Whole Earth Catalog

Before he begins his memoir “Dog Heart,” Breyten Breytenbach drops a neat little epigram to establish his credentials. “The man who finds his country sweet is only a raw beginner; the man for whom each country is as his own is already strong; but only the man for whom the whole world is a foreign country is perfect.” Breytenbach attributes the saying (originally the composition of a 12th century Saxon) to Erich Auerbach, the literary critic and war-time exile. Certainly the quote is ripe for exiles the world over, the sacred motto of the outsider.

And what an outsider Breytenbach is. Born in 1939 into an Afrikaner family that passed for white in Bonnievale, South Africa, Breytenbach joined the African National Congress in its Parisian exile in the 1960s. During a secret visit to South Africa in 1975, Breytenbach was arrested and served seven years of a nine-year sentence in prison. Although he afterwards returned to Paris, the fall of apartheid has permitted him the luxury of not only revisiting his native land and his racially mixed roots, but also of nipping with the voice of a gadfly at the heels of the new masters of South Africa, becoming, as one South African friend of mine says, “quite the coolest bloke in town.”

“Dog Heart” is only the latest of Breytenbach’s immensely poetic and painfully acidic memoirs. A poet and painter, he has engrafted his own portrait of the artist as a dog in previous autobiographies, from the 1980 “A Season in Paradise” to his most recent collection of essays and open letters, “The Memory of Birds in Time of Revolution.” But “Dog Heart” takes the author back to the heart of the heart of his own origins with a dynamic fondness that struggles against his will to be a “perfect” man.

Like the flight of memory, the trajectory of “Dog Heart” is hazy at best. On a recent trip to South Africa, Breytenbach returns to the Bonnievale of his youth. He is feted by his old school. With the help of his wife, Lotus, he fixes up a house called Paradys. He investigates the artifacts of his own past. He leaves.

But along the dusty path of his story, Breytenbach flits around many candles that flicker like verse. There is the candle of memory or, more exactly, the act of remembering. “Maybe memory is the winds among leaves. Maybe memory is an illusion. Maybe it is an illusion which we invent to protect ourselves against the light of time which cannot be stopped, which eats our faces, and against the sorrow of not being able to bring back moments and orgasms.” With the more prosaic candle of personal history, Breytenbach tries to illuminate a select few of these moments that belong to a time before his memory. He sifts through the archives of the local library searching for information about his great-grandmother Rachel Susanna Keet, a famous midwife. “Reading about my great-grandmother is like listening to someone else describing the dusty light coming through the windows of a room where dead memories are kept.” But through that light peer other episodes from the Breytenbach clan that read like grand guignols from the pen of fellow Afrikaner Andre Brink: “A descendant, also called Johann Jacob, decides to move to the Boland with his nine sons and his ostriches. . . . His sons have to bring the patriarch’s possessions over the mountain. . . . With the load are also the family’s coffins. How will you be laid away if you are too poor to afford a coffin at the time of your death? Will you be thrown to the dogs?

“They take turns sleeping in one of the coffins, where it is reassuring and warm. It is night when the wagon lurches over the neck of the mountain. The donkeys bray at the salt-white moon. The descent is steep, the shadows are deep, and the load shifts, crushing to death the brother sleeping in the coffin. He who holds the reins only notices at sunrise that his brother has exchanged the temporary for the eternal.”

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But it is Breytenbach’s accounts of the recent post-apartheid history of his country that burn the sharpest with their Orwellian justice. Every excursion toward the light of reconciliation brings him another story of singed wings. A pistol is stolen from the house of his brother Kwaaiman. Although the police know the identity of the thief, the pistol has disappeared into the neighboring black township of Zolani. “The stealer is a youth who earns pocket money on Saturday afternoons carrying golf bags for local players. Through the mediation of another caddy my brother opens negotiations with the thief, to buy back his pistol. They agree on a price which will reflect the expenses and sacrifices incurred by the new proprietor. But then the transaction gets bogged down. The seller has no confidence that Kwaaiman will pay him as agreed. You just cannot trust these Boers.”

This is, perhaps, the mildest of the historical anecdotes Breytenbach recounts. Horror stories of murder, rape, child slavery and dismemberment scar the memoir like price tags on the peaceful transition from the bad old days to the New South Africa.

The passion and regret, as Breytenbach returns time and again to these grotesque corners of his country, keep “Dog Heart,” fortunately, from being the memoir of the perfect man. Irony and ambivalence, after all, are the wing marks of the moth and the strong man, “for whom each country is as his own.” The chums Breytenbach visits include his fellow former prisoner, Nelson Mandela, whom he greets by accident at a wine festival, and Alex Boraine, “an old friend from earlier times when the struggle against injustice was noble. (Alex is now one of the dogs of God; together with Archbishop Tutu, he chairs the inquisition called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: Misery and devastation and iniquity and treachery and pain are staged before a bench of the pure and beamed into the living rooms of the populace. So that memory may be excavated, shaped, initiated and corrected where needed to serve as backbone to the new history of the new nation. Our Earth is full of skeletons.)”

It is a sign of his dog heart that Breytenbach, as an exile, is worried about being dismissed as an outsider for such analyses, “mortally afraid of being irrelevant or Eurocentrist.” Yet he is equally terrified of the Charybdis of “moral and emotional correctness. We are the victims of racism,” he says, identifying the true culprit. “Under cover of darkness we are dogs scrounging on rubbish dumps for the delicacy of a hand or two.”

Breytenbach ends as he begins, aware that he is still an imperfect man in an imperfect country. “I’m planting a beacon in Africa. A landmark. Am I not allowed to mark out my history? May one not adopt a dead person? It will not harm anybody. Don’t worry, there’s nothing I want. Underneath the soil surely only soil is left.” As surely, perhaps, as our bones return to dust.