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a.k.a. Breyten Breytenbach: Critical Approaches to His Writings and Paintings (review)

Judith Lutge Coullie and J. U. Jacobs, eds. a.k.a Breyten Breytenbach: Critical Approaches to His Writings and Paintings. (Cross/Cultures 75). Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, 2004. 337 pp. $94.00 Cloth. $36.00. Paper. The title of Coullie and Jacob's collection of essays on the contemporary South African poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, painter, and political activist Breyten Breytenbach makes primary reference to his self-constructed and self-deconstructing multiple narrative and authorial personae. As Lisbe Smuts observes, these personae-Galaska, Bengai Bird, and a host of others-problematize "a one-to-one relationship between the real person, Breytenbach, and the textual subject" (57). But the essays also examine, on a more implicit level, the always complex, often ambiguous, and multifaceted position of the reluctant colonizer and anti-apartheid Afrikaner who, according to Coullie, was "born of the white (master) race... but as an albino with a black heart" (210). This sense of double-consciousness pervades the collection. On one hand, Breytenbach is depicted as a kind of archetypal white artist in contemporary South Africa, an individual caught in the debate between the contention of authors like Andre Brink that art should be "elevated" above the political and the stance of writers like Nadine Gordimer, Steve Biko, and Breytenbach himself, whose first volume of poetry, Die ysterkoei moet sweet ("The iron cow must sweat") (1964) took the position that "artists ought to employ art in the fight for political freedom, human dignity and justice" (xii). On the other hand, the critics whose essays make up this work seek to define what makes Breytenbach not only unique within this context, but also transcendent. In this quest, a variety of themes and discourses emerge-multiplicity, mirroring, representation, African memory, metamorphosis, and regeneration, to name but a few-and are threaded through a chronological dialogue in which Breytenbach's critics speak with the artist (as in Marilet Sienaert's interview) and also with one another. On the matter of gender, Louise Viljoen examines Breytenbach's literal, literary, political, and poetic "fathers" in his early poetry; Judith Lutge Coullie questions the absence of the female subject in his critical writing; and Andries Visagie, in his examination of the masculine subject in Breytenbach's later works, seems to conclude that perhaps nothing definitive can be concluded: "Breytenbach is likely to continue to revise his approach to masculinity, specifically in relation to women and sexuality" (325). Many of the essays in this collection, in their attempts to distinguish Breytenbach from his fellow writers as postmodern, postcolonial, or South African, position him alternately within and outside of those aforementioned paradigms. …