Memory of Birds In Time Of Revolution: Essays

by Breyten Breytenbach

The Memory of Birds in Time Revolutions is a collection of searching new essays by the acclaimed author of Returen to Paradise and True Confessions of an Albion Terrorist. Essaying his homeland, Africa, at the end of the twentieth century, Breyten Breytenbach offers penetrating insights on a variety of the release of Nelson Mandela from prison ("Nelson Mandela is Free"); the early days of Mandela's presidency, and its failures (the controversial "Open Letter to Nelson Mandela"); the geography of the writer's imagination ("Tortoise Steps"); death as the mother of beauty ("Cadavre Exquis"); the true meaning of reconciliation and reform after apartheid ("Fragments from a Growing Awareness of Unfinished Truths"); and much more.

169 pages, Hardcover

Published January 31, 1996

About the author

Breyten Breytenbach was a South African writer, poet, and painter. He became internationally well-known as a dissident poet and vocal critic of South Africa under apartheid, and as a political prisoner of the National Party-led South African Government. He is also known as a founding member of the Sestigers, a dissident literary movement, and was one of the most important living poets in Afrikaans literature.

Reviews

[Rana Rafeh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Breytenbach, an exiled Afrikaner poet, navigates multiple aspects of existence- both as an atomic individual and as part of a movement bigger than one’s self. Certain essays were profound; others were presumptuous and obnoxious. For that very reason, I wouldn’t recommend the book as a whole, but I do believe it is in the interest of those who were shaken by Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is not a Luxury” to read his essay titled “ To the Invisible Guests”