Andre Brink is a South African, an Afrikaner. Apartheid meant nothing to him until he went to Paris as a student in 1959. Once there, "my eyes opened, I had grown up accepting that all Blacks were either domestic servants or labourers. In Paris, I saw my mistake. I had to leave my country and look at it from a distance to see what was wrong with it. I was ashamed." He was away when the Sharpeville Massacre occurred in 1960, "so I saw that through foreign eyes" which helped open his own.
Now the world appears to think that change has finally arrived in South Africa. While Brink is pleased that some steps towards a more just society have been made, be cautions "It's not yet over, not by a long shot."
During the "past 30 years he has written several of South Africa's most important novels Looking on Darkness (1974) An Instant in the Wind (1976) and Rumours of Rain (1978), which were both short listed for the Booker Prize A Dry White Season (1979) A Chain of Voices (1982) States of Emergency (1988) An Act of Terror (1991) and now Imaginings of Sand which takes the story of his country up to the historic elections of 1994.
Many would feel that in common with his compatriot, Nadine Gordimer, Brink is not the most polished of stylists. Both writers have come to accept, though not endorse, their status as commentators rather than artists. Brink's work has always been marked more by the importance of what he has to say than by lyricism or refinements of style. Unlike that of his friend J.M. Coetzee, Brink's writing is a deliberate craft, not an art. Brink has always pushed his range and his fiction, either contemporary or historical, to its limits, battling against inevitable stereotypes and frequently taking risks in narratives with deceptively complex technical structures.
As an Afrikaner, he knows the protected world of the white South African and the experience of living with a siege mentality. His finest novel, Rumours of Rain? banned in South Africa on publication coffers through the creation of narrator Martin, Mynhardt, probably the most perceptive insight into the mind Of the Afrikaner male ever written Brink agrees that he is drawing on, his own life and observations, "but no more than in all my work. I couldn't be a writer without that, "the essence of being a writer is coming to grips with one's deeper experience." In Rumours of Rain, Martin's father, a retired history teacher, repeatedly reminds his son that he should "look at our history" it becomes a refrain. Late in the novel, Martin imagines he can hear his father, now dead after a long, slow illness, saying to him "Martin, we Afrikaners have had to put up with a lot in our lives. There's still people looking down on us just because we are Afrikaners. But we must show them. Every day of our lives we've got to show them. Until they learn to respect us." As Martin says of his father "To him, history became a metaphor for everything he couldn't understand about the world around him."
Speaking of that novel with its theme of blindness, compounded by metaphors of sightlessness, Brink remarks "I wanted to show the Afrikaner as a human being defensive, vulnerable as well as bullying and selfish. I don't think there is any point in presenting a monster. It is always too easy to forget that no one is entirely good, or entirely bad."
THE son of a magistrate, Brink was born in 1935 and his childhood was pent moving from one small village to another across the Orange Free State, due to his at his work. It was an outdoor life, playing tennis, playing rugby. Africa is full of large spaces. The awareness of a very bare landscape of flint stones and thorn trees and open plains. It was wonderful and almost innocent. I accepted the roles given. The white people were the masters, it was all I had known."
Language became very important to him "We all had to learn English anyway. I lived in, and through language and books from an early age". His mother helped by introducing an English Day, "every Tuesday, we spoke only English." Afrikaans is a very physical language, rich in metaphor. In Brink's new novel, Kristien returns home to South Africa because her ancient grandmother is dying. Brink wrote Kristien's narrative in English, whereas the old lady's magic realist stories spanning generations of the family's women, were first written in Afrikaans.
He is a large, friendly, charming man an inveterate optimist with a wistful expression and a mop of sandy hair. A fluent, confident speaker, he is both spontaneous and thoughtful, looks the professional academic which he is, and appears much younger than his 61 years. He has been married four times and has four children. Fascinated by other people, the strength of his fiction lies in his interest in their lives their fears, the mistakes they make.
In common with all South African writers he has spent much of his career being asked about politics rather than his novels. "Although I'm a storyteller, I didn't really mind this because I felt yes, here is a chance to tell the outside world about what is going on, it was a moral obligation." Referring to Gordimer's exasperated observation "In this kind of situation, courage becomes a literary virtue", Brink smiles at the absurd irony. Living and writing in South Africa have proved an exciting hell for him. "I have always been involved."
Professor of English at Cape Town University, he has written 12 novels in English, all of which were originally written or partly written in Afrikaans and rethought into English by him. "There are another seven which I have not translated. That makes 19 novels" he announces with schoolboy's triumph, and adds "I've also written lots of literary criticism, travel writing and journalism. I've been very busy."
RELATIONSHIPS rather than politics are central to his fiction and his vision is romantic. At times, the intensity of the physical passions, described is his novels is reminiscent of Lawrence. "Yes, I am a romantic. I'm a romantic writer. I'm particularly interested in relationships, how men and women relate with each other. I was never political, but the racial politics of South Africa forced me into becoming so." Through his work he has captured present day South Africa and also Africa itself in a wider, more mythic sense, as in historical novels such as An Instant in the Wind, A Chain of Voices and in the historical passages of An Act of Terror.
The Ambassador (1963), his fifth novel which was first published in English the following year he reworked it for a 1985 English re issue is an apolitical story of sexual jealousy. The South African ambassador to Paris becomes involved with Nicolette, a young drifter. But she has already begun a messy affair of sorts with the obsessive Third Secretary who, tormented by her behaviour, sets out to destroy his rival. The story in itself is not highly original, yet the novel impresses through Brink's moving study of a man of 56 responding to the girl's youth. Brink was not yet 30 when he wrote it. Love, loss, vulnerability became his themes from the outset.
Looking on Darkness, which was `a' need in early 1974 revolted white sensibilities not because of any implied political message but because it told the story of a white woman's love affair with a black man. Joseph Malan, an actor, is a sophisticated, educated, somewhat distant an Poetry is Joseph's natural language. As he awaits execution for the murder of his lover Jessica, he quotes Shakespeare to himself.
Having spent much of his life emotionally adrift, he then falls passionately in love. It is a forbidden love with tragic consequences.
Brink returned to the theme of mixed race love in the historical novel, An Instant in the Wind. It is 1749 and when a white woman's eccentric explorer husband dies in the interior's wilderness, her survival depends on a runaway slave.
According to Brink, now that the political issues are beginning to be resolved, many other taboos are finally being confronted, particularly the gender issues, "white South Africa has never been an easy place for women, it is an extremely male society. The woman is expected to tolerate all levels of humiliation. The male rules."
An Act of Terror, his longest novel, was first begun in 1983, but he delayed it on finding "the urgency of the developing political situation in the mid Eighties made it too difficult to work on such a sustained narrative." Instead he wrote the multi layered States of Emergency, possibly his most technically complex work. When he did return to An Act of Terror, the last pages were written while watching Mandela's release on television.
At the close of A Dry White Season, which was also banned, the narrator asks himself why he has written down the entire tragic story of his dead friend Ben Du Toit, an Afrikaner school teacher whose life is destroyed by helping the school gardener investigate his son's murder. "Then why did I go ahead by writing it all down here? ... Perhaps all one can really hope for, all I am entitled to, is no more than this to write it down. To report what I know. So that it will not be possible for any man ever to say again I knew not/zing about it." It also testifies to Brink's determination that everyone knows the truth about the South Africa in which the men and women of his powerful fictions live.
