Return to paradise, by Breyten Breytenbach

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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

Both writer and painter, Breyten Breytenbach is a man of many talents. Born in South Africa in 1939 and exiled in France since 1961, he is the author of a protean work, divided between poems, novels, essays and travel journals. Return to Paradise which he wrote following a trip to South Africa, on the model of Une saison en enfer rimbaldienne, is one of his most beautiful books, nourished by concerns about the future of his country however. freed from the scourge of apartheid.

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Return to paradise by South African Breyten Breytenbach is a “travelogue”, recounting the author's comings and goings between his native country, South Africa, and his adopted country of France in the 1980s and 1990s. It is also a private diary, as the book's subtitle suggests: “  Return to Paradise. African newspaper   ”.

Literary diptych

Retour au paradis is part of a literary diptych, the first volume of which appeared in the 1970s entitled Une saison au paradis . Placed under the sign of A season in hell by Rimbaud, this first text, composed of travel notes, childhood memories, reflections, poems, had been inspired by the poet by his return to his native country after thirteen long years. of exile.

The young Breytenbach had gone into exile in Paris in 1961, fleeing the repression and institutionalized racism of South Africa under apartheid. His personal situation is further complicated when he marries a Frenchwoman of Vietnamese origin. As mixed marriages were banned in South Africa, he could no longer return to his country without being arrested. In 1973, however, he succeeded in obtaining a three-month visa for himself and his wife to travel to South Africa to receive a literary prize. A season in paradise was born from this first pilgrimage to the sources.

The circumstances of the writing of the second volume of the diptych are different.
Engaged in the struggle against apartheid, Breytenbach returned illegally to South Africa in 1975 to establish contacts with the armed wing of the ANC. He will be arrested for terrorism and will not be released from prison until 1982 before being deported to Paris. Then authorized to supervised stays, he had to wait for the dismantling of the regime to be able to return to his country in complete freedom. It was during a new trip he made in February 1991 in a South Africa free from the scourge of institutionalized racism that Breytenbach wrote Back to Paradise . It is a motley text, halfway between a prose poem and meditations, rich in digressions and magnificently written, even if the tone of the whole is dark as is the author's vision on the future of his country.

Paradise found and lost by Breytenbach

A feeling of disenchantment and deep disillusion runs through the work through and through. In a way, this book is Breyten Breytenbach's tale of paradise found and lost. Paradise regained, because with the abolition of apartheid, then the release of Nelson Mandela, South Africa has given itself the political means to renew itself. One can imagine the immense satisfaction that these events were able to procure for the poet, who had become an emblematic figure in the struggle against apartheid. The country was well and truly engaged in a process of transition.

Yet how can you not feel when reading Return to Paradise , constructed like a travel diary, that the new South Africa emerging from the rubble of apartheid inspires the author with limited confidence? While his old friends are enthusiastic about the democratic process underway, the author wonders about the lack of communication between blacks and whites, about the cynicism of politicians in the face of the increase in violence that they sometimes have. - orchestrated, whether to keep power or to get there.

He relies on press articles to recall the four truths: a country plagued by a latent civil war, police torture, banditry, men and women lynched, stoned, stabbed. "  Violence pierces a little, in the newspapers of the country, like blood which crosses a bandage  ", writes Breytenbach, before wondering: "  What happened to the revolution?  "

" A bird of misfortune "

The portrait heavy with disillusions that the exiled poet paints of his reborn country testifies above all to a great lucidity and an in-depth understanding of the challenges of the changes underway in post-apartheid South Africa.

In his book, Breytenbach recounts the quarrel which pitted him during his stay in South Africa with one of his closest friends who accused him of being "  a bird of doom who came here to have the satisfaction of a high man. and healthy moral indignation  ”. An accusation that the poet who is also a painter made his own by picturing himself on the cover of his book as a bird ridden by a gnome, flying over his lost paradise.

A bird of misfortune that Nelson Mandela would nevertheless have liked to have by his side, as evidenced by the appeal that the leader of the ANC launched to him during his stay in Paris, after his release in 1990: "  I came to get you for bring you home . Breytenbach preferred to remain an exile.

Return to paradise: African newspaper ,

by Breyten Breytenbach.

Translated from the English by Jean Guiloineau.

Editions Grasset,

332 pages.

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