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MEETING DENNIS BRUTUS
by
Olu Oguibe
 When
Dennis Brutus and I posed for the cameras in the hallways of
Harvard University during the international event in
celebration of the poet Christopher Okigbo in 2007, it would
have seemed odd to think that a little over two years hence,
I would be writing about him as the late. I had driven to
Cambridge, Massachusetts in a rental car, having narrowly
survived a near-fatal crash in my own vehicle only a week
earlier; if anything, it seemed to me at the time that I was
closer to Heaven's door than the strong and robust man I met
at Harvard. Yet, such is the truth of our nature that, in
spite of Dennis's spritely carriage at 84, eventually our
ration of breath on Earth runs out, and only the work we did
lives on.
Like everyone in my generation of English-speaking Africans,
I first met Dennis Brutus while in grammar school in the
mid-1970s, on the pages of what was then known to every West
African school child as simply "Senanu and Vincent". Brutus
was among the poets featured in our required poetry text,
A Selection of African Poetry, edited by Professors K.
E. Senanu of Legon University, and Theo Vincent of
University of Lagos. In that much distinguished company were
others whose names we would soon commit to heart: Oswald
Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Okot p'Bitek, Taban Lo Liyong, David
Rubadiri, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, Cosmo Pieterse,
and, of course, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Senegal's liberator
and philosopher president. Soon, those children who were
blessed with a good memory like I wasn't, could easily
recite Mtshali's ‘Sounds of a Cowhide Drum’, Rubadiri's
‘Stanley Meets Mutesa’, or Soyinka's "Telephone
Conversation" ("Madam, I warned/I hate a wasted journey/I am
African"), the last of which would be fresh on my mind as I
searched for an apartment in London a decade and a half
later.
I was 11 when Senanu and Vincent published their anthology,
and so, unlike my father's generation which learnt about
poetry by reading Shelley and the myths of the Greek
oracles, my generation was lucky enough to learn about
poetry by reading modern African poets like Okigbo, Rubadiri,
Senghor and Pieterse writing about our own history, our own
myths, about things and places with which we were mostly
familiar, about experiences that someday would be our
experiences.
Brutus's featured poem in Senanu and Vincent was the
inimitably romantic ‘A troubadour, I traverse all my land"
from the prison collection, Sirens, Knuckles, Boots. "A
Troubadour" would ultimately become my most beloved and
cherished of all Brutus's poetry, and have an immeasurable
influence on my own work as a poet. I have had the full text
of "A Troubadour" on my web site for more than a decade,
along with excerpts from Whitman, Cesaire, Ginsberg,
Darweesh, Espriu, Lorca and Neruda.
A troubadour, I traverse all my land
exploring all her wide flung parts with zest
probing in motion sweeter far than rest
her secret thickets with an amorous hand:
and I have laughed, disdaining those who banned
enquiry and movement, delighting in the test
of wills when doomed by Saracened arrest,
choosing, like unarmed thumb, simply to stand.
Long before I could understand and embrace Okigbo, Brutus's
poem formed my image of the poet; the rambling, traveling
songster eternally in love with his mother, his land; who,
refusing to be repressed or terminally depressed, always
finds in his long-suffering land beauty worth fathoming, and
versatility worth singing. That a poet in prison could pen
such glorious triumph over the hangman's call taught me that
there is nothing in existence to equal the power of song.
The quiet, yet defiant image of the unarmed thumb choosing
simply to stand would be etched in my mind forever. The
beauty and music of Brutus's poetry also taught me that no
matter the subject of my attempts at poetry, a masterful
command of music and imagery must come first, or it isn't
poetry at all. If Okigbo led me to Carl Sandburg and Lorca,
it was Brutus that led me to Whitman and Cesaire.
I met Dennis Brutus again, this time in person, in London in
1991. He was in town for one of the great literary events of
progressive London in those days; the International Fair of
Radical Black and Third World Books, founded and hosted, as
it was for many years, by the now late doyen of London's
radical literati, the beautiful and indomitable John La
Rose. Before the fair kicked off, someone--and I believe it
was the novelist and playwright Biyi Bandele Thomas or
perhaps writer and critic Kole Omotoso, who still lived in
London in those days--invited me to meet up at a cafe in
Brixton, South London. At the meet-up was the legendary
editor, Margaret Busby who was one of my mentors in London
for a while, poet Odia Ofeimun, Professor Omotoso, and
Professor Brutus. Once again, I was reliving the magical
narrative of my early and mid-twenties, meeting in flesh and
blood legends whose words I read as a rural child; legends
whose works had shaped my life. There was the author of "A
troubadour", of Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, of
Letters to Martha, of Poems from Algiers, of A
Simple Lust and Stubborn Hope... There was the
legend who got Apartheid South Africa banned from
international sports, and I was sitting in a small, roadside
cafe in Brixton, London, with him. Two or three years
earlier, while still in Nigeria, I had had the uncommon
fortune to travel as a field assistant to Ulli Beier, the
man who, in 1963, spirited Sirens, Knuckles, Boots out of a
South African jail and published it. What a magical, magical
life!
Brutus's Airs and Tributes had only just been
published about a year or so earlier, and he had copies with
him, as indeed tons of pamphlets, press releases, protest
letters, and documents from some radical pan-African
organization or another that he was leading at the time. In
fact, I believe he got us to sign on to some campaign he was
championing, the details of which now escape me. I had read
Airs and Tributes and was not entirely impressed, but
even as I rode the very short-lived heights of my own powers
as a poet, I was quite at peace with the knowledge that all
writers eventually lose their creative fire, all that is
left being the still bright flame that burns not on the rich
oil of art, but the thin paraffin of radical desire. In
spite of his diminishing art, Brutus was still the author of
some of the greatest poems ever written in any language or
tradition, and that was enough inspiration for me.
In the days that followed, Brutus read at the fair and other
venues, including a welcoming party at John La Rose's in
East London at which the great Tanzanian Pan-Africanist
Ibrahim Babu was also in attendance. In addition to writing,
at the time I was also a what is now inanely known as a word
poet, performing my work with musical accompaniment in
schools and other venues across London and the rest of
Britain, and it might have been that or the following year,
that I performed on same bill at John's book fair with the
late Afro-German poet May Ayim who eventually took her own
life only a few years later, and Linton Kwesi Johnson. I
would meet Professor Brutus at the fair several more times
throughout the early '90s, and it was imperative, always, to
attend his readings and listen to his carefully cadenced
elaborations on the state of global radical politics. In
1994 I convened an international conference of African
writers in exile, ‘Dreaming of the Homeland’, in Bethnal
Green, London, in which Dennis Brutus participated, along
with Buchi Emecheta, Lewis Nkosi, and numerous others.
However, after I left Britain in 1995, we would not meet
again, if memory serves me right, until Cambridge in 2007.
Unlike African novelists, African poets have yet to receive
the international recognition and acknowledgment that they
deserve. That Brutus was a finer poet than, say, Allen
Ginsberg, there is no doubt, but even with his political
accomplishments, jail not counting among them, and even in
death, relatively few in the West know about Brutus. Fewer,
still, would find the courage to place him in his deserved
league among history's greatest poets. As noted earlier,
like most poets, his later years were not his most
accomplished as an artist, although he continued to produce
impressive amounts of verse. Yet, on the basis of his first
three or four collections of poems, it is clear that very
few poets in the 20th century could assail the power of his
work. He did not approach poetry with the towering
grandiosity of a Walcott, yet his language and imagery and
vision towered above the prosaic dispensability of a Rita
Dove, for instance. To find his equals in American poetry we
would have to look to Kunitz, even to Sandburg, though the
social urgency if searing beauty of his early work place him
more in the company of Darweesh and the very best of Neruda.
The long story of Brutus's successful campaign against South
Africa's Apartheid regimes belongs to historians. The duty
of recounting his work as a life-long teacher will fall to
the numerous generations of his students. I write only as
one who once sought to walk in his footsteps, as a humble
traveler who found inspiration in the power of his craft.
I was unimaginably blessed, as I am sure so many others
were, to have met Dennis Brutus, and even more, to have
known his work and learnt from it like an acolyte learns
from a master. His mortal remains will now return to the
earth, secure in that land that he once traversed, an
irrepressible troubadour defying banishment and jailers'
shackles; the land that he loved so deeply and sung so well.
That Brutus was one of the greatest writers of all time,
there is no doubt, but he was also an indefatigable
campaigner for justice, a relentless organizer, an
incorrigible romantic, and a great humanist, and the power
and beauty of his spirit and his work will remain with us
for long.
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