Dennis Brutus died in his sleep on December 26, 2009 at the age of 85, in Cape Town, South Africa. Throughout his life Dennis moved with purpose, honesty and gentleness. He willingly shared his ideas and gave freely of his talents to all who were open to hear him. He eptimozed collaboration. He lived with his "eyes wide-open."
In the YouTube excerpts below Dennis talks about his political activism, time in prison, the ANC, recent developments in African society, his work as an organizer, his thoughts on his poetry, and on reparation, international loans, and extractive industries.
When Nelson Mandala was freed from prison Dennis was teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. He wrote this poem to commemorate Mandala's return to being able to work on behalf of his people.
For Nelson Mandala
Yes, Mandela, some of us
we admit embarrassedly
wept to see you step free
so erectly, so elegantly
shrug off the prisoned years
a blanket cobwebbed of pain and grime;
behind, the island's seasand,
harsh, white and treacherous
ahead, jagged rocks
bladed crevices of racism and deceit
in the salt island air
you swung your hammer grimly stoic
facing the dim path of interminable years,
now, vision blurred with tears
we see you step out to our salutes
bearing our burden of hopes and fears
and impress your radiance
on the grey morning air.
Dennis Brutus has been referred to as one of South Africa's best poets, but most definitely the title of the poet of liberation most defines his life and work. Here he relates his love for his native country, the pain of exile and longing for its liberation.
Sequence for South Africa
1.
Golden oaks and jacarandas
flowering:
exquisite images
to wrench my heart.
2.
Each day, each hour
is not painful,
exile is not amputation,
there is no bleeding wound
no torn flesh and severed nerves;
the secret is clamping down
holding the lid of awareness tight shut—
sealing in the acrid searing stench
that scalds the eyes,
swallows up the breath
and fixes the brain in a wail—
until some thoughtless questioner
pries the sealed lid loose;
I can exclude awareness of exile
until someone calls me one.
3.
The agony returns;
after a crisis, delirium,
surcease and aftermath;
my heart knows an exhausted calm,
catharsis brings forgetfulness
but
with recovery, resilience
the agony returns.
4.
At night
to put myself to sleep
I play alphabet games
but something reminds me of you
and I cry out
and am wakened.
5.
I have been bedded
in London and Paris
Amsterdam and Rotterdam,
in Munich and Frankfort
Warsaw and Rome—
and still my heart cries out for home!
6.
Exile
is the reproach
of beauty
in a foreign landscape,
vaguely familiar
because it echoes
remembered beauty.
1975
In the poem below Dennis Brutus relates an incident that occurred in Sharpeville near Johannesburg on March 21, 1960, when South African policed opened fire, killing 69 civilians. Demonstrators were protesting the establishment of apartheid pass laws which restricted movement of non-whites. In addition to those killed, 176 were wounded with 63 people shot in the back. Over 13,000 were jailed. Dennis often referred to this event as radicalizing him to act on behalf of the poor.
Sharpeville
Remember Sharpeville
bullet-in-the-back day
Because it epitomized oppression
and the nature of society
more clearly than anything else;
it was the classic event
We are going to say to the world: There’s too much of profit, too much of greed, too much of suffering by the poor...
I met Dennis in Chicago through a close friend. I had just finished reading his first collection of poems, Sirens, Knucles, Boots. Dennis came to the U.S. in-exile from South Africa and taught in several U.S. colleges and universities throughout his stay. He became one of the most visible symbols of anti-apartheid. At the time the Reagan administration waged what seemed to many of Dennis' friends a "war" to deny him his status as a political refugee in order to return him to South Africa.
Ironically today, many know Dennis for the work he did for social justice and global peace. However, his story started in the 1950s. Though known as a poet who advocated for the poor of his country, Dennis assumed a pseudonym, A. de Bruin (meaning "a brown" in Afrikanns) and wrote a sports column that dealt with issues of race and sports. Consequently, he was banned from writing. While attempting to flee from police custody in 1963 he was shoot and almost lost his life. Dennis was imprisoned in the notorious Robben Island prison for eighteen months. He broke rocks next to Nelson Mandela for raising his voice and pen against the injustice of his country's racial policies.
Dennis Brutus
There Will Come a Time
There will come a time we believe
When the shape of the planet
and the divisions of the land
Will be less important;
We will be caught in a glow of friendship
a red star of hope
will illuminate our lives
A star of hope
A star of joy
A star of freedom
I think we need to keep a running brainstorm of ideas for the Playback page and what we think needs to be included when folks come to put in their own stories or contribute to those already there.
Draft Page as it now Exists
These are some few comments I remember from yesterday's conversation:
Questions for us to Consider as we move forward with Seattle Center School:
1. Do we have students have a closed (unseen) working site?
2.
What are come categories that we want people to include in their Playback contribution--How can we make putting this information easy when they come to the site?
1. Relating the story
2. Including pictures, documents, videos
3. Commenting on story (or blogging page)
4. Linking to other sites or resources
Since winning the award, Ms. Ngo has continued her efforts on behalf of the Asian refugee community in Seattle. Due to welfare reform, most of her quilting women sought full-time jobs, and last year, the group disbanded, closing up their little shop. Ms. Ngo would now like to find funding to start a plant nursery staffed by some of these women, which would build on the successful landscaping business she created for the men. "I want to use my energy to help these people recover from their depression, and show them that they can be productive, can live a life. Right now, we are just surviving in this country." She feels financial independence is crucial to these refugees' recovery. "If you are financially in such bad shape," she says, "the mental health recovery part is not possible. You have to have food on the table for the family, and live in a decent neighborhood, where you don't have to witness drugs and killing and car wrecking every day." Ms. Ngo is also concerned about the fate of the children of Cambodian refugees growing up in the United States. "Nine out of ten Cambodian families have children who are in gangs or in jail," she says sadly.
Ms. Ngo also plans to finish writing her memoirs. "I want to write the story of my war experience and share it with the younger generation of my family members, because they didn't go through the war. Because in the Western world here, people don't appreciate what they have. They just want more, and I would like my nieces and nephews to know it's not necessary, because if you've had the kind of experiences I've had, you'd see that the things around here are just extra."
To Ly-Sieng Ngo, leadership is all about caring. "If I don't do what seems right, I can't sleep well at night," she admits. She has found her happiness serving the same population that were her servants as a child back in Cambodia. "You know," she says, "people don't need a special skill, or to go to a special school, to learn how to lead. You can do a lot of things by just being who you are. When you care about other people, what goes around comes around. When you help other people recover, other people help you recover, too — and then we can be productive members of society, and contribute to make society better for the next generation."
Then a unique opportunity presented itself. Inside Group Health Hospital was a small retail space designated to support minority and women's businesses. The space was becoming available, and needed a tenant. "Everything just happened at the right time," Ms. Ngo says. "The store was available with very little rent, and my women had enough quilts to sell. So we open the store, and we sold quilts, and then we were on the front page of The Seattle Times! And we sold our quilts like hot cookies!" she finishes with a laugh. "It was like a miracle."
At the same time, Ms. Ngo was moving ahead on other fronts as well. She trained and evaluated new interpreters. She organized a volunteer network to assist people in need of preventive health care. In the face of the AIDS epidemic, she developed and conducted AIDS education workshops for Cambodian men and their wives. At one point, she visited China to study herbal medicine with the express purpose of providing extra care to patients with AIDS. Ms. Ngo's combination of caring and expertise allowed her to promote appropriate western health care practices among Asian patients without undermining their own health beliefs or cultural practices.
In 1984, Ms. Ngo returned to school for training as a community health advocate. in a year she earned her certificate of completion, and began advocating for the rights of individual patients and for quality patient care. She addressed conferences and meetings of American medical providers, speaking about Cambodian culture and appropriate use of interpreters. She provided individual and family health education activities in areas such as nutrition, family planning, and prenatal care. She assisted with workshops: a typical workshop, taught by health providers from a clinic, helped parents to provide home care for their children's minor problems, and to recognize when their children needed further medical attention. These activities helped sensitize the two communities — providers and patients — to cultural differences, and built an atmosphere of trust between them.
In 1988, Ms. Ngo went back to school again, obtaining a childbirth educator training certificate. She began childbirth education classes for refugee mothers-to-be, and eventually coached hundreds of women in labor over a 10-year period. In 1989, she took on an additional part-time job as a mental health interpreter, helping prepare state evaluations for a local Seattle psychiatrist.
For all these efforts, in 1994 Ly-Sieng Ngo was nominated for, and received, the Robert Wood Johnson Community Health Leadership Award. "It changed my life entirely," Ms. Ngo says of the award and the $100,000 stipend that came with it. She used the money to pay the salary of a co-worker to do with Cambodian men what she herself had done with the women — create a support group that would provide not just healing, but a livelihood. Their first project was a furniture manufacturing co-op. But after a short while, the men themselves, most of them farmers in Cambodia, asked Ms. Ngo if she could help them set up a landscaping business. She turned to the staff of the Community Health Leadership Program (CHLP) for help. "They were very supportive and well-organized," Ms. Ngo says. "They had expertise in setting up a business, and could connect us with people who could help us." The men began by mowing the lawns of Ms. Ngo's clinic co-workers, and from there, by word of mouth, their client list grew. The business is now booming, providing the men with increased self-esteem as they can now take pride in supporting their families, and come to feel secure in their financial futures.
Another result of the award was that Ms. Ngo found herself the object of media attention. "When I came back from the award ceremony in Washington, D.C., reporters came to the clinic to interview me, and they put me on the front page the next day!" she remembers. "After that, people kept calling to find out about what I do, ask for advice, ask about my experiences — and it still continues." She also appreciated the opportunity to exchange ideas with other CHLP award winners at the program's annual retreats. "Each time I come back from the retreats," she says, "it boosts me up to another level of recovery."
