Apartheid and Exile in the Poetry of Dennis Brutus

Abstract

Brutus lived and wrote his poetry when apartheid thrived in South Africa. This means he was writing either as an exile or sometime as a prisoner.  These circumstances greatly influenced his poetry and continued to serve as the central theme of his message. Although he remained resilient in his unwavering hope for freedom, he advocated for peaceful resolution of the crisis, he never wanted bloodshed. Even after his death; December 26, 2009, people fondly remember him as a poet who until the end wrote about and fostered peace. Brutus' recollection of his exile and prison experiences perpetrated by the apartheid regime in South Africa serves as a good entry point into the world of his poetic exploits. Many Critics looked at metaphor, imagery, and other qualities of the language of modernist poetry in Africa apart from both a work's historical setting and any detailed biographical information that might be available about the author. This study, however, is more historically or philosophically inclined, it sought to place African poetry into a larger historical and theoretical context. The research emphasized historical development by relating changing styles of the literary representation of reality by the selected poet. The study also observes that the substantial emotions depicted or aroused by Brutus are universal human feelings symbolized by the work rather than mere copying of a foreign literary tradition, or a mere expression of personal sentiments.