South Africa, 1963: “Somehow We Survive by Dennis Brutus
Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) is perhaps most well-known for getting South Africa banned from the Olympic Games—a fact which did not endear him to the Apartheid government of the time. A passionate anti-apartheid campaigner, Brutus was imprisoned on Robben Island, in a cell next to Nelson Mandela, for 18 months from 1961 through 1963. He wrote the poem below during this time, and it was later published in his first collection: Sirens, Knuckles, Boots. The book received the Mbari Poetry Prize, but Brutus rejected it on the ground that the prize was only for black authors—he was considered “colored,” but he considered racial exclusivity of any kind to be wrong.
Somehow We Survive
By Dennis Brutus
Somehow we survive and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither. Investigating searchlights rake our naked, unprotected contours; over our heads the monolithic decalogue of fascist prohibition glowers and teeters for a catastrophic fall; boots club the peeling door. But somehow we survive severance, deprivation, loss. Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark hissing their menace to our lives, most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror, rendered unlovely and unlovable; sundered are we and all our passionate surrender but somehow tenderness survives.
Comment
For the vocabularically challenged among us, the word “Decalogue” refers to the Ten Commandments given to Moses. I had to look it up too. It is a fascinating image, though, likely referring to the Apartheid government effectively making itself the ultimate authority. During the time that Brutus wrote this poem, South Africa was a highly segregated, violent, oppressive place for its black majority population, and many, like Brutus, were persecuted for their race. Nonetheless, even as Brutus presents the situation in all its grim, stark, scarred reality, he concludes with a single hope: “somehow tenderness survives.” Having been seriously wounded by a gunshot directly prior to his imprisonment, Brutus had undergone many trials at the hands of the government, but even in the darkest of places he can find a glimmer of light in the fact that as long as they can find tenderness, humans can survive.
Sources
The Poem – Source: Uhuru’s Fire: African Literature East to South
Dennis Brutus – Biography and Poetic Analysis
Excellent overview of Brutus’s life from The Guardian’s obituary
