Dennis Brutus, world-renowned South African poet and human-rights activist, died on December 26, 2009 at the age of 85. (Click here for information on the planned NYC memorial, January 17 at 2:00 pm.) The poem below, composed on the occasion of Brutus's 80th birthday by Martín Espada, is followed by Steve Bloom's personal remembrance.
* * * *
Martín Espada
STONE HAMMERED TO GRAVEL For poet Dennis Brutus, at eighty
The office workers did not know, plodding
through 1963
and Marshall Square station in Johannesburg,
that you would dart down the street between
them,
thinking the police would never fire into the
crowd.
Sargeant Kleingeld did not know, as you escaped
his fumbling hands and the pistol on his hip,
that he would one day be a footnote in the book
of your life.
The secret policeman on the corner did not know,
drilling a bullet in your back, that today the
slug
would belong in a glass case at the museum of
apartheid.
The bystanders did not know, as they watched
the coloured man writhing red on the ground, that their shoes would skid in blood for years.
The ambulance men did not know,
when they folded the stretcher and refused you a
ride
to the white hospital, that they would sit
eternally
in Hell’s emergency room, boiling with a disease
that darkens their skin and leaves them
screaming for soap.
The guards at Robben Island did not know,
when you hammered stone to gravel with Mandela,
that the South Africa of their fathers
would be stone hammered to gravel by the
inmates,
who daydreamed a republic of the ballot
but could not urinate without a guard’s
permission.
Did you know?
When the bullet exploded the stars in the cosmos of your body, did you know
that others would read manifestos by your light?
Did you know, after the white ambulance left,
before the coloured ambulance arrived, if you
would live at all, that you would banish the apartheid of the
ambulance
with Mandela and a million demonstrators dancing
at every funeral?
Did you know, slamming the hammer into the
rock’s stoic face,
that a police state is nothing but a boulder
waiting for the alchemy of dust?
Did you know that, forty years later,
college presidents and professors of English
would raise their wine to your name
and wonder what poetry they could write
with a bullet in the back?
What do the people we call prophets know?
Can they conjure the world forty years from now?
Can the poets part the clouds for a vision in
the sky
easily as sweeping curtains across the stage?
A beard is not the mark of prophecy
but the history of a man’s face.
No angel shoved you into the crowd;
you ran because the blood racing to your heart
warned a prison grave would swallow you. No oracle spread a banquet of vindication before
you
in visions; you mailed your banned poems
cloaked as letters to your sister-in-law
because the silence of the world
was a storm roaring in your ears.
South Africa knows. Never tell a poet: Don’t say that. Even as the guards watched you nodding in your
cell,
even as you fingered the stitches fresh from the
bullet, the words throbbed inside your skull:
Sirens
knuckles boots. Sirens knuckles boots. Sirens
knuckles boots.
REMEMBERING DENNIS BRUTUS
Early in this decade, when he was a professor in the Black
Studies Department at the University of Pittsburgh, Dennis Brutus and I were
attending the same political conference in that city. We had never met. I
approached him, somewhat hesitantly, to share a poem I had written referencing
the struggle in South Africa. He read it immediately, and eagerly. Then, to my
surprise, he began a conversation as if we were long-time comrades and
collaborators.
That, in my experience, was Dennis Brutus summed up: a man
who had achieved greatness by any ordinary standard. But the esteem in which he
was held by others seemed unimportant to him. He felt, and acted, like an
ordinary human being simply doing what needs to be done. He treated others,
even strangers, as if that were true as well.
Over the next few years, every time our paths crossed—mostly
on his frequent visits to New York City—Dennis would ask me what poetry event
was being organized that he might participate in. It was, in part, as a result
of his urging that I organized the very first “Activist Poets’ Roundtable” at
the US Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007. He also helped launch the Roundtable in
New York City in March 2008, after the annual “Left Forum” where Dennis
appeared on several panels.
It was at this time that I really got to know him well. He
had injured his foot, somehow, on the eve of the Left Forum and was having
difficulty walking. I spent that weekend driving him back and forth between his
hotel and the conference site, also making sure he had the help he needed
getting around at the conference itself (and in his hotel). Then, when his foot
did not improve, he accepted an offer of a place to stay for a few days in
Brooklyn, where he wouldn’t have to manage on his own.
He and I spent a lot of time together during those few days,
in particular waiting for medical attention at the Kings County Hospital
emergency room. And he told me stories about his life in the struggle against
Apartheid. I will never forget the chuckle in his voice as he talked about the
time he was shot in the back while attempting to escape from the police. He
could laugh, too, about the absurdity of breaking rocks at Robben Island
prison, the lengths to which the Apartheid regime had gone to suppress dissent.
And yet it was all for naught (the source, I assume, of his mirth). The regime
could not survive, no matter what brutal measures it resorted to. The people of
South Africa were too strong.
During this entire time, as his foot at first got worse then
gradually began to feel better, the biggest concern he expressed to me was that
he shouldn’t become too much of a burden.
In that same month we drove together to Washington, DC, for
the first “Split This Rock” poetry festival. Dennis found it impossible to
attend such an event without making it an opportunity for a little political
organizing. He decided, on the way down, that we should use the festival as the
occasion for a declaration of poets calling for peace and social justice in the
world. And so an “Appeal to Poets,
Writers, and All Creative Artists” from the festival, for actions in March 2009
which would “Speak Art to Power,” was born. In the end it was signed by a
majority of those in attendance at the festival.
The overwhelming majority of young activists in the struggle
for a better world believe that they are committed for life. Very few, however,
actually fulfill this promise which they make to themselves. How many who were
Dennis Brutus’s comrades in the anti-Apartheid struggle, for example, ended up
compromising their commitment to human liberation once the overthrow of
Apartheid was achieved and power transferred into their hands? Dennis, however,
remained committed to the poor and oppressed of South Africa and of the world until
his final days. He was constitutionally incapable of doing otherwise.
It has always struck me as one of the sad ironies of our
existence that we can never, truly, count anyone in the ranks of the very
special few who fulfill their youthful pledge—to themselves and to their own
humanity—until they are no longer with us. Dennis fulfilled his pledge. He is
no longer with us. The world will miss him.
