For almost half a century Dennis Brutus was at the forefront of the campaign to bring down the apartheid system in South Africa, the place where he was born and which gave him the awareness of racism, poverty and injustice that has informed his work ever since. In 1963 Brutus was shot by the police in South Africa and later imprisoned for 18 months alongside Nelson Mandela on Robben Island. After being exiled from his homeland, Brutus became a prominent political organizer, who in 1970 led the successful campaign to expel apartheid South Africa from the Olympic Games. While working as a university lecturer in the US, he also became a pioneering advocate of postcolonial studies within academia, helping to introduce African literature as a category within the curriculum....
Without doubt, there is a certain Audenesque quality about Brutus's own poetry, in particular in his ability to move from personal feeling to the spirit of the collective - the shared hopes and fears of people who are usually on the receiving end of history. To use poetry as a means of fighting back against the forces of oppression and exploitation is for Brutus not just an intellectual choice but an existential cry from the heart for social change to come sooner rather than later:In the dark lanes of Soweto,
amid the mud, the slush, the squalor,
among the rusty tin shacks
the lust for freedom survives stubbornly
like a smoldering defiant flame
and the spirit of Steve Biko moves easily.
Auden's poem "Spain 1937" is a particular point of reference in another poem by Brutus - "Love; he Struggle." When Auden writes "To-morrow he rediscovery of romantic love ... but to-day the struggle," Brutus paraphrases this radical postponement with his own dialectic of personal freedom and political necessity:
Conched, contrapuntal our concord
Day's breath wracks our peace,
Our dreams disrupt in blustery discord
Buckling to winds' capricious buffet we desert our calms
- Ah love, unshoulder now my arms!
Like the early Auden, Brutus also sees his role as that of a public poet, "the world's troubadour" as he describes himself, one who seeks to give a voice to those whom the system has silenced. There is therefore in Brutus's poetry an implicit sense of radical dialogue with people whose lives remain outside the focus of the established media. This is where the real struggle s taking place, and it is within this context of solidarity with the dispossessed that Brutus has always situated himself as a writer:
An old black woman,
suffering,
tells me I have given her
"new images"
- a father bereaved
by radical heroism
finds consolation
in my verse.
then I know
these are those I write for
and my verse works.
- Ronal Paul, from a review of Poetry and Protest: A Dennis Brutus Reader that originally appeared in Socialism and Democracy, issue 21, and has been reprinted if full at AfricaResource.