Notes from the Middle World

"I had a profound problem with this book, which I will come to in a moment. Breyten Breytenback is another one of our most esteemed Afrikaans poets. His most celebrated work of English prose is The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, which was a memoir about his seven years in prison. He was part of a group of dissident Afrikaans writers formed in the 60s; another famous member was Andre Brink. Breytenbach went to live in France because he couldn’t justify a life under the apartheid state. He married a Vietnamese woman and when he came back to South Africa with her to give a talk he was thrown into prison on a trumped-up charge. When he got out of prison he went straight back to France and he has sort of remained there. If you look at his biographies and certain websites it says he divides his time between France and South Africa, but I think he is mainly in France. Of course you can’t dismiss Breyten Breyetenbach just because he criticises South Africa from afar – I mean, he did languish for seven years in an apartheid prison, which is the ultimate sacrifice. But my major issue with Notes from the Middle World is this concept of ‘unbelonging’. He’s anti the idea of identity. I find his reaction so powerful in the negative that you are left feeling he is as attached to identity and home as much as anybody talking about it in the positive. There is a specific passage in an essay that appears in this book, which is written in the form of a letter to Mandela. One passage goes something like: I must tell you this terrible thing, my old and revered leader: if a young South African were to ask me whether he or she should stay or leave, my bitter advice would be to go. For the foreseeable future now, if you want to live your life to the full and with some satisfaction and usefulness, and if you can stand the loss, if you can amputate yourself – then go… Now there are two things there – the first, obviously, is the line about amputation. He is acknowledging that to leave South Africa as a South African is to amputate a limb. But what he is also saying is it is better than the amputation of the head; you can live without a limb. Fair enough, I suppose, except the problem is in the phrase ‘satisfaction and usefulness’. I mean, I personally don’t think that there are many countries that you can live in with more satisfaction and usefulness – we have every socio-economic problem you can think of, a wealth of critical issues to devote a life to. There are many people that I met when I was writing my book who are a testament to that. So I find Breytenbach’s attitude glib and offensive. I think my generation, by which I mean 25 to 40, I think we need to acknowledge where we stand in South African society and we need to be very careful when we point to the ANC’s faults. Their faults are plenty, but we need to be very careful about how our presence in South Africa contributes to the ANC’s stance. We need to be conscious of how we behave on the streets and temper down our sense of privilege and entitlement. White South Africans have a profound sense of entitlement, it’s in-bred. We need to find our modesty, our humility in the face of our inherited and sometimes unjustified privilege. I think if we do that then the generations that come after us will be able to negotiate their problems with a lot more ease."