Return to Paradise

Hazel Rochman

The radical Afrikaans writer who spent seven years in prison in South Africa for terrorism now lives in exile in Paris with his Vietnamese wife. Here he describes his 1991 three-month return journey to South Africa to lecture, travel, see friends and family, and take part in the debate on the future. He finds himself, as always, "a foreigner at home." Once an ANC activist, he rejoices at Mandela's release, but he's heartbroken to find a land awash in blood. Looping back in time and place from Paris to West Africa to Pretoria and Cape Town, he sometimes gets lost in detail, but he reaches from the immediate and political to the surrealist images in all our dreams. With raging fury, he attacks the apartheid killers, but his prose becomes plain and quiet when he writes with almost unbearable tenderness of his late father ("I remember the rhythm but not the words"). In the landscape he can't forget, the names of places become a litany. There's no self-importance or heroics: his surprise encounter in a roadhouse with his prison torturer leaves him shaken with impotent rage and terror. A lesser writer would have exploited the drama of the confrontation; Breytenbach makes it almost bathetic. He knows only that, like cockroaches, the evil will survive all cataclysms. He's a drifter, a nomad. With echoes of Eliot, he hears "the tragic mumbling of the broken waves at night."