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Introduction
Breyten Breytenbach is South Africa's most acclaimed poet, and one of its most controversial and ambiguous political figures. He was born in 1939 in a small town in the Cape Province, and moved to Paris in 1960 to paint and write. Beginning with his first collection in 1964, his poems-- surreal, sexy, grotesque, lyrical, fiercely subversive both of politics and language-earned acclaim and vitriol, in seemingly equal parts, from his fellow Afrikaners. As the sixties progressed, Breytenbach became increasingly radicalized, and he later joined Okhela, a still-mysterious underground anti-apartheid group.I In the summer of 1975, on a recruiting mission for Okhela, Breytenbach entered South Africa under an alias; he was arrested, charged with terrorism, convicted, and in November 1975 received a nine-year sentence without possibility of parole. He was held in solitary confinement on death row for almost two years; summarily freed in December 1982, he immediately returned to Paris.
Breytenbach's horrific first trial,2 at which he pled guilty and essentially recanted his beliefs, has been documented in various works such as Peter Dreyer's Martyrs and Fanatics (1980) and Lawrence Wechsler's Calamities of Exile (1998). But the most searing indictment of his behavior-and of his prison experience--comes from Breytenbach himself in The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist (1983), a harrowing, almost Dostoyevskian examination of betrayal, destruction, imprisonment and freedom. (At the end of our interview, Breytenbach told me he has never read the book since completing it.) In this pitiliess "memoir," Breytenbach anticipates the question often asked of political prisoners-"How did you survive?"-and replies: "I did not survive."
In End Papers, a collection of writings published in 1986, Breytenbach wrote: "I desperately attempt to hide the shame of not having had the courage of my convictions in prison . [N]o amount of `sensitive self-analysis' can obscure the fact that I cannot forgive myself." The following interview makes clear that Breytenbach has changed, if not abandoned, this view, and here he puts forth a radically different interpretation of his actions. It is difficult to tell which of his many accounts is most accurate; perhaps that is fitting, since truth, lies, memory and transformation have been at the very center of his work.
Breytenbach's latest English-language book, Dog Heart (1999), is a far-from-comforting look at...