Volume 46, Number 14 · September 23, 1999
Against the South African Grain
By J.M. Coetzee
Dog Heart: A Memoir
by Breyten Breytenbach
Harcourt Brace, 197 pp., $22.00
Breyten Breytenbach first came to public attention when, as a young poet and painter living in Paris, he sought permission from the South African authorities to bring his Vietnamese-born wife home on a visit and was informed that as a couple they would not be welcome. The embarrassment of this cause célèbre persuaded the authorities, in 1973, to relent and issue lim-ited visas. In Cape Town Breytenbach addressed a literary symposium. 'We [Afrikaners],' he said, 'are a bastard people with a bastard language. Our nature is one of bastardy. It is good and beautiful thus…. [But] like all bastards—uncertain of their identity—we began to adhere to the concept of purity. That is apartheid. Apartheid is the law of the bastard.'
Review, 3474 words
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