Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:
I ONCE ASKED Breyten Breytenbach, the exiled South African poet and painter, why, in his opinion, after the fiasco of his clandestine return to his homeland in 1975 (traveling incognito as a would-be revolutionary organizer), the calamity of his arrest (his cover having likely been blown before he even entered the country, such that not only was he arrested but virtually everyone he’d contacted was arrested as well), the debacle of his trial (his appalling, groveling breakdown, his operatic recantations and expressions of contrition, all to no avail), after his being sentenced to nine years’ hard time in the country’s notorious penal system, why, I asked him, why had the authorities who allowed him to go on writing in prison nevertheless forbidden him to paint?
At the time, we were sitting in Breytenbach’s airy, light-drenched studio, in Paris. (He had been released in 1982, a year and a half short of the completion of his nine-year term, and had immediately returned to his Paris exile.) We had been looking through a life’s worth of canvases, dazzlingly colorful paintings with surreal images by turns lyrical and profoundly unsettling. He paused for a moment to think about the question, then said, “They weren’t stupid. I think they must have realized that for me an empty canvas would have been an open field of freedom—and they weren’t going to allow me that.”
more here.
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