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Poetry from Steve Bloom |
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Tribute
to Dennis Brutus
Dennis Brutus, world-renowned South African
poet and human-rights activist, died on December 26, 2009 at the age of
85. The
poem below, composed on the occasion of Brutus's 80th birthday by
Martín Espada, was read at the NYC memorial on January 17,
2010. It 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 thecrowd. 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 aride 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 theinmates, who daydreamed a
republic of the ballot but could not
urinate without a guard'spermission. 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. *
* *
* * by Steve Bloom
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. I will miss him, too. |