role of art in autobiography, time and the use of memory, and the writer's interpretation of his past. (Andersen, p.21)
Andersen's delineation of the fundamental components of the genre is partly confirmed by Wroblewski's findings. For her, the important elements are "the autobiographer's personality, the element of reconsideration, ... the shaping of the past, the interaction of the self with the outside world, and the resulting form and meaning in life" (Wroblewski, p.ll). This formulation would, in turn, encompass Weintraub's requirements of "self-questioning ... self discovery ... self-evaluation" (p.26). Since these components of the genre must be shaped and ordered into the text, they are inevitably and inextricably interlinked. Brian Finney explains that "all the staple ingredients of theme - form, characterization, style, imagery - cast light on the subject of the book and are integral to the autobiographical process of self portrayal" .10
9 James Olney, Metaphors of Self, p.35. 10 Brian Finney, The Inner I, p.72. 5
Todd Matshikiza's Chocolates for My Wife, for example, emphasizes the emotional fragmentation caused by his self-imposed exile from South Africa. His form of narration reflects his shattered life and the collapse ofan ordered, stable world: The story leaps frenetically from incident to incident, starting with "Arrival". A description of the English Channel then follows, after which the narration leaps to "Ian Smuts Airport", then springs forward again to arrival at London Airport: "we have arrived"." After Matshikiza's 'imprisonment' within the system ofApartheid, complete freedom is unnerving. The first few chapters switch somewhat arbitrarily from episode to episode describing his new life in England, shifting back briefly to disquieting scenes in South Africa. His style communicates a sense of amazement and shock at the contrast between South Africa and non-Apartheid England, in which he is treated like a human being: "... I slipped into the pub on that very hot day. I stood there halfafraid to go forward, and the eyes turned round and made me want to run. But I didn't run. The barman said, 'What's for you, sir?'" (p.l?). Matshikiza's nervous, 'fidgety' style embodies his unbalanced, oppressed life under Apartheid. Under this oppressive regime, the 'non-white' dared not voice his opinion: "Crack ... skull ... kaffir ... shit ... neck ... break" [sic] (p.124). His stuttering fear is creatively evoked.
'Terror' Lekota adopts another method. He writes a lengthy history in the form of letters tohis daughter. Pascal explains that "we have different forms appropriate to the nature and achievements of different men" (p.50). Varieties of forms reflect a "variety of ... impulses, affections, moods, thoughts" (pascal, p.52). The personal letter implies a uniquely close relationship between writer and recipient. Lekota's letters do indeed reveal his deep love for his daughter, Tjabi, and for his family: "Tjabi mine", he writes, "I miss you and your little brother. Regards to Grandma.
I embrace you It .12 His concern for his people is also evident: "All I try to do here is to open the door to the history, and a better understanding, of our country and its
11 Todd Matshikiza, Chocolates for My Wife, pp.7-9. 12 Mosiuoa Lekota, Prison Letters, p.56. 6 people" (Lekota, p.I71). He exhorts Tjabi to "develop as balanced an outlook on this country, its people and the world, as possible" (Ibid, p.I7). Lekota, too, is trying to establish some sense of balance and order within his own mind, thoughts, and life, and also to "accept the world as it is, not as we would all like it to be" (p.I7). Each letter on its own forms a discrete unit, and yet, "like a jigsaw puzzle", all the letters unite to "form a whole picture" (p.Ll), This fragmented form which eventually creates an entire historical picture, reflects his own attempt to 'fit in the pieces' and fashion a coherent pattern of his own life.
Under the umbrella of form and structure, one can place the question of autobiographical truth, and fiction: "Autobiography as a genre has a considerable degree ofoverlap with fiction" says Finney (p.19). Fantasiesand fictional inventions often uncover certain inner realities of a writer's life; they may "more vividly •.. delineate the shape of an author's private drama"." A case in evidence can be quoted from Shumaker's English Autobiography: In her Memoirs, Mary Darby Robinson, writing in a darkly romantic, Gothic vein, describes her birth - an event which she could not possibly remember having witnessed: the "chamber" in which she was born, she asserts, was "'dark, Gothic and opening on the minster sanctuary ... by a narrow winding staircase, at the foot of which an iron spiked door led to the gloomy path of cloistered solitude", Much of this may be "fraudulent", says Shumaker, but points nevertheless to her "romantic and singular characteristics" (p.93).
Elements of fiction within autobiography, then, communicate certain authorial attitudes, reflecting aspects of the author's personality. In his book, The Autobiographical Novel and the Autobiography, Pascal states that "in every case the autobiographer is a bit ofa novelist ... out of the manifolddata of his life he has to construct a coherent story ... and to select and arrange ..." (Wroblewski, p.21). The "'autobiographer vitalizes his facts in the shape offiction'" , says Merrill (Shumaker, p.139). All autobiographies "must, like novels, have a story structure" (pascal,
13 Patricia Spacks, Imagining a Self, p.189. 7
p.187). Inevitably, then, there is always some fictionalization - a transformation from life to literature - in the shaping, selecting, and labelling of experience. How each individual does this is unique, dependent on his/her creative disposition. Each , autobiography expresses individual versions ofexperience. Shumaker dismisses the idea of uniformity of approach. It is, he says, "militated against, by a feeling that each person knows best what parts of his life were important ... the form of an autobiography ... varies with the personality of the author, since, in a sense, in autobiography the form is the author" (p.136).
Every fictionalization, then, tells some autobiographical truth about the author's self. "Every lie tells some truth", says Patricia Spacks. She further explains that every falsehood tells us more about the author, how "he wishes, how he dreams - than we would have learned from a meticulously factual report" (Spacks, p.18). Pascal, however, states that "we could not, and do not want to know everything about a man" (p.6I). What is important is "a truthful, objective relationship to oneself' (Ibid, p.6I). He further maintains that failure in autobiography arises from "the desire to appear admirable" (p. 63). This, then, is the kind of untruth that must be avoided.
Gill, quoted in Andersen, poses the question:
'But if the [autobiographer's] aim be to create as true an impression of himself as possible, does the fulfilment of that aim really demand of him, does it even permit, the revelation of the nude?' (pp.29-30)
The confrontation with the naked self is often painful. lane Watts believes that, for some writers, Ita deeply self-analysed ... confrontation is still too traumatic an undertaking" (Watts, p.115). She maintains that these writers often 8
side-step the issue by picaresque accounts of law breaking adventures, or by humorous if schizophrenic series of apparently unrelated fast-moving sketches. (Watts, p.115)
Alex La Guma conforms to Watt's description. La Guma was imprisoned many times, most notably during the Treason Trial of 1956, and his "experiences are distilled in The Stone Country" (Bemth Lindfors, see back cover of The Stone Country). The Stone Country offers a picaresque description of 'law-breaking adventures' in South Africa's 'ghetto' townships:
Hear me, mister, I put a knife in a 'juba', He went dead. Is put out like ... There is me in this subway, hear me, hey ... he got this ... wrist-watch on, too, hey. But he don't give up straight. He want to struggle, mos. So the next thing the knife is in him."
During this narration by the 'Casbah Kid', the background singing of 'Nearer My God To Thee' by a convict, adds a bizarre element of humour to the account. In this book, George Adams is the protagonist; the'!' of autobiography is absent, and La Guma writes within the framework of the traditional novel. Jane Watts, however, maintains that, although The Stone Country is not a "straightforward autobiography", it does contain "autobiographical Components" (p.W8):
[La Guma] is looking back at situations ... reflecting the ... extremely repressive measures enforced both in daily life and in the statutes (notably the Suppression of Communism Act which enabled the government to label all opponents communists and then imprison them). (Watts, pp.3-4)
14 Alex La Guma, The Stone Country, pp.14-15. 9
La Guma's writings "deal with materials and emotions that have been completely transmuted into literary materials and emotions", says Watts (p.IOS). Nevertheless, his sharply personal nervousness and fear are reflected in his nightmare description of the "human salad" (p.80) holed up in the prison cell:
[A] jungle of stone and iron, inhabited by jackals and hyenas, snarling wolves and trembling sheep ... fighting offshambling monsters ... with stunted brains and bodies armoured with the hide of ignorance and brutality. (La Guma, p.SI)
This was the "country behind the coastline of laws and regulations and labyrinthine legislation" (Ibid, p.SI). Here La Guma offers a scathing indictment of the system ofunjust, dehumanizing statutes, a system which inevitablycreates these Kafkaesque "depraved and brutalized inmates" (La Guma, p.82). The narrator seemingly views the trauma from a distance, but the emotionally charged language reveals his deep involvement. This is how he deals with the painful truth.
"Autobiography", says Coetzee, "is a kind of writing in which you tell the story of yourself as truthfully as you can, or as truthfully as you can bear to"." As early as cAOO A.D., St. Augustine found that "the self is a piece of difficult ground, not to
be worked over without much sweat."16 The mind, says Maurois, exercises
"perfectly natural censorship [towards] ... whatever is disagreeable". 17 Shumaker refers to "subconscious reticences: memories which have been mercifully veiled by a curtain of forgetfulness or which have been sufficiently transformed to offer no further threat to psychic health." These reticences, however, are "not deliberate" and are, therefore, not concerned with "secretiveness" (PAl). We often change circumstances or "consign to oblivion anything which has hurt us", maintains
15 J.M. Coetzee, Truth in Autobiography, p.I, 16 William Spengemann, Forms of Autobiography, p.33. 17 Andre Maurois, Aspects of Biography, p.142. 10
Maurois, in order to "makeour narrative a little more lively, a little more pleasant, a little moreexciting than theactual event" (p.142). Spengemann concurs: a writer "cannot possibly includeall hisexperiences, he mustdecidewhichones are the most important, the most telling or the most interesting" (p.38). Furthermore, a writer does not remember everything. "We forget" says Maurois (p.133); therefore omissions are inevitable. Truth and memory, then, are interlinked. Wroblewski avers: [T]he unconscious selection of the memory is constantly at work, omitting details or incidents either through simple forgetfulness, or through the peculiar nature of the author himself. In the latter case, incidents can be excluded for many reasons ... embarrassment, pain, concern for public image. (Wroblewski, p.l7)
.What is significant is what the writer "can remember of his past" (pascal, p.19). Pascal believes that "matters of detail do not trouble us much, where the autobiographer has erred through forgetfulness, ignorance or even prejudice" (p.188). Stendhal sums up the point: "I do not at all claim to write a history, but quite simply to note down my memories in order to guess what sort of man I have been" (pascal, pp.18-19). Pascal explains that the "truth ... of autobiography lies in the building up of a personality through the images it makes of itself" (Ibid, p.188). Whatis significant, then, is the shaping of thepersonality, not smalldetails about the life of the writer. For Pascal personality is often "perhaps most rapidly detected through style" (p.79), because of the elusive nature of truth (see Chapter V, "The Elusiveness of Truth"). Olney utters similar sentiments:
[W]hen ... a man writes ... something autobiographical ... we may be able to trace therein, that creative impulse that is uniquely his: it will be unavoidably there in manner and style ... and in matter and content as well. (Olney, p.3) 11
The artistic structure and form of the text, then, the process of narration and its arrangement, inevitably reveal the writer, demonstrating his skills, capabilities, and habits. The way he has arranged his text is "experienced as a 'sample' of his
epistemology and personal skill".18 Judith Coullie expresses similar convictions: "The author", she says, "determines the form of the text and, in effect, creates and
controls the meaning ... seeminglydeterminescontent and composition."19 From the way a writer "manipulates his readers [we can] draw inferences about his habitual mode of interaction with others" (Bruss, p.l3). All writers inevitably write out of their own experiences, therefore all creative responses mirror the writer to varying degrees. S/he must eventually paint some form of self-portrait, flaws and all.
The autobiographer, nevertheless, does not have the novelist's freedom. His/her task is to be as truthful and reliable as possible. Whereas the novelist may "'create' persons and situations", observes Shumaker, "the autobiographercan only re-create" (p. III). Finney concurs: an autobiographer can "shape, dramatize or stylize his material, but he cannot knowingly invent it" (p.7l). "An ironmonger", asserts Shumaker, "cannot pretend in autobiography, as he might in fiction, to have been at home in the fashionable ranks of society" (p.l35). Nevertheless, "absolute trustworthiness ... cannot be hoped for ... a 'truthful' recreation of the whole life, precisely as it was lived, is impossible" (Shumaker, pAS).. This point is also made by Yeats, who writes in the 'Preface' to his Autobiography: "'I have changed nothing to my knowledge, and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge'" (quoted in Shumaker,p.46). Here, both the fallibility of memory and the self-protective tendencies of the subconscious are implied.
The reconstruction of the past is inevitably linked to memory and truth. In the 'Preface' to his autobiography, Kaffir Boy, Mark Mathabane has every intention of telling the truth as far as his memory will allow: "In Kaffir Boy I have recreated,
18 Elizabeth Bruss, Autobiographical Acts, p.123. 19 I.U. Jacobs (00.), Current Writing, p.3.
.' 12 as best as I can remember (my emphasis) ... a portrait of my childhood and youth in ..-, a black ghetto of Johannesburg ...".20
"The autobiographer is a victim of time", says Andersen (p.28). Time distances one from past events, affecting memory. The writer's "ability to recall", she continues, "usually diminishes in proportion to the increasing number of years which separate him from his experiences" (p.28). "There can be no assurance that [the memory] will retain more firmly what is important than what is petty", says Shumaker, adding that the memory is "irrationally selective" (p.38). Wroblewski, however, believes that the element of time is an advantage in terms of "maturity" (p.14). Pascal, too, values what he calls "significance in the long run"; a significance that may "appear on the surface only after much time ... [one] that the experience acquires only in retrospect". For him, the real significance of an event can acquire meaning only "when viewed in the perspective of a whole life" (pp.16-17). After writing Experiment in Autobiography, H.G. Wells "came to the conclusion that as mankind 'matures' ... it becomes more possible to be frank in the scrutiny of self and others ..." (pascal, p.163). For Wroblewski, this element of 'perspective' is vital to autobiography; it "gives greater meaning to all experience" (p.14). It is, for her, the "shaping power" behind the text, functioning as a "selective agent", so that the writer selects "only those incidents which appear relevant in light of his knowledge" (Wroblewski, pp.15-16). Perspective, then, is the agent that aids memory, linking the past to the present in a meaningful way, as the author "realizes how his present position came to be, where it has led him and where it may lead in the future" (Wroblewski, p.21).
The autobiographer's task, then, is to review his/her life, bringing his/her past experience, the 'bios', into balance with his/her present self, the 'autos', by means of writing, 'graphe'. Writing an autobiography, for 'Pascal, offers "almost unlimited opportunity for the exploration of personality - not solely of the author's, but also
20 Mark Mathabane, Kamr Boy, p.ix, 13
of the people with whom he is intimately involved" - part of his 'bios' (pascal, p.162). Autobiographical writing, then, is not limited to the self, since it is the 'bios' which gives the personality its own peculiar shape. The author must construct a unity from his disparate past experiences by fitting all the significant jigsaw pieces together, creating a "wholeness within the welter of jumbled memories" (Shumaker, p.120). The object must be to grasp the self as a whole, to find a harmonious balance. For Wroblewski, this unity is achieved by the element of 'perspective' (mentioned above), together with "selectivity, consistency and cyclical movement" (p.13). For her, 'perspective' is more important than the other three. It is "a kind of self-knowledge that permeates the whole of the autobiography", allowing the author to view his/her past experiences in their "contemporary meaning" (p.14). Pascal's viewpoint is very similar: "Autobiography is not just a reconstruction of the past, but interpretation ... a judgment on the past within the framework of the present ..." (p.19).
Other critics of autobiography also uphold this element of perspective as being vital to the genre: For Olney, it is "[a] point of view ... unique to the individual: it is ~ point of view [which gives] awareness of the nature of self being" (Metaphors of Self, ppA2-43). Shumaker's views coincide: each writer writes from the perspective of his own personal interests: "the philosopher [writes] of intellectual development ... the novelist, of people and art ••• the family woman, of her home life; and, ... the priest, of his religion" (p.138). Self-portraiture, then, varies with each individual character, his/her outlook and interests. His/her unique perspective is expressed since s/he can draw upon only his/her own recollections and his/her own interpretation of them. "A man's view ofhimself differs from the view of him held by acquaintances" (Ibid, p.34). This is so, according to Clark, since it is "impossible for a man to get out of his own skin" (Metaphorsof Self, pAO). Were this possible, the writing would no longer be a subjective autobiography, but a biography, from another person's perspective, and the autobiographer must perforce write from his own, personal perspective, using the form appropriate to his nature and achievements. Each writer "takes a particular standpoint", maintains Pascal, 14
"and interprets his life from it" (p.9). Shumaker observes that, in Newman's Apologia, for example,
one section of thirty-onepages summarizes a period of thirty-two years and in another a period of only two a disproportion .... In Mill's Autobiography, one chapter discusses a period of three years and another a period of thirty. (Shumaker, p,46)
Such selectivity and shifts of emphasis give a sense of authenticity to successful autobiography, the history of the author's 'autos' "as it appears to the author" (Wroblewski, pAO). 'It is the author who must select, from the jumble of his/her past experiences those which.most aptly suit his/her purposes. Perspective, says Sartre, "disqualiflies] in our own eyes some episodes of our lives" (pascal, p.I7). Perspective, then, determines 'selection'. Often the selectionofordinary experiences is telling: "common experiences" often allow the "reader to ... form some conclusions about the nature of the autobiographer" (Wroblewski, p.16). These also, by their very nature, allow the reader to identify with the writer. This will also contribute to the element of autobiographical truth within the text.
Nevertheless, it is not possible to record every detail of one's life. The feature of selection thus cannot be separated from the element of autobiographical 'truth':
Every man has reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has other matters in his mind which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But there are things which a man is afraid to tell even to himself .... (Shumaker, pAl)
Selection is inevitably determined by the author's purpose. Each kind of autobiographical intention "demands its own selections and rejections" (Ibid, p,44). I.M. Coetzee argues that the "gapsand evasions, perhaps even lies, are ... elements 15
of the life story, elements of the maker of the story" (Coetzee, p.4). A gap in Harriet Martineau's autobiography points to an important part in her life story: Her decision to omit "almost anything pertaining to her brother, James, was due ... to the painfulness oftheir estrangement", says Pascal (p.64). This omission, then, tells its own tale of the silencing anguish of the author. The nature of the autobiographer, then, together with his purpose and the extent of his memory, determines selection.
'Selection' and 'perspective' both unite to determine the feature of 'consistency'. The items which have been selected for narration must reveal to some extent the man the writer now is: the writer, says Wroblewski, must make "his childhood somehow consistent with his resultant personality" (Wroblewski, p.18). This is achieved, she says, by selecting and "presenting hereditary and environmental influences which directed or determined the evolution of the writer's personality" (p.19). Pascal maintains that there must be a "certain consistency of relationship between the self and the outside world" ·(p.9). Here, the close relationship between the 'autos' and the 'bios' is evident. The reader must be able to ascertain how the writer's present self came into being, not only through inherited traits but also through interaction with the outside world. Pascal emphasizes the role of the external sphere: "the self comes into being only through interplay with the outer world" (pascal, p.8). The 'autos' portrayed, then, should be consistent with the 'bios' of the writer.
The last element demanded by Wroblewski is that the basic movement of the autobiography should be circular. The fmal 'autos' revealed by the author should be "the fully realized personality" (p.30). He must also project a "self-awareness of the components of his life and ... where they may lead him" (Wroblewski, p.30). The interplay between the past 'bios' and the present 'autos' also serves to demonstrate the cyclical process, for "past events are revealed in terms of their present significance" (Wroblewski, p.20). For Pascal, "the beginning is in the end" and the "end is in the beginning" (pascal, p.12); past and present are inextricably linked. It is the present personality that "anticipate[s] ... look[s] backward ... 16 recall[s] and foreshadow[s]" (Shumaker, p.13). The autobiography should also take on a "futuristic note, extending these realizations into possible future action" (Wroblewski, p.24).
The autobiographer's task, then, is to construct a coherent whole from all the elements - truth and fiction, time and memory, structure, form, selection, perspective, movement, and portrayal of self - discussed above. The final product must demonstrate the development of the self and reveal aspects of the personality, not only to readers but also to the writer him/herself. This search for the developing self, the self in a never-ending state of 'flux', is the essence of the autobiography. This search also has profound existential implications, especially in the prison situation.
PRISON AUTOBIOGRAPHY
1.4 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND THE TOTAL INSTITUTION
The most terrible thing about ... prison-life is ... that it turns one's heart to stone."
Erving Goffman defines a "total" establishment as:
a place of residence where a large number of like situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life.22
This kind ofprison regime, then, is totalitarian in essence, having an "encompassing or total character" (Goffman, p.15), assuming responsibility for the whole human
21 Oscar Wilde, "De Profundis", Prison Writings, p.107. 22 Erving Goffman, Asylums, p.16. 17 being, who no longer has any control over himself, any rights, or any choice. It is a place in which the human being is reduced to a number, in which all sense of individuality is destroyed and a person's selfhood is "systematically ... mortified" (Goffman, p.24). All this points to the chief aim of the total institution: the "curtailment of self" (Goffman, p.24), a systematic defacement of the individual personality. The totalizing prison, with its "internal mechanisms of repression and punishment" ,23 annihilates most potential sources of self-affirmation. Foucault asserts that, in most cases, this type of institution "assume[s] responsibility for all aspects of the individual ... it is 'omni-disciplinary' ... tak[ing] possession of man as a whole, of all the physical and moral faculties that are in him, and of the time in which he is himself" (Foucault, pp.235-6).
According to Robert Johnson, the "most total of total institutions" is epitomized by death row. It is, he says,
the penitentiary most demanding of penitence, the prison most debilitating and disabling in its confinement ... [where] the allegorical pound of flesh is just the beginning. Here the whole person is consumed, the spirit gradually worn down, then the body is disposed of.24
In such a prison, the prisoner is stripped of everything - family, friends, status, possessions, influence, will • in short, anything which may give some meaning to his/her life. All the familiar goals are snatched away. Life becomes a vacuum in which the human being has little purpose, few challenges, and no obligations, except to be obedient to the authorities. Cut off from the opportunity to work and to enjoy life, the prisoner ultimately suffers what Victor Frankl calls an "existential vacuum"; there is a vast emptiness within him/her. In these circumstances, man's "will to
23 Michael Foucault, Disciplineand Punish, p.236. 24 Robert Johnson, The Pains of Imprisonment, p.129. 18
meaning", a vital need to find a "why" for which to live, is activated." Frankl continually asserts his belief in the philosophy of Nietzsche: "He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how" (Frankl, p.108). In this situation, writers must inevitably "confront themselves and take measure oftheir own identity" in an attempt to reinstate their alienated selves (Watts, p.IO?). This is often achieved through 'graphe', the act ofwriting, which assists the ego in re-establishing itself within what Baltard terms these 'complete and austere institutions' (quoted in Foucault, p.235).
It is this kind of environment that motivates the prisoner to find a way of re establishing a sense of dignity and independence, in the face of the total extinction of the self. These conditions would be particularly conducive to a written response such as autobiography, which constitutes a re-definition of the self. For an individual to maintain feelings of self-worth, s/he needs to enjoy a certain amount ofdignity, self-respect, and pride in his/her capabilities, appearance, and social self. According to Watts, autobiography is a means through which a "broken individual" can restore some feelings of self- respect (see p.15l).
In his 'Introduction' to his Anthology of Prison Writings, Geoffrey Bould maintains that, for one with a creative mind, communication via the pen is essential in order to live, but "for the writer and artist in prison (my emphasis), the urge to communicate overrides all else and gives the will to live".26
In her doctoral thesis on the prison experience, Mildred Andersen suggests that those who raise their pens do so "in protest, in pain, or in simple acts of communication" (p.I). Albie Sachs, for example, writes in protest and resistance: "I have no control over my circumstances", he states in his Jail Diary, "but I can describe and interpret them ... I will write a book ... this is a way of fighting back".zt
25 Victor Frankl, Man's Search-for Meaning, p.99. 26 Geoffrey Bould, Conscience Be My Guide, pp.v-vi. 27 Albie Sachs, Jail Diary, p.92. 19
The Nigerian poet, Wole Soyinka, writes in pain. He expresses his inner torment in "Prisoner". His anguish is evident in the words, "pains and longings", "grey
hours and days and years", "ashes", "sadness", "grief", "tears".28 Others take up their pens to communicate, to maintain a sustaining link between those in prison and those outside. Hugh Lewin, who spent seven years in a South African prison, wrote Bandiet in order to communicate "what it's like to be black ... [and] what it is like to live in a hanging jail"." Similarly, 'Terror' Lekota writes Prison Letters to a Daughter
to communicate to our children the message that was closest to our hearts, namely, that the struggle to free our people from apartheid rule and exploitation is the one to which the energies of everyone of us should be devoted without reserve [and] because ... the yearning to communicate with my daughter tore my insides apart. (Lekota, p.iii)
Here, the "energies" which impelled Lekota to write, are clear: a motivation to protest and to resist the policies of Apartheid, and to alleviate the pain of personal separation. In all cases, says Roy Pascal, writing, and autobiographical writing in particular, must involve a "personal pressure" (p.18l). This implies a sense of imbalance within the human system that impels the creative mind to communication. The fragmented world of the prisoner causes uncertainty, insecurity, and chaos within the mind, a chaos which in tum forces the sufferer to try to establish some sense of balance within the system. For Pikita Ntuli,30 writing helped to establish "some order and sanity" (Bould, p.13). Breyten Breytenbach expresses similar sentiments: "If I had not been able to write in prison, I would have gone insane" (Bould, p.4).
28 Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, Penguin Book of Modem African Poetry, p.191. 29 Hugh Lewin, Bandiet, p.14. 30 Ntuli, sculptor and member of the Pan-African Congress spent time in a South African prison. 20
In The True Confessions ofan AlbinoTerrorist, Breytenbachdeclares that, for him, writing is "a means, a way of survival". He writes about his "irrepressible urge ... the need to write ... in an attempt to erase" (pp.154-155). For Breytenbach, then, writing has cathartic possibilities. It represents a means of escape into a fantasy world: "In this way one plunges directly into a dream" (Ibid, p.155).
For Egyptian writer and psychiatrist, Nawal EI Saadawi, who was imprisoned by Anwar Sadat's regime, the act of communicating supersedes all else. She recently stated that "jail was very depressing, but the worst part was that I was forbidden to
write. For me writing is like breathing. If! don't write I suffocate and die".31 The above utterances lend credence to Landow's assertion that "social disturbances make the individual more aware of himself and at the same time incite him to self expression ... produc[ing] a new sense of self-hood" (Andersen, p.13). Margaret Bottrall supports this viewpoint:
Autobiographical impulse is favoured by disturbed social conditions when traditional structures are breaking down, when men are no longer conscious of a clear pattern by which to order their ... existence, when the sense of belonging to a community is lost. 32
Under such circumstances, autobiographycan assist in the search for identity. Jane Watts asserts that this form of writing is the means through which "the broken individual ... searches for himself ... for self-revelation". She believes that autobiography is "a voyage of discovery ... only thus can [the writer] reflect his being authentically... " (p.151).
Existential implicationsare evident here, since a conscious search for one's identity inevitably includes the element of meaning. Frankl asserts that a meaningless exist-
31 Caroline Hurry, "Trends", The Star, p.13. 32 Margaret Bottrall, Every Man a Phoenix, p.13. 21
ence creates a "void within" (Search for Meaning, p.l09). A sense of purpose and meaning in one's life helps to restore "the dignity of a human being" (Ibid, p.135), and thus establish a sense of identity and self-worth. Watts maintains that the
"ultimate criterion of autobiographical form 0" is a genuine search for meaning" (p.15l). The autobiographer, then, must perforce be something of a philosopher, existential in essence, in his search for meaning and self-knowledge. Margaret Bottrall concurs: "Inasmuch as the writer is concerned with self-knowledge, he has affinities with the philosopher ..." (p.3). This striving to find a meaning in one's life is "the primary motivational force in man", says Frankl (p.37). This is what he terms the 'will to meaning', a striving which can lead the individual to his "spiritual being, his inner self" (Frankl, po37).
1.5 mE EXISTENTIAL NEED FOR SELF-AFFIRMATION AND MEANING
Being aware of one's life ... to the maximumis living
00. to the maximum."
Cuddon defines existentialism as "a vision of the condition and existence ofman, his place and function in the world ... "34. Abrams maintains that existential philosophers, such as Camus and Sartre envisage man as
an isolated being who is cast into an alien universe ... possessing no inherent human truth, value or meaning
0 •• an existence which is both anguished and absurd."
For Camus, the 'absurd' is created by "the divorce between man and his life"
33 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, p.54. 34 s.s. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, p.25l. 35 MoH. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, pol. 22
(Sisyphus, p.13). In this situation, man is alienated from his essential self. His life is devoid ofpurpose, he has a "sense of the senselessness oflife ..• senselessness of the human condition". The world becomes one in which "all certitudes and
unshakeable basic assumptions ... have been swept away".36
In The Myth of Sisyphus, however, Camus does voice a more redemptive philosophy. The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaseless and futile labour: he was required to roll a rock to the top of a mountain, "whence the stone would fall back of its own weight" (p.96). Camus believes, however, that, at those moments when Sisyphus leaves the heights to retrieve his stone, "he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock". For Camus the struggle towards the heights is a victory in itself (see pp. 97-99). Frankl explains:
In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way - an honorable way - in such a position man can ... achieve fulfilment. (Search for Meaning, pp.36-7)
For Sisyphus the struggle itself imposes some sense of meaning upon his miserable existence.. In accepting his fate, he is able to maintain an essence of dignity and transcend his meaningless world. For Frankl, the way a man accepts his fate provides an opportunity to add a deeper meaning to his life: "His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden" (Ibid, p.78).
Frankl views existentialism as a life-enhancing philosophy. His view is that what is demanded of man is not to "endure the meaninglessness of life but rather ... to grasp its ... meaningfulness" (Search for Meaning, p.120). "Man is basically ... oriented towards meaning", he says, a meaning which is "unique and specific" to each individual and "can be fulfilled by him alone" (Ibid, p.99).
36 Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp.22-3. 23
Sartre's existentialist view is also optimistic: "it is wrong to consider existentialism a totally pessimistic doctrine. It allows everyone at every moment to hope, to exercise his will. "37
Like Sartre, who asserts that "I choose myself, not in my being, but in my manner ofbeing" (Maurois, p.307), Frankl also believes that manis decisive; he has control of his life: "Man ... determines himself ... he decides" (Search for Meaning, p.132). For Frankl, this freedom, "prevailing even in prisons, may lead either to a meaningful or an empty life". 38 What each man becomes, then, depends not on his conditions but on his decisions. Frankl maintains that "man needs tensions".39 A sense of inner tension often results in "striving and struggling for some goal" (Search for Meaning, pp.106-7). Agitation and pressure can act as inner dynamics, spurring the sufferer to action, often to creative action, as in the case of the prisoner, driven by restrictions and anguish, to embark on autobiographical ventures in an endeavour to come to terms with himself, his life, and the world about him. Creative writing becomes, in the words of Pascal,
poetic re-enactment and creation, that is, a new creative experience of the author, whereby he grasps himself in a new way, shapes and reshapes himself anew. (pascal, p.23)
A writer is able to re-shape and re-create. In his creativity, he is free. This is the very core of existentialism, says Sartre, that the "consciousness ... is free" (Maurois, p.305). The act of writing, then, and writing autobiography in particular, is a way of affirming one's identity and restructuring one's life anew.
37 Andre Maurois, From Proust to Camus, p.307. 38 Joseph Fabry, The Pursuit of Meaning, p.130. 39 Victor Frankl, Cry for Meaning, p.l06. 24
1.6 THE AUTOBIOGRAPHER - PHILOSOPHER
"Man ... can only be known in the story of his life". (Roy Pascal, p.52)
According to historians ofGreek Philosophy, Heraclitus (c. 500 B.C.) was the "first theoretical autobiographer" (Metaphors of Self, p.4). He was "the first to declare that every cosmology begins in self-knowledge". For him, "the elements are in continual flux and transformation, and so are men" (Ibid, p.5). Like the elements, he says, "man never is but is always becoming" (Ibid. p.6). This notion of the "universal flow" of Heraclitus," the concept of 'becoming', is a fundamental tenet of existential philosophy.
Friedman defines 'existentialism' as a
mood ... a reaction against the static ... in favour of the dynamic personal involvement and "engagement", action, choice and commitment •.. and the actual situation of the existential subject as the starting point of thought ... a movement from the abstract and general to the particular and concrete. (Friedman, pp.3-4)
According to this definition, man does not remain in a fixed state of being, but is in a constant process of development. Pascal asserts that autobiographers are the first authors "to see themselves as a complex process of 'becoming' in which the past always resounds in the present" (p.52). It is thus clear that the focus of both autobiographer and existentialist is upon the developing, 'becoming'self. Heraclitus
40 Maurice Friedman, The Worldsof Existentialism, p.17. 25
captures the conceptual essence of 'self' in the word "logos", defined as "a kind of universal law of becoming" (Footnote, Metaphors, p.6). In Fragment 101, he emphasizes the importance of searching out the self, the need to "discover the real meaning ofselfhood" (Metaphors, p.7). One can thus view Heraclitus as being both . philosopher and autobiographer.
Olney insists that awareness of the "nature of self-being is essential to the full autobiographic art" (Metaphors, p.43).. He suggests that the Cartesian "'Cogito, ergo sum' is a preautobiographic statement" (Ibid, p.43). This is because the constant process of thinkingis linked to the dynamic process of becoming. Thought implies movement, growth and development, simultaneously giving "a more
sharply defined picture of the ... inner world, "41 the 'I', the focus of the autobiographer.
The act ofautobiography, says Olney, "constitute[s] a bringing to consciousness ... the nature of one's own existence ..." (Metaphors, p.44), and the "root of existentialism, is, of course, 'existence'" (Friedman, p.6). The autobiographer, then, who strives to find his unique self must be something of an existential philosopher. A.M. Clark maintains that "autobiographyis not the annals of a man's life but its 'philosophical history'" (pascal, p.9). It shows how the writer "changed from the man he was into the man he now is" (Spengemann, p.39). The autobiographer
has no fixed image of himself to contemplate; what he is now cannot be understood without a consideration of his own past. It is the developmentof his own identity that he must scrutinize. He is called to be philosopher as well as historian. (Bottrall, p.IO)
Once again, it is clear that the autobiographer in search of his/her essential self -
41 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel, p.336. 26
his/her 'autos' - cannot be divorced from the philosopher. Gunn maintains that in shifting attention from the '''bios' to the 'autos' - from the life to the self', James Olney "was largely responsible for ... turning the [autobiography] in a philosophical,
psychological and literary direction".42 The emphasis, says Gunn, is on the act of "self-reading" rather than "self-writing" (p.8). Furthermore, she upholds the role of language in the search for one's essence, because it promotes the act of "self reading" (p.8):
It is by means of language [graphe] that self both displays itself and has access to depth; it is also through language that the self achieves and acknowledges its bios. The self's impulse towards orientation in its world exhibits the bios of autobiography. (Gunn, p.9)
The self, then, comes into being through interplay with the world and through language, the act ofwriting. Language is a vehicle through which the writer is able to explore the depths of his inner spirit. The significance of language in the search for one's quintessence is also stressed by Heidegger:
The primary function of [language] is to relate us to ourselves, other people and the world, and so ultimately to Being itself ...[it] leads man to truth and the openness of being."
The act of writing implies an active process of thought which, by its very nature, "'introduces order where there was none, by impositing a unity of mind on the diversity of things:" (Sartre, quoted in Watts, p.43). In addition, the act of inner exploration implies a form of self-analysis, which in tum can lead to inner health.
42 Janet Gunn, Autobiography, p.3. 43 Ronald Grimsley, Existential Thought, p.56. 27
For the writer, then, the autobiography should be a "search for the true self" (Watts, p.39), "an instrument for understanding life ... a voyageof discovery" (Ibid, p.Sl),
From the above survey, it is clear that the focus of the autobiographer and the existentialphilosopher is upon the unique, emergentself, which is always in a state of flux. It is upon this central aspect, then, that this dissertation will focus, and upon the various aspects within the selected texts that reveal the developing self: form and structure as a reflection of the self and the personality, and tone as a mirror of the mood of the writer. The motive for the writer's creativeresponsewill also be examined, togetherwith theextentto which his 'graphe' portrays his 'autos' in relation to his 'bios'.
In his creative expression, each writerchooses the form most appropriate to his own nature, and the nature of his own experiences. Each writer is unique in his mode of expression. Oscar Wilde affirms the uniqueness of creative response:
To the great poet there is only one method of music his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting - that which he himselfemploys. (Wilde, Intentions, p.213)
This dissertation will focus uponthecreative, prison expressions ofHermanCharles Bosman, Dennis Brutus, and Jeremy Cronin in an attemptto discover how each one reveals his unique self, and expresses his personal, existential need to communicate and to discover meaning.
" 28
CHAPTER TWO
HERMAN CHARLES BOSMAN - COLD STONE JUG
But Oh! dear God the tears that flow, The anguished grief, the bitter woe, In that stone builded citadel: The hearts that break ... my heart as well.
HERMAN CHARLES BOSMAN CIRCA 1926 - 1929}
Cold Stone Jug is an account of Herman Charles Bosman's experiences in Pretoria
Central Prison, which "in Cold Stone Jug he fictionalizes as Swartklei Great Prison" .2 Told in the first person, Bosman's book is subtitled "A chronicle: being the unimpassioned record of a somewhat lengthy sojourn in Prison. "3
On the 171uly, 1926, Bosman shot and killed his step-brother, David. In a statement made to the Bench after he had been sentenced to death on the 15 November, 1926, Bosman explained that he had been "impelled by some wild and chaotic impulse" (Rosenberg, p.55). On 24 November, 1926, his sentence was commuted to ten years' imprisonment. In August, 1930, however, he was released on parole, and "returned to the world to live" (Rosenberg, p.65). Bosman's physical life in prison had ended, but his psych<:>logical and emotional agonies had not. Prison life left its mark on Bosman. Indeed, Vaclav Havel maintains that prison is intended "to mark ... a man ... for life ... score his heart in such a way that it [will] never heal completely" (Bould, p.8).
Throughout his life, Bosman was haunted by his prison experiences, "spectral long agos"." For him, life itself was a prison house: in "Ghosts", published in 1946, he writes that "when a convict ... hears the prison gate clang shut behind him ... he
1 Quoted in Valerie Rosenberg, Sunflowerto the Sun, p.56 (Rosenberg doesnot provide a bibliography nor disclose sources in footnotes). 2 Stephen Gray (00.), Hennan Charles Bosman, pA. 3 Herman Charles Bosman, Cold StoneJug, p.S. 4 Herman Charles Bosman, A Cask of Jerepigo, pA3. 29
realizes for the first time that the whole world is a gaol" (Cask of Jerepigo, p.68). Bernard Sachs, who was a life-long friend of Bosman, alleges that Bosman's "cell gave him claustrophobia, from which he suffered greatly"," This fear afflicted Bosman during much of his lifetime. In Cold Stone Jug, published in 1949, Bosman explicitly states that he "had got claustrophobia in prison" and that he "still get(s) nightmares about that period" (p.216). Sachs recounts that when, on one occasion, he slept at Bosman's home, "[s]uddenly, he [Bosman] woke up and sent up shrieks that shook me for days. He had dreamt that he was entombed, he told me" (Sachs, p.68).
Bosman's "suffocation fears" (lyg, p.216) are expressed in many of his writings predating Cold Stone Jug. In "Cape Town Castle" (1946), Bosman describes one of the "old prison cells" of the castle as being "blacker than anything I have ever seen" (Cask, p.91). His terror of suffocation is apparent in his description of the dark hole in the ceiling, "a couple of inches square", which was to provide some 'ventilation':
I felt that if I had been a prisoner in that cell I wouldn't have worried about the dark so much. I would have been in terror that the warder, on the rampart, through carelessness or spite, would.have put his foot on the air hole. (Cask, p.92)
Bosman experienced a feeling of entrapment even in the open air: in "Marico Revisited" (1944), he says that "the sunsets in the Marico Bushveld are incredible things, heavily striped like prison bars" (Cask, p.158). Bosman's fears became so intense that, when he was temporarily trapped in a lift in the High Court Buildings years after his imprisonment, he "became frantic and thrust his fist through the glass of the door in an effort to get out" (Sachs, p.68). This episode, together with his recurring nightmares, prompted Helena, his wife, to suggest that "as a therapeutic catharsis he write an autobiographical novel chronicling his experiences in prison ... [so] he set up his typewriter and began work ..." (Rosenberg, pp.191-2).
Cold Stone Jug was published in April, 1949. A period of nineteen years had elapsed before he was able to write about his prison experiences. This delay implies a sense
5 Bernard Sachs, Bosman as I knew him, p.39. 30
ofgufuand shame verified by Bosman's own assertion:
I left prison twenty years ago. And I have been conscious
for'eveq moment of the time, since then, that I am an <, ex-convi~ , (Cold Stone Jug, p.213)
Irmgard Titlestad asserts that the 1940's represented, for Bosman, a "transitional period
... a time of stock-taking",6 after which he experienced what Lionel Abrahams describes as "reintegration, restoration and peace".' For Bosman, however, the cathartic need to exorcise prison ghosts was not the only motive for writing Cold Stone Jug. Neil Rusch maintains that one aim or Bosman was "to bring to public notice prison conditions, the enforcement of prison regulations and the effect these have on the prisoner as a human being".8
Bosman also wrote from sheer compulsion: "since my early adolescence I had one fervent longing: to devote myself ... to the task of writing the things that surged blindly inside me for expression" (Cask, p.134). He wrote for the purejoy ofcreating: "Language of any description fascinates me. The sound of a word can drive me mad if it's the right word" (Cask, p.191). Bosman writes about
The eternal grandeur of sentences, even ifyou don't know their meaning. Many years ago I made up the word "mokador" - signifying the feeling of exultation you get, of ecstatic elation, when a word is used correctly. , (Cask, p.191)
For Bosman, then, language was a stimulant, providing what he termed "eternal magic"." These assertions lend credibility to Rosenberg's claim that "he could get high on words" (p.76). Bosman, then, not only wrote Cold Stone June as a cathartic exercise, but also to fulfil his artistic urge to create.
6 Irmgard Titlestad, From Amontillado to Jerepigo, p.8S. \ 7 Herman Charles Bosman, Collected Works, "Forward", by Lionel Abrahams, p.13. 8 Neil Rusch, "A History of the South African Prison Crusade", ~, Vol.1, No.6,1979,p.IS. 9 Herman Charles Bosman, Uncollected Essays, p.517. 31
Another strong motivation for Bosman was the need to communicate, to authenticate his individuality, and to attain immortality:
[I]f you have ever taken up a pen and written something ... you know inside of you that what you have put down ... is something that you have created; it is something that is eternally part of you, something that has never been in the world before, and something that must remain for always just as you have done it. (Uncollected Essays, p.72)
These words evoke the Cartesian principle, 'I think, therefore 1 am. '10 In this case, however, Descartes' dictum can clearly be replaced by the idea 'I write, therefore I am'. For Bosman, then, the writing of Cold Stone Jug was a means of restoring his identity. Cold Stone Jug is autobiographical in essence. It can be seen as an attempt, by Bosman, to reconstitute his own self-concept, and Bosman's action in writing such a work conforms to Pascal's belief that "through wrestling with images of [the] past ... writers ... are able to search out and assess their 'inner standing'" (Watts, p.114). Cold Stone Jug deals only with a short period of Bosman's life, his prison years from November 1926 to August 1930. Nevertheless, the writing of his semi-autobiographical novel seems to have been a 'liberating' experience for Bosman. The termination ofhis long-standing association with the established South African journals, Trek, and The S.A. Opinion. in the early 1950's, and the birth ofan exceptionally prolific short-story writing phase, suggest a desire to start afresh. The early 1950's, the last one and a half years of Bosman's life, were characterized by a "new creative impulse" (Titlestad, p.53). From April, 1950, until his death in October, 1951, Bosmanpublished no fewer than eighty-three stories in the 'Voorkamer' series, and was concurrently writing Willemsdom, his last novel.
10 Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialismand Humanism, see p.44. 32
SWARTKLEI GREAT PRISON AS A TOTAL INSTITUTION
"Whereas no man should break the law, the law must not break man either. " (Albino Terrorist, p.345)
Bosman's creative ability had been stifled during his incarceration: "... the atmosphere [in prison] inhibited his urge to write, something as necessary to him as dreaming at night" (Blignaut, p.43). The one extant poem that he did write in prison expresses the extreme anguish he suffered while he was serving time: he writes about "'A massive pile ... a stone-builded citadel ... a place of broken dreams and hearts'" (Ibid, p.43). These words capture the essence of the total institution with its "encompassing tendencies" (Goffman, p.15). Swartklei Great Prison in Cold Stone Jug provides a good example of such an institution. Indeed, this gaol may be envisaged as being "the most total of total institutions" (see p.17 of this dissertation), for this is a gallows prison: "Swartklei Great Prison is dominated by the gallows chamber" (Jug, p.14). This cell is called "Terminus. Death House", by Breytenbach (Albino Terrorist, p.31). The total institution provides a social world for its inmates, completely free of contact with the outside world. Social separation is emphasized in the very first chapter of Cold Stone Jug: in "honouring the mothers of the country" on Mother's Day, the convicts felt "very proud that [they] were participating in a ceremony that was on that day being observed in the magical world known as 'outside'" (p.9). The sense of isolation is further underlined by the use of the words "us", and "we", referring to the inmates, and "they", referring to those "people who were free to roam the streets ... men and women who were not in prison" (Jug, p.9). This barrier that total institutions place between the prisoner and the wider world "marks the first curtailment of self' (Goffman, p.23).
Such institutions also exercise control in the "reinforce[ment] of property dispossession" (Ibid, p.28). Hugh Lewin, who served seven years in Pretoria Central Prison from December 1967, testifies to the fact that "you are stripped of everything that you can call your own" (Bandiet, p.4I). Such deprivation is important to the prison authorities because "persons invest self feelings in their possessions" (Goffman, p.27). Bosman asserts that, after his suitcase had been restored to him, he viewed his "few poor possessions ... with a warm feeling of intimacy" (pp.217-8). In most total institutions, " 33
admission procedures demand that the prisoner be stripped of all his belongings, the belongings that represent his own personal 'identity kit'. Swartklei is no exception: Bosman's own suitcase has to be "dug up" ffi!g, p.217) when he is discharged.
Upon admission to gaol, the prisoner is issued with the standard prison clothing, uniform in character, and "typically of a 'coarse' variety" (Goffman, p.29). Bosman describes the "coarse, stinking, degrading" (p.2I?) "ridiculous knee-breeches ... black stockings ... with horizontal red stripes ... washed-out brown jacket that hangs like a sack on you" (P.71). Goffman refers to these uniforms as "substitute possessions [which] are clearly marked as really belonging to the institution" (p.26). Bosman describes the "prison (my emphasis) nightshirts ... made out of blue jean" (p.65). He was clearly perturbed by having had to surrender his belongings upon admission to prison. In Willemsdorp, he again writes about a prisoner having
to surrender his watch and money and valuables and cigarettes and matches to the section warder ... and [being] issued with a tin dish and a wooden spoon and a sop1 pm'1 ....11 (p.l??)
In addition to the personal diminution that comes from being stripped ofone's property, total loss ofhuman dignity is ensured by the appropriation ofthe dearest ofpossessions: "one's full name" (Goffman, p.26). In this respect, Swartklei also conforms to the archetypal total institution: "'You mustn't call a convict by his name', the warder announced pontifically,... 'you must calls him by his number'" (p.124). Loss of one's name represents a great curtailment of the self, because one's identity is inexorably associated with one's name. To be called by a number is to be deprived of one's identity and humanity. Bosman relates that he wished that "one day a warder ... would call [him] by [his] name and not by [his] number. Just once" (p.l57). To his mind, this "accolade" would have conferred upon him the distinction of "being officially accepted as a human being, with a name ..." (p.15?).
Prison life in Swartklei is thus characterized by unceasing regulations, what Goffman
11 Herman Charles Bosman, Willemsdom. p.177. 34
calls '''house rules', a relatively explicit and formal set of prescriptions and proscriptions that lays out the main requirements ofinmate conduct" (p.51), specifically designed to create disorientation and to ensure absolute power over the inmates. In Cold Stone Jug, Bosmanconstantly refers to the directives that set out codes ofconduct: "the prison regulations demand ... that ..." (p.54); "... in terms of the regulations ..."(p.54); "... the regulations insist that a convict shall not..." (p.60); "the rules lay it down that every convict passing through from the workshops into the section has got to be searched" .(pp.93-94). Bosman explains the 'need' for this "serious formality" (p.60): many convicts "bottle-in" forbidden articles such as "... dagga. Tobacco. Writing-paper. A boot-brush. A newspaper. Bootpolish ..." (p.60). This list of innocuous articles - most of which could never be 'bottled in' - grouped together with a potentially harmful substance such as dagga - reveals Bosman's attitude to the arbitrary nature of many prison regulations. The "strip-search" (p.61) constitutes the most degrading violation of the person's intimate self, a defiling of the body that is designed to mortify and to humiliate: "You... come up to the warder ... with your jacket and pants off ... and he feels allover you " (p.61), notwithstanding the 'rule' that "the warder was not supposed to feel there between your legs, high up ... he was supposed to respect your private parts" (p.63). This constitutes an assault on the prisoner's personal privacy. The search is, however, only one aspect of the constant surveillance in prison. In Swartklei, this perpetual scrutiny takes the form of warders always on patrol, "checking and counter checking" (p.59), shouting commands and "blood-curdling threats" (p.57), even when the prisoners are using the toilets, which, typically, are "open latrines" (p.109): "'Get back to your shops you two', the latrine warder shouted, 'I been timing you. Wipe your --- and get offthem buckets •.. or I'll report yous ... for loafing in the latrines'" (p.112). The prisoner is "the object of information, never a subject in communion" (Foucault, p.2(0). He is, therefore, under the constant eye of the authorities. The prison authorities are thus able to observe the convict at all times and under all circumstances.
Ceaseless observation is a controlling mechanism common to all total institutions: "the gaze is alert everywhere" (Foucault; p.195). In Swartklei Prison, the cell doors are equipped with judas windows so that the inmates can be observed at the will of the authorities: "the warders, coming along the corridor at hourly intervals, [could] look ... in through one peep-hole after another ..." (p.203). The condemned man is ., 35
subjected to the ultimate scrutiny, "watched ... day and night ... with the lights on all the time" (p.16). Breytenbach wryly explains that one of the reasons for this is to prevent the condemned man from trying to "commit suicide before his execution ... [and thus] deprive the State of its rightful vengeance" (Albino Terrorist, p.140). In this situation, a prisoner must find some outlet for the "soul-killing monotony, the bleak gloom and brutality" (Jug, p.68), which inevitably "produces delinquents by imposing violent constraints on its inmates" (Foucault, p.266). Swartklei Great Prison is no exception: Blue-coat Verdamp was so badly beaten that "he would never again, for the rest of his life, be able to walk without a crutch" (p.151). Bosman himself was also at the receiving end of warder brutality: a warder brought his "booted heel down on to the central part of [his] ... instep ... [so] that several of [his] metatarsal bones got dislocated" (p.192). The prison staff ofSwartklei Prison, therefore, did not possess the "moral qualities" which, according to Foucault, are required ofprison authorities, who should adopt the role of "educators" (Foucault, p.270). The prison authorities' control by violence and oppression is a serious issue constantly alluded to by Bosman. Their brutality is disturbingly highlighted by Bosman's nonchalant, detached tone: "So I was limping for a while" (Jug, p.192), "and so everything was settled very nicely" (p.152).
Foucault asserts that the prison should be an "apparatus for transforming individuals" (p.233); it is "supposed to apply the law, and to teach respect for it", but "all its functioning operates in the form ofan abuse ofpower" (Ibid, p.266). In Swartklei, the authorities, who should set the standard, are corrupt from the Governor downwards: "the granting of long leave was ... bound up with nepotism. Only the Governor's favourites got granted it" (p.21). Most of the warders indulge in 'lumbering': ,
[A] friend of the convict's would send five pounds to an address where the warder would collect the money and keep half for himself. For the two-ten the warder bought ... tobacco which he would smuggle into the prison.... (p.75)
Bosman reports that "unofficially everybody, including the Governor, knew that the warder[s] lumbered" (p.76). The prisoners thus learn corruption and anti-social behavioural patterns from the authorities. They learn from their "seniors how to escape 36
the rigours of the law" (Foucault, p.267).
Foucault maintains that prisons do not diminish the crime rate: "detention causes recidivism; those leaving prison have more chance than before of going back to it; convicts are, in a very high proportion, former inmates" (p.265). Breytenbach concurs: "Prisons only serve to create prisoners" (Albino Terrorist, p.345). Bosman makes a similar observation, painting a bleak future for many convicts: "... with each year that passed, the percentage of convicts wearing blue jackets - [habitual criminals] - got higher" (Jug, p.12). This is inevitable, because, when a blue-coat is eventually discharged, he returns to a "world that has changed utterly" (p.13). He is "alone and friendless" (p.13). According to his terms of parole, "he is not allowed to frequent pubs ... [or] ... consort with fellow ex-convicts", who are usually his only 'friends' (p.ll). In short, virtually everything he may do or wish to do is illegal, so eventually he ends up back in prison for committinga "minor offence", for which an 'ordinary' person would get "a five pound fine" (p.ll), and so "he will have to start on the indeterminate sentence allover again" (p.13). Bosman himself was subjected to stringent "conditions of discharge" (Jug, p.218). These were "contained in two pages of print" (Ibid). Bosman casually remarks that "through [this] system ... it is possible, of course, to spend as long as forty or fifty years behind bars - that is, if you live that long" (pp.11-12). Here he presents an angry indictment of the injustice of the prison system. The fury of his condemnationis underscored by his seemingly disarming tone and ironic understatement: "And so the blue-eoat goes on ... year in and year out" (p.13); "And how the world changes while you are doing a stretch" (p.13).
It is impossible for the incarcerated inmate to keep pace with social changes on the outside. This isolation leads to what Goffman terms "'disculturation' ... an 'untraining' which renders [the ex-convict] ... incapable of managing certain features of daily life on the outside" (p.23).
Bosman points out that When you come out you findout that places that you used to know ... have vanished. Sky-scrapers have gone up where there were tin shanties. And people's habits. They are altogether different. (p.13)
" · 37 The prisoner inevitably takes a 'frozen' picture of the outside world into prison with him...Little wonder that he is disoriented when~returns "alone and friendless" (p.13) to the "outside world that has forgotten him during those long years behind bars" Qyg, p.Ll), The prison system socializes individuals for prison society, not for a useful life after release. Throughout Cold Stone Jug, Bosman denounces this arbitrary system, which makes little attempt to rehabilitate, or to equip the inmate for useful employment after discharge. Useful work is an essential element in the transformation and socialization process but, in Swartklei, in the stone yard, the inmates spend most of their time "making big stones smaller" (p.82), "chopping stones" (p.I04), "making largish stones smaller" (p.92). Bosman acerbically comments that "the knack oftipping a loaded wheelbarrow is always a useful accomplishment in life" (p.126). The prison should be a place of correction, but, in Bosman's eyes, it makes a sorry job of rehabilitation. For Bosman, prison life induces "sick[ness] ... through the poison of introspection" (Jug, p.169), and drives one "potty" (Jug, p.21O).
STYLE AND STRUCTURE AS A REFLECTION OF SELF
From the above discussion it is clear that Swartklei Great Prison, with its internal machinery of discipline and punishment, is a totalizing institution. All aspects of the day's activities are strictly monitored, ensuring total power over the prisoners. In this gaol, Bosman has no control over his life at all: he explicitly states that the prison authorities "could chivvy [him] around from pillar to post, just like they wanted to" (llig, p.206). Wroblewski asserts that "when an individual ceases to be in harmony with his environment, an artistic quest for stability results" (p.143). This quest becomes the organizing principle behind the story of Bosman's life in prison - a life composed of an arbitrary series of events.
It would seem that Cold Stone Jug is composed haphazardly, without any pattern and internal shaping power, but Bosman is. conscious and calculating in his art. In "Mafeking Road", Bosman clarifies one of his principles of narration: "... it is not the story that counts ... [a] necessary thing is to know what part of the story to leave out. 12
12 Herman Charles Bosman, Mafeking Road, p.47. 38
Cold Stone Jug is constructed in the form of seemingly random sketches, just like the prisoners' stories, "starting just from anywhere and ending up nowhere" (Jug, p,4I). There is no sense of continuity in the narration. Each story related by Bosman reflects a different tone and mood, but the fragmented style of the text embodies the absurd nature ofprison life as well as the shattered life of the inmates, who inevitably become dehumanized, "battered receptacles of stories" (Jug, p,42) that never come to any logical conclusion, ending "just like that, in mid-air ... exactly like [their] own liv[es]" (p,4I). This arbitrary movement of the narration from one story to another also reflects Bosman's dynamic mind, his "volatile personality" (Collected Works, "Foreword", p.8), or what Sachs calls his "high voltage" (p.8). The fast-moving sketches and matching variety of styles suggest an active, energetic intellect: in Cold Stone Jug, Bosman will switch from a picaresque rendering of a lag's story about "One-Eyed Bombadier", narrated in "boob slang" - '''I was longstall when Snowy Fisher and Pap done that job in Jeppes'" (pp.34-5) - to an understatedly poignant passage describing his own feelings: "To be locked up in a prison and to be misunderstood by those about you has got to it certain very bitter features. Especially ifyou are young and you have gaiety in your nature" (p.42). In another section, he adopts a matter-of-fact, yet humorous tone, giving a few generalities about "dagga" (p.43). Bosman spends some time giving inside information about "a typical day in the Great Prison" (p.53), focusing on the daily routine and the "offenders" around him (p.57), rather than on himself, his 'autos'.
In effect, Cold Stone Jug may be termed an 'anti-autobiography'. Bosman ignores the traditional rules and conventions ofautobiography 'proper'. His narration is not strictly chronological, but rather deliberately fragmented. Bosman employs different literary modes in order to convey the complexity of response required if one is to come to terms with the trauma of imprisonment. He does not intend to dwell upon the self. In prison, there is no self. Nevertheless, Bosman's self-effacing method of narration paradoxically exposes aspects of his personality.
In Cold Stone Jug, the focus is upon the other prisoners, rather than upon the self. This fact reveals something of Bosman's 'autos'. Shumaker observes that each writer writes from the perspective of his "special interests" (p.138). Abrahams maintains that Bosman had, within him, "a deep human resonance" (Collected Works, p.I), Bosman's 39
profound interest in humanity is explicit in the following assertion:
[W]hen I walk about the streets, and see the crowds ... with all the different sorts of light in their eyes ... I feel the warm glow of human beings, and my nostrils are filled with the heady stink of human beings, and something inside me comes alive to the joy and pathos of humanity - then I sometimes think ... of the blue-coats ... and the long prison years in front of them ... hemmed in by brown walls and brown years ... leading their silent lives. And I hope that God will go with them, through all those years. (Cold Stone Jug, p.13)
Here it is clear that the memory of his experience 'inside' always remained painful. However, through his sharing in the tribulations of the convicts, Bosman acquired a wisdom and understanding of human nature and suffering. His prison writings depict his fellow convicts as human beings, rather than as brutalized criminals. Also, for him, life is a force to be lived to the full: it is to be experienced in its entirety - its "joy" and its "heady stink". He explicitly asserts that true creation springs from "the raw things of human life" (Cask, p.43) , from "man and the earth" (Uncollected Essays, p.51). For Bosman, then, creativity is concerned with every element of the human condition: "Poetry should come ... from the gutter. From the sewer. From the abysses of life itself; warm with raw splendours", he says (Uncollected Essays, p.68). He, therefore, recommends that "if you have any poetry inside you, go into the world and live it. The verses will write themselves" (Uncollected Essays, p.69). This is just what Bosman does. He goes into the 'gutter' to get his material: from the blue-coats in prison he collects the raw material for his stories, which Sachs calls "prose poems" (p.63). Bosman avers that he learnt some of his "most valuable lessons ... at the institution conducted by Adversity (upper case "A")" (Cask, p.24). In Cold Stone Jug, Bosman categorically asserts that prison is "the finest University that there is" (p.166). In Swartklei, he eschews the first offenders' section because it is boring, "like a small and narrow-minded village. The blue-eoat's spirit was the city" (p.42). The blue coats, the seasoned and habitual criminals, had, for Bosman, lived. He declares that he "really enjoyed being in the company of this type of unregenerate scoundrel" (PA2), because "their talk and their ways fascinated me ... (until I got sick of them)" (p.33). This avowal reveals Bosman the 'decadent' aesthete, always on the alert for new 40
excitements and stimulation. Abrahams attests to this aspect of Bosman's personality: "He burned with a desire for experience of all kinds" ~, p.9), he had a "positive horror of the obvious and pedestrian" (Ibid, p.19). For Bosman, then, there could be no dull in-betweens: \ For poetry to be great and inspired and a living force you have got to have a world in which there are magnificent and terrible contrasts. You have got to have jewels and ermines on the one hand and rags on the other. (Uncollected Essays, p.71)
These words reflect the tenet of aesthetic philosophy that advocates the cultivation of one's "whole area ofawareness" .13 The aesthetic soul recoils from everyday banalities, and embraces varied experience, the "rags" and glories of life, its ugliness and beauty. This aesthetic notion that creativity must include life in all its diversity, the heights and the depths, is epitomized in the works of Charles Baudelaire, from whom "Herman drew inspiration" (Sachs, p.65):
o Beauty, do you come from heights sublime Or hell? You look infernal and divine •.• Do you from depths arise, from stars alight?
Lightly you scatter dolour and delight."
A strikingly similar idea is expressed in Bosman's poem, "Royalty of Grass":
The stature of man is that his feet Should stand one on the veld and one on the street, And that his neck Should stand level with the star ... . (Collected Works, p.649)
In Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, Lord Darlington utters identitcal sentiments:
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. «ts
13 R.V. Johnson, Aestheticism, p.19.
14 Charles Baudelaire, "Hymn to Beauty". Flowers of Evil, p,4S. 15 Oscar Wilde, Plays. Prose Writings and Poems. p.328. 41
Titlestad maintains thatWilde provided a "model" for Bosman, and that Bosman "uses very similar metaphors to express his ideas" (p.63). Indeed, Bosman himself claims to feel "a queer sort of intimacy with ..• Oscar Wilde" For Bosman, then, as for Wildeand Baudelaire, creativity and lifeare characterized by disturbing yetinspiring extremes. In "Edgar Allan Poe", Bosman applauds writers such as Twain, Bret Harte, and Artemus Ward for carrying on "thePoesque tradition". He furtherclaims that their workis imbued with "freedom and vigour - but complete with all the elements of the macabre". They specialized, continues Bosman, "in a grave exaggeration to one great end of entertainment" (Uncollected Essays, pp.95-6). A primaryaim of Bosman, then, is to entertain. Thosewho knew Bosman personally, consistently attest to his humour: Abrahams mentions his "love of fun" ~, p.9); Blignaut refers to "hisaffection and his laughter" (p.1l1); Sachs declares that "there was something phenomenal about Herman's sense of humour". Bosman himself writes that creativity must be "fun" (seeRosenberg, p.172), and clearly delights in his own writing powers. His humour entertains, even in descriptions of horrifying conditions. To offer a striking example: through his ironic and wittyuseof the hygienic "whiffof ... disinfectant" , he focuses attention on the unhnienic andinsanitary conditions of the death-cell, withits "sanitary pailin thecomer" (pp.16-17). Hisattitude is alsorevealed in Willemsdow, in which he describes the "sanitary bucket" (p.l77) as "a stinking pot ... an evil-smelling latrine bucket ... a crapcontainer" (pp.178-9). Bosman's humour, then, is not merely amusing. Beneath all the jest, he is savage and satirical, underscoring the lackof fun and humour in the prison situation, using black comedy to lacerate the prison system. For instance, he jestinglyinterprets the letters "'I.S. '" which are sewn onto the lapels of the "'Indeterminate prisoners'", as denoting "'I'm settled'" (p.12). Such banter sharply exposes the disturbing fact that, through the indeterminate sentence system, a man could spend "thirtyyears and more in prison ... through his having committed ...minQr offences while out on ticket" (pp.11-12). I' Bosman's sense of fun, then, alerts the reader to underlying horror, intensifying awareness of the "terribly different, terribly mysterious way of life" (my emphasis) of ...the prisoner (lyg, p.34). Traditionally, laughter and humour connote freedom, but, in Cold Stone Jug, they serve to stress the fact that there is very little fun or freedom in I' a Gothic institution like Swartklei Great Prison. 42 According to MacAndrew, many writers employ Gothic elements to "shock the reader into a sense ofits strangeness" and to "arouse horror on the verge oflaughter" (p.137). Indeed, Bosman's laughter is often tinged with a' sense of hysteria, especially in the "gallows half-laughs" (Jug, p.21). For Bosman, this kind oflaughter is cathartic. His uproarious laughter after he had "done his nut" (Iyg, p.18?) served to do him "a lot of good. It had driven the madness out of [his] stomach" (p.188). This episode serves to uphold Sachs' contention that, with Bosman, "a certain sadness overlay the laughter" (p.38). The sadness that underlies all the humour in Cold Stone Jug is the disturbing awareness of the tragedy of the diminution and waste of human beings. Little wonder that Bosman's humour is "somewhat shivered [and] neurotic" (Sachs, p.12). It is the mixture of horror and humour that increases the sense of unease prevailing in Cold Stone Jug. A tragicomic irony is seen in many of the stories that Bosman narrates in Cold Stone Jug, a constant reminder of the ever present 'chiaroscuro' of the prison bars: the image of the "Clown" demonstrating the "black-bottom", is eclipsed by the consciousness that the laughter generated by such antics belongs to the category of "condemned-cell ... mirth" (p.21), and by the chilling comment that "a condemned man [is] something already dead" (p.17). Even before Stoffels, his "company in the condemned cell" (p.16), was executed, Bosman had "not felt in Stoffels's veins ... the blood and breath of life" (p.31); Stoffels did not "appear ... as a creature of flesh and blood" (p.29). Bosman writes that, during most of the year, the gallows cells are empty: "There is nobody waiting up there ... with the death sentence suspended over him" (p.15). This dark punning has a piercing barb, also felt when Bosman asserts that Van Graan, a warder who guards them, "know[s] the ropes" (p.22). This phrase is repeated many times in the book (pp.12, 73, 89, 158, 189, 191, 199, 208), a constant, horrifying reminder of the ubiquitous shadow of the gallow~ chamber. Bosman's own shuddering contemplation of the gallows is reflected in his evocation of the trap-door that drops "with a reverberation that shakes the whole prison building" (p.16). The comic element, then, intensifies the reader's sense of the tragedy. 1\ Capital punishment is an issue that looms large throughout the book. The image of "the rope .. ~. a short rope" (lyg, p.18) is repeatedly emphasized. Bosman associates "the rope" (p.58) with the "mortuary gate" (p.58), through which he marched daily to and /'from his place of work. He reports that every time that he walked under that gate, he "made the sign of the cross religiously" (p.73). Once again there is a chilling side to 43 this humour: after a man died in prison, "either, naturally or through the rope ... a piece of sacking [would be] thrown over him, [and] he would be carted by wheel barrow through the mortuary-gate ..." (p.58). Bosman, thus, was reminded daily of his narrow escape from the gallows, and of "violent death ... the gruesome ceremony of doing a man to death above a dark hole" (p.15): "It was a strain on my nerves, having to pass through that mortuary-gate, with its unpleasant associations, four times a day" (p.58). The memory of the "mortuary-gate" obviously haunts Bosman, for it is mentioned several times in the book (pp.58, 59, 60, 68, 73, 93, 96, 113, 114), and often several times on the same page. Clearly Bosman envisioned himself meeting the "King of Terrors, the gallows, a rope and cross-beam ... a short hempen rope ... (Willemsdorp, p.190). In Cold Stone Jug, Bosman also mentions death "at the end of a rope that was too short" (p.I13). The macabre implications of the length of the noose are described in Willemsdorp: If the rope was too long it was liable to jerk your head right off, so that they would have to sew it on again ... or else [if] the drop ... was too short ... the hangman's assistant would have to clamber down a lot of wooden steps ... and kick you enough times in your belly for ... the prison doctor to be able to certify that life was extinct. (p.l78) Bosman again describes the actual hanging ceremony in Cold Stone Jug: the prisoner , stands in "hand-euffs and leg-irons and a sack drawn over [his] head and a piece of coarse rope knotted behind his ear ..." (p.15). Bosman claims that convicts and warders alike "share to some extent the feelings of the man who is being dropped through the trap-door" (p.16). He later recounts that, after Stoffels had been hanged, the face of the warder guarding him (Bosman) was "greenish-white" (p.31). Bosman discusses the hangings that "loom like a shadow over the prison all the time" I' (p.16) in a seemingly unimpassioned and detached tone, as if he were an observer rather than an insider: "They say it is all done very efficiently. They say that it takes less than two minutes ..." (pp.15-16). In true Gothic tradition, however, this 44 detachment "contains a certain measure of pain" (MacAndrew,·p.160). Bosman does betray his real feelings about the death penalty: "the hangings are the worst part of life inside prison"Qllg, p.14). Such glimpses of Bosman's deeper feelings are all the more effective for their rarity. Some of the stories about the gallows cell do, then, have a duality in mood and tone, contrasting shades of light and darkness. Blignaut asserts that it is "because of the sombre patches [that] we see his humour" (p.5). Abrahams agrees: Bosman's '''negative' phases were a necessary counterpoint to [his] ... 'positive' ones" (Collected Works, "Foreword", p.B). This schizophrenic aspect of Bosman's nature is implied in the preface to his pamphlet of poems, The Blue Princess: "Baudelaire belongs to me even more nearly and intimately than ... Keats belong[s] to me" (Blignaut, p.71). Bosman's darker side is also expressed in his assertion that "the moment of ... encountering ... Edgar Allan Poe ... was an immortal moment" (Sachs, p.24). For Bosman, a certain kinship exists between Baudelaire and Poe in their preoccupation with "all the elements of the macabre" ("Edgar Allan Poe", in Sachs, p.75). Sachs maintains that "Herman never moved away from the ... Poe landscape" (p.65), he "remains in the ... Gothic domain with Poe" (p.64), where "dark passions" 16 abound, "along with scenes of cruelty and horror [in a] sinister, grotesque ... claustrophobicatmosphere".17 The influence of Poe and Baudelaire upon Bosman is evident in Bosman's evocation of the grotesque in his works. Bosman claims that Cold Stone Jug is an "unimpassioned chronicle". There is, however, a great deal of passion in his chronicle, and this is intensified by the "unimpassioned" pose. Bosman deals darkly with dark matters. He writes of the most terrifying times of his prison life in chilling, Gothic terms. Such Gothic descriptions underline his anti-capital punishment stance, which may be summed up in the words of Breytenbach: When the State executes someone (murders him in a reflex of barbaric revenge) ... it is a negation of the II dignity of man, any man; it is also an admission of its own incapacity to improve the social environment. (Albino Terrorist, p.345) 16 Roger Fowler, Modem Critical Terms, p.l0S. , '17 Chris Baldeck, Literary Terms, p.92. " 45 Bosman spent nine days in the gallows cell, and, as already discussed, writes with much hilarity about the "pulling ofthe warders' legs" (p.29). His deep fear is, however, also very clear in his descriptions of a hanging, the "shadow [of which] ... lies like a pall over the inmates of the prison" (h!g, p.14). This passage is consciously written in the Poe tradition, for in Poe's works, "death hangs like a pall" (Sachs, p.68), like "a crescent of glittering steel'"! coming "like a thief in the night" (poe, "The Masque of the Red Death", p.273). Gothic echoes of this resound in Cold Stone Jug, in the bizarre "'Greetings' in heavy black scroll", delivered to the condemned man during the dark hours notifying him "that his execution has been set down for the morning after next" (lyg, p.15). Gothic imagery reinforces the horror of the 'danse macabre' as the condemned man stands astride the hole of death, "trussed and pinioned and with the rope around his neck, waiting for the trap-door to fall" (Jug, p.l6). The evocation of the dead man being taken "to the mortuary for dissection" (p.58), and the horrifying imagery of "the stench ofdeath ... the stink of corpses ... the smell offear ... the stink of carrion ... the decaying bones" (pp.58-59) reveal Bosman the "decadent" (Sachs, p.61), the "imperious priest of demonic aestheticism" (Collected Works, "Foreword", p.3). This is so because this imagery reflects the jaundiced outlook of Charles Baudelaire, the decadent, who also sketches "carrion" and "corpses", "belly in decay ... maggots, dense and black ..• gruesome" ("The Carcase", Flowers ofEvil, pp.56-7). Elizabeth MacAndrew asserts that Gothic devices within Gothic tales are used with the purpose of "drawing the reader into their closed worlds. ,,19 This simultaneously increases the "fear" and "educates the reader's feelings" (MacAndrew, pp.3-4). Here, then, Bosman's aim is to jolt his readers out of their complacency, and to remind them that prisons exist in all their ghastliness. The horrible ingredients ofthe grotesque draw the reader into the inhuman, bizarre realm that is prison. Bosmanevokes the grotesque to create "a doubtful, murky atmosphere" (MacAndrew, p.157). II For MacAndrew, Gothic literature is a "literature of nightmare" (p.3). Its conventions include "dream landscapes and figures of the unconscious imagination" (MacAndrew, -p.3). Itis a type of fiction which "develops a brooding atmosphere of gloom ... and ,, 18 Edgar Allan Poe, "The Pit and the Pendulum", "Tales and Poems, p.252. 19 Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, p.22. 46 often deals with aberrant psychological states" (Abrams, p.72). This dark mood is also evoked in Bosman's frightening description of his descent into madness during his incarceration. He sees "the most terrible figures ... etched in black lines, drawn in India ink across the whole universe" (p.175-6), and has a vision of "'life' as a vast, black serpent, trailing through ... the prison" (p.176). MacAndrew contends that "the encounter with madness is one of the basic experiences of the grotesque" (p.158). Paradoxically, this dark period of Bosman's prison life was caused by the most "beautiful thing that happened to [him]" whilst he was in prison (p.167): a walk outside the prison walls to fit a bracket into a guard-post. This is the 'lightest' episode in Cold Stone Jug, described in poetical terms, revealing Bosman the Romantic. Romantic literature, however, also contains Gothic elements in its depiction of "darker aspects" of life (potter, p.213). Bosman darkens his Romantic picture with Gothic elements that evoke a sense of claustrophobia and horror: "poison", "cramped walls" (p.169), "black and scarlet" (pp.170 and 173), "haunted", "deadly" (p.l71). The juxtaposition of the Romantic with the Grotesque intensifies the horror, transforming the idyll into the Gothic nightmare that is prison. Prison is a Gothic place, a place of "terror and cruelty ... [with] a stupefying atmosphere of gloom and doom". 20 In his description of this adventure into "Paradise" (p.172), Bosman engenders a sense of tension, so intrinsic to Romantic poetry, by juxtaposing a Romantic Utopia with the realities of his existence, the "black and scarlet"prison (p.173). He describes this 'excursion' as an "adventure into Avalon" (p.173), ajoumey to "fairyland" (p.172), which had a "sublime impact on [his] soul" (pp.170-171). This imaginative fantasy imparts a sense of alienation and strangeness, bespeaking a yearning for freedom and escape from the tyranny of the prison situation. In a Keatsian synesthetic style, Bosman describes the "thick silence that was fragrant" (p.171) and "heavy with perfumes" (p.173), and his feeling of "dreadful ecstacy" (p.168) induced by the "trancelike vision" Ii (p.172). The "ancient palaces, richly arrassed ... with armorial bearings" (p.172), confer an air of mystery and medieval remoteness - a feature of Romantic poetry- upon the scene. Similarly, the exotic Keatsian names, "Stout Cortez" and "Darien", (p.167), magnify the delights. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the Romantic and the Gothic Ihighlights the fact that escape is an illusion, and that Bosman, like a beast, 20 J.A. Cuddon, Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, p.381. 47 must return to his "all-steel cage", which induces "a state of animal despair" Qyg, pp.32 and 193). During his excursion, "life had been broken open like a ripe pomegranate" (Jug, p.172). The reader is, however, left withthe uncomfortable notion that the multitudinous possibilities of life connoted by the comparison with this fruit, are not offered to those in prison. In Cold Stone Jug, then, Bosman employs various modes: "romantic ... documentary , ... ironic comedy" (Gray, p.25). As "a conscientious literary artist" (Irmgard Schopen, in Gray, p.123), he concentrated always on tithe way (my emphasis) you tell it" (Mafeking Road, p.47). Gray asserts that he was "obsessively calculating" and that he put "careful drafting ... into every phrase that he wrote" (Gray, p.59). Bosman's detached technique, then, is a deliberate pose. He seems to keep detached from his subject matter: his use of the second person, "you", when describing the generalities ofprison life, creates a sense of emotional distance between his prison experiences and himself: "you are awakened about 5.30 a.m." (p.53); "Anyway, if one of your garments is missing ..." (p.65); "And then you get inside your cage ..." (p.59). When writing about the most emotional material, "the hangings" (p.14), he appears to distance himself even further by his use ofthe third person: "he is lodged in the condemned cell adjacent to the gallows until such time as he is either reprieved or hanged" (p.15). This technique, however, serves to highlight the dehumanizing aspect ofcapital punishment, which is, according to Breytenbach, "a destruction of freedom" (Albino Terrorist, p.345), and, therefore, a destruction of one's sense ofpersonal identity. Bosman avoids any sentimentality. He clarifies his attitude towards this stance by his barbed comment on Warder Marman's novel about prison-life: "It was a very moving story", says Bosman, adding contemptuously that "it was full of slush and sentiment and melodrama ..." (p.128). Abrahams claims that Bosman "urged the need for detachment and cautioned against dangers like self-pity and sentimentality" (Collected Works II "Foreword", p.17). For Bosman, this approach serves to intensify the condemnation that he heaps upon an absurd, unjust system. In Cold Stone Jug, then, it is Bosman's humour, understatement, and creative I' techniques that strengthen his reproach. His humour is indeed surprising: "We lived like kings", says Bosman (Iyg, p.152). He asserts that the footsteps of the convicts "sounded like the tread of kings" (p.17). This kind of incongruity is employed to 48 shock the reader into a sense of its strangeness and to make him aware of the very opposite. In similar vein, Bosman incongruously describes the murderers as being a "jolly lot" (p.14), but undercuts this statement by averring that "the murderer is a strange figure ... lonely somehow; almost like an eagle. But also with the lost bewilderment of a child" (p.14). This statement expresses a wish for escape from society, and a sense of splendid alienation, often the lot of the artist. The idea of the artist as a lonely, tormented genius is expressed by Baudelaire - whose work is "germane to much of Bosman's ..." (Collected Works, "Foreword", p.5) - in his poem, "L'Albatross": The Poet, like this monarch of the clouds Who haunts the storm and blind to arrows flies Exiled to earth, stumbles through jeering crowds Cramped by his mighty wings, shaped for the skies! (Flowers of Evil, p.23) Here is a vision of what Baudelaire terms the "'prete maudit'" (the accursed, haunted poet), rejected by a "philistine public because of the superiority - and therefore incomprehensibility of his vision" (Titlestad, p.25). Bosman has a similar vision ofthe poet: "It is the fate of the poet to be wounded while he lives, perhaps to die from his hurts in order that his songs may live" (Uncollected ESsays, p.3). In prison, Bosman was an outcast. He was a murderer. This fact "single[s] him out from the other convicts" (Jug, p.14). All convicts are outcasts - rejected by society and cut off from humanity because of some anti-social offence. Bosman describes himself however, as a 'double' outcast: he has been separated from society, but is also shunned. by his fellow convicts. At the very beginning of his "chronicle", Bosman emphasises how, his fellow cell-mates react in horror to his murderer status, moving "right across to the other side, to the comer that was furthest away from [him]" (p.8). Bosman felt stigmatized. He ironically asserts that he was "a member of some sub-pariah species" :. -(p.86). His feeling of isolation was augmented by the fact that he was also a poet, a Ilonely genius. Bosman was very aware of this aspect of himself. In his 'Epilogue' (Iyg, p.220), he claims to "feel a queer sort of spiritual intimacy" with other famous writers "who have been in prison. Villon and Verlaine; and Oscar Wilde and O. Henry and St. Paul". Bosman feels a sense of fellowship with these outcast poets 49 and writers because they represent a 'community' t~ which he can belong. Within this distinguished company, he feels a sense of selfhood; he is no longer alone. Here he has some status and can thus reinstate the self. Within this circle, he i1 'somebody', no longer totally apart. Leon Hugo asserts that "the burden of his genius ... set him [Bosman] apart from others" (Blignaut, "Foreword", p.13). Bosman felt different from lesser mortals, whom he called "the mob" (Collected Works, "Foreword, p.9). With a characteristic touch of arrogance, and displaying signs of being what Abrahams terms a "mocking prankster" (Collected Works, p.3), he includes himself in the category of those "whom God has purposely made different from their fellows" (Ibid, p.9). Those who knew Bosman personally, agree that "Herman was an outsider" with "overrefined sensibilities" (Sachs, pp.23 and 8); "his sensitivity and his individual mode of thought ... set him apart", concurs Abrahams (Cask, p.9). In prison Bosman felt alienated from the other lags: "in my isolation I envied them" (p.46). He felt as if he was "in the prison but not of it" (p.17). He writes as an outsider, with them, but not of them, creating a sense of exclusion, of being different from those around him. He was different: besides his genius status - "with all its glorious, eccentric and tainted associations" (Collected Works, "Foreword, p.l) - he was a murderer and was always acutely aware of the mark of Cain on his brow: "murder is a doomed sign to wear on your brow", he declares, "Cain's mark is there for all to read" (lyg, p.14). Bosman clearly feels that this mark is indelible: "every suit I wear has got prison numbers plastered on it. Ifthe world can't see those numbers, I can ..." (p.213). Here, his rare use of the first person reveals the sense of guilt, which remained with him all his life. "Two decades" (1yg, p.47) after leaving goal, he declares that "It was only when I got into the outside world that I discovered that I would always have numbers on my jacket and.a broad-arrow on the seat of my pants" (p.213). Abrahams believes that the "after shock of having killed ... haunts the book to its end, being one of the emotions that energize the unique aching laughter" (Collected Works, "Foreword", p.15). " Bosman was thus acutely conscious of his pariah status. This consciousness heightened his empathy with the outcast, and he often "defend[ed] the underdog" (Sachs, p.12). In Cold Stone Jug, he claims that he "enjoyed being in the company of the ... unregenerate scoundrel" (p.42). He even "began consciously to acquire the blue-coat's 50 mode of speech" (Ibid). Similarly, Bosman felt an affinity with the convicted murderess, Daisy de Melker, calling her '''Mighty daughter of the line of Cain!'" (Sachs, p.42). Bosman used her forthcoming death-sentence as an opportunity for him to crusade against capital punishment. In the summer of 1932, he wrote a pamphlet in "defence of Mrs de Melker" (Rosenberg, p.99), entitled "Mrs de Melker under the Gallows", in which he "compared [her] favourably with almost everyone involved in the trial ... but more particularly with the wardresses who guarded her in gaol" (Ibid, p.98). He denounced these for their '''usual coarse abuse of prisoners ... [their] loud crudities and solecisms of slum parlance" (Ibid, pp.98-9). Explicit here is a denunciation of the insensitivity of the prison staff, from whom, like Bosman, the "Mighty" de Melker "kept aloof' (Rosenberg, p.99). In this pamphlet Bosman presents, in a chilling, Gothic vein, gruesome anecdotes of other hangings: 'Of the man who was still alive when he reached the bottom ... of a man who went on cursing after the trapdoor had dropped and was subsequently found lying in the sawdust with his wind-pipe cut' . (Blignaut, p.224) The fmal sentence contains the lethal sting of litotes: "'I would like to see Capital Punishment abolished" (Ibid, p.224). Here, Bosman's unflinching rejection of the death sentence is overt. AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ELEMENTS IN COLD STONE JUG II From the above discussion, it is clear that many aspects of Bosman's personality are revealed in Cold Stone Jug. We meet Bosman the Romantic, the aesthete, the -humorist, the satirist. Wroblewski claims that "the constant presence of the personality of the author ... is one of the distinctions of the autobiography" (p.ll). In chronicling / ' the period of his life in gaol, however, Bosmandoes not follow the conventional pattern of an autobiography. Bosman was !lQt conventional: "he just couldn't fit Into a uniform or into a straight line" (Sachs, p.21), "his haphazard ways were at times the vehicle his mutinous soul used to range itself against punctilio" (Blignaut, p.52). Most 51 critics agree that the arrangement of events in an autobiography is mainly chronological. Cold Stone Jug is chronological to a certain extent, since the story begins with Bosman's first day in prison, and recounts his 'progression' from the "printers" (p.32) to the "stone-pile" (p.70), and from there to the "carpenters' shop" (p.155), ending with his release from prison. This rough sequence is, however, interspersed with diversionary quasi-documentary material, such as "a few generalities about boom" (p.50). Bosman also tells typical prisonjokes: "'Beauty Bell's brother has got a special discharge'. 'Gawd! Can't he see a doctor about it?" (p.l04). Many stories are imbued with pathos: Bosman explains how you could work out how long a man had been in prison when you heard him sing by his repertoire. I wonder if ... a caged singing bird remembers only the notes that he heard in the woodland, long ago and far away. (p.67) There are also moments of lyricism as when Bosman relates that these songs had to be sung "softly" for fear of detection and punishment. They were thus filled with "a quality of nostalgic fragrance and honey-suckle wistfulness" (p.68). The disparate incidents and the variety of tone and mood are united by Bosman's artistic intuition, his "unflinching unity and discipline" (Sachs, p.lO), and by the homogeneity of subject matter - Bosman's experiences in Swartklei Great Prison. Bosman sketches a true microcosm. Swartklei has its own hierarchy: "A blue-eoat is even higher than a murderer" (p.12); its own currency: "tobacco was money" (p.76); its own language: "Boob slang ... Shoes they called daisies; trousers, rammies. A cell was a peter" (p.34); its own music: "genuine prison songs ... [which] could have been composed only in a prison" (pp. 67-8). It is a world apart in which the inmate is "hemmed in by brown walls and brown years" (p.13). Here, the prisoner experiences a peculiar sense II of deformed time, in which a small time-unit appears endless. Bosman often refers to this phenomenon: "All time in prison seems too long" (p.166); "in prison ... even a short stretch seems to take a long time to do" (p.126); "all time ... passes slowly when you are in prison" (p.144). Cold Stone Jug is pervaded with an existential sense of 'pushing' time. Bosman himself experienced this sense of time distortion: he reports that he was in the condemned cell "for more than four weeks" (p.30), whereas, in reality, he spent nine days in the gallows cell. He also contends that he spent "years", 52 "a number of years" (pp.32, 75, 155) in prison. In actual fact, Bosman was paroled after three years and nine months. During this time it seemed to him as if "the best years of [his] life had fled from [him]" and that his "youth [had been] spent and wasted" (p.21O). Bosman, then, does impose a sense of form and order upon his miscellaneous material. The disjointed form eventually creates a whole picture, a picture of the prison house characterized by "misery ... soul-killing monotony ... bleak gloom and brutality" (p.68), a microcosm to which "nobody ... would ever want to go back again" (p.69). In Cold Stone Jug, Bosman adopts a 'novel', vibrant approach: he does not preach or moralize. Nevertheless, beneath all the humour, lies "all the awfulness of what men do to each other" (Collected Works, "Foreword", p.15). The focus in Cold Stone Jug is clearly upon aspects of prison life, and upon the other prisoners. Bosman does not dwell upon himself. His centre of interest is not on the 'autos'. The'!' of the text is never once named in his 'chronicle'. Bosman remains anonymous, elusive, and "self effacing in the extreme" (Gray p.25). This effacement underscores the fact that, in the prison world, where a prisoner is a non-entity, merely a number, the use of the speaker's name is not required. Bosman's focus upon the 'bios' also serves to highlight the impact that this environment has upon the human psyche. This damaging and degenerating effect is overtly explored in an article written by Bosman in 1932, two years after he had left prison: "I am twenty-seven now ... but I look over forty" (Uncollected Essays, p.3). Prison turns a person into a 'zombie', a shadowy cipher. In Cold Stone Jub, the narrator .is a shadowy figure. This device corresponds to Gothic fiction in which "treatment of setting is one reason for the limited characterization" (MacAndrew, p.lll), and in which the "settingconvey[s] mood, tone, and emotions" (Ibid). In such fiction, "physical appearance corresponds to ... spiritual it state" (MacAndrew, p.12). This refers not only to the actual body, but also to physical surroundings, which both reflect, and enable exploration of "the subterranean landscape of the mind" (MacAndrew, p.8). Bosman explores himself through this un autobiographical, unconventional technique, revealing his inner misery and torment in this unusual world where "nothing happen[s] ... just nothing at all" (Iyg, p.128). 53 "There is very little soul searching" in ColdStoneJug. 21 This lack of focus upon the self demonstrates a difficulty common to all autobiographers - that of "portraying the self" (see this dissertation, p.s). "The 'theme' of an autobiography is the develo.pment of [the] personality", says Wroblewski (p.ll). Bosman, however, never appears to develop, to grow as an individual. No 'becoming' is demonstrated, but this is precisely the point that Bosman is trying to make. In a total institution such as Swartklei, no progress is. possible. DuringBosman'sbriefexcursion outside the prison gates in order to fit a bracket to a post on the pavement in front of the prison, "a woman and a girl came past ... they didn't look at us of course" (p.170). For innerdevelopment to take place, meaningful social interaction and integration is vital. The self can come into being only through interplay with the outer world, and prison, by its very isolating nature, excludesthispossibility. In Swartklei, most 'social contact' is madewithprison lags who speak illicitly"out of a mouth opened sideways" (p.121), or with the warders, whom Blignautcalls"moronicilliterates" (p.198), whocontinuously shout "meaningless remarks addressed at nobody in particular" (p.5?). According to Robert Sayre, the autobiography examines "the self both as a sovereign integrity and as a member of society" (Wroblewski, p.3). Cold Stone Jug is, however, not a conventional autobiography, since it does not dwell on the 'autos'; nor is it a novel, for, as fiction, it depends on fact. It is, according to Rusch, "fictional art" (p.14). Cold Stone Jug may, then, be placed in the category of 'faction', defined by Cuddon as "fiction based onand combined with fact" (Cuddon [New Ed.], p.324). Sachs maintains that Bosman's "prison life ... is , dealt with very fully ... in his Cold Stone Jug" (p.38). Similarly, Rosenberg asserts that Bosman "chronicled his experiences in prison" in ColdStoneJug (p.57). Gray also states that Bosman fictionalizes his prison years in Cold Stone Jug (see p.4). Indeed, many of the details are too intimateto be anything but factual: for example, only a person who has been in prison would know about the "number nought clippers" used to crop hair very "short", and which "also served as a razor" (pp.17, 66). Although there is a distinct fictional element in Cold Stone Jug, the book ~ largely autobiographical. Lago Clifford, who was in Pretoria Central at the same time as Bosman, published a serialized version of hisown prisonexperiences, "Lago Clifford's 21 Vivienne Mawson Dickson, The Fictionof Herman Charles Bosman, p.174. 54 Amazing Prison Story". These tales bear a close resemblance to Bosman's own stories. Clifford, for example, describes the "strip-search" that is described by Bosman in ~ Stone Jug. Clifford also narrates how "the officer felt allover my body".22 He also mentions the contraband "tinder box" used for lighting cigarettes - "a little wooden box, a flint ... and a little steel wheel with two holes in it through which a string is passed and knotted" ("Usury in Gaol"). This is described by Bosmanas "a small wooden box ... tinder ... a small steel disc ... with two holes for a piece of string to go through" (Jug, pp. 61-2). It is clear that the narrator of Cold Stone Jug had had first-hand experience ofgaol. The fictionalized version, however, provides the necessary freedom to 'embroider' the obvious. Bosman always "spurned the obvious", says Abrahams (Collected Works, p.15). Bosman himselfasserts: "I can't stand anything as dull as the declaration ofan obvious truth: I very much prefer a lie even"." This notion can almost be labelled a 'Bosman aphorism', since he so often iterates this viewpoint: [W]hen all is said and done, it is not the dull fact, recorded in terms of historical truth, that is going to survive ... in the end that historical fact ... cedes place to the poet's embroidered lie. (Cask, p.66) Bosman's aim, then, is to eschew dull facts. He treats the grim subject of gaol, and "the most terrible thing [of being] ... deprived of ... liberty" ~, pAS), with a "daringly light hand" (Collected Works, "Foreword", p.15). Bosman's philosophy was that "this is a romantic world ... and if you are a poet and you can't write about princesses - because there aren't any - then you can't write at all" (Uncollected Essays, p.75). Blignaut explains that Bosman liked the '''embroidered lie' of the artist because \I it predicated for him creation whereas the truth smacked ofstatistics" (p.17?). Indeed, this reflects Bosman the artist, demonstrating the truth of Wroblewski's claim that "distortions offact mirror the personality rather than alter it" (p.39). Bosman employs 22 Lago Clifford, "Usury in Gao)", The Sjambok, 28 June, 1929, p.J, 23 Herman Charles Bosman, "The Poetry of Elizabeth Eybers", Trek, March, 1949, pp.26-7. 55 the technique of the 'embroidered lie' to underscore the mundane reality ofthe "misery ofprison existence" (Jug, p.68). This duplicity on the part of Bosman is evident in the binary opposites in Cold Stone Jug, since the reader can never be sure whether Bosman is trustworthy. This is part of his ruse to confuse and to manipulate the reader. Abrahams asserts that Bosman purposely set out to spin "an entanglement of hair-fine lines and blobs that tickle and trick the mind into filling out what has been suggested" (Collected Works, p.5). In Cold Stone Jug, then, singularity of meaning is not always attained nor desired. The uncertainties in Bosman's book invite a deconstructive analysis on the part of the reader, since such a reading will tell us more about the author and reveal the enigma that is Bosman, whose "life and art" is characterized by "riddles" (Collected Works, p.3). This complicated and involved construct ('de construct') also reflects the notion that life in general, prison life in particular, is too complex to be fitted into a neat, symmetrical mould which can easily be interpreted. Jonathan Culler states that "deconstructive criticism is ... an exploration oftextual logic in texts called literary" .24 According to Peck and Coyle, a deconstructive reading is "a sort ofdouble reading: it acknowledges the way in which a writer attempts to order things, but then points to the contradictions ... in the text". 2S Any assurance or finality of interpretation regarding any 'reading' of a text, then, is impossible, because, paradoxically, "'all reading is misreading'" (Abrams, pAO): [f]he meaning of any utterance or writing ... is disseminated - a term which includes among its deliberately contradictory significations the notions of having the effect of a meaning, of dispersing meanings among innumerable possibilities, and of negating meaning. (Abrams, p.39) CUlle~\ explains that deconstruction focuses upon pairs of 'binary opposites', such as: "serious/nonserious , literal/metaphorical, truth/fiction" (p.181). Cold Stone Jug contains many pairs of these opposites: the serious/nonserious opposition occurs throughout the work, and thus "one can never be quite certain who is playing, or 24 Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction, p.227. 25 John Peck and Martin Coyle, Literary Tenus and Criticism, p.166. 56 playing 'seriously', what the rules are, or whichgame is beingplayed" (Culler, pp.130 131). These inconsistencies in the text serve to highlight the mad paradoxes and indecipherable complexities of prison life. Describing his "first hours" in gaol, for example, (p.7), Bosman recounts how all the other newly arrested prisoners claimed that their arrests were the result of the "working up [of] spurious cases ... against law abiding citizens" (p.7). Bosman is the only one who admits guilt: "I was ... doing time because I had been justly convicted" (p.87). Whenever a new intake ofprisoners arrives, he discovers that "they were all of them innocent" (p.85), "the johns [having] rung a dirty on them with fabricated evidence" (p.87). Although he claims that he found this "very much to their credit" (p.85), he immediately subverts this statement by his sarcasm: But I felt very dismal there, all the same, as one guilty man chucked in with a whole lot of innocent lambs, and guileless simpletons and angels with large white wings, and plaster saints . (p.85) It is obvious that Bosman, who calls himself a "worm, [a] shabby felon" (p.86), "the only one there ... who didn't claim to be innocent" (p.87), is totally aware of the contemptible, absurd hypocrisy of these 'innocent' men, who address him "from [a] noble elevation of ... guiltlessness" (p.86), since he refers to them as "whited sepulchre[s]" exhibiting "Pharisaism" (p.91). In the light of the indictment that Bosman implicitly makes of the prison system, however, he could slyly be pointing out an emotion engendered by prison existence, that the prisoner begins to feel a sense of "injustice ... he becomes habitually angry against everything around him ... he no longer thinks that he [is] guilty: he accuses justice itself' (Foucault, p.266). 1\ Breytenbach also testifies to this phenomenon. He narrates theincident about a prisoner who stated that "he was innocent, as all prisoners are; it was a frame-up that got him there" (Albino Terrorist, p.145). Similarly, in Swartklei Great Prison, an inmate would recount how"... the judge gave me five years for arson ... well, of course, I didn't do it" (p.85), or assert that "the Judge was ... corrupt ... the Crown Prosecutor was a -- ... and his own Counsel was the most depraved of the whole lot" (pp.87-8). It is thus not clear whether Bosman is being serious or 'nonserious', since here one encounters different levels of interpretation, what Derrida terms "a double gesture ... a double 57 writing" (Culler, p.85), what Culler calls an "opposition [in] meaning" (Ibid, p.93). Similarly a truth/falsehood contradiction is occasioned by Bosman's categorical claims that he "never smoked dagga to any extent" (p.43). He does, however, cause confusion in the reader's mind by providing detailed and intimate facts about "boom" (pp. 43-53), and by admitting several times to having smoked the weed: "we (my emphasis) were smoking dagga ..." (p.90). The text thus appears to deconstruct itself because the oppositions are blurred constantly; there is no clear distinction between 'truth' and 'lies'. The text involves an "aporia (a contradiction, or irreconcilable paradox)" (Abrams, pAO), often in evidence in Bosman's stories, pointing to Bosman's own contradictory, unpredictable nature, and to his self-admitted "strange cunning" (Iyg, p.203). These contradictions also reveal Bosman, the raconteur, the master story teller. He delights in teasing and beguiling the reader. Irmgard Titlestad asserts that Cold Stone J:yg is not merely a recollection of his miserable prison years, but also "an achieved work of manipulation and exploitation", both of the reader and of various literary modes (see p.l09). Through such skilful manipulation, Bosman is able to show off his literary prowess and thereby impose some sense of meaning upon his life, and confer some dignity upon himself as a human being. Another duality in Cold Stone Jug, which serves to perplex and puzzle the reader, is , the sanity/insanity binary opposition. In the section that deals with Bosman's madness, it-is evident that Cold Stone Jug is a text which dismantles itself. An example is the discussion that Bosman has with Parkins, the safe-blower, who assures Bosman that he is "sane ... dead sane" (p.200), and that he has 'bluffed' the doctor that he is "mad ... [until] the doctor doesn't know where the hell he is" (p.200). He explains that his ruse is "dead simple" (p.l99): Every time I sees the quack, I tells him ... about a million and a half pounds, all in Kruger sovereigns, as I have got hidden in the old Robinson dump. (pp.l99-200) After having convinced Bosman of his sanity, Parkins makes "a remark that [seems] to 58 cut the ground out from under [Bosman's] feet in one hit" (p.200). He remarks that he does have "them Kruger sovereigns ... all collected together under the sand of the Robinson mine-dump" (p.201). The situation is even more complicated, as Parkins has used the story of the buried sovereigns to pretend that he is mad, whereas he actually believes that they do, in fact, exist. 'The meaning is thus inverted and dissolved, and the reader is as confused as the doctor: "he don't know where he is" (p.200). In a beguiling twist, Bosman himself employs a reversal of the technique used by Parkins: whereas Parkins, actually being mad, pretends to be mad, Bosman, believing himself to be mad, pretends to be sane: "I knew I was mad, and I had managed to convince the doctor that I was sane" (p.198). He "had got the doctor ... muddled" (p.198). "I was mad, stone mad ... and I learnt that what I had to do was to play-act sane: it has come easy to me with the years" (p.201). The reader is not sure whether this is "written in earnest ... or ironically in jest" (Jeremy Cronin, in Gray [ed.], p.142), "playing, or playing 'seriously'" (Culler, p.130-131). In this instance, the text possesses "so many different meanings that it cannot have A MEANING. There is no guaranteed essential meaning" (Cuddon, Literary Terms and Literary Theory, p.223), and the reader becomes entrapped within the text, like those in prison. Bosman's need to convince the authorities that he was sane arose partly from another curious parallel: Bosman's admirer, Pym, had written him a note after his breakdown, saying that should Bosman be sent to the Criminal Lunatic Asylum, "he would play-act insanity, in order to ensure of his also being sent [there]" (p.194). Bosman's sudden collapse had "imparted so severe a shock to his sensibilities, that he [pym] was really afraid of going mad" (p.194). Pym's fears were realized: "Pym had started raving, one night, in his cell. And he had foamed at the mouth, and had been very violent ... 1\ [he] had been carted off to the Criminal Lunatic Asylum" (p.202). Later, Bosman was comforted when a warder asserted that "the authorities must be mad to give [him] time off" his prison sentence (p.205), because he "didn't feel so lonely and cut off from the rest of mankind, in [his] insanity. Here were the authorities also mad" (p.205). !&ld.. Stone Jug breaks down the distinction between sanity and insanity, pointing to the anomaly that the border between them is very fine, and that "other people in the world [are] mad, also" (p.201). This story invites an intertextual allusion: in "Playing Sane" (Cask, p.69), Bosman refers to Poe's story of "a man's visit to an insane asylum" (Ibid, p.70). As it turns out, a "lunatic's revolution" (p.70) has taken place, and unbeknown , ~ 59 to the visitor, he is escorted around the institution by the "chief lunatic" (p.70). Bosman's main concern is "how is it possibleever to tell" (p.70) the difference between the lunatics and the doctors, since "you don't know where you are in this world. It's a frightening thought" (Cask, p.71). The reader is, however, further perplexed by Bosman stating that "in this mad world there are ... a good many of us who have to engage in the pastime of 'playing sane'. There is a good deal of fun in it. Playing sane-sane" (Cask, p.73). Once again one can never be sure whetherBosman is serious or not. This evasive technique demonstrates Bosman's contention that prison serves to confuse the brain: "your mind can get ... queer ... after a year or two in prison" (l!!g, p.113). In Cold Stone Jug, the literal/metaphorical dualities also become blurred, causing meaning to become diffuse. Bosman's reference to Pym as his "black shadow" (p. 159), and his "hated shadow" (p.194), points to the notion of Pym being Bosman's alter-ego or 'doppelganger', one who pursues Bosman with a relentless "serpent pursuit" (p.194) from which there is no escape. The device of the "shadow ... the double", the doppelganger, is a device used extensively in Gothic fiction (see MacAndrew, pp.142-3), and here, Bosman uses it to intensify a sense of horror by blending actual and psychological fears. The serpent becomes Pym in Bosman's mind, choking and suffocating the life out of him: "the serpent coiled throughout the cells and sections of the prison. That must be Pym, I thought. Pym" (p.194). Pym, the serpent, Bosman's "terror of going mad" (p.194), and Bosman himself, all seem to merge into one terrifying life: "die lewe in die penal" (p.194), "that slippery black mass" (p.192), and meaning itself becomes uncertain. Paradoxically, Bosman's breakdown can be seen in terms of a 'healthy', normal response, if one considers the words of Lessing, quoted by Frankl: '''There are things which must cause you to lose your !reason or you have none to lose'" (Search for Meaning, p.l8). "An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behaviour" says Frankl (Ibid, p.18). Cold Stone Jug, then, does not present the reader with a straightforward and unified text. Its meaning cannot be defined in an "univocal" way (Culler, p.131), because Bosman deliberately equivocates. It is thus difficult to determine "what [the] author intends" (Ibid, p.131). Rather, the text deconstructs itself, consisting as it does of many paradoxes, inversions, and perplexing anomalies: the 'liar' who tells the truth about prison; the 'cultivated' man who admires villains, "colourful creatures" (p.41), 60 if only for the diversions they create;" to alleviate the soul-destroying boredom of the "brown years" (p. 13); and the autobiographical'!' 'who is largely absent from his own text. These, paradoxically, reveal the anomaly that is Herman Charles Bosman, with all his "subliminal flickerings ... play and laughter ... truth, wisdom and compassion" (Collected Works, "Foreword", p.I). Bosman wrote Cold Stone Jug some twenty years after he had left prison. He does confess to lapses of memory: "I feel my head swimming when I try to recall ..." (p.161); "I can't possibly be expected to remember ... certainly not over this distance of time, over a quarter of a century" (pp.193-4); "I don't remember ..." (p.195). Nevertheless, he does have the vantage point of time and maturity, which gives "greater meaning to all ofexperience" (Wroblewski, p.14). This perspective allows for "fuller comprehension" (Ibid, p.14), so that the writer "can reflect on meanings which were obscure in the situation as they occurred" (Ibid, p.14). The meaning of incarceration was, however, obvious to Bosman at the time. In a rare betrayal of his feelings, he admits that he "had been miserable ... for a long time" (p.175), and twenty years later he still remembers his feelings of "unutterable despair" (p.168) as he first approached the prison gates "under sentence of death" (p.168). In prison, the only real 'perspective' that the prisoner has is, literally, the "brown walls" (p.13), and, says Bosman, "... it is still like that. You can go and look there" (Jug, p.7). Hugh Lewin, who also spent time in Pretoria Central Prison many years after Bosman, asserts that "in forty years, very little has changed" (Bandiet, p.I09). Things do not change, and neither do Bosman's feelings: "Nobody who has ever been in prison would ever want to go back again ... even for one night ... the very thought appals me" (p.69). Wroblewski avers that 'perspective' allows the writer to "see his life as ... unique", (p.15). The prisoner, however, cannot be unique; he is a non-person, a number in a "cage" (Iyg, p.32), and his life cannot be unique, since everything that he does is "conducted in the same place ... under the same authority ... [and] in the immediate company of a large batch of others, all of whom are treated alike" (Goffman, p.I7), in circumstances which are designed to halt the process of personal growth. Wroblewski asserts that it is 'perspective' that determines the element of 'selectivity'. The autobiographer must make a "deliberate selection [of] those incidents which appear relevant in light of his knowledge" (Wroblewski, p.16). These should be "'turning .' 61 points' ... moments of great impact" (Ibid, p.26), from which positive development of personality results. In Cold Stone Jug, the 'turning point', the episode that had the greatest impact upon Bosman during his incarceration is his "wonderful adventure ... [to] the outside world" (p.167). Paradoxically this was not positive for him, since it was a direct cause ofhis breakdown, contributing to his retrogression rather than to his progression. For Wroblewski, autobiography should end in the realization of a meaningful standpoint, [one] that has been operative throughout the work" (p.20). Bosman ~ establish a meaningful 'standpoint' that is sustained throughout Cold Stone Jug, and, in this way, he fulfils the autobiographical requirement of "consistency" (Wroblewski, p.18). He does not dwell upon the development of his personality as a result of positive responses to his environment, because there was no scope for such progress or responses. Rather, he is consistent in his condemnation of the prison regime, which annihilates all possible sources of such progress or self-affirmation, and in his sadness at the waste and degradation of human-beings. In Cold Stone Jug, Bosman integrates the modes "of his literary predecessors" (Titlestad, p.l09). He exploits various well-known literary conventions, such as the Gothic, the Romantic, the tall-story, and devices to baffle and confuse the reader. Bosman, then, has written a writer's autobiography, a literary work. He was thus able to impose meaning upon his life, shape his experiences, and take his place amongst the community of writers whom he reveres, his literary peers, "Villon and Verlaine; and Oscar Wilde and O.Henry and St. Paul" (Cold Stone Jug, p.220). In an "Introduction" to Govan Mbeki's Learning from Robben Island, Colin Bundy declares that "Bosman's sardonic Cold Stone Jug begins the genre ... of the body of . [South African] prison writing", 26 in which can be included Breytenbach's True Conf~ssions ofan Albino Terrorist, Ruth First's 117 Days, AlbieSach's Jail Diary, and prison memories ofothers, such as Idris Naidoo, Hugh Lewin, and Jeremy Cronin (see Mbeki, p.xxiv), As Sheila Roberts emphasizes, these ~ritings all exhibit the "homogeneity of sUbstan~, tone, and mood - no matter the form - [that] comes from 26 Govan Mbeki, Learning from Robben Island, p.xxiv. 62 the physical conditions out of which prison literature springs", and that it "makes little difference whether the author or protagonist be felon, political dissenter, or a Josef K: a prison is a prison".Z7 The analysis ofthe prison works ofDennis Brutus and Jeremy Cronin undertaken in the following two chapters will attest to Roberts's belief. The above analysis of Cold Stone Jug has emphasized Bosman's ironic understatement and detached attitude. These have been explored as intentional devices to intensify his involvement, and to lacerate the prison system. Dennis Brutus, on the other hand, is an 'engaged' artist, personally involved in his work. He also has the same intention as that of Bosman, to expose an evil system and to re-humanize himself in the face of strictures and structures which de-humanize. 27 Sheila Roberts, "South AfricanPrison Literature", Ariel, Vol.16, No.2, April, 1985, p.61. 63 CHAPTER THREE DENNIS BRUTUS - A SIMPLE LUST robben island the extended blood-stained baton of apartheid1 "Robben Island ... misery and oblivion and fog and a salty wind" (Albino Terrorist, p.256), was the destination of Dennis Brutus, a political activist who was largely responsible for South Africa's Olympic expulsion, and who was "banned during his campaign to shut doors on apartheid S A."2 He was arrestedin 1963 for "breakinghis banning order and allegedly leaving the country illegally - to put his case to the IOC" (S'bu Mngadi), and was sentenced to eighteen monthshard labour. Brutuswas released in 1965 and, in July, 1966, was given a one-way exit permit at Jan Smuts Airport, Johannesburg, and ...thrown outward in a steelprojectile to hurtle outward in quivering uncertainty to a cold fragment of a continental ledge for huddling and perching and grubbing and ultimately, unthinkingly, to find settlement there....3 Beforehe went into exile, heavy bans prohibited him from writing or publishing. This was an attempt by officialdom to silence him and to break his spirit. Brutus, however, 1\ would not be broken or silenced: abouteight months after his release from prison, he decided to sidestep the ban and indulge in the activity of 'graphe', in the only legally 1 dikobe wa mogale,prison poems, p.24 (In May 1984, wa mogalewas foundguilty of furthering the aims of the ANC and sentenced to ten years imprisonment, some of which were served on Robben Island). 2 S'bu Mngadi, "Exiled poet still stateless", City Press, 31 May, 1992(page number obliterated on photocopy). 3 Dennis Brutus, "After Exile", A SimpleLust, p.112. -: 64 possible way - by writing 'letters', poems that reflect his unique creative response to his circumstances. Over the next four to six months, he wrote these 'letters' to Martha, his brother's wife, intending them for later publication. He wrote them to her "for ... consolation", and also so that she could "see ... some evidence of [his] thought and caring" ("Letters to Martha", pp.60, 68), since her husband was now on Robben Island. These 'letters' discuss "the feelings of a prisoner, the experiences of prison, the importance and anger of relatives".4 By writing these letters, Brutus was able to fulfil his existential needs and to assert what 'freedom' he had left by opposing the forces which tried to depersonalize him. According to Goodwin (see p.10), the original publication of these "Letters to Martha" (1968) included some early poems, as well as some composed after his 'letters'. This mixture created some confusion, with the result that some reviewers rearranged the poems in a roughly chronological order. All these poems were published in A Simple Lust in 1973. Part One of this volume contains some of Brutus' early poems arranged under the heading, "Sirens Knuckles Boots & Other Early Poems", written from the "mid-fifties to the first half of 1963" (Goodwin, p.10). These poems draw a picture of a significant section of his 'bios', his pre-prison life in South Africa, and many condemn the ubiquitous menace of the police state, "the iron monster of the law" ("Sirens Knuckles Boots", p.?). Several prefigure his imprisonment, the period that Brutus calls his "fated splintering" (Ibid, p.7), "the shadow of an arrow-band" (Ibid, p.2). These early poems, then, take on a futuristic note: the end - his imprisonment and exile - is in the beginning. Past and present are inextricably linked (see p.1S of this dissertation). Brutus specifically states that he has always had a "personal conflict, which eventually brought [him] to prison, with the apartheid regime",S asserting that these poems anticipate "a particular prison ... Robben Island".6 Some of these poems will therefore also be included in this study of Brutus' prison poetry, since, in a sense, . all writings by 'non-whites' in Apartheid South Africa are 'prison' utterances, because of the very circumscribed lives decreed for Blacks by the state. Brutus is a 'Coloured' by legal definition, and was therefore subject to all the debased living conditions of the disenfranchised, oppressed Black majority under Apartheid. Like Bosman, Brutus was 4 Ken Goodwin, Understanding African Poetry, p.ll. 5 Dennis Duerden and Cosmo Pieterse, African Writers Talking, p.55. • 6 Bemth Lindfors et al (eds.), Palaver, p.2S. " 65 a 'double' outcast: as a Black man he was spumed by his white oppressors, and as a 'political', openly opposed to the racist policies of the government, he was demonized by the State, and cast out of society onto the prison island which he describes in his poetry. The second section of A Simple Lust contains "Letters to Martha and Poems about Prison", together with "Postscripts", which are more personal in tone than the 'letters'. .J, cr-: ..... The latter are mostly characterized by the use of 'on~~1_a.Jechnique_J.!tatreveals the (,N ---- ..• _-..•._--_. .-. -_ ...._--._---.--_. __ . -~-._..__.-•.._--" sense ofinhibition and fear engendered in Brutus by the Apartheid regime. This section _. '-'-"--. -_.-..- --." -.--." -_.'-'-"-'~""-- also includes poems written "Under House Arrest", and a sub-section entitled, "Into Exile". In a sense, as Brutus suggests, 'house arrest' is worse than prison, because under such conditions, one is alienated within one's own home, where one should find the ultimate refuge: Brutus feels "screaming tensions [because he] cannot stir beyond these walls". He is filled with "fear", "desperation; despair" ("Under House Arrest", pp.73,74,87). Part Three of A Simple Lust contains Brutus' "After Exile" poems. These poems bear testimony to his artistic urge to communicate, to his determination to assert his self hood, and to reinstate his self-respect. According to Nadine Gordimer, Brutus is '''one of the few writers who managed to develop his talents despite the trauma of exile, which has reduced many to silence'".? Nevertheless, these poems do reflect his loneliness in exile: he longs for home, "where the world glows, while here I pine" (p. 103), and yearns for the "Landscape of my young world!lLand of soft hills and huts" (p.132), wishing that "the day may sooner come/of our unexiling/of our return" (p.135). He determines to "be faithful to a land/whose rich years, unlike England's, lie ahead" (p.l04). These 'exile' poems also reveal his altruistic nature: he expresses his inner pain and his anxiety as he reflects upon the prisoners who are still on Robben, Island, "crouching now/in the grey cells, on the grey floors, stubborn/and bowed" (P.lQ7): the men on the island on strips of matting on the cold floor between cold walls and the long endless night (p.126) 7 Titus Pemba, "Years of exile have not cowed Brutus", The Weekly Mail, August 16 to 22, 1991, p.3l. . 66 who "fumble stones with tom hands ... in the cold unlighted night" (p.lll). Like Bosman, whose post-prison thoughts often stray to "the blue-coats in the Swartklei Great Prison" while he "walk[s] about the streets" (lyg, p.13), Brutus thinks of his comrades as he "stroll[s] in the quiet dusk ... and they do not" ("After Exile", p.lOl). Similarly, in "Today in prison", written on "26 June 1967/South African Freedom day", he remembers that the prisoners "will singjust one song: Nkosi Sikekela [sic]... by tacit agreement". Clearly Brutus recalls his own "suppressed passion and pent-up feeling", and with "tears close and sharp behind the eyes" (p.l09) he recollects that he himself had been 'inside' on that date. The poem itself sings the significance of the ANC anthem, which serves to unite those 'inside' and 'outside', and which promotes a sense of solidarity and fraternity. These"After Exile" poems were written during his London-based years, July 1966 to September 1970 - and part of 1971 - a period in which he did a great deal of travelling in order to canvass support for his crusade against Apartheid. Brutus was determined that South African sportsmen should be denied "that which they hold most dear", the pleasure of the "Olympic panoply", and of showing their "sporting prowess". In his "anger and resolution", he insisted that the "deprivers" should be "deprived" ("Under House Arrest", pp.90-91). This campaign was the original cause of his imprisonment on Robben Island. Unlike Bosman, who was a common-law prisoner, sentenced for a capital offence, Brutus was a political prisoner "of a system [he] had fought and still opposed" ("Letters", p.64). Dennis Brutus arrived on Robben Island, the 'Devil's Island' of South Africa, in 1963. This prison island is notorious for its totalizing nature, cut off from the mainland "by walls of bleak hostility and pressed upon by hostile authority" ("Letters", p.66), "surrounded by freezing sea ... a centre of suffering and struggle".8 "[A]bout two hours after being locked up for the night", Indres Naidoo recalls that he witnessed Brutus' ignominious arrival: 8 Indres Naidoo, Robben Island (as told to Albie Sachs), "Introduction", by Francis Meli, p.7. 67 ... the door opened and I saw a pale body come flying on to the floor of the hospital cell. When the doors were relocked I ran to the body and recognized my comrade Dennis Brutus lying there semi-conscious ... he was in tremendous pain ... and when I lifted his shirt I got a terrible shock. His whole back was red and blue and there was a deep gash right across his stomach. (Naidoo, p.103) This wound had been sustained after his arrest when "he had made a dash away from the police, one of whom had opened fire with a pistol, knocking him to the pavement ..." (Naidoo, p.103). Ruth First writes that this incident occurred on 17 September, and that Brutus had been shot by "Warrant Officer Halberg ... a deadly accurate shot".9 In an interview with Titus Pemba, Brutus recalls how he "collapsed onto the side-walk ... and they made [him] walk back to the station" (p.31). He also recounts how, after he had been sentenced, he was "put in a truck with about sixty other prisoners ... chained together, hands and ankles ... and taken down to Robben Island ... a distance of about a thousand miles", where, in accordance with the practices of all totalizing institutions, they ... strip you, take all your clothes from 'you, and you line up naked. Then they come along and issue everybody these short trousers and a little vest, and then they ... chain you ... and halfway on the journey, in a little town called Colesberg, [you] stop ... for the night. (palaver, p.30) This stop-over in Colesberg is described in one of his "Poems About Prison~ The erratic form of this poem reflects the emotional fragmentation of the prisoners, their shattered world, and the arbitrary punishments meted out to them: The chains on our ankles and wrists that pair us together II jangle glitter. We begin to move awkwardly. 9 Ruth First, 117 Days, p.4S. 68 There is very little fictionalization in this poem. Naidoo's experience of his own journey to Robben Island is very similar to Brutus'. He recounts how the prisoners sat "crowded together on the floor of the ... van, a dozen pairs of people, legs linked by chains, wrists by handcuffs ... a discomfort and an agony" (p.58). In Brutus' rendering, the one-word sentences communicate a mood of alienation, reflecting the solitude of the captives who are rejected, chained off from humanity, under "the large frosty glitter of the stars". Here, even the heavens are hostile, intensifying the sense of rejection. The 'cold' imagery - "frosty","damp", "three o'clock dew" sustains the feeling of isolation, underscoring the indifferenceof the warder, who refers to the captives as "rats you can only shoot". Satirically, Brutus uses the inhumanity, bestial nature, and lack of dignity of this "grizzled senior warder" to confer a sense of dignity and humanity upon the prisoners, who, with "naked feet", courageously "labour erect ... numb with resigned acceptance". Long vowel sounds reinforce the stiff awkwardness of the captives as they strive to stretch their limbs, "steel ourselves into fortitude". In this poem, Brutus employswhat he terms "sharpeneddiction" - "stubbled ... black ... glittery edges" - to "sharpen ... [his readers'] response to ... [the] oppression of our time".10 The use of such words as "we", "our", "us", "together" reveals an essential part of Brutus' 'autos' - his concern for others rather than for himself. He also communicates the solidarity that is forged by human beings under shared straitened circumstances. In the Palaver interview, Brutus asserts that, in his Colesberg poem, he is trying to show absolute "deprivation" and "desolation" at being "totally desertedby God" (p.31). To achieve this aim, he says that he uses the word "awkwardly": I think the use of the Southern Cross with' a kind of religious overtone, a certain spirituality, helps the suggestion that awkwardness is gracelessness, is being without grace, is being ungraceful. But to be without grace, which is something given to you gratis by God, is II a spiritual concept ... forsaken by God. (palaver, p.31) 10 Kevin Goddard & Charles Wessels, Out of Exile, p.69. J. W' ",s i ~\'''C',\'i~~r~J\C, ~. cy,()/~~f' 69 \\\ i' ) I' l C . . :-t"\ J \ ( ! ) , :; ~C'f..l:) V -)0 '-;i'{;tl h,t/I' On Robben Island, however, Brutus was destined to feel even isolated d 'I' 8 ,1\ b forsaken "in the grey silence of the empty afternoons", and in the "greyn Isolated (;,'C rJ time", in a "single cell" (Letters, p.56). "Much of[his] ... period in prison ... was in fact spent in solitary---_.-. confinement" (palaver, p.28).In his 'Foreword' to Naidoo's Robben Island, (p.7), Francis Meli, a memberof the National Executive Committee of the ANC, describes the "harsh prison camp": [A] grey, soulless, cruel spot, designed to crush the spirit of the bravest and truest leaders of our revolt against the apartheid system, to douse once and for all the flames of rebellion in our hearts, to deter and subdue us forever. Paradoxically, however, Robben Island has become synonymous not with defeat, but with fortitude and endurance, as proved by the many Robben Island writings. In his Introduction to Mbeki's Learning from Robben Island, Colin Bundyasserts that many writers who had been imprisoned on the island "recreated the cell blocks and rock quarries of Robben Island", deploying their works of art in the service of freedom (p.xxiv), For Barbara Harlow, these writings, especially those written by political _____,.w."- •.•,-,·-·-.·-~""'...·.•~-.----.."-...... • ~'''_''''., ._,'..... ,_, •.•_",.,' __ •••.•_ ...__...... -.-..- __.•_...... _.,....-._-.., _I,P detainees, are "collective documents, testimonies writtenby individualsto their common ~ ~1';v _,,'0_" __ ••_ .". < •• '.' ,,- '.'''., ' ...... , '''''-''--''--''- ~.------.,.",....",-,.... struggle."II These writings, she continues, are to be distinguished from conventional autobiography, because they are "actively engaged in a re-definition of the self and the individ;~-i~'~~;~~'~f a collective (my emphasis) enterprise and struggle" (Harlow; p.120). Jane Watts asserts that, by breaking away from the European tradition of writing autobiography, these writers are able to grasp and to express "that small degree of freedom they have left" (p.30). In this way they are able to find meaning in their lives and to reinstate a sense of self in a position in which "'pursuing' (Sartre, quoted in Watts, p.27) a self" is clearly not an option. Prison writings composed by detainees also serve as a "sustaining link between the prisoners inside and those struggling outside the pris.(>n_walls~.(Watts, pp.127-8). These , .- '-. '" writings, then, form part of a larger body 9(resistance writi g. In South Africa, this \ collective body is inevitably concerned withracism, -- om, and oppression. In his , . . CfVSt ,),f'!( ~~,d'\' ,:n,tll.f' o t. 11 Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature, p.120. ,0 70 book, Detained, Ngugi concurs that writing in prison functions to maintain solidarity among prisoners: they become "part of an undeclared political fraternity" in their common struggle against various repressive regimes.f? Brutus belongs to this fraternity, voicing his opposition to the system of Apartheid: he states categorically that he is part of the "shared .. enterprise". He is "a fellow-link", he says, "a part of the work" ("Under House Arrest", pp.86, 89). Chidi Amutaasserts that "the struggle for freedom constitutes an overriding concern in Brutus' poetry". I] Indeed, Brutus specifically avers that '''it [is] absolutely basic for a human being to be free, it is part of our psyche, our nature. It's as elemental as the need to breathe or to eat or to sleep ... or to make love'" (quoted in Amuta, p.179). Like Bosman, who wrote to expose prison conditions, Brutus writes so "that some world sometime may know" ("Postscripts", p.68). He wishes to expose the "cruelties ... and indignities ... [that] must be endured" ("Letters", p.59). These words support Herdeck's claim that Brutus uses his art "to fight for human dignity". 14 For Brutus, the ultimate concern of the writer is "to express his concern with human beings"." The writer, he says, must concern himself with the "inward man ... interior values, the real values at the heart of man" (Wastberg, p.33), and uphold the "value of freedom, freedom of expression" (Ibid, p.34). He believes that a writer "must commit himself ... to human personality •.. to the assertion ofhuman value, of human dignity" . He must "stand up" and speak when he sees "humanity being mutilated" (Ibid, p.34). For Brutus, writers "have a function as human beings to stand up against these things" (Ibid, p.34). Brutus is the spokesman: "I am the voice crying ... endlessly ... in a shrill sad protest" ("After Exile", p.l06). In "Testimonial Literature", Gitahi Gititi asserts that "the voice raised against silence is a voice that pledges itself to life" (Current Writings, p.44). It is clear that Brutus does just that. While in exile and still under a publishing ban, Brutus published Thoughts Abroad under the pseudonym John II 12 Ngugi wa 'fhiong'o, Detained, p.13l. In 1977/78 Ngugi was politically detailed in a Kenyan prison. He now lives in exile in Britain (see Mongane Wally Serote, On the Horizon, p.I23). 13 Chidi Amuta, The Theory of African Literature, p.179. 14 Donald Herdeck, African Authors, p.78. 15 Per Wastberg (ed), The Writer in Modem Africa; African - Scandinavian Writers' Conference. p.50. 71 Bruin so that this little volume of poetry could be freely sold in South Africa. The ruse worked and the authorities were "unaware of the deception" .16 Brutus said that he did this "as a little joke against apartheid" (Gordon Winter). These poems may be included in his prison writings, since Brutus was in exile, 'exprisoned', having been "warned ... never to set foot in S A again" (S'bu Magadi). Like Bosman, Brutus experiences a sense ofclaustrophobia and imprisonment after being discharged. Whilst 'exprisoned', he writes how In the jungle of our distress stripe - flanked we champ and chafe against the bars. ("After Exile", p.1l4) Brutus' feeling of impotent anger and frustration is also overt here. All these pressures must, ofnecessity cause a measure of internal imbalance and stress. Brutus admits that he has "a certain tension" within him.. For him, inner tension is a necessary element for creativity: "You can't write poetry about anything ... [without it]" (Palaver, p.33). Brutus' poetry, then, can be fully understood only within the larger framework of the social circumstances in which it found its being, and of the political reality, the Apartheid system, which fostered it. Itis the product ofa particular history, inevitably bearing the stamp of its historical era, voicing the frustrations and tensions of the oppressed majority. Brutus specifically asserts that "the circumstances in which I, and most South Africans live, is [sic] one which creates tensions, [and therefore] it is true to say that in my work there is a tension" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.54). This tension is mainly due to the injustices of Apartheid, "a devil philosophy"? of racial segregation and white supremacy, officially born in 1948, the year that the National Party came into 16 Gordon Winter, "Brutus' poems published in S.A. under false name", Express, London, 27 May, 1973 (page number not available). 17 Mzwakhe Mbuli, Before Dawn, p.36. Mbuli, known as the Dub Poet of Soweto and the Poet of the Struggle, was detailed several times under the Internal Security Act. 72 power. Many features of the system, an inherent part of his 'bios', are reflected in Brutus' early poems, in which he speaks about the cruelty ofracism in what Patel terms "my prison country" .18 Brutus is passionately concerned about "our land's disfigurement and tension" ("Sirens", p.22), a land which is "trafficked and raddled ... by gross undiscerning, occupying feet" (Ibid, pAD). For him, his "land takes precedence of all [his] loves" (Ibid, p.24). Like Karl Marx, he is fully aware of the integral role of the artist who becomes "a vital agent ... in the shaping of social consciousness through the creation of artifacts which reveal the dynamics of social life and shatter the veils and complacencies of false consciousness" (Amuta, p.53). He believes that ...the bodies of poets will always be the anvils on which will be beaten out anew, or afresh, a people's destiny." "In South Africa", says Brutus, "you are compelled to be committed, you are involved in a situation so fraught with evil that you are brought into collision with it" (Wastberg, pp.33-4). Brutus, then, also writes in protest. He believes that his poems have a "protest function" (£alaver, p.32), but insists that he does not, however, 'preach': I have tried not to preach about racism or to make political speeches about racism in my poetry because I really believe that there is a thing called artistic integrity. I really believe that one ought not to turn art into propaganda ... I think it's a prostitution of the art. (Ibid, p.32) Brutus prefers to hint at protest, "by indirection, by implication ... [and] ask people to make up their own minds" (Ibid, p.32) about the inhumanity and injustice of the racist regime, under which the black man, "the dispossessed" ("Sirens", pAD), was "herded into squalid townships to rot away" (Lekota, p.108)20 "in rusted ghetto-shacks" ("After II 18 Essop Patel, Fragments in the Sun, p.4. Patel is one of South Africa's "most radical and committed poets. He articulates the heroic struggle of a people in bondage" Exile", p.176). The living conditions of the 'non-white' under the Apartheid regime are starkly sketched in Brutus' "Train Journey", in which he tells a tale of children lacking physical and spiritual nourishment, robbed of their birthright to play and to be carefree: Along the miles of steel that span my land threadbare children stand knees ostrich-bulbous on their reedy legs, their empty hungry hands lifted as if in prayer. ("Sirens", p.49) This poem also reflects the conditions of poverty and squalor suffered by the Black people. The ghetto-like, non-family environment 'reserved' for the Black man, produces a rootless people, bewildered, without any sense of direction or identity. Anything that vaguely spelt ease or comfort was reserved for whites. Under Apartheid, "the signs which preserved white sanctity were everywhere: 'Slegs Blankes -Whites Only''', writes Lekota, explaining "'petty apartheid'" to his daughter (p.I06). Brutus writes about the blight of Apartheid because it is an inherent part of his environment: "In South Africa you write about prison and ... machine guns because this is your landscape ... the police and the system of tyranny surround you in South Africa" (palaver, p.32). In his poem, "Waiting (South African Style): 'Non-Whites' Only" ("Sirens", p.ll), Brutus writes about the dehumanizing and humiliating tyranny arbitrarily meted out to Blacks. He recalls his own "oasis of ... impotence" when he writes of going to buy "postage stamps", and the "ordinary girl" at the "counter", with her "surreptitious novelette", rudely regards his "verminous existence" with "Stanislav disdain". He II makes his point with a wry sense of humour: "The Civil Service Serves - without civility". Brutus is aware of the element of laughter in his writings: "it may be that I am engaged in a fight but at the same time I find a certain delight in it. I enjoy the fight; and this is where the laughter ... and the humour come in" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.55). Nevertheless, there is a barbed message in "Waiting (South African Style)" which can be summed up in the words of Wally Serote: "there is something very 74 wrong when people are unable to see each other without seeing race". 21 Like Bosman, Brutus uses humour as a weapon. He is, he asserts, "both fighter and poet" (Ibid, p.55), and it is this 'fighting' element, his "conflict [and] tension", that makes his laughter a form ofself-protection, defiance, and passive resistance in the face of arbitrary violence: and I have laughed, disdaining those who banned inquiry and movement, delighting in the test of will when doomed by Saracened arrest, choosing ... simply to stand. ("Sirens", p.2) Banning of "movement" was assisted by the influx control regulations which gave the government Draconian powers of control over the movement of 'non-whites'in accordance with the needs of the labour market: the 'native' was allowed into the urban areas only if slhe was II 'willing to ... minister to the needs ofthe white man, and should depart therefrom, when he ceases so to minister'". 22 Many Black families were thus broken up. Brutus was also a victim of this social injustice, albeit while under banning orders, separated from his wife and family, who were living some seven hundred miles away in Port Elizabeth, while he was in Johannesburg. His longing for his wife is evident in his poem, ["For My Wife, In Separation"] (see postscript, "Sirens", p.20): It is your flesh that I remember best as dearly memorable are speech the shy expressive gestures of your eyes your patient, penetrative, patient mind. 21 Mongane Wally Serote, On the Horizon, p.3? (In 1969, Serote spent nine months in solitary confinement in a South African jail). 22 Govan Mbeki, The Struggle for Liberation in South Africa, p.28 (Mbeki, veteran ANC leader and intellectual, served time on Robben Island between 1964 - 1987). 75 In this lyricalpoem, Brutus speaks to his wifein his personal, private capacity. In this way he is able to assert his individuality and his inner freedom, and so express what Franklcalls the "very self' (Search for Meaning, p.66). He is thus able to rise above his situation, and to reconstruct an identity in circumstances in which the 'non-white', ... more than eighty percent of the population living in squalor below the subsistence minimum (wa mogale, p.37) became the ... hobo sapiens anonymous and dehumanised (Ibid, p.37) These are the social conditions which led Brutus to review his approach to his poetry. While on Robben Island, he decided to eschew the richly ornamented, metaphysical style of his earlier poetry: The first thing I decided about my future poetrywas that there must be no ornament, absolutely none. And the second thing I decided was you oughtn't to writefor poets ... you ought to write for the ordinary person: for the man who drives a bus, or the man who carries the baggage at the airport, and the woman who cleans the ashtrays in the restaurant. (palaver, p.29) Brutus claims that the poetry of Tennyson, Wordsworth and Donne had a strong influence uponhim (see Goddard & Wessels, p.71). Nevertheless, "afterprison", these influences "went", and "now I have myown voice ... much more stripped down, more sparse" (Ibid, p.71). In breaking free from traditional literary conventions, Brutus is asserting what freedom he has left, writing what can be termed 'anti-poetry', poems without embellishment or metaphor. Here is is making an assertion of independence, and engaging in a redefinition of self. In addition, by aiming to provide the 'ordinary' man with access to culture, "sothat the man who drives a bus ... can quoteif he feels likequoting" (Ibid,p.29), Brutus clearly intends his poetry to have a dynamic function, to re-humanize in the face of structures and strictures which de-humanize, since "culture 76 in any society is potentially a humanizing force" (Watts, p.14). Here, Brutus' strong sense ofhumanity and desire to reach out to others and to communicate is obvious. His emphasis on humanity is an "ultimate value ... characteristic of [him]" (Goodwin, p.97). This inherent part ofBrutus' 'autos' is evident in his poem written "[Across the Mediterranean: Cairo to Frankfurt]" ("After Exile", p.131): all the world is mine and to love and all of its humankind. His writing is clearly community-and-audience orientated. Brutus specifically intends his poetry to "reach a wider audience" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.58), and to "make sense to ...['ordinary'] people" (Ibid, p.29). Brutus says that he writes "principally for the people of my own continent", and is therefore fully aware that he must "avoid embroidery or anything that would be an interference in, and a barrier against communication between writer and reader" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.58). This point invites an illuminating comparison with Bosman, who also uses simple, unadorned language in Cold Stone Jug. Bosman adopts a casual, conversational tone: "Naturally" (p.106); "Oh ... I forgot ..." (p.60); "Incidentally" (p.l38); "By the way" (p.59); "Anyway" (pp.65, 98 ...). This technique, together with the sustained use of the second person, draws the reader into the prison, making him/her aware that "there really was a world such as this, here in our midst, with its own ... terribly different ... way of life" Qyg, p.34). These techniques facilitate personal contact with the reader, which is also the aim of Brutus. Although Bosman does not share Brutus' reforming sense of community involvement, both men use the language of ordinary people to create a bond between readers and writer. 1\ Serote asserts that "simple, direct English ... link[s] the poets and the people ... becom[ing] a language of ... liberation" (Serote, p.IO). This approach to creative writing, then, has its advantages in creating a new energy and freshness, opening up new possibility for intimacy between poet and reader. Brutus' main aim, then, in the words of Serote, is "to have dialogue with the masses" (p.9). Chidi Amuta asserts: " 77 Because ... art ... stands in eternal opposition to the dehumanization which tyranny ... constitute[s], the poet tends to ... pitch his tent with the people in their struggle for justice and humane existence ...' fighting on the side of the people. (Amuta, p.177) Serote explains that under "intense repression ... the voice of the poetry ... become[s] a voice of resistance ... search[ing] the past, exploring the heroic deeds of the oppressed ... urg[ing] the oppressed to resist and fight for freedom in the spirit of past heroes" (Serote, p.9). This is a theme that runs through many of Brutus' poems: In "At a Funeral", for example, he writes "For one whose gifts the mud devours with our hopes" ("Sirens", p.17). Here he celebrates the memory of Velencia Majombozi, who died shortly after qualifying as a doctor. He exhorts all "you frustrate ones" whose "powers [are] tombed in [the] dirt" of an oppressive regime, whose "tyranny scythes our ground", to "Arise! The brassy shout ofFreedom stirs our earth". His anguish at "our narrow cells of pain defeat and dearth", is poignantly heightened by the dignity of the imagery of "bride's-white, nun's-white veils". Nevertheless his message of resistance is clear: Better that we should die, than that we should lie down. The words "you", "our", and "we" create a sense of solidarity and common purpose, which is embodied in the slogan, "Freedom or Death", propounded by Serote in his essay, "FREEDOM OR DEATH; A Cultural Expression" (On the Horiwn, pp.58-64), and anticipated by Brutus in this poem. A similar message is conveyed in Brutus' elegy, "For a Dead African" ("Sirens", p.34), written for John Nangoza Jebe, shot by the police in a Good Friday procession in Port Elizabeth in 1956. Here, Brutus amalgamates a call to resistance, an intense feeling of anguish, and an anticipation of future freedom: he laments the "lashing rains of hate" and "captives killed on eyeless nights/and accidental dyings in the dark". This is a chilling indictment of those who are "eyeless", blind to the truth, lacking spiritual insight, who commit criminal acts of violence and murder under protection of the law, and under the label of 'accidental death'. His belief that freedom will eventually be attained is confident, even triumphant, although tempered by grief over the losses of the past: 78 ...when the roll of those who died to free our land is called, without surprise these nameless unarmed ones will stand beside the warriors who secured the final prize. Here Brutus conveys an awareness of the components of his 'bios' and of where they may lead. He both looks back and foreshadows (see p.IS of this dissertation). "Time - ordinary time" ("Sirens", p.lO) has a violent streak, revealing the aggressive side of Brutus. In this poem, he also foreshadows and envisions a successful revolution, warning that the "sores" of the nation unhealed and unattended that bleed afresh each day under the horny ministrants of law must, under impulse of augmented streams explode in gouts and swish these papered clerks and all into a bloodied waste. The only punctuation in this stanza, the comma after "must", focuses attention on this imperative, leaving the reader in no doubt that, for Brutus, revolution is a certainty, and that "Time ... exerts its own insistent/unobtrusive discipline" (Ibid, p.IO). This, according to Goodwin, is one of Brutus' responses "to imminent brutality ..• [that of] retributive violence" (p.5). Amuta states that Brutus stands among those poets who "have dedicated their art .•• to the pursuit of freedom" (p.17?), to "end apartheid" (p.179). Brutus' poems do not express a sense of a man broken or bitter, but rather of one who has triumphed over wickedness. It is clear that he intends to fight for the inauguration of a society freed from pass laws, influx control, and 'Bantu education', a society dedicated to the view that "Bantus should become ... hewers of wood and drawers of water" (Mbuli, p.48). Brutus explicitly states that he is "a political activist !I interested in social justice" (Goddard & Wessels, p.68). As such, he devoted himself to speaking out against "fascistprohibition" ("Sirens", p.4), and against the laws which reduced the Black man's life to a state of terror. This terror is epitomized in some of Brutus' earlier poems, which are filled with a sense of menace: In "Nightsong: City" ("Sirens", p.18), for example, Brutus achieves temporary respite, "for this breathing night at least", from the insidious menace of the police state, from "police cars [that] 79 ,0 cockroach through the tunnel streets". His deep patriotic commitment to his primary love, "my land", and his tenderness for his mistress, "my love", are juxtaposed with the destructive legacy of racial hatred: the "violence ... fear ... anger"; the poverty, evoked by the image of "the shanties creaking iron-sheets"; and the disease-ridden reality of the "bug-infested" townships. Here Brutus is seeking inner resources of strength to enable him existentially to transcend the situation and to attain what Serote terms "psychological liberation" (p.23), by advocating a sense of "fresh hope" ("Sirens", p.5) and dignity, and by refusing to lower himself to the brutalizing level of the oppressors, who try to "crunch ... our bones and spirits ... under jackboots" ("Sirens", p.9). Brutus shows his capacity to rise above his "outward fate". He refuses to submit to those powers which threaten to rob the human being of his/her inner self and inner freedom (see Search for Meaning, pp. 66-67). Brutus begins and ends his poem with the same words of tenderness and concern, "Sleep well", making this a circular poem, reflecting the circle of peace in which he temporarily desires to enclose himself. In the face of constant humiliation and assaults upon humanity, Brutus aims to retain his moral supremacy over those whom Serote calls the racist "Boers" (p.128), and to triumph over hatred and evil. Indeed, Owomoyela asserts that Brutus' poetry is "a means of establishing his moral superiority over racists" .23 In "Extrapolation", Brutus acknowledges the divine element of mankind, the gift of reason: the capacity to ennoble or pervert what is otherwise simply animal amoral and instinctual and it is this that argues for us a more than animal destiny and gives us the potential for the diabolic or divinity. 1\ ("Letters", p.64) Thus the ability to "choose one's attitude in a given set ofcircumstances" (Search for 23 Oyekan Owomoyela. African Literatures, p.70. 80 Meaning, p.65) is for Brutusone way of imposing meaning on his life and retaining an existential measure of hope, by the "intensification of inner life ... [as] a refuge from ... emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty" (Ibid, p.38). Another means of preserving his personal integrity and of finding some sense of temporary respite from brutalityis "personal retreat into the comfort of understanding female companionship and sex" (Goodwin, p.6). In the face of constant threat and man's inhumanity to man, sex provides "still oblivion/shut[s] out the knives and teeth; boots, bayonets/and knuckles" ("Sirens", p.30). Many of his poems are highlycharged and sexual, celebrating renewal and life. The beloved is often his land and mistress fused into one being, as in his poem, "Sabotage, 1962": my country, an ignorantly timid bride winces, tenses for the shattering releasing tide.24 Similarly, in "Nightsong: Country" ("Sirens", p.47), Brutus makes a "simultaneous statement to a person and about the country" (Goddard & Wessels, p.72): All of this undulant earth heaves up to me; soft curves in the dark distend voluptuous-submissively mixing most intimately with my own murmuring we merge, embrace and cling: who now gives shelter, who begs sheltering? Here two voices of Brutus are clear: his private voice, a "resort to inner stores of tend~rness" (Goodwin, p.6), and his public voice, which makes "a larger, perhaps political, statement" (Goddard & Wessels, pp. 71-2). Brutus explains that, when he speaks of "South Africa as a mistress then it is both woman and country ... a physical presence in the sense of flesh. At the same time it is the land I traverse" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.56). Brutus' patriotism is intensely 24 Dennis Brutus, Strains, p.S, " 81 personal and passionate: ... I traverse all my land exploring all her wide-flung parts with zest probing ... her secret thickets with an amorous hand. ("Sirens", p.2) For Brutus, his country is "female and the relationship with it is almost sexual, that kind ofintimacy" (Goddard & Wessels, p.72). In his 'love' poems, then, Brutus makes both private and political statements. His 'private' statements are suffused with tenderness, "I can bend and kiss you now, my earth" ("Sirens", p.37), but his political ones are fraught with rage and anger for his "ravaged" love (p.16), his land. This is inevitable, since love and hate are 'bedfellows'. In "Erosion: Transkei", his "sensual delight mounts ... mixed with fury" (p.16). In "Under Me", he feels "a rage of tenderness" (p.31). This sense of passionate outrage, "passion ... hate", is aroused by his "land's disfigurement" (p.22). Brutus feels a sense of betrayal: his land is "trafficked and raddled ... by gross ... occupying feet" and thus he is "dispossessed ... forced apart [from] ... [his] land, [his] love" (pAG). Throughout his poetry, Brutus is attempting to retain his faith in humanity in the face of the daily assault upon the psyche and body of the 'non-white'. In an interview with Titus Pemba, Brutus explicitly asserts that his "chief concern is to preserve human sensitivity in a world of brutality" (p.3l). In "Somehow we survive" ("Sirens", pA), he ponders about various aspects of his 'bios', the omni-present and omnipotent "patrols", whose "boots club the peeling door" with "investigating searchlights [which] rake our naked unprotected contours". The outrage of violent personal invasion is once again juxtaposed with the positive human trait of "tenderness [that] does not wither". Amidst such brutal threats, Brutus upholds elements of survival, gentleness, and hope, refusing to become filled with hate, showing his resilient and invincible spirit in a "land scarred with terror/rendered unlovely and unlovable" ("Sirens", p.4). Nevertheless, the inevitable tension that is evident in many of his poems is overt here. For Brutus, this tension is "partly a deliberate desire to catch tension" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.54). In "The sounds begin again" (Ibid, p.19), a succession of brutal images tells a cruel tale of outrage and violation, emphasising the relentless nature of the oppressors: 82 the siren in the.night the thunder at the door the shriek of nerves in pain ... faces split by pain the wordless, endless wail only the unfree know ... sirens, knuckles, boots The rhythmic sound of marching emphasizes the persistent search for 'transgressors' of the law, and the nightmare of pursuit. The chilling story of this poem can be explained in the words of Mbuli: To be arrested is not a nice experience, especially in South Africa. There is a knock on the door; it always happens in the early hours of the morning. The police knock down doors with rifle butts, they jump into the house ... they set up a reign of terror. 25 A similar tale is told by Patel: [They] came with arsenals of threats to drag a naked man out of his house .... (patel, p.7) In these poems, it is clear that under the Apartheid system, Black people lived in a kind of "Bentham's Panopticon" (Foucault, p.2(0), "a cruel, ingenious cage" (Ibid, p.205), in which the victim is always visible and "surveillance is permanent" (p.200). The eye of supervision is omni-present within this total institution of a country which does not belong to the majority of its inhabitants. The living quarters allotted to the Blacks reflect their lowly status: 'The homes are different, the streets are different, the lighting is different, so you tend to begin to feel that there is something incomplete in your humanity, and that completeness goes with whiteness.' (Woods, Biko, quoted in Watts, p.26) 25 Kirsten Holst and Anna Rutherford (008.), On Shifting Sands, p.69. 83 This is the social environment that gives birth to reader and writer alike, robbing the 'non-white' of his basic human rights, and "the whites of some vital aspects of life" (Serote, p.37), promoting a "mutilated consciousness" (Watts, p.25), and a collective anaesthetized 'white' conscience, which is simultaneously a resultof Apartheid, and an indispensable contributor to its continuation and reinforcement. Amuta asserts that "literary works cannotbut bear the stamp of theirclass origins and orientation" (p.55). A rigidclass system and compartmentalization of society must inevitably havean effect on thecontent andquality of all South African literature, White and 'non-white'. Watts explains that a system such as Apartheid "confines the writer'S imagination and constricts understanding" (p.lO). This is so because all Whites and Blacks are "quarantined" (Gordimer, quoted inWatts, p.11)from oneanother by law, andcan thus neverachieve a true understanding ofone another. In hisautobiography, Down Second Avenue, Ezekiel Mphahlele quotes from his thesis, asserting that, since 'Non-whites livein locations, or in the Reserves, or work for whites in towns and on farms ... there can hardly be a healthy common culture in conditions that isolate whole communities and make social and economic intercourse difficult or impossible. And the problem of a national culture is ~ the problem of a national literature. It must remain sectional and sterile as long as such conditions prevail' .26 Nadine Gordimer utters similar sentiments: "There are some aspects of a black man's life thathavebeen put impossibly beyond the white man'spotential experience, and the same applies to the black man andsomeaspects of the white man's experience". Z7 La Guma concurs: social fragmentation creates the problem of "'living in one set of compartments and knowing only ofyour ownlife, andthen trying to inject yourself into the life of the environment of another part, another party'".28 26 Ezekiel Mphahlele, Down Second Avenue, p.196. 27 Nadine Gordimer, -The Novel and the Nation on South Africa", African Writers on African Writing, G.D. Killam (ed.), p.52. 28 Landeg White and Tim Couzens(OOs.), Literature and Society in South Africa, p.161. 84 " Brutus protests against these conditions. Nevertheless, he asserts that he prefers to protest "by indirection, by. implication" (Palaver, p.32). His linguistically and figuratively stark language, then, can be viewed in terms of a tacit protest, paradoxically 'articulating' the intellectual, literary, and cultural dearth imposed on the majority of the population by the impoverishment of Bantu 'education', and by the arbitrary censorship laws. Barbara Harlow asserts that, in many resistance poems, "the very bareness of the language represents a critical dimension of the poems' attack on certain forms of ... imperialism" (p.50). Racial oppression, by virtue ofits aggressive policy and its extension of power, falls under the category of 'imperialism'. These writers, says Harlow, seek to "redefine through their poetry the possibilities of a new, revised social order" (Ibid. p.50). Under Apartheid laws, this was an impossible task, similar to that of Sisyphus, condemned forever to futile labour. The struggle alone, however, can be seen in existential terms, if one concurs with the words of Camus: "The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart" (Sisyphus. p.99). Furthermore, personal involvement may be seen in terms of an existential exercise, "'engagement', action, choice and commitment" (see this dissertation, p.24). Only recently, after Nelson Mandela's release from prison, and the unbanning of the SACP and the ANC on 2 February, 1990, have many of the writings by Robben-Island convicts and other political prisoners - such as Breytenbach, Albie Sachs, Ruth First, Indres Naidoo, Zwelonke (Dan Mdluli), Govan Mbeki, Jeremy Cronin, Hugh Lewin, and Dennis Brutus - been unbanned. At last South Africans have access to a vast store of writings which tell the truth about prison conditions. Brutus' actual poems about prison - his "Letters to Martha", the "Postscripts", and also the "Robben Island Sequence" contained in his volume, Stubborn Hope, epitomize these experiences. Brutus' initial reaction to his jail sentence involved "mingled feelings" (p.54), one of them being "sick relief'. This paradoxical emotion may be explained by Hugh Lewin, . who also testifies to a feeling of desperation and "an aimless vacuum of uncertainty" at not knowing what was to happen to him: "I don't care what the sentence is - twenty years, twenty-five years, I don't care, as long as I know" (Bandiet, pp.65 -66). Thereafter, he says, one has "a point around which to structure [one's] thoughts and actions" (Ibid, p.66). For Brutus also, " 85 ... knowledge even when it is knowledge of ugliness seems to be preferable, can better be endured. (p.59) "After the sentence", this knowledge gives Brutus a peculiar sensation of "exultation a sense ofchallenge" (p.54). He also feels "self-pity", and a feeling of "apprehension - [at] the hints ofbrutality" . These feelings, however, are "tempered by the knowledge of those I who endure much more / and endure ..."(p.54). This is the compassionate, altruistic Brutus, voicing his concern for fellow sufferers, rather than for himself. Brutus does not dwell upon his self - he avoids the use of the autobiographical 'I', using the impersonal 'one' and 'oneself instead. This is a recurrent feature in his "Letters to Martha". This evasive technique paradoxically conveys both a sense of alienation and one of unity or 'oneness' with his fellow prisoners. It also points to a desire to distance himself from the "cruelties [that] must be endured [and the] indignities the sensitive spirit must face" (p.59) whilst in prison: sexual assault, victimization, and deprivation. Nevertheless, Brutus does not evade these issues. Instead, he starkly describes the prisoners' brutality: One learns quite soon that nails and screws must be handed in; and seeing them shaped and sharpened one is chilled, appalled to see how vicious it can be - this simple, useful bit of steel. - produced perhaps from some disciplined anus - Brutus is appalled at the "senseless brutality" when "knives suddenly flash" (p.55). This is a common occurrence in prisons. Naidoo also testifies to the fact that "assault and murder were everyday matters" (p.95). He describes an incident when, after returning from work one day, he "saw a knife flashing ... a common-law prisoner was raising it ... plunging it into the head of another prisoner" (p.129). The words "disciplined anus" in the above poem, evoke chilling images of the degrading, ritualistic 'tausa dance' demanded of the common-law prisoners: " 86 [T]he naked person leapt into the air, spinning round and opening his legs wide while clapping his hands overhead and then, in the same movement, coming down, making clicking sounds with the mouth, and bending the body right forward so as to expose an open rectum to the warder's inspection. (Naidoo, p.31). On Robben Island, the political prisoners were not spared the indignities suffered by the common criminals. Indeed, these common-law prisoners were often incarcerated with the 'politicals', Naidoo states that this was a deliberate strategy on the part of the authorities to "degrade" the politicals to the level of these "hardened wrecks" (p.94). Such "hardened" criminals are notoriously violent, having "been in prison all their lives, many serving multiple life-sentences" (Naidoo, p.94). They often ill-treated the politicals with the sanction of the warders, who also indulged in "unmotivated senseless cruelty" ("Letters", p.56), and who, for this purpose, "specially selected [certain common-law prisoners] to bully and inform on us" (Naidoo, p.98). Naidoo describes these prisoners as being "disfigured, their shaven heads covered with scars, their eyes bloodshot, their noses askew, their teeth knocked out" (pp.94-5). This description aptly fits those whom Brutus calls the "gibbering society" (p.57). He compares them to "seagulls" ("Postscripts", p.69). For him, these birds are not symbols of grace and freedom; they are birds ofprey. He stresses their "raucous greed and bickering", their "predatory stupidity", their "ineradicable cruelty" (Ibid, p.69). Such raptor-like savagery is the result of humankind's being pushed to the outer limits of degradation and despair. In "Robben Island Sequence", Brutus describes an incident of hideous cruelty as he remembers the "bronze-sharp lines of Kleynhans", a prison warder, laughing khaki-ed, uniformed, with his foot on the neck of the convict who had fallen, !I holding his head under water in the pool where he had fallen while the man thrashed helplessly and the bubbles gurgled and the air glinted dully on lethal gunbutts, the day was brilliant with the threat of death." 29 Dennis Brutus, Stubborn Hope, p.59. 87 Itis this kindof crueltythat leads him to question andponder "bywhatshrewdness was it instigated? \ desire for prestige or lust for power? ... from what human hunger was it born?" (p.55). Here Brutus does not sit in judgement; the horror of thedescription evokes rathera response of musing about thereactions and motivations of human beings under such ghastly conditions: "What was the nature of the emotion?" he asks, perplexed. Frankl offers an explanation, stating that boredom and a lackof contentin one's life leads to an "existential vacuum". In these circumstances, "thefrustrated will to meaning is vicariously compensated for by a will to power". Frankl further asserts that this frustration often results in "sexual compensation", leading to "thesexual libido becom[ing] rampant" (Search for Meaning, p.I09). Brutus bears testimony to the phenomenon of sexual obsession and harassment in the total institution: "the pressures to enforce sodomy" (p.57) dominate. He points out that many "beg ... for sexual assault", which they have previously "resisted". He ponders about the inhumanity of the situation which drives them to this: To what desperate limits are they driven and what fierce agonies have they endured that this, which they have resisted, should seem preferable, even desirable? For Brutus this is one of the most terrible most rendingly pathetic of all a prisoner's predicaments. (p.58) He remembers that one prisoner "fled in[to] a maniac world [where] he was safe ... fro~ the battering importunities I of fists and genitals of sodomites" (p.70). Another "sought escape I in fainting fits and asthmas I and finally fled into insanity" (p.57). Here, actuality bears out the truth of the contention of Norman Johnson et at that "The offender is not only incarcerated in a physical prison without exit, he is enmeshed in a human environment ... from which the onlyescape is psychological withdrawal"." 30 Nonnan Johnson et al. The Sociology of Punishment and Correction, p.l00. ·' 88 In a lecture given at the University of Wisconsin, Brutus analysed some of the horrifying facts about imprisonment on Robben Island. He explained that sexual assault was commonly used to break an individual's morale and self esteem: Prisoners were starved into submission, beaten if necessary, then, when on the point of consent to homosexuality, leftalone without food or water, though with an occasional beating. Most then found themselves begging for sexual assault in order to get food and water. (Goodwin, p.13) In "Robben Island Sequence" (p.60), Brutus relates how ... old lags came along with their favourite warders, to select the young prisoners who had caught their eye so that these could be assigned to their span. Most prison memoirs bear testimony to the sexual assault and victimization rife in prisons. Hugh Lewin recounts that, while he was in "Central" (pretoria Central Prison), one night he heard a scream from downstairs. The following morning, "one of the hospital orderlies explained (the screamer had been taken to the hospital during the night): 'Oh, it was nothing much really: the boy was raped ... and is still crying about it'" (Bandiet, p.158). Breytenbach describes "blood-curdling incidents of gang warfare, gang murder gang rape" (Albino Terrorist, p.273). Naidoo also testifies to the fact that "forced sodomy was common" (p.94). . When writing about the morbid obsessions ofthe imprisoned "gibbering society" (p.57), about the savagery of depraved and terrified inmates, Brutus departs from his simple style, using many words and concepts which will never be understood by 'the man who carries baggage at the airport'. He speaks about "whispers of horrors I that people the labyrinth of self" (p.56). These are "Coprophilism; necrophilism; fellatio I penis amputation ... suicide [which is] a companionable ghost ... a familiar I a doppelganger I not to be shaken off" (p.57). Here, Brutus recalls some of the worst atrocities of prison life, which is characterized by "a hammering brutal atmosphere" (p.70). These horrors cannot possibly be expressed in spontaneous, 'ordinary' language. Such experiences can be expressed only in "language that is chosen and not spontaneous, 89 artificial rather than natural" (Goodwin, p.l3). Goodwin calls this technique "poetic armament" (p.l3). Prisoners must indeed 'arm' themselves and have a very real fear of - and defensive stance against - these horrors, since they are a reality, not a figment of Brutus' imagination. Breytenbach also bears witness to these horrors, bred of a social climate of "staunchness and despair" (Albino Terrorist, p.274), "in the Cape particularly [where] prison life is run by gangs" (Ibid, p.272): "I could tell you of people I saw who had their penises cut off at the roots" (Ibid, p.274). This is, he maintains, "the revelation of the interaction of man with his environment pushed to its most awful and degrading consequences" (Ibid, p.274). Brutus employs grotesque imagery to shock the reader into an awareness of the evil of the degrading realm of prison, which dehumanizes and emasculates. In this "tense atmosphere ... with its perversions and ... sexual frustrations, even those inmates who do not engage in overt homosexuality suffer acute attacks of anxiety about their own masculinity" (Norman et al, p.96). An additional horror here is that Brutus and his comrades were political prisoners, innocent of any criminal acts against society, but fighting for humanitarian reasons, to destroy the cycle that perpetuates cruelty from one generation to the next, to wipe out the colonization ofthe minds of oppressor and oppressed alike, to eliminate the myths of superiority and inferiority that flow from and reinforce exploitation. (Meli, in Naidoo, p.IO) Deprivation is another ordeal which serves to augment the atrocities described above. In a totalizing situation, inmates are deprived of family and friends, and thoughts inevitably tum towards those at home. Unlike Bosman, who never mentions those 'outside', Brutus voices his concern about his family and friends. He also suffers deep mental anguish on behalf of "those outside": The not knowing is perhaps the worst part of the agony for those outside; (p.59) 90 However, the mere thought of his loved ones, and the "reach[ing] across space \ with filaments of tenderness [brings] consolation" (p.59)~ helping to preserve some remnant of his life, and to impose meaning in an unbearable situation. For Brutus, the ultimatedeprivation wasthe "deadly lackof music". For him, "nothing was sadder\ there was no more saddening want" (p.62). This lack "grew to a hunger ... the need that one felt most" (p.62). Although there were bans on "singing, whistling", often "surreptitious wisps of melody" came floating "down the damp grey corridors" : Strains of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik the Royal Fireworks, the New World, the Emperor and Eroica, Jesu joy of man's desiring. The softwhistling and singingof strains of these famous works served to form a bond among "those who shared one's loves and hungers". Whilst incarcerated, Brutus also found his music in nature: The graceful unimpeded motion of the clouds [is] - a kind of music, poetry, dance - send[ing] delicate rhythms tremoring through the flesh and fantasies ... through the mind. (p.66) Music, then, is an important part of Brutus' 'bios'. At the New Nation Writers' Conference in Johannesburg, in December 1991, Professor Brutus told me that one of the first things that he did afterbeing released from prison was to go to a Tchaikovsky concert in Cape Town - "It wasn't ~ music, but at least it was ~"! 1\ The lack of music induced a spiritual craving in many of the educated, cultured captives, and was an element of the mental deprivation imposed upon them. Physical deprivation wasalso designed to humiliate and degrade: prisoners were denied the right to useful labour and medical care. Brutus describes the "mornings [when] we lined up for 'hospital' ... for all had injuries": 91 split heads; smashed ankles, arms; cut feet in bandages, or tom and bloodied legs: ... a bruised and motley lot ... . ("Robben Island Sequence", p.60) With a bitter sense of humour, which underscores the horror, Brutus says that the prisoners were then all given "castor oil" (Ibid, p.60). Naidoo corroborates this type of occurrence: "A young comrade went to hospital with 'flu, and was turned away ... he died within days" (p.132). The 'medicating' usually occurred before the prisoners went to the stone quarries to 'work' for the day, after which they returned "shuffling ... white-dust-filmed and shambling" ("On The Island", p.7l). In his book, Robben lllMQ, Simon de Villiers naively asserts that "no matter what prison it may be in South Africa, the prisoners are rehabilitated, by teaching them a useful trade or occupation so that when they are released they are able to find work and become useful members of society".31 All of those who have written of their experiences on the Island, however, bear testimony to the fact that the 'useful', 'rehabilitative' skills learnt are merely the breaking ofstones in quarries, in which "the brute hammers fall unceasingly \ on the mind" ("Postscripts", p.68). In "that hammering brutal atmosphere" (Ibid, p.70), it is almost impossible to find any sense of consolation. Brutus did, however, find some comfort in religion: Particularly in a single cell, the religious sense asserts itself in the grey silence of the empty afternoons it is not uncommon to find oneself talking to God. (p.56) These sentiments, however, are not caused by religious longings only. They are also inspired by the most intense of human fears: "awareness of the proximity of death" (Ibid, p.56). In this poem, Brutus utters similar sentiments to those of Edicio de la Torre, a Filipino Roman Catholic priest who spentnine years in prison after President 31 Simon A. de Villiers, Robben Island, p.1l6. 92 Aquino came to power. He asserts that "prison is like a novitiate. You learn spirituality, a spirituality for struggle. Its a time to gather yourself as a human being ... [to find out] what you "are ... II (Bould, p.112). While reading Brutus' poetry, one is constantly aware that he Is investigating his inner self, probing "the landscape of[his] experience I traversing [its] ... arid wastes" (p.60). He is clearly trying to balance his thoughts, "a montage of glimpses" (p.60), and to create some sense of order within the "mesh of ideas" that "thrust and clash ... [in the] mind" (p.136). This is the existential Brutus, Brutus the philosopher, who is continually striving to find some sense of meaning, "some sense of worth" (p.68) in his "barred existence" (p.71), a senseless, absurd world of"unmovingtime" (p.71). Brutus is always searching and self-examining: "so we must grapple ... then, perhaps an agonized truth" ("Under House Arrest", p.85). Here, Brutus is searching for his 'inward moral being', trying to establish some sense of identity (see p.2 of this dissertation). For Brutus, this inner probing also has cathartic possibilities: "picking the jagged bits embedded in [his] own mind" provides "some ease for [his] own mind" ("Postscripts", p.68). It is clear that Brutus' prison poems do not reflect a man who is beaten and bowed. For Brutus, the autobiographical element of 'perspective' gives a greater meaning to his jail experiences. He realizes that these experiences have not been in vain. Being one "of those that prison holds" has made him a part of the cause, "I am a part of the work" (p.89), a part of the 'machinery' which will ultimatelylead to justice in a 'new' South Africa. Perspective gives a "fresh dimension" to his experiences: Events have a fresh dimension for all things can affect the pace of political development - a special freedom - (p.61) Brutus feels no guilt. The oppressors are the criminals, the "thieves" (p.91), and he is fighting for a just cause, "a land and people just and free" (p.89). This sense of righteous suffering gives meaning to his prison experiences. 93 In writing about his experiences, Brutus constructs a coherent whole from the welter of his jumbled memories. He reveals his past experiences in terms of their present significance (see p.15 of this dissertation). Brutus' poems display many aspects of his 'autos', such as his altruistic tendencies and his determined, resolute nature, as well as excoriating the injustices meted out to the 'non-white' in prison and to those 'imprisoned' under Apartheid. In her article, "South African Prison Literature", Sheila Roberts maintains that all prison writings exhibit a "homogeneity of substance, tone, and mood" (Arid., p.61). This is inevitable because of the physical and mental environment from which they arise. Breytenbach asserts that "prisons are pretty much the same the world over" (Albino Terrorist, p.339). Hugh Lewin, incarcerated in Pretoria Central Prison some forty years after Bosman, utters similar sentiments. He maintains that "in forty years very little has changed ... Cold Stone Jug is what Herman Bosman called it" (]Jandiet, p.I09). Roberts explains that, whether the detainee be "thug or saboteur, murderer or merely doubting intellectual", his experience of arrest and incarceration will follow a pattern. There is always the fear of brutal lawless lawmen, the shock of being in custody, the realization of prolonged and multiple deprivations, the post-trial despair, and a partial or consistent retreat into madness. Space shrinks and time expands ... . (Ariel, pp.61-62) Bosman shows these elements in Cold Stone Jug, as does Brutus in his prison poems. In the following chapter, it will become evident that Jeremy Cronin is no exception to the above statements. His poems also evince the dehumanizing experience of long-term imprisonment, and, like those of Brutus, embody the spirit of resistance, so evident in Ii the poetry of intellectual political captives, involved in an ongoing struggle against injustice and evil. 94 CHAPTER FOUR JEREMY CRONIN -INSIDE Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for any just man is also in prison. (Henry Thoreau, Bould, p.llS) Jeremy Cronin joined the ranks of those jailed in the cause of freedom and justice in 1976, and, like many other prisoners, hepoured outhis heart on paper while in prison. Shortly after the Soweto riots in 1976, Cronin was arrested and convicted under the Terrorism Act for carrying out underground activity on behalf of the ANC. Nineteen seventy-six was a crucial year in South African resistance history: 16 June saw the student uprising in Soweto, as the youth in the township began active protests against the inferior education system to which they were subjected, and against the ruling that they would haveto be taught various school subjects in theAfrikaans language. "1976 was the beginning of the reversal of everything theNationalists had done since coming to power in 1948 ... cracks were showing everywhere in the edifice of apartheid" (Lekota, p.15l). The Statewas thus actively threatened during thistime,andresponded to the threat by arresting many political activists, such as David and Susan Rabkin, who, together with Cronin, were tried and sentenced to jail terms. During his summary, thejudge found Cronin "unrepentant and doubted that prison would reform him".' Ironically, this statement has turned out to be accurate. If anything, he has hardened his resolve: he is truly "unrepentant". "Wepick up where we left off last ... more determined" .2 Cronin served his seven-year sentence mainly in Pretoria maximum security prisons, including three years "as a 'guest' on death row ... while they were 'maximising' Pretoria maximum security prison".' This prison is ironically nicknamed "'Beverly 1\ 1 Anonymous, On the Bookshelf, "Poetry from prison", Cape Times, 11 January, 1984. 2 Jeremy Cronin, Inside (Jonathan Cape edition), pp.l07-8. 3 Sarah Crowe (Interviewer), "Breaking Down Bars with Fighting Words", Sunday Express, 12 February, 1984, p.S, 95 Hills' the cherry on top of the cake ... no windows to the outside ... a very high wall also watch-towers ..." (Albino Terrorist, p.133). Cronin was released from jail in May 1983, and on 1 February, 1984, his collectionof poetry, Inside, composed while he was incarcerated, was launched in Johannesburg. Cronin says that he had great difficulty in "writing the poems and getting them out of prison" (Crowe) because he was "not allowed to writein prison, thatwas illegal"," He says that he did manage to send out some poems in letters, but that was soon stopped, so he' memorized many of the poems, often performing them for his comrades (see Crowe). In this way, Cronin was able to achieve some intensification of his inner life, and to impose some meaning upon his experiences. Cronin writes in protest: his words, he says, are "words for the 'voiceless'. Fighting words" (Ibid). With Cronin, then, one cannot separate the man from his poetry. AswithBrutus, "hispoemsare the product of a particular historical experience. And it is within that context that they should be judged".S Thesepoemsare withoutdoubtautobiographical. In thecontextualizing section, "Inside out" anside, p.10), Cronin identifies himself: "In the seven years between 1976 and 1983 I was held, mostly in Pretoria, as a political prisoner" (my emphasis). Cronin mentions 'real' people: Braam Fisher; political martyrs who died in detention, suchas Steve[Biko], and Looksmart [Ngudle]; threeprisoners who were hanged while Cronin was in Maximum Security in PretoriaCentral - Shabangu, Moise, Tsotsobe. He refers to actual places in Cape Town, such as "Greenmarket Square ... the Groote Kerk ... the CulturalMuseum", which hepassed while on the wayto mail "onethousand illegal pamphlets" anside, pp.97-8). Cronin also mentions actual personal events, such as the deaths of his wife and his father, as well as political incidents, as for example, the Treason Trial, the Sharpeville massacre, and Langa. To South Africans these references, which need no explanation, giveverisimilitude as well as emotional impact II to Cronin's poetry. In fact, Cronin categorically asserts that his poetry Is autobiographical: "by and large it's certainly me".6 4 Stephen Gray, Interview: "Jeremy Cronin Inside", Index on Censorship, p.3S. 5 Anonymous, First Impressions, p.3. 6. Susan Gardner, Four South African Poets, p.14. 96 Cronin's anthology is divided into six sections: the first is entitled "Inside". The poems in this cycle refer directly to the physical and psychological experience of incarceration. Here Cronin explodes the myth thatprison is a place in which one can discover some "authentic self" (Gray, p.35), voicing a fundamental truth, earlier discovered by Albie Sachs, that "man is interdependent in his very depths. He disintegrates in isolation, but flourishes through association" QailDiary, p.97). Cronin states: My own discovery of being inside prison andhaving a lot of time on my own was [that] ... there was no innerself. I depended a great deal on social interaction, and I suppose one of the central themes of.In..sllk is just how dependent one is on others for being a human being. (Interview with Stephen Gray, p.35) Here, he echoes the words of Pascal that "the self comes into being only through interplay with the outer world" (see p.15 of this dissertation). Thus, in Cronin's experience, prison,by itsveryisolating nature, cannot effect "a new sense of self-hood" (see p.20 of this dissertation). For him, prison encloses rather than discloses. The stagnation of prison existence is epitomized in Cronin's assertion that When I first came to prison I'd write about rivers Now my poems are all about pools. Un side, p.91) Likewise, in Cold Stone Jug, Bosman implies that in prison no inner progress is possible, because there is so littleopportunity for meaningful contact. The convicts in Bosman's prison are "no longer human beings" (lyg, p.42). Similarly, in the "arid wastes" described by Brutus, (Simple Lust, p.60), noinnerdevelopment can takeplace. In the second cycle, "The Naval Base", Cronin makes a journey into a different 'inside', theinsideof hispsyche, as heexplores his childhood experiences and attempts to interpret and understand - re-assess and re-examine - them (see p.3 of this dissertation). "Venture intotheInterior" is an archaeological journey in search of the 97 "cave-site of word/roots", where he can "prise carefully ... layer through layer ... shells of meaning" (p.53). Here, Cronin explores the theme of constructing "a cable" ofcommunication with words (p.56). In these poems, Cronin "experiment[s] with local idiom". He explains that "this is part of a wider political, ideological and cultural programme that informs [his] poetry" (Gardner, p.17). Cronin states that, in these poems, he was trying to "discover a new voice, or voices, for an emergent national South African culture" (Gray, p.35). In order to create such a "shared" (Gardner, p.23) national culture, Cronin believes that it is essential To learn how to speak with the voices of the land To write a poem with words like I'm telling you Stompie, stickfast, golovan Songololo, just boombang .... (p.64) He asserts that he is attempting "to recover in the words that are currently present, a sense of the people who once spoke those words" (Gray, p.35). He informs the reader that the words "Eina" and "Quagga", for instance, are legacies from the Khoisan anside, p.5l). In "Some Uncertain Wires", Cronin reveals his colonial heritage: "Granma Kemp ... The English Bride" (p.68). "Love Poems" were written for his wife, Annemarie, who unexpectedly died from a brain tumour in 1977, after he had been in gaol for about six months: Scalp shaved, you died, they say, your head encased in wraps. (p.84) Finally, "Isiququmadevu" is a philosophical collection of sketches, parables, and II disquieting thoughts about life 'inside': 98 But who killed Ahmed, mama ... '1 Only the tenth floor, I heard. So thYla, thYla, now quiet my child But who killed Steve, mama ...? Sssssssssshhh! ... A brick wall, the magistrate said. Butwho killed Looksmart, mama ...'1 Sssssssssshhh! ..... His own belt, that's what was blamed. So thula, 1hYJ.il, now quiet my child. ("Lullaby", p.102) Paradoxically, this elegiac 'lullaby', in which Cronin mourns for some of the political activists who died violently while being 'interrogated' by the Special Branch, is more likely to induce insomnia than repose. It is intended to raise questions and to arouse 'sleepers' from their slumbers of complacency. Here, Cronin questions the legitimacy of political imprisonment and all it represents: torture, solitary confinement, "being cajoled, pressured into talking, tricked ... threatened ... cornered" ffiandiet, p.29). In 117Days(seepp.89- 102), Ruth First describes thenightmare ofLooksmart Solwandle Ngudle, (mentioned in "Lullaby"), who was arrested in good health on 19 August, 1963. On 5 September, he was found dead in his cell. During the inquest into his death, chilling tales of "gross brutalities", such as electric shocks, emerged. Nevertheless, the magistrate returned a verdict of suicide by hanging. Like Brutus, Cronin exposes the realities of stateoppression, distilling his frustration and resistance into poetry. Although bothBrutus and Cronin sharea common solidarity in their stance against racism, each offers hisown unique poetic response. In contrast. to Brutus' poems, many of Cronin's works have a distinct oral, onomatopoeic quality. In hispoetry, language as speech is fore-grounded as a pleasurable physical experience. "Prologue" (p.52), offers a good example: Take the tongue-tip and feel up t-t-t-t-t-t there Let lip touch lip hmmmmm, mmmmm 99 Cronindoes not mimicother artists. Indeed, he is acutely aware of individual talents: "I think that different people ... have different skills and different things to offer, in their poetry".7 He states that in prison-writings "there are quite marked differences". He does, however, qualify this statement: "notentirely" (Gardner, p.22). He implies that these similarities exist because writers who record their prison experiences are inevitably influenced by other prison writings that have inspired them (see Gardner, pp.22-3). There are, says Cronin, "tinges of Bosman in, say, Breytenbach ... also to an extent in ... Bandiet" (Ibid, p.22). Cronin himself was influenced by other prison writings: "I certainly readBrutus attentively before I wentin, and had remembered his poems ... [and] I was aware of following in [his] footsteps" (Gardner, p.23). He asserts that, from Brutus, he "learnt that one could write an extended book of lyrical poetry outof prison existence" (Gardner, p.23). Cronin was also motivated to write by Hugh Lewin's Bandiet: he says that "if Lewin could have wrung words from the stones and concretethen so could 1".8 He also states thatLewin's record madehis own "experience livableand hehoped that his ownwriting would havethesamehumanizing effect" (FirstImpressions, p.l). For Cronin, thecircumstances in Bosman's Cold Stone lYg are "exceptional" (Gardner, p.23). He claims, however, that in the more recent South African gaol writings, imprisonment is not an extraordinary experience: in Apartheid South Africa, says Cronin, prison becomes a "paradigm for the widersociety in South Africa". It is "'exemplary' of the wider society", since South Africa is an authoritarian, 'prison' society, "redolent with spatial controls of all kinds ... pass laws, influx controls, migrant labour ghettos, the Group Areas Act" (Gardner, p.23). For him to be removed jailed, endorsed out, banished man from woman is II After all nothing unusual in this our country, in these times. ("Love Poems", p.75) Locked up in prison, Cronin clearly feels a linkwith thegreat majority of other South 7 Anonymous, "Solitudeand Solidarity", p.84. 8 Interview with Mike van Niekerk, The Star, 13 February, 1984, p.l0. 100 Africans: "Sitting in an apartheid prison I was connected to the rest of the mass of people who were daily suffering under apartheid" (van Niekerk). For Cronin, then, prison has existential possibilities: he finds meaning in his suffering, and thus adds a deeper meaning to his inner life by sharing his hardships with the greater majority of South Africans. For him, the anguish of separation from his wife is no different from the misery experienced by all those "millions of families tom apart by migrant labour, Bantustans, and forced removals" ~, p.73). By suffering in prison, he felt that he was able to share the fate of an oppressed people with whom he sympathized and identified. It is thus evident that Cronin's poetry has a socio-political function: to expose the realities of prison conditions, and to direct attention to the unjust realities of life under authoritarian rule. He endeavours "to speak and to probe ... to provide moral, political and social direction and guidance" ("Solitude", p.85). Like Brutus, who aims to write for a wider audience and "principally for the people of my own continent" (Duerden &~Pieteise, p3S), Cronin wishes to make contact with th~'~~j~ritY'~fP;pi~~i~-~s-~~tli . • > - •• Africa. As far as language is concerned, Brutus and Cronin have similar intentions. -~ ..... " ...... ""-,,.-..-...,... Brutus desires to write "particularly [for] those who are just becoming familiar with the English language - but who one hopes will developa great love for the language" (Ibid, p.58). Similarly, Cronin states that he ~shes to reach a "wider rangeof' South Africans ... whose mother tongue is not basically English" (Gray, p.36). Thus Cronin wrote many ofhis poems for oral performance, since he states that "40 to 50% ofblack . . people in South Africa are illiterate" (Ibid, p.35). Mbulelo Mzamane asserts that "poetry in South Africa today has moved away from the page to the stage", because oral forms communicate with a larger audience, and can be instrumental in "raising cultural awareness and political consciousness" (White and Couzens, p.155). Raising cultural and political awareness is certainly one of the aims of Cronin. The vital motivation to reach out and to communicate is reflected in the very first poem ofthe anthology, "Poem-Shrike" (p.13). In prison Cronin suffered "desperately" from the dearth of companionship, particularly "human speech" (van Niekerk). This "lack of human association", says Albie Sachs, is "the greatest deprivation and source of suffering" Oail Diary, p.245). For Cronin, writing was a means of maintaining a sense of communication with those outside and of "expressing his solidarity with his 101 'comrades' - those whose lives were lost in the cells down the passage from his own" (Crowe). In "Poem-Shrike", the shrike is a metaphor of the body of poetry which must be ----.,'' ._-"--- -. "-- _ •...__ . .- ~ ..•._ ..,••. _- •. • __.,_ •• -'.' 4' launched "over the high walls" if Cronin is to achieve his aim to make contact with . .."- ---_.~ .~- . --' . those 'outside' .... First, however, the raw, "scorched", "barred" experiences of prison life must be wrought into a new form with the scant available materials: "socks short prisoner's ... card pack ... cigarette blaadjies ... prison cell floor". These suggest the dearth of experiences and lack of privileges avilable to the prisoner. The prisoner's socks also suggest the 'totalizing' policy of property dispossession, the removal of anything that the prisoner can call his own, anything which will make him a private individual. His restricted voice is evoked in the image of the beak of the bird which "was bent/uptight for a week", but which also paradoxically implies the collective voice ofresistance. Cronin's yearning for freedom and hunger for human contact is joyously expressed in the final shrill shriek as he launches his objective: sshrike! He is thus able, in the words ofthe Turkish poet, Nazim Hikrnet, who spent twenty-one years in prison, and by whom Cronin was very much "influenced" (Gardner, p.23), to "mingle so with the crowds of the world" (Bould, p.199). In "Motho Ke Motho Ka Batho Babang (A Person Is A Person Because Of Other People)" (p.26), the theme of man's dependence on society and his existential need to reach out for the human interaction which gives meaning to life is again voiced. Here, Cronin describes his own urge to make contact with one of the other prisoners, a Black man, but for the confined Cronin, simply "a person down there". From the confinement of his cell, Cronin strains to see him "By holding [his] mirror out of the window". The difficulty of liaising with other prisoners is evident here, but this man, who is "polishing a doorhandle", is aware of Cronin's attempt to communicate: "In the mirror I see him see My face in the mirror". The prisoner 'speaks' to him by means ofcovert signs: "A black fist ... Strength brother, it says". He reveals that he is under close observation: "Two fingers are extended in a vee!And wiggle like two antennae! (He's being watched)". "I see the fingertips of his free hand/Bunch together, as if to make ... a badge". This White warden 'speaks' to the polishing man: "Hey! Wat 102 mw iy daar? ... Just polishinl:. baas". Ironically, although words are spoken, it is clear that there is D.Q communication between warder and prisoner. In referring to the warder as 'baas', the Blackman is merely answering automatically. Paradoxically the position of warder and prisoner is inverted: the warder is shown to be ~ communicated, and incommunicado. He is theone who is isolated, encaged within the petty enclosure of laws and racial prejudice. The prisoners dQ develop a channel of contact, albeitby gestures, "a talkative hand", showing theirsolidarity andbrotherhood in their solitude. Brutus, too, experienced a sense of solidarity with those prisoners who shared his ideals: One comes to welcome the closer contact and understanding one achieves with one's fellow men, fellows, compeers. (Simple Lust, p.60) One way of maintaining some vestigeof control over one's, life in dehumanizing prison conditions is human association. In suchcircumstances, says Lewin, "if youcan't talk, you communicate by other means" (Bandiet, p,4S). "Motho Ke MothoBatho Babang" bears witness to man's ingenious determination to find a line of communication, and thus to maintain some senseof self in the faceof external attempts at annihilation. For Cronin, "being deprived of contact is massively diminishing as a human being" (van Niekerk). This same theme is sustained in "Labyrinth I" ("Venture to the Interior", p.56), as Cronin describes his attempts to "trail !t. a lifeline" and make "a thread ofcontact" with !~is prison neighbour, from behind his own "locked door". Here, in his attempt to share his "month-old scrap ofl -newspaper", he also evinces the spirit of solidarity evident among these prisoners. For Cronin, then, news and contact provide a life saving outlet in a situation whereeven "Darling and Huisgenoot !t. [popular women's magazines] were censored" (Crowe). In this vacuum the prisoneris left alone "without appetite", to "commune with the stale bread of yourself' ("For Comrades in Solitary Confinement", p.32). Here the Sacrament of Holy Communion is evoked, but there is no sharing or spiritual 103 inspiration. The ritual is empty and meaningless. The imagery in this poem hints at potential madness: pacing to and fro, to shun, one driven step on ahead of the conversationist who lurks in your head. You are an eyeball you are many eyes The theme of insanity is innate in most prison writings. Brutus, too, speaks about a young prisoner, "a studious highschoolboyhe looked", who "fled in[to] a maniac world where he was safe" (Simple Lust, p.70). The emotions encountered in Bosman's case are more sinister and frightening than those hinted at and described above. Bosman's "dreams" and his "waking hours" become "haunt[ed]". The repeated use ofwords such as "haunted", "suffocating", "terrors", "obsessions" (Cold Stone June, pp.175-177), convey the intensity of his anguish and panic. In "Poem-shrike", the "high walls" and the virtual impossibility of cultivating human contacts - factors which increase the possibility of insanity - emphasize the totalizing nature of this prison. The sense of claustrophobia and restriction is sustained in "Overhead is Mesh" (p.14). Here, however, the connotations are more menacing: Cronin mentions the "morgue", and the "gallows wing". The ultimate power of this 'wing' is implicitly challenged by the casual penetration of this fortress by a delicate butterfly, which has flown into the prison "yard ... by happenstance". Cronin's own reaction to the prison experience is typified by the reaction of the butterfly: "Halfway 1\ to panic I Halfway to give a damn". The image of the butterfly, an archetypal symbol of freedom, the brevity of life, and the cycle of natural life, underscores the horror of the impending presence of unnatural death, and the fact that "springtime [which] has come" will herald no joy for those in gaol, nor restoration of life for those in the "gallows wing". The poem ends on a redemptive note, however: "The struggle goes on". This ending suggests 'solidarity' in 'solitude', resolute resistance, and defiance in the face of death. " Cronin had first- hand experience of this attitude of steadfast prisoner resistance while 104 he was a 'guest' on death-row. He explains that, while he was in "Pretoria local", three of his comrades managed to escape. "Very exciting. As a result they moved those who remained behind to the hanging prison" (Gray, p.34). In this type of institution, the senses, hearing especially, become acutely responsive to the slightest nuances of change in the pattern of noise: "It is your ears ... that become sovereign in a place like that" ("Inside", p~33), since there is very little visual stimulation apart from the "four grey walls [and] a grey floor" (Ibid, p.33). Cronin explains that, as time goes on, you begin to build up an aural picture of [the] place, its routines, rhythms, personalities and layout. As the picture clarifies, a terrible awareness begins to dawn ... they are hanging people in this place. ("Inside", p.33) Extra-sensory perceptionalsoplays a role: the inmates intuitively become aware ofany changes of mood. Such a change occurs during the build-up to an execution, with its accompanying electric tension. Croninprojects this temper into his poem "DeathRow" (pp.36-40), an elegiac tribute to three young ANC resistance fighters. These men, Johannes Shabangu, David Moise, and Bobby Tsotsobe, characterized by the warder as "three fokken terrorists" (p.36), died on the gallows while Cronin wasin Maximum Security. Cronin informs us that "there is a great deal of singing in that prison •.. mostly mournful", (p.33) like"A guinea-hen's call ... glass on glass I a pocketful of marbles weeping" (p.38). Then, the condemned are informed of the precisedate and time of their execution "48 hoursbefore", with the bizarre death warrant: "Greetings, you prisoner ... will be hanged at ... Signed ... the Sheriffof Pretoria" (p.33). Bosman also describes this "document" bearing the title 'Greetings' as being written in "heavy black scroll" Qyg, p.15). After this notification has been delivered, the pattern of the singing changes. It buildsup to a "thrumming" 'crescendo'and 'prestissimo'offrenzy. This frenzy of tempo reflected in the rhythm within "Death Row", increases in pace as the whole prison keeps "the full 48 hour vigil" (p.34): 105 To boil or Respond like a Ripple like a Lurch like a Ukuhlabelela [Meaning to sing] is to Glow like a Growl like a Glow like a Boil like a Bean stew like a Ripple like a Bus queue weaves like a Moves like a Stalks like a Moves like a Fighter Ukuhlabelela The unfinished sentences reflect an incoherence, panic, and rage as the appointed hour approaches. Then, ten minutes before seven in the morning, "we could hear two or three voices detach from the main body of singers ... these would come, still singing, although constrictedly" (p.34): Three voices Called or Moise Combine or responding Tsotsobe Weaving Shabangu In and Voices Each other Around of, sliding Into each night's Finale, all three Three now As one: Then, says Cronin, there is "A short silence ... followed by the slap of trapdoors" (p.34): another, a staggered sound like bioscope seats flapped back. 106 The final words of the three bear witness to their indomitable spirit: "... a-MAAA I : NPLAI longleev I mY1Y - mandela - 1aJ:nQQ I LONGleevl LONGleevl" These voices, redolent ofresistance, carry "Down the ... concrete I Corridors of power". With their courageous assertion of ongoing life, the voices challenge injustice and mobilize those left behind to positive action: "Arrraaise ye ... Prisoners from your slumbers". Such courage also provides an inspiration for Cronin andhiscomrades: "Westopped feeling sorry for ourselves" (p.34). The refusal of the prisoners to be totally crushed by the authorities is reflected by the determination of White and Black to make some meaningful contact, despite their segregated isolation: Of course we never get to speak, As such, to each other. We're still fifty yards, one corridor, Many locked locks apart. ("Death Row", p.38) Hugh Lewin explains that in prison, "apartheid applies as completely inside as it does outside, ensuring that blacks and whites ... are kept always separate" @andjet, p.77). A sense of solidarity, mutual support, and affirmation of commitment is nevertheless imparted by the freedom songs, and by the resolute endeavour of each group to 'converse' with each other: Nkosi sikelel', we try singing, at night. Us down here, to you, Three condemneds, along there. Morena ... we whiteys sing, Mayibuye iAfrika, and muffled Far-off chortling, you guys Call back: Encorel Encorel 9 Likewise, the political prisoners on Robben Island voice their comradeship and collective resistance on June 26, by singing "just one song": 'Nkosi Sikelele' (see A Simple Lust, p.l09). Cronin's poems celebrating human courage assume the traditional spirit of izibonga or lithoko (traditional African praise songs) in their concern with - 9 Mayibuye iAfrika, a freedom slogan, meaning 'Let Africa Return'. 107 and triumphantelevation of - heroic actions. In "Walking on Air" (pp.15-23), Cronin pays homage to another 'heroic' individual, John Matthews, who refused to compromise his principles. Here, too, the ending is one of affirmation and challenge. The poem is also, however, a tribute to the support and strength given to those in prison by their families. _TI1~. short,_SW.cglt9-'!!!~S_~9 stanzas imitate the manner in which Cronin heard the story: "in the prison workshop", - .~~." •.. ~ ." ,•...-,-.. ,,_._-_.~,.~- -. - - .~ - . . ." ..,', .. ,., ..... -.-.. ...~...... -, "in snatches", which he "pieced together". Like Cronin, Matthews is a political prisoner. Although they belong to different political generations, they are united as comrades by their belief in the axioms of the Freedom Charter, which envisioned "a future South Africa beyond apartheid, a democratic, nonracial South Africa in which black and white would live together in peace and harmony" .10 The poem sketches a particularperiod of political history: "1950 I The Suppression of Communism Act I Membership becomes a punishable crime", and "Kliptown ... 1955 ... when the People's Congress adopted the Freedom Charter". At first Matthews supported "Passive resistance ... until 1960: the massacre I Sharpeville I Langa". He then started making "ignitors". Finally 1964 After a quarter century in the struggle A security police swoop and John Matthews was one among several detained. 1\ Cronin then describes the insidious methods used to extort information: .... White and 52 so they treated him nice. They only made him stand 10 Allister Sparks, The Mind of South Africa, pp.239-240. 108 On two bricks for three days and three nights and When he asked to go to the lavatory they said: Shit in your pants. This is one of the 'special' methods adopted by the Special Branch for extorting information. Isaac Tlale, who gave evidence during the 'Looksmart' Inquest, also testified that while being questioned in Pretoria Central Station, he was forced to stand for hours on end, tortured, and then told to go and "clean" himself up, because he had "defecated into [his] trousers" (First, p.99). More chilling, however, is the psychological torture practised by the Security Police. Matthews relates how he was tormented and tempted to turn state witness, and thus 'buy' his freedom: Think of your wife Dulcie. Dulcie. 7 kids. Dulcie ... And there they had him. On that score he was worried, its true. And they promised him freedom. And they pressed him for weeks on end. Nevertheless he refuses to 'name' anyone: II Dulcie, I will never betray my comrades. And with a frog in her throat she replied - I'm behind you. One hundred percent. Thereafter, he is described as dancing back into prison: 109 All" the way down the passage toe-heel, heel-toe, diddle-diddle ONE HUNDRED PERCENT I mean, he was high off the ground, man. He was walking on air. In thispoem, Croninshows theimportance of familial support for thosein prison. Fear of being deserted by one's wife and family is a very normal and constant anxiety. In "Your duty to spite the enemy", Nazim Hikmet also utters this truth: maybe your woman doesn't love you any more (don't say it is a small matter; to the man in jail it is likea young limb broken off the tree). (Bould, p.200) Cronin also suffered from this concern: In "Love Poems", he voices this fear to his wife, Annemarie, who was in "thatmost beautiful I desolate city of my heart": "- will you wait for me my love? ... - Will you wait for me my love?" (p.78). Here the repetition increases the sense of urgency and anxiety. Nevertheless, Cronin does not project any sense of self-pity. Rather, he voices his concern and compassion for the "hungry labouring people" in the "Faraway city ... our Cape Town", people whose homes are being smashed. His admiration for their resisting spirit is clear: they are "frightened, broken", but they are also unbowed, "defiant ... and unbreakable", as they set about "rebuilding yet again theirdemolished homes I withbitsofplastic ••.anything to hand". Cronin's saluteto the unvanquished spiritis also evidentin oneof the poems in "Pollsmoor Sketches" (p.25), in which he portrays Johannes Stephanus Februarle, 1\ who refuses, in Brechtian mode, to be intimidated by the prison authorities: There is Between Johannes Stephanus Februarie And submission, This epic gap. Februarie makes a covert mockery of their shouts and threats during "a headcount and thumbprint check": 110 Gives a small stylized skip And begins his casual sideways shuffle, in caricature of haste He rolls exaggerated thumbs in ink ... Prints them, tenderly. In his hair he wipes off ink As he slips back with head bowed and Panache to his place in line. Not all prisoners, however, have this dignity. Cronin makes this point in some caricatures of common-law prisoners in "Pollsmoor Sketches": for instance, there is the usual 'innocent' one, ... in boob for something I hardly didn't do who knows prison 'royalty': Course I knew Braam Fischer. He tune me one day straight: - Pssssssssss Hulloa Ginger. There is also the "Portugoose" prisoner, so addressed by one ofthe warders, whom the "Portugoose" secretly calls "Deesa Peeg". The humour here underlines the fact that the degrading prison conditions instil a peculiar kind of warped, brutalizing humour in prisoner and warder alike. The degraded prisoner responds in sullen silence: I theenk: FUCKA YOU! (I say nothingk.)" The language and phonetically rendered accents employed in these poems reveal the characters' own particular voices, together with the dehumanizing effect that these 11 Jeremy Cronin, Inside (Johannesburg Edition). p.16. This 1983 edition does not include contextualizing information before each section. but does include some poems not included in the Jonathan Cape edition. 111 debased conditions haveon some ofthe inmates and warders, oneof whom rails, "You bloody cocksucking, kaffir loving I Communis jew, I'll donner you up ... Jail's a shit sandwich". The "turnkey" is no better: The pay's kak The prisoners give bek Ting ting fokkak bek. Onside, Johannesburg edition, p.16) Croninasserts that "communication with [thistype] of common law prisoner ... was an interesting, though not always happy experience" (Gray, p.34). He thus does not evince a sense of solidarity with the common-law prisoners. Nevertheless, these sketches do show that he does not see himself as a central figure in his poetry. He rather broadens the scopeof his own experiences by including vignettes about the lives of other prisoners. The dark humour of this broadening helps to alleviate the anguish of his depiction of solitary confinement, and reflects his larger commitment to humanity. Cronin concentrates on the political prisoners, and most of the "Inside" poems bear witness to their refusal to be cowed and dehumanized by the crushing prison regime. "Group Photo" (pp.29-30) testifies to this: "There we are I seated in a circle ... Raymond ... Dave K ... Denis ... David R ... John ... Tony ... There we are, seven of us". Cronin is saying that these are people with names, people who want to stand up and be counted as human beings. In this poem, there are'also several references to 'time': "after a few months ... after a few years ... four years before ... 17 years ... Life sentence ... After a few years". It Most prison writings explore the anomaly of unmoving time in prison, and often it is characterized by dull colours. For Cronin, time is "brown" (p.31). Bosman also speaks about "brown years" (lug, p.13); For Brutus time is "cement-grey ... a grey gelid stream I of unmoving time" (Simple Lust, p.71). Such references capture the essence of Frankl's avowel about the "peculiar sort of deformed time" (p.70) that is experienced in prison. This phenomenon of theinverted- " 112 time experience is voiced by Bosman in his reference to Oscar Wilde's assertion that "all time ... passes slowly when you are in prison" Qyg, p.I44). Albie Sachs creates the simile of prison time being "like a landboat which remains stationary" Qail Diary, p.65). 'Brutus testifies to the "empty afternoons" (A Simple Lust, p.56). Cronin is no exception: "4 times 12" (p.31) captures prison time's abysmal emptiness. Here he explores the notion of empty time: those ... times parcelled in separate brown paper packets. A time that walks in circles. A time that flattens itself incredibly thin or drips from the taps drop by drop. In "I run a length", he asserts that it seems as if it will be six o'clock forever: "Tick tock tock-tock ... six o'clock ... six o'clock ... Tock-tock tock-tock ... (p.94), while the prisoner in solitary confinementasks, "how-how-how long?" (p.32). In this soul destroying boredom, the prisoner must find some outlet to give some meaning to his experience. Bosman listened to the endless stories of the blue-coats. Brutus "cushioned [his] mind I with phrases I aphorisms and quotations", "picking the jagged bits embedded in [his] mind" together (p.68) to help him to transcend "the greyness ofisolated time" (A SimpleLust, p.56). Similarly, for Cronin, writing poems played a role in surviving the prison experience: he says that poetry kept him "sane", it was "therapeutic" (Gray, p.35). He says, however, that his writing is not only "self serving". He also writes "to communicate" (Gardner, p.l4), and to reach out to those "struggling outside [the] four walls" (Ibid, p.23). "A person is a person because of other people", says Cronin (p.26). While in prison, he experienced the fundamental truth of this avowal. In almost impossible conditions, he shared his experience with others by occasionally performing his work for his comrades 'inside' (see Crowe), and, whenever possible, by sending his work to those 113 'outside', by "writing and getting [his poems] out of prison" (Ibid). His poetry thus becomes a bridge between himself and a dispossessed majority. This kind of connection helped him to find some sense of self and meaning in appalling circumstances. Part of this process was his courage to reach inside of his own psyche and his attempt to interpret his childhood experiences in the light of his adult experience, what Wroblewski terms 'perspective'. In "The Naval Base" sequence, Cronin "burrow[ed] into [his] memory as a way of holding on to the outside" (van Niekerk). Here, the process involved is a psycho analytical voyage of exploration into his own depths, his 'autos', in order to effect some sense of relief, because "childhood weighs an anchor in my head" (p.44). The poems in this sequence aim to reconcile the adult imprisoned Cronin with the ... string-thin, five-year-old boy with big ears and bucked teeth .... . (p.46) who came from a "typical South African English family who believed that politics was something the Afrikaners and the Blacks should sort out" (Crowe). Jeremy Cronin was born in Durban, in 1949. His father was a Lieutenant-Commander in the South African Navy, which he joined during World War II, during which he "sailed on convoys to Murmansk and I Archangel" ("Naval Base", p.48). From the time that Cronin was five until his father's death five years later, the Cronin family lived at the Simonstown Naval Base, and the young Cronin knew II at five because learnt by heart, the naval salute, the sign of the cross the servant's proper place and our father who art. (p.46) These words describe the context in which Cronin was reared: religious, with colonial values, and respect for discipline and rules. The words "learnt by heart" reveal an implicit indictment of blind acceptance of the beliefs of other people and of the avoidance of personal moral responsibilities. 114 In the first poem of the cycle (p.43), Cronin hints that what he intends to achieve, by returning in memory to "the half-forgotten house by the beach", is the autobiographical discovery of a hidden part of himself: I check the beach, the old jetty and now the house: the wardrobe ... under the beds. These all being the finite number of places a five-year-old kid would hide .... In this poem the poet is both the hider and the seeker. The seeker is the adult Cronin, and the hider is the poet as a five year old and as an adult. Here, Cronin links the activity of hiding to his recent adult past. The hiding child is used as a metaphor for avoidance of security police surveillance, a reminder "[n]ever to hide I where you wouldn't hear / ... feet closing in". Like Brutus he is aware of the "patrols" (Simple !:dill, pAl, the ever-present menace of the police state. For both Cronin and Brutus, the word "hiding" assumes the more sinister connotations of being stalked and watched by those "circling about", and of escape from these sinister forces, "feet stumbling in [the] undergrowth ... hiding" Onside, p.44). The poem subtly links prisoners excluded 'inside', with those voluntarily 'imprisoned' outside, residing 'inside' "the armed white camp, behind I the newest precautions", ignoring the brutal realities around them: "the bulldozers moving on the zinc camp / of the trek fishermen group area'd out" (ppA3 44). This "armed camp" image sums up the attitudes of Apartheid society, with its "white lager" [sic] mentality ("Solitude", p.84). The sense of imprisonment in this sequence is poignantly underscored by the images of the untamed marine beauty of the Simonstown Naval Base: "the sea's snuffling / in through countless fish", and the "streamlet / with its wild cat prints". These contrasts increase the level of pain and tension within the poem, emotions which are further augmented as both hider and seeker realize that the search, the process of self-discovery must continue: There is between the two of us, in this necessary space, nothing, nothing that could be learned, or forgotten now by backing off. 115 The search for knowledge and the fundamental truths of life is sustained in the next poem in this cycle, in which the child asks, "Where? 1 Where do babies come from? ... People get married - says my mother 1 When you're older you'll learn - says my father". This attitude of avoidance and an inability to communicate are contrasted with the affection and warmth exuded by Jenny Brown, the maid: "Only women can make lighties. 1- she laughs". Jenny, banished to "the coloured quarters on the hill" (PA5), blends into the South African landscape, "warmed with buckscent and the wildest pelargonium", awash with "the winter rains". The abandon and fertility suggested here are in stark contrast with the boy's sterile world of rigid routine, in which in the "darkness 1 At ritual and appointed hours 1 in cod liver oil my tongue 1 would be anointed". These were his "rites of passage", which usually connote a 'rebirth', but here instead herald death: "my father passed on ... thirty-four when he died" (PAS), and "a widow was lowered into widowhood" (p.47). This burial is accompanied by the lament for the dead taken from Psalm 130: "From the depths crying out", which enhances the elegiac quality of the poem. These religious words, however, offer no consolation, but simply "dissolution in the wind". The imprisoned Cronin associates the world of his childhood with the slow rhythm of the death march: Where the gun carriage rattled And the slow march marched. Ironically, "the first dockyard hooter", which should herald activity and life, is the hom hooting out "~solution in the wind" (my emphasis), IDs-integration between the races. Here, the pun on the word 'dissolution' hints that this is llQ solution. It must therefore be discarded, and a new solution must be sought for the future. The final words of the actual Psalm 130, words which Cronin reworks, imply a sense of hope: "The Lord ... shall ransom Israel from her slavery to sin". 12 It In the final poem in this sequence, Cronin is still searching for possible "retrospective conciliation" with his father, painful though it may be. He relates that his father's last words were, "Jeremy must play cricket". This "patrimony of aspiration" has caused Cronin suffering and troubled sleep - "all night zig-zag in my torpedoed dreams stumps 12 The Way: The Living Bible, p.524. 116 fly", because his father's' ideals held no significance for him, they were "inconsequences". The poems in this cycle point to the fact that Cronin associates his young world with death, futile, absurd aspirations, and a sense of imprisonment. The theme of imprisonment that is sustained throughout the anthology is subtly evoked in the poems in "Some Uncertain Wires" (pp.67-70). These poems also belong to Cronin's experience of his 'navel' base. His grandparents live on a "mw!holding" in "Humansdorp" (my emphasis). Ironically, neither grandparent seems ostensibly 'humane'. "Granpa Kemp", the epitome of rigidity with his "headstrong maxims", is imprisoned within his "narrow mind", symbolized by his little "mealie ~ [and] chicken hok" (my emphasis). The "post office cables", which he erected with the help of a Xhosa "polegang", have become reduced into the "loneliest pole ... ever raised". Ironically, all these cables, which took the devotionof "mostofa lifetime" to raise, and which spell worldwide links and communication with others, stand in bitter contrast with the few words that "Granpa" does "bother ... to speak". These are words of non communication: "a few bastardized words ofXhosa - for command". Sadly, Grandpa Kemp exudes none of the warmth usually associated with grandfathers. His eyes radiate no light, they are merely "glass caps, insulated on a crossbeam", on which he has crucified himself in his isolation: he is "lonely out there". "Granma Kemp" (p.68) also remainsimprisoned 'inside' her house, above the "kitchen steps". She is "pale and transplanted", out of tune with the harsh South African environment. Cronin compares her life circumstances to those of a prisoner in solitary confinement, and it is clear that he feels a sense of empathy and sympathy with her in her state of solitude: An electric device listens in my cell's walls it must have been a bit like this you felt !I with those, what you called, creepy crawlies, and the big sun besides. Thus, although Cronin is critical of the attitudes of his family, he remembers them with affection as well as with criticism. He realizes that they are an inherent part of him, and that he cannot "disclaim ... This five-year-old boy, this shadow I this thing .' 117 stuck to my feet" ("Naval Base", p.46). Cronin does, however, repudiate '''the abhorrent system'" (Crowe) which his family supported. Despite this repudiation, he does not deny his past, for this would be limiting. In order for him to sketch a full picture of his life, all the pieces must fit in. Only thus can one construct a unity from disparate past experiences. In the final poem of this section, Cronin specifically acknowledges that the past cannot easily be "erased", nor family ties broken, painful though they may be: this nostalgia is thicker than water, my family between generations is all space half filled with childhood rhymes, joined by some uncertain wires. From the above discussion, it is clear that, in both "The Naval Base", and "Some Uncertain Wires", Cronin concentrates on themes of restriction and isolation, simultaneously emphasizing man's basic need for freedom and human interaction. In "Inside", this theme of 'solidarity' is also linked to the idea of 'solitude', which is often endured because of some vestige of contact, verbal or otherwise. In prison, Cronin "desperately missed human speech" (Van Niekerk), His "wordplay" and his reconstruction of the "words, name places" (Gardner, p.20) of his country were "a way of holding onto the outside" (Van Niekerk). In "Venture to the Interior" (pp.51-64), Cronin makes a greater effort to "reconstruct ... through words ... a sense of the reality of outside" (Gardner, p.20). In order to do so, he must venture outside the prison walls, into the interior ofSouth Africa under the freedom ofthe "spreadeagled sky" (p.59), where he can "learn how to speak I With the voices of this land" (p.64). In this way he will get "a sense of the stoneness of these II stones I From which all words are cut", and gain a deeper understanding of his heterogeneous, multilingual country, since knowledge of the different languages, cultures, and histories ofthe forefathers, contributes to an understanding of the present, because past and present are inextricably linked. Only thus can he "voice the thoughts of those around him" and "find a language that is a part and makes him part of the emergent national culture" (First Impressions, pp.2-3). In his venture into the interior, " 118 Cronin is able to escape from the confines of his prison cell. Yearning for freedom is an inherent part of prison life, and Cronin was also able to 'escape' from his cell by making "geography in the small threatre of [his] mouth": Thrust into the loneliness of solitary confinement ... I began, to recite over and over the standard SABC weather forecast. ' Port Shepstone to the Tugela Mouth ... to Kosi Bay....' (Inside, p.51) Cronin says that he was thus ableto "gather a sense of space" (p.51), and "recover ... a sense of the reality of South Africa" (Gardner, p.20). The final lines of the first-poem in the cycle, point to Cronin's main intention: "let flesh be made words" (p.52). Here, Cronin overturns the words of St. John's Gospel (1,9): "And the Word was made Flesh" - "He became incarnate ... and was made man". In this poem, then, the word "flesh" connotes 'humanity'. Onceagain, Cronin points to man's innate need for human contact and also to the fact that speech I language is a uniquely human activity, hinting at its potential powers and its endless possibilities. In this sequence (p.54), Cronin traces the development of language from the primal swamps down the line of mudfish through the snake where your ways parted after the hardening of the palate ... . II He salutes the "Tongue! I 0 Ark of language", discovering a sense of freedom in the celebration of the sheer physical and oral pleasures of its versatility: "t-t-t-t-t-t . aaaaah! (p.52) hmmmmm, mmmmm"; "tchareep grrrtch ... kree-kree-kree-kree . sszzzzzzzzzzz whirra-whirra ...." The tongue is the "Love Scout I Periscope of Pleasure I Winged Breath [which] comes I bearing the leaves of speech", which are obviously meant to be scattered. In this way, "words" will be spread. Here, once again, Croninsubtly pointsto thecentral theme of Inside: the vital necessity of human 119 interaction, and man's dependence on society, since no human being can learn speech or language in a state of isolation. Cronin explores the origins of language with the meticulous probing of the archaeologist (p.53), and invites the reader to follow suit: I want you to prise carefully sound from sound to lift, cough breccia, rock, sediment, layer through layer in this mouth or cave-site of word roots, birdbone.... This exploration will also yield a wealth of history which is concealed in words "shells of meaning I left in our mouths I by thousands of years ofI human occupation" - "lineage upon lineage ... Tucked in this earth". In this way Cronin uncovers evidence of the extinct "Khoisan peoples ... liquidated by colonial conquest" (p.Sl). They have, however, left an indelible token of their legacy in "Plato's Cave" - a rock painting of the "Quagga", drawn "with a quick downward stroke" (p.55). Evidence of their linguistic wealth has also been left by the actual word "!quagga!", spoken with a quick q click" (p.Sl). Sadly, like the people who named it, the quagga, too, has gone forever, "leaving behind it a click". Cronin linguisticallyevocates the ghostly names of these dispossessed tribes (p.5?): Goringhaicona Goringhaiqua Gorachouqua: sounds Like ... cicadas' songs ... Hessequa It Hacumqua, like vocables swallowed In frogs' throats: Cochoqua The names of decimated Khoikhoin tribes - their cattle stolen, Lands seized As their warriors died Charging zig-zag into musket fire. Here Cronin pays tribute to the courage of these "warriors who've left behind I Their fallen spears", after an unequal battle. The elegiac quality of this poem is .' 120 heightened by the onomatopoeic, elemental lament, which, paradoxically, spreads a message of condolence: The wind ... hums, the wind tongues Its gom-gom, frets a gorah, In a gwarrie bush the wind, So I fancy, mourns thin Thin with worries. There is an implicit warning in this poem: that the bitter "truths ... that our land I Like a peach its pip I Holds now" (my emphasis) will inevitably be revealed, demanding redress: The "pip" cannot always be protected. It must inevitably be discarded, germinate, and live its full cycle. "Now" must give way to a time when "This unfinished task" will be completed. Here, Cronin echoes the notion propounded by Brutus, that "Time ... exerts its own insistent/unobtrusive discipline" (see p.77 of this dissertation). In this cycle, Cronin also pays tribute to Olive Schreiner, for her political awareness years ahead of her time, and for her quest for justice (p.60): ceaseless campaigner against all oppressors. jingoes, warmongers, God, Rhodes, The British South Africa Company. In his tribute to Schreiner, Cronin reveals his feminist leanings. These are clear in a quotation from one of her letters included in the poem: I am glad that in your meeting Men and women are combined Because men and women Are the right and left sides of humanity. 1\ Cronin clearly feels a sense of solidarity with Schreiner, who communicated Mr ideas by writing "letters to meetings" - "sowing seeds" - when she was "too unwell to attend them" . To Cronin, the notion of sharing is vital, since it leads to reciprocal spiritual and intellectual enrichment. 121 " In "The River That Flows Through Our Land" (p.63), Cronin reminds his readers of the sweatand tears of those whose painfuland hard labourbuilt, and continues to build, this country: The "river that trickles ... Down the worker's face". These are the people whom his "ancestor I The Great White Hunter" insultingly called "Black Ivory ... The contract mine labour". Theseare the labourers who formed the 'backbone' of the land, working More than a mile below the surface of this earth Contracted into low-roofed Chambers where they move A quarter million tons of rock In a single stope each month While the pressure ...... builds and buckles While the stress points Shift until, as they say, She bumps ... [sic] These are the menwhosepersonal identities were erasedby the white "forebear". They were "renam[ed]" and trans~ intoobjects, "Sockies, Sikkies ... Fifteen ..• Houtkop ... Tickey ... Doek ...". In "Cave-Site", Croninwarns that, in the search for truth, the archaeologist must "sometimes •.. discard". Here, he rejects and discards the dehumanizing approach, advocating a gentle and humane attitude: Tread Tread, tread ever so softly now, grandpa, There's men down there .... These are the men who gave their lives for their land; theyare still "downthere ..• and still I Chewing earth". They have thus become an inherent part of their land, having been absorbed into the earth, and, ironically, they can ~ be eradicated. These poems attest to Cronin's political convictions as he speaks out for justice and freedom for tall, and his refusal to be silenced in the face of tyranny. He upholds the words of Wole Soyinka: "The Man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny" (Bould, p.31). The "Venture to the Interior" has afforded Cronin a sense of physical space and 122 existential freedom in his imprisoned state. In this sequence, Cronin raises philosophical questions aboutthe nature of freedom, especially in the prison situation. The above analysis has demonstrated that "man ~ preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, ofindependence of mind, even ... in terrible conditions" (Search for Meaning, p.65). John Matthews refuses to submit to the authorities even under extreme coercion. He 'dances' back into prison where he still refuses to kowtow: "'I work for myself' - he says - 'not for the boere'" (p.15). The three condemneds go to their death singing freedom songs. Those who ~ truly 'imprisoned' are so because they elect to be restricted; these 'prisoners' are people like Grandma and Grandpa Kemp. Cronin would certainly agree with the celebrated words of Richard Lovelace: Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage; Minds innocent and quiet take That for an hermitage; If I have freedom in my love And in my soul am free, Angels alone, that soar above, Enjoy such liberty. (Bould, p.127) Cronin has said that "A person is a person because of other people" (p.26). In prison, Cronin did not write in isolation. He managed to make contact with others whenever, and by whatever means, possible. He believes and indicates that people will reach out to one another, if they share common ideals. By refusing to be silenced, he was able to keep some flame of inner liberty alive. One line of contact was opened by writing "Love Poems" to his wife. Cronin asserts that, as his political involvement grew, his "lyrical leanings" waned: "how do you write lyrically in a country where millions of families are tom apart ...It (p.73). Paradoxically, however, while in prison, when he was "forcibly separated from [his] .wife ... it became possible to write lyrically again". This is because he found "in solitude solidarity" (p.73): where to say plainly: 123 'I love you' is also a small act of solidarity with all the others. (p.75) Like Brutus, Croninwas able to fuse two of his main interests, politics and poetry, his private and his public voice: limy own sufferings and separation ... were not unconnected with a wider reality" (p.73). Annemarie Cronin's sudden death afterJeremy Cronin had served seven months of his sentence led to great personal anguish and pain. Cronin asserts that he "was prepared for the eventuality of going to prison ... but not for the death of [his] wife" (Crowe). Even when she was terminally ill in hospital, he was not allowed to visit her, nor was he permitted to attend her funeral. He contends, however, that "the suffering thatsome of the othershad gone through made it easier for him to copewith [his] pain"(Crowe). Nevertheless, his grief is overt in "I Saw Your Mother" (p.83). Here the repetition of the words "on the day that you died", and the attendant alliteration, heighten the numbing impact of the news of his wife's death. The sense of shock and grief is intensified by the callous hectoring of the warder: 'Extra visit, special favour' 'The visit will be stopped if politics is discussed. Verstaan - understand!?' on the day that you died. These "Love Poems" are lyrical and playful in tone, epitomized in "Labyrinth II", (p.79), in which Cronin describes his nuptial capers with erotic abandon: "a-hooked and kicking we ... wildeye, like / two katonkel, made love I Or awoke, a-tangled ... II laden with scents of voyages made". In "your deep hair", the sense of sexual joy is sustained: "under the curdled I star clouds of galactic semen / spilled across the sky" (p.84). Thisjoy is, however, overshadowed by theever-present fear, "thedarktimes", well known to the majority of the South African population: "unmarked cars ... an unwanted knock on the door", also evoked by Brutus. In these poems it is clear that Cronin and his wife shared the same political ideals: 124 Partly, the light I've switched on, and Partly: (SHIT MAN Jeremy, I almost thought you were the cops ... ) Her grin. Gottschalk asserts that these poems are "feminist in their values, questioning roles within marriage ... comradeship, not domination, sets the tone".13 Annemarie, Cronin's "muse" (p.74), is "Ariadne [whose]beautiful erotic thread .. , guiders] him in the stone darkness". She is associated with light: "nights of candles" (p.86), "a teaspoon of light" (p.84); "her eyelashes are glistening dragonflies" (p.82). Cronin's longing for her is enigmatically verbalized in "Tonight is an envelope" (p.76). In this poem, he constructs a conceit in which he imagines himself leaving prison as the letter "I" in an envelope. flying at last As three-week-old words, behind the inside flap's Gummed Touch to reach you. An explicit indictment of the censoring of letters, and the resultant personal invasion, is made in this poem: Never more than 500 words One letter per month quota, I take Three months at least to arrive. After their reckoning of words, after the censors, After the ink-eheck, code-check, comes A rubber stamping ...... no more than 500 words. II In sharp contrast, Cronin evokes a sense of freedom: "its just I Possible to consider me flying at last ...". This image of absolute abandon underscores the fact that there ~ no freedom. Even visits are monitored "by two or more warders, a hidden tape recorder and ... a hidden video camera. The most intimate moments were the most closely scrutinized" (p.Bl), Political prisoners were allowed only one visit for half-an- 13 Keith Gottschalk, "Inside: Jeremy Cronin", p.SS. 125 hour a month, "through a glass plate" (p.83). The agony of these visits is portrayed in "Visiting Room" (81) and in "I SawYour Mother" (p.83). The former describes a visit from Annemarie, whom he saw through a window shadowed by warders. A glass plate, its sheer quiddity, its coldness forever between our hands. The other visit was from Annemarie's mother to inform him of her death. In these poems, the inhumanity of the visiting system is starkly evoked: I couldn't place my arm around her, around your mother when she sobbed. Unlike many of the poems in this anthology, "Love Poems" do not have an 'oral' quality. This absence again suggests the personal voice of the poetand his attempt to retain the privacy of an intimate relationship. Cronin wrote fur and 1Q his wife. He did not write about her. She is depicted as an active, dynamic human being, with her "pair of tights I Tossed I Quick over the back of a chair" (p.87). Like Jenny Brown, his parents' maid, shebecomes onewith the warmlandscape: "a hillside of vygies, and namaqualand daisies" (p.86). These images of freedom, juxtaposed with prison conditions - "warder[s] ... controlled doors ... grilles ... locks" (p.75) - provide some senseof relief from the claustrophobia of theprisonsituation. Cronin is notsentimental about Annemarie's memory. He locates his relationship with her in the context of his impfjsonment, his political involvement, and her death. These images, which occur throughout the anthology, are summed up in "Mirrors", thelast poem of the sequence, in which Cronin tries to retrieve memories of the past, "our submerged years". He can, however, only see "feet shackled" and ... your face starring] out with its nose pressed againstan impassable glass frontier. 126 In the final sequence, "Isiququmadevu", Cronin envisages his release from prison, and a just future for South Africa, freed from these shackles. In "A Tale of why Tortoise Carries his Hut upon his Back" (p.103-4), Cronin foresees a completion of "this unfinished task" (see p.120 of this dissertation). The "pip" has grown full cycle. Here he casts the Apartheid and the prison regime in the role of the bullying "Tyrannosaurus", with fearful "six-inch teeth". Thisis the ferocious creature that consistently terrorized Tortoise: Croninwrylycomments that this "beast" occupied a "special, civilizing role in this place": he made Tortoise a prisoner and forced him to work all day every day, in a field. Only late afternoon was Tortoise led back to rest in the quietness of his cell. Yet often on return he would find the small world he'd made was smashed, his few books and letters scattered and awry. The bed he'd made was ripped up his once folded clothes were scattered on the floor. The use of the past tense indicates Cronin's belief that the regime will not survive for long. He explicitly states that "Tyrannosaurus is now extinct I while tortoise is alive and well". Tortoise has learnt to survive: he"took to carrying his hut upon his back". Nevertheless, you can still see how he had to sticktogether broken pieces - he's got marks on his shell. (p.l04). Tort~ise learned to bide his time, to be "patient": he learnt ... by picking up the fragments of a shattered world time and time again. The scars will be visible for a long time to come, sinceno shameful past can easily be erased. Cronin's poems imply that the advent of a just future will be accomplished 127 only by a radical change of attitude: by exchanging the isolating 'white laager' mentality for one of 'solidarity' with all those who live in this multilingual, heterogeneous society. The final two poems, in which Cronin describes his "mothballed" clothes with a feeling ofintimacy - "we were almost inseparable, once" - have been positioned in such a way that release seems imminent. Here Cronin warns that "you can't I Mothball yourself. Even in here". Even in prison Cronin paid heed to his own advice that "a person is a person because of other people". It was through sharing his experiences with others that he was able to become a 'whole' person. He learned "how to speak with the voices ofthe land" by adopting a multi-lingualapproach and by integrating many words of non-English origin into his poetry, such as "thula, khaki, gorah, agh, koppie, hayikona, buchu". Furthermore, the oral orientation of many of his poems links him with traditional African cultural practice. This is a way of transcending the confines of his own 'white' society in order to include all peoples regardless of race or colour, and thus to create a united brotherhood. Cronin is able to hear and render accurately voices other than his own. Theportraits in "Pollsmoor Sketches" bear testimony to this ability. Nevertheless, Cronin is not rigid in his approach. Like Brutus, who claims to be both "fighter and poet" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.55), Cronin recognizes both the public and the private voices ofthe poet. His lyrical love poems are intensely personal, while many of his other poems articulate the aspirations of the majority of people in South Africa. He may thus be seen as carrying out his own programme for poetry: To learn how to speak With the voices of the land, To parse the speech in its rivers To trace with the tongue wagon-trails II Saying the suffix of their aches in -kuil, -pan, -fontein To voice without swallowing Syllables born in tin shacks Cronin, thus evinces his own unique response and demonstrates the truth of his own contention that different poets have "different skills and different things to offer, in their poetry" ("Solidarity", p.84). 128 Cronin's anthology ends on a committed, redemptive note, confident of the success of future action. He is "Set to confound all our enemies ... We pick up wherewe left off last ... Life goes on". As with Brutus, Cronin's ceaseless campaigning for ajust anddemocratic South Africa has not been in vain. Their works, together with those of countless others, have contributed to the emergence of a 'New South Africa', which was finally born in reality on 27 April, 1994,with its first democratic all-raceelections, 'one man one vote', and with the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as State President on 10th May. 129 CONCLUSION We dedicate this day to all the heroes and heroines in this country ... who sacrificed in many ways and surrended their lives so that we could be free. Their dreams have become reality. Freedom is their reward. 1 The writings of Bosman, Brutus, and Cronin all reveal the kind of "homogeneity" which Sheila Roberts perceives in prison works (see p.61, this dissertation). Each writer exposes the processes which attempt to efface the self. Indeed, the works of each reflect an awareness of a unique artistic identity thatcontends with effacement of identity in prison and imposes some meaning on life and experience. Nevertheless, each writer adoptsdifferent methods in an attempt to counteract prison procedures, and to reinstate the ego. Each personal response is unique. Each one of these writers displays a different disregard for traditional literary conventions andexpectations. Such defiant differences reflect a measure of independence and a desire to reconstitute the self. Bosman, in effect, writes an 'anti-autobiography'. The emphasis is upon the 'bios' rather than upon the 'autos'. Bosman uses a fictional construct to shapeand to impose meaning on his experiences. He writes a literary autobiography, blending and fusing different modes and literary conventions, such as the 'tall tale', the Gothic, and the Romantic, in keeping with those whose community he seeks, distinguished fellow writers and convicts such as Oscar Wilde and O. Henry. Thedark and ironic humour in Cold Stone Jug is also uniquely Bosman's. II Bosman wrote in order to expose prison conditions. It would alsoseem, however, that he wrote for himself, in order to purgehimself of hisexperiences. The writing ofC!llil Stone Jug seemed to have been a cathartic and liberating experience for him, since, after completing this book, he entered his mostprolific period of writing. During this "final period (1950 - 1951)" his "verysuccessful changes in form and content" , 1 Tim Cohen, ·Out of the Valley of Darkaess" (the address delivered by Nelson Mandela at his inauguration as State President of South Africa), BusinessDay. p.16. 130 springing from "a new creative impulse", indicate "a new, original perception" (Titlestad, pp.l 11-2). Like Bosman, Dennis Brutus, in his prison writings, moves away from established literary conventions. His refusal to conform to traditional literary styles reflects a measure of protest and independence. Brutus claims to belong to anew, emergent "tradition", that of "the South African poets of the seventies" (Goddard & Wessels, p.71). He states that he rebels in order to communicate with a wider audience, and, like Bosman, he writes "largely about prison conditions" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.58). He also, however, speaks out against conditions in his country, so "that some world sometime may know" (A Simple Lust, p.68): I speak the others' woe: those congealed in concrete or rotting in rusted ghetto-shacks: only I speak their wordless woe, their unarticulated simple lust. [December 1971] (Ibid, p.176) Brutus writes poems in the form of 'letters'. Letters generally reveal the subjective emotions and stream of consciousness of the writer. Unlike Bosman, Brutus U often subjective as he tries to reconcile "a mixture of feelings" (Ibid, p.72). He claims to write in his "own voice, which is a kind of fusion of many voices" (Goddard & Wessels, p.71). In this fusing of voices, he resembles both Bosman and Cronin, who also integrate different modes and voices. Brutus says he is like a "troubadour ... the man who travelled ... fighting and ... singing ... a man who can be both fighter and 1\ poet" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.55). Brutus explains that the troubadour is an image that he often uses in his work, because it represents the image ofa knight-errant on a quest, this being his "pursuit of justice in a menacing South Africa" (per Wastberg, p.98). He says that he writes in protest about the political and social conditions, "not as a politician ... but as a poet" (Duerden & Pieterse, p.59), and, as such, he is able to combine different poetic voices. The union of fighter and the poet implies a merging of both a public and a private voice. 131 Brutus writesfor cathartic reasons: "towrench some ease for my own mind" (A Simple l&.st, p.68). Unlike Bosman, however, and like Cronin, Brutus feels no sense of guilt or shame. Political prisoners rarely feel guilt or remorse, since they do not believe that they have committed any crimes. They believe rather that the State is guilty of injustices, and that they were attempting to combat these. These sentiments were voiced by Nelson Mandela, "who, when he was asked to plead ... in December 1963, told the court in a firm, clear voice that he was not guilty. He added: 'It is the members of the government, not me, who should stand indicted here ...'".2 Brutus' poetrydoes not reflect a cowed, embittered man. Conversely, likeCronin, he resolves to pick up where he left off last (see Inside, p.I07). Whilst 'exprisoned', as "theexile ... the troubadour", Brutus determines to carry on with his "quest" for justice, (A Simple Lust, pp. 137, 168) so thathe can return to his "rightful world" (Ibid, p.1l5). Brutus did return to his "rightful world", albeit for a very short time. In December, 1991, he attended the New Nation Writers' Conference in Johannesburg. In the light of the words spoken by Nelson Mandela in his inauguration speech (see p.129 of this dissertation), Brutus' words have turned out to be prophetic: "those who died to free our land" took their silent 'place' on the podium alongside thenew President of South Africa, the "warrior ... who secured the final prize" (see p.77 of this dissertation). Jeremy Cronin's unique response toprison is a dedicated desire "to learn how to speak I With the voices of the land" Onside, p.64). Like Brutus, Cronin distilled his prison experiences into poetry, in which he reveals both a public and a private voice. Conversely, Bosman does not exhibit his private voice; hispersonal feelings are rarely expressed without some form of ironic 'veiling'. 1\ One of the most striking aspects of Cronin's poetry is the wide range of 'voices' with which he is at ease. For instance, there is a dramatic difference between the casual, conversational toneof "MyGrandma had been getting old ... so ... and of course, etc., in short ... " (p.69), and the powerful statement that he makes in "Death Row": 2 Winnie Graham, "Rolling back the years to Rivonia",The Star, p.26. " 132 Tha-a-a In.ta nasha - na - ale yooonites tha hooman reissss. a MAAA - ndla! !MID Cronin is also able to render accurately the accents of speaking voices other than his own, such as that of the Afrikaans warder in "Pollsmoor Sketches": "Kom, korn, kom '"~ you donders" (p.25), or that of the turnkey: "AAAAAAAAgterhek!" Cronin's poetry is also distinctly oraland phonetic. In this respect, the intonation and individual speaking voices are distinctly audible: 979899 one HUNdred! ... COMing! (p.43) HEAR ME BOY']! nex' time YOU's gonna pay extra one word charge your bliksem self. (p.!?) Bosman shows similar talents. He, too, is able to render accurately the voices of others, such as those of the nighthead-warder - "Andlookat all them pertaters in your socks. I never seen so many pertaters in a sock" (Iyg, p.20) - and the "longstall": II "and I piped what looks like two johns coming round the johnny homer, and I gives them the office to edge it" UYg, p~35). These are the devices that shape and impose meaning on their experiences. The three artists discussed above evince similarities and differences in their autobiographical renderings. Each one, however, is consistent in his yearning for freedom, epitomized in the "little tent of blue", which Wilde mentions in "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", (prison Writings, p.l69): Brutus mentions the "small space of sky" (A Simple Lust, p.67); Bosman refers to "that piece of blue sky" (lyg, p.175); and " 133 Cronin envisages the "thin sky" which is just visible "between bars and mesh ... Blue" (p.91). The above analysis of prisons and prisoners has analysed not only the anguished expressions of the "souls in pain" ("Reading Gaol", Prison Writings, p.169), but also their unfading hopes and aspirations, the blue sky. 1\ " 134 SELECT BmLIOGRAPHY PRIMARY SOURCES Bosman, H.C., A Cask of Jere,pigo (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1974). Bosman, Herman Charles, Cold StoneJug (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1975). Bosman, H.C., The CQllected Works QfHerman Charles Bosman (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau, 1988). Bosman, H.C. Mafeking Road (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1987). Bosman, H.C., "The Poetry of Elizabeth Eybers", Trek (Johannesurg: March 1949) Bosman, H.C., Uncollected Essays (Cape Town: Timmins, 1981). Bosman, H.C., Willemsdorp (Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 1984). Brutus, Dennis, A Simple Lust: Collected Poems of South African Jail and Exile. including Letters to Martha (London: Heinemann, 1989). Brutus, Dennis, Wayne Kamin & Chip Cameron (eds.), Strains (Texas: Troubadour, 1975). Brutus, Dennis, Stubborn HQpe : Selected Poems of South Africa & A Wider World Including China Poems (Oxford: Heinemann, 1978). Cronin, Jeremy, Inside (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1983). Cronin, Jeremy, Inside (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987). SECONDARY SOURCES Aarons, Michelle Sandra, Prison Experience in the Work of SQme South African Writers from Lessing to Cronin. (Dissertation for the Degree of Master of Arts, University of the Witwatersrand, June 1988). Abrams, M.H., A Glossary of Literary Terms (Hong Kong: CBS Publishing, 1987). Amuta, Chidi, The Theory Qf African Literature (London: Zed Books, 1989). 135 Andersen, Mildred Cecilia, Autobiographical Responses to Prison Experience: an Examination of Selected Writings of the Late-Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Thesis for Doctor of Literature and Philosophy, University of South Africa, 1988). Baldick, Chris, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Litel1lO' Terms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). Baudelaire, Charles, Flowers of Evil. Poems of Baudelaire, Florence Louie Friedman (trans.) (London: Elek Books, 1909). Bindman, Geoffrey (00.), South Africa: Human Rights and the Rule of Law (London: Pinter, 1989). Blignaut, Aegidius Jean, My Friend Herman Charles Bosman(Johannesburg and Cape Town: Perskor Publishers, 1981). Bottra11, Margaret, Every Man a Phoenix: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1958). Bould, Geoffrey (ed.), Conscience Be My Guide: An Anthology of Prison Writings (London: Zed Books, 1991). Breytenbach, Breyten, The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (London: faber and faber, 1989). Bruss, Elizabeth W., Autobiographical Acts: The Changing Situation of a Literaty Genre (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976). Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus, Justin O'Brian (trans.) (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975). Coetzee, J.M., Truth in Autobiography (University of Cape Town, 1984). Cuddon, J.A., A Dictionary of Literary Terms (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Cuddon, J.A., A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Culler, Jonathan, On Deconstruction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985). de Villiers, Simon A., Robben Island: Out of Reach. Out of Mind (Cape Town: C. Stroik, 1971). Dickson, Vivienne Mawson, The Fiction of Herman Charles Bosman: A Critical Examination, Ph.D. thesis (unpublished) (Austen: University of Texas, 1975). Eagleton, Terry, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1987). " 136 Ellis, Stephen, & Sechaba, Tsepo, Comrades Against Apartheid (London: James Currey, 1992). Enright, D.J., and De Chickers, Ernst (eds.) English Critical Texts (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). Esslin, Martin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979). Fabry, Joseph B., The Pursuit of Meaning (Boston: Beacon, 1968). Finney, Brian, The Inner I : British LiteraIy Autobiography of the Twentieth Century (London: faber and faber, 1985). First, Ruth, 117 Days (London: Bloomsbury, 1988). Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish : The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (trans.) (Harrnondsworth: Penguin, 1977). Fowler, Roger, A Dictionary of Modem Critical Terms (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). Frankl, Victor E., The Unheard Cry for Meaning (New York: Pocket Books, 1985). Frankl, Victor E., Man's Search for Meaning (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1962). Friedman, Maurice (ed.), The Worlds of Existentialism (New York: Random House, 1964). Goffman, Erving, Asylums (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). Goodwin, Ken, Understanding African Poetry (London: Heinemann, 1982). Gray, Stephen (ed.), Herman Charles Bosman (Johannesburg; McGraw-Hill, 1986). Grimsley, Ronald, Existential Thought (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1960). Guerin, Wilfred L., Labor, EarI!Ul, AHandbook of Critical Approaches to Literature (New York: Harper and Row, 1979). II Gunn, Janet, Autobiography: Toward a Poetics of Experience (philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). Harlow, Barbara, Resistance Literature (London: Methuen, 1987). Herdeck, Donald E. (ed.), A Companion To Black African Writing, Vol. I. 1900-1973 (Washington: Inscape Corporation, 1974). Jacobs, J.U. (ed.), Current Writing, Volume 3, Number 1 (Durban: University of Natal, 1991). 137 Jefferson, Ann, and Robey, David, Modem Literary Theory (London: B.T. Batsford, 1987). Johnson, Robert, The Pains of Imprisonment(Beverley Hills: Sage Publications, 1982). Johnson, RV., Aestheticism (London: Methuen, 1969). Johnston, Norman, Savitz, Leonard & Marvin, E. Wolfgang, (OOs.), The Sociolo&yof Punishment and Correction (London: John Wiley and Sons, 1962). Killam, G.D. (ed.), African Writers on African Writin& (London: Heinemann, 1973). La Guma, Alex, The Stone Country (Cape Town: David Philip, 1991). Leitch, Vincent B., Deconstructive Criticism: An AdYanced Introduction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). Lekota, Mosiuoa Patrick (Terror), Prison Letters To A Daughter (Johannesburg: Taurus, 1991). Lewin, Hugh, Bandiet: Seven Years in a South African Prison (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Phillip, 1989). MacAndrew, Elizabeth, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Mathabane, Mark, Kaffir Boy: Growin2out of Apartheid (London: Pan Books, 1987). Matshikiza, Todd, Chocolates For My Wife (Cape Town: David Philip, 1982). Maurois, Andre, As.pects of Biography, S.C. Roberts (trans.) (London: Cambridge University Press, 1929). Maurois, Andre, Profiles of Modem French Writers: From Proust to Camus, Carl Morse and Renaud Bruce (trans.) (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1970). Mbeki, Govan, The Prison Writings of Goyan Mbeki: Learnine from Robben Island (London: James Currey, 1991). Mbeki, Govan, The Struggle For Liberation In South Africa: A Short HistoO' (Cape Town: David Philip, 1992). Mbuli, Mzwakhe, Before Dawn (Fordsburg: Cosaw, 1989). Moore, Gerald, and Beier, Ulli (eds.), The Penguin Book of Modem African Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). Naidoo, Indres (as told to Albie Sachs), Robben Island (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). " 138 Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary (London: Heinemann, 1981). O'Flinn, Paul, How to Study Romantic Poetry (London: MacMillan, 1988). Olney, James (ed.), Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980). Olney, James, Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1972). Owomoyela, Oyekan, African Literatures: AnIntroduction (United Statesof America: Crossroads Press, 1979). Pascal, Roy, Design andTruth in Autobiography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960). Patel, Essop, Fragments In The Sun (Johannesburg: African Cultural Centre, 1985). Peck, John, and Coyle, Martin, Literary Terms and Criticism (London: MacMillan, 1988). Petersen, K.H., & Rutherford, A., OnShifting Sands (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 1991). Poe, Edgar Allan, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). Rosenberg, Valerie, Sunflower to the Sun (CapeTown: Human and Rousseau, 1981). Sachs, Albie, The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (CapeTown: David Philip, 1990). Sachs, Bernard, Herman Charles Bosman as I Knew Him (Johannesburg: The Dial Press, 1971). Sartre, Jean-Paul, Existentialism and Humanism, Philip Mairet (Trans.) (London: Methuen, 1984). Sero,~, Mongane Wally, On The Horizon (Johannesburg: Cosaw, 1990). Shumaker, Wayne, English Autobiography: Its Emergence. Materials, and Form (United States of America: University of California Press, 1954), in California University Publications, English Studies, Volumes 7-9, 1953- 1954. Spacks, Patricia Meyer, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Noyel in Eighteenth Century England (London: Harvard University Press, 1976). Sparks, Allister, The Mind of South Africa: The Story of the Rise and Fall of Apartheid (London: Mandarin, 1991). " 139 Spengemann, William C., The Forms Qf AutQbiography. Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (London: Yale University Press, 1980). Titlestad (Schopen), I.C.C., From Amontillado to JerepigQ: Herman Charles Bosman's use of Edgar Allan Poe as a Source and Influence (Dissertation for Master of Arts in English, Rand Afrikaans University, 1987. wa mogale, dikobe, prisQn poems (Cape: Donker, 1992). Wanjala, Chris L., Standpoints Qn African Literature (Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1973). Watt, Ian, The Rise of the NQvel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985). Watts, Jane, Black Writers from South Africa: Towards a Discourse of Liberation (London: MacMillan, 1989). Weintraub, Karl Joachin, The Value of the Individual Self and Circumstance in AutobiQgraphy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). White, Landeg, Couzens, Tim (eds.), Literature And Society In SQuth Africa (Cape Town: Maskew Miller Longman, 1984). Wilde, Oscar, Intentions and The Soul Qf Man (London: Methuen, 1908). Wilde, Oscar, The Soul Qf Man and Prison Writings, Isobel Murray (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Wroblewski, Nancy, The AutQbiography: Its Theory and South African Forms, M.A. Dissertation (Kent University Press, March 1969). INTERVIEWS AND ARTICLES Anonymous, First Impressions (press release on the occasionof the launching of Inside) (Vol.l, No.1, 1 February, 1984). Anonymous, On the Bookshelf, "Poetry from prison", Cape Times, 11 January, 1984. Anonymous, "Solitude and Solidarity: Jeremy Cronin Interviewed", South African Outlook (Alice, NQ.1I5, June 1985). Bosman, H.C., "The Poetry of ElizabethEybers", Trek (Johannesburg: March 1949, pp.26-7). " 140 Clifford, Lago, "Lago Clifford's Amazing Prison Story", The Sjambok, Vol.l, No.9, 14 June, 1929, pA. Clifford, Lago, "Usury in Gaol", The Sjambok, Vol. I, No.Il, 1929, pp.3-5. Cohen, Tim, "Out of the valley of darkness", Business Day (Johannesburg: 11 May, 1994). Crowe, Sarah, "Breaking Down Bars with Fighting Words", Sunday Express (Johannesburg: 12 February, 1984). Duerden, Dennis & Pieterse, Cosmo (eds.), African Writers Talking (London: Heinemann, 1972). Gardner, Susan, NELM Interviews, Four South African Poets (Grahamstown: 27 April, 1984). Goddard, Kevin & Wessels, Charles (eds.), Out of Exile, NELM Interviews (Grahamstown, 1992). Gottschalk, Keith, "Inside: Jeremy Cronin", Critical Arts (Durban: Vol.3, No.2, 1984, pp.52-59). Graham, Winnie, "Rolling Back the Yearsto Rivonia", The Star: Birth ofa Nation (11 May, 1994). Gray, Stephen, "Jeremy Cronin: Inside. Poems from Prison and an Interview", ~ on Censorship (London: Vol.3, 1984, pp.34-37). Hurry, Caroline, "Trends", The Star (Johannesburg: December 6, 1991). Lindfors, Bemth, Munro, Ian, et al (eds.), Palaver: Interviews with Five Writers in Texas (The University of Texas at Austin: African and Afro-American Research Institute, 1972). Mngadi, S'bu, "Exiled poet still stateless", City Press (31 May, 1992). 1\ Pemba, Titus, "Years of exile have not cowed Brutus", The Weekly Mail (Johannesburg: August 16 to 22, 1991). Wastberg, Per (ed.), The Writer in Modem Africa: African-Scandinavian Writers' Conference. Stockholm 1967 (Sweden: Almqvist & Wiksells Boktryckeri, 1969). Weintraub, Karl J., "Autobiography and Historical Consciousness", Critical Enquiry, VoU, pp. 821-848, 1975.