Andre Brink: A Fork in the Road

Posted on | April 21, 2010 | No Comments

Andre Brink reads from his memoir tomorrow as part of the season of guest speakers at the Newcastle Centre for Literary Arts.

‘It started with a passionate love affair with Jeanne d’Arc when I was not yet fourteen,’ writes Andre Brink, the South African novelist, scholar, and opponent of apartheid, of his Francophilia—or more precisely his love affair with Paris—in his new memoir A Fork in the Road. That passion took the young Brink to Paris (the first time as a man, rather than boy) in October 1959, in time for the new academic year of the Sorbonne, arriving in the city ‘like a castaway on a distant beach… curious and intimidated, driven by all kinds of urges and desires to which I could not yet assign a name.’

(Andre Brink’s wife, Karina Brink, reading from the book)

It was, in fact, like ‘coming home’—although as he points out, it wasn’t that home ‘was in every respect a happy or a reassuring place’. The Algerian war, a whirlwind marriage to Estelle, and the sensations ‘of living on borrowed time, being strangers in a world that was not-quite-real… turned even moments of almost sublime beauty, discovery or happiness into glimpses of mortality, of absurdity.’ Importantly for Brink the writer, it meant real experience rather than a head stuck in books: ‘I no longer needed to read Camus, or Sartre for that matter… to understand what existentialism was all about: I was living it every waking and sleeping moment of my life.’

However, it was in London, at the Tate Gallery in August 1960, not Paris, where the art of Picasso changed Brink forever—into the author of eighteen novels, two collections of essays, editor of a South African literature reader, and this autobiography, and one of the 20^th century’s most committed writers against racism. The encounter with Picasso’s work was ‘one of the most intense and profound emotional experiences of my life… a spiritual tsunami’. The experience remains for Brink ‘along with only a very small handful of memories, a moment of radical change. I could never write again in the way I’d done before. I could never be again as I’d been before.’

Brink knew that his time in Paris would mark his writing. Or as he says, ‘more than “mark”: it would definitively decide whether I was really going to be a writer as I’d so foolhardily resolved when I was nine, or not at all. And within two months I’d started writing in a different key altogether.’ Back in Paris Brink wrote urgently ‘day and night’ because ‘for the first time I really knew that writers are not made by the stories that they carry within them, their themes or ideas or beliefs or whatever, but by their intimate relationship with language. And this was my exuberant and defiant and adventurous and terribly intimate engagement with the angel of language.’ It is only when this adventure stops, Brink writes, ‘if the adventure were to go flat, then very quietly and very resolutely, like the lover in the wonderful cummings poem, petal by petal my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, and I will cease to be.’

Besides art—or rather, alongside art—violence has been a major provocateur in Brink’s life and writing. The autobiography opens with the chapter ‘Violent Villages’ and bloodshed is spilt at critical forks in the road, where Brink has then chosen his path. It is the juxtaposition of sitting in the Luxembourg Gardens with a copy of Comte’s Philosophie Positive on his lap while his thoughts were far away in South Africa and the Sharpeville massacre that Brink draws on to tell the story of how and when he chose to act against apartheid, to return, to write opposing the injustice. As he says of Sharpeville: ‘Yes. This is it. Of course. This is what we have really been waiting for… Nothing until that disastrous moment, had demonstrated with such conviction, such abandon, such staggering arrogance’ his country’s ‘total commitment to racism’.

But it is also the everyday brutality, the excess, that Brink identifies with his own upbringing in his country: ‘Violent encounters occur in all societies: but in South Africa there almost invariably appears to have been an added edge to it, a fortuitous surplus of violence.’ He retells the story of a friend and a posse of police, searching for cattle rustlers who had wrecked the friend’s father’s farm, who came across a black farm worker who happened to be walking along the street as the posse reached the height of their anger and frustration. ‘He was shot in both legs and fell down. At point blank range he was then given a shot in the back, which shattered his spine. Then came the supplement, as they fell on him and kicked and beat him to a pulp.’ Back at the police cells, the boy was beaten at intermittent intervals. Miraculously, he survived. Brink’s father, the sitting magistrate on the case when it came to court, found the boy not guilty.

From Paris and the protests of 1968 Brink, drawing on thinkers and writer such as Herbert Marcuse and Ortega y Gasset, identifies the impact of Western consumer lifestyle as the pivot around which protest as resistance has now turned; so that it is no longer only generational, but existential—and is coloured by a wilder, convulsive violence: protest not for revolution but protest that is desperate, its opposition everywhere already institutionalised. As Brink writes, ‘the positive creative influence of the individual hardly exists any longer: throughout his university education the student is required to conform; the labourer no longer has any relation with the product he helps to produce.’ For Brink, this danger, ‘already signalled so clearly by Marx, has become a strangling reality.’

Perhaps predictably, but not any less revelatory for it, the relationship between writing and violence, the self, life and death, permeates the book. Personal and intimate violence has played a formative role in the writer Brink has become. His early relationship with the Afrikaans poet Ingrid Jonker is typical of this: their tempestuous and self-destructive relationship that lasted for two years across his time in South Africa and Paris, finally ending after Ingrid committed suicide in July 1965, by walking into the sea.

‘Ingrid, who could swim like an angelfish…! Her body,’ says Brink, ‘as she had predicted in poems written since before her sixteenth birthday, and reiterated in any recent letters and telephone calls to friends, diary entries, jottings on old scraps of paper, had been found “washed ashore in weeds and grass”.’ Ingrid Jonker was then a heretic in its original sense, or, as Brink quotes the writer Monique Zerder-Chardovoire to articulate the meaning:

Heresy comes from the Greek word meaning choice: for heresy to exist, there should be an ideology, a faith, to which a community adheres, and inside this community there must also be people who distance themselves, no longer accepting the received truths, in order to choose for themselves.

Ingrid continued to choose for herself, to make her way back to a particular fork in the road which, regardless of all other choices, would continue to exist, would always exist for her, until she, finally, took it. With the detail of Ingrid’s predictions, written in letters, diary entries, jottings on old scraps of paper—wherever she could write her choice for herself—it is clear that Brink’s use of the concept of the fork in the road and the heretic as someone who chooses at that fork, is an architecture which frames the book, not only to aid the reader to think through the relationship between protest and the ideologies of apartheid or capitalism; not only to examine the techniques and life choices of a writer; but also for what Roman Krznaric calls more broadly the ‘art of living’—or in Brink’s words, being: the fork that is taken so that ‘I could never be again as I’d been before’. What Brink’s own story articulates is that against this background of life, living, art, violence, opposition, protest and writing:

…our fork in the road, the traditional either/or is replaced with an incomparably more complex notion of both/and.

Both this life, this death, and… Along all these forks, all these choices, Brink’s life, his writing and his adventure with language, protests strongly against the Western capitalist imposition that our overcrowded world ‘simply no longer has any space left for the individual’ (I wonder what Brink thinks of the book also being released on the Kindle). Through his writing, through the decision to, when faced with a fork in the road, to just ‘take it. What the hell’ Brink has proven himself as both a writer, and an individual.

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