Abstract
This paper explores the intersections of nature, identity, and social justice in the poetry of Dennis Brutus the South African poet and anti-apartheid activist. Through a close reading of Brutus’s poems, this study examines how the elements of nature serve as a mirror reflecting the poet’s experiences of exile, oppression, and resistance; it explores the profound connections between the landscape and the human condition. The poet’s sharp pictures of boundless clouds sailing overhead, cast against the incarcerated viewing from below, and of boundless strong ocean waves crashing against stony limitations at the shorelines of a prison island artfully capture the unspeakable conflicts between the opposing forces of oppression and resistance, of limitations and freedom. In that censorious apartheid context where the cryptic tools of poetic metaphor became the alternative voice for the voiceless who must speak about unspeakable things, nature was a mirror not only of the outer self but also of the inner soul. This paper argues that Brutus’s employment of images of nature, sometimes introspective in the psychic connections that those images draw between art and life, reflects not only the poet’s own experiences as a victim of the politics of race in pre-independent South Africa but also serves as a powerful tool for social censor and resistance.
Presenters
Kontein TrinyaStudent, PhD, Ignatius Ajuru University of Education, Port Harcourt, Rivers, Nigeria
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
POETRY, DENNIS BRUTUS, SOUTH AFRICA, APARTHEID, LITERATURE AND PROTEST, AFRICA
