Breyten’s words migrate home like birds with ash in their beaks

PÈRE LACHAISE, named after the confessor of Louis XIV, annually attracts more nosey parkers, glamour hunters and groupies, death ghouls, tourists and random visitors than any other cemetery on earth. And yet on Tuesday, it was probably the first time that Afrikaans was heard at a funeral service here. And again, Breyten Breytenbach was a pioneer, as in life, so also in death.

His daughter Daphnée concludes her lyrical French tribute with a few phrases in the “Creole language that was yours", the language in which he became “a magician of metaphors and images in a thousand colours". “Pappa, ek het jou lief. Ons het jou lief." These simple words, with a French accent that also paints my own daughter's Afrikaans in exotic tinges of colour, bring tears to my eyes.

And for the rest of the memorial service I can't for the death of me get my eyes dry again.

As an Afrikaans writer in France, with a French partner and a French daughter, I inevitably feel a strong connection to Breyten. He was the one who made me realise as a teenager that everything can be said in Afrikaans – and that you can keep saying it even if you live in another country. It's probably not Breyten's fault that in the end I also became a weglêhoender, but his words and actions made it possible for the first time to dream about an existence outside the cage, to maybe one day lay my eggs with a modest cluck beyond the backyard.

That is why it was necessary to attend his funeral, to metaphorically touch the master's feet (or at least the weathered red velskoene his daughter had placed on the coffin), also on behalf of all my medesterwendes (fellow dying) in the distant southern land who couldn't be there. All Afrikaans readers across the world who would have liked to say goodbye to our language's wizard of many names:

Panus, Kamiljoen, Woordfoël, Buiteblaf,
Lasarus, Bian Tong, die lawwe Grafblom Blom-vent
en die ander Afrika Fuifgat Bibberbek alias
... Beweborsie breytenbreytenbach.

I'm quoting because how else do you honour a formidable poet than with his own memorable words?

It takes two nights of sitting-sleep in a train to travel from my hamlet in the south of the country to Père Lachaise and back, two nights of reading his poems, with a day full of tears and laughter in between. Funerals are an emotional jumble, a seesaw of sad goodbyes and happy goodbyes. I am not the only one who has travelled far. I bump into old acquaintances and meet strangers who feel like friends. From everywhere we marched for a final tribute: The writer Anelia Heese from Berlin, journalist Raymond Willemse from Amsterdam, academic Yves T'Sjoen from Ghent, readers and admirers from Switzerland and elsewhere in Europe. Dominique Botha and her elderly mielieboer father spent the night on a plane from Cape Town and flew back the next day.

Quite a few South Africans who live or work in Paris came to briefly touch Yolande's hand (die klein klein hand tjie tjie tjie van sy wintervrou, to slightly transform BB's ode), or simply to express gratitude for the words that have fed us all for so many decades. Never before has Yolande looked so small and so fragile, and yet also like steel inside, with a soft smile for every stranger who came to express sympathy.

Late at night I sit exhausted on the train, like a child who is all played out after a whole day's seesawing, and leaf through the volume I'd brought with me, the last one he had signed for me: Vyf-en-veertig skemeraandsange uit die eenbeendanser se werkruimte (Forty-five twilight songs from the one-legged dancer's workspace). I don't know where I'm going to find the words to capture this experience. Then my eye falls on the poem “reisende" (travelling) and I see myself.

afgebeeld in die treinvenster
deur 'n herfslandskap van diep aarde
en swaar hemel –
hoe honger ek na buite na binne kyk.

(depicted in the train window
through an autumn landscape of deep earth
and heavy sky –
how hungry I am looking out looking in.)

And I realise this is where I'm going to find the words; in Lasarus' poems. Where else?

Wanneer jy uitasem genoeg is
op pad van nêrens na nêrens
gaan staan jy stil om te luister
hoe gebeur die êrens van skrywe
in die stof

(When you are enough out of breath
on the way from nowhere to nowhere
you stop to listen
how the somewhere of writing happens
in the dust)

From the moment we sat down in the crematorium hall and the coffin was carried in, suddenly there right in front of me, disturbingly close, my thoughts fluttered like escaped birds around BB's words. Many of my friends are long dead, he wrote, they knock on the coffin lids and they don't like moles. Perhaps it is a consolation that his body will not lie in that coffin for long, that he will soon be freed from moles and worms, that there will be nothing more of him than a pile of ash. That's how I try to comfort myself.

The first part of the ceremony is conducted by two Zen Buddhist monks. Many of those present do not understand French, so the mumbled incantations of the bald-headed monks, which no one in the hall is likely to understand, become a welcome equaliser. It gives us an opportunity to think about the deceased, a time of quiet meditation that was perhaps foreseen 60 years ago. In that ground-breaking first volume of his, the large lime green square which announced at first glance that it was a new kind of thing, the “thin man in the green sweater" was already bringing flowers to Buddha.  

(ek) asem in (ek) asem
uit (ek) asem 'n alles
in
        en
uit

(I) breathe in (I) breathe
out (I) breathe an all
in
       and
out 

After the silence, Daphnée talks about the man of multiple identities, but who to her was always just her father. He wanted her to refrain from becoming attached to his native land; he advised her to give her heart to another part of the world, “because here we are painted with the colour of disappearance". Forgive me, Daddy, she says, but she and her two sons, Bokkie-Zoeloe-Grootman and Boeddha-Janneman, are not going to listen. “We are going to rejoice in the light of the rainbow land, even if it blinds us." Again and again, over and over, as long as he continues to guide their steps.

George Lory, who spent decades translating Breyten's books from Afrikaans to French, also refers in his moving tribute to his friend's fascination with birds, to all the birds that fly through his poems, and to his Spanish home, Can Ocells, which means “place of the birds" in Catalan. He ends with Breyten's beloved poem about a tourterelle (turtle dove), and when he turned from French to Afrikaans to read the first lines, I wasn't the only one in the hall crying shamelessly:

Allerliefste, ek stuur vir jou 'n rooiborsduif
want niemand sal 'n boodskap wat rooi is skiet nie ...

(Dearest, I am sending you a red-breasted pigeon
for no one will shoot a message that is red ...)

But the highlight for me, and perhaps for most of us, was an animated video from Diek Grobler, in which Breyten's unmistakable voice recites his poem about his father's large bôrdienghuis in Wellington:

vriende, medesterwendes,
moenie huiwer nie; nou hang die lewe
nog soos vlees om ons lywe
maar die dood beskaam nie ...

(friends, fellow dying,
don't hesitate; now life hangs
still like flesh around our bodies
but death does not shame ...)

To hear that Boland accent on a gray rainy day in the heart of Paris while I focus on red velskoene on a coffin in Père Lachaise, so verdrietbek verdwaal tussen blinde wegkommers en weemoedige binnelinge (so sad-mouth lost among blind away-getters and melancholic insidelings), is an experience that I cannot truly articulate.

And whatever I might say about it, he would say better.

After everyone in the hall has had a chance to walk around the coffin and lay a flower or a leaf, it is carried away, up a staircase to the glittering blue walls and blue stained-glass windows of the crematorium's dome, as if taken to man-made blue heavens. And then the dome echoes with Johannes Kerkorrel singing Breyten's prayer “Aa mens", a delightful humanistic version of “Our Father" which is exactly right for the moment.

Outside on the steps of the crematorium I say a quick goodbye, skulking in the crowd, because my heart hangs heavy in my chest and I need silence to process all these emotions. But Dominique Botha surprises me by pressing a stone into my hand. It's the most beautiful, sweetest gift, a rough piece of rock that she found on a high peak of the Drakensberg and carried with her, because we know that Breyten was also a collector of stones.

So soos mens in 'n ander taal leef
om nie te weet jy gaan dood nie:
o, soos ek in Afrika met pampoentyd versoen
'n klip op sou tel teen die tyd, om so
gewapen die dood tegemoet te gaan

(So like living in another language
not knowing you're going to die:
oh, like I reconcile with pumpkin time in Africa
a stone would pick up against time, so
armed to meet up with death)

A few hours later I sit with my stone in the train and find comfort in Breyten's words, like so many times before and like so many times still to come, I'm sure of that. It was a special day.

nog 'n asemstoot gewen
teen die onsedelike
oneindigheid
van nie hier wees nie.

(another breath won
against the immoral
infinity
of not being here.)

Just before the rhythm of the train lulls me to sleep, I read the poem entitled “instruksies" (instructions):

Wanneer ek die dag nie meer daar is nie
... onthou om vir Maandag na die Dinsdag
van die vorige week te laat kom
sodat ritmes erken en eerbiedig mag word,
onthou ook om die kinders aan die lag te kry
veral net voor slapenstyd.

(When I am no longer there one day
... remember to have Monday come after
the Tuesday of the week before
so that rhythms may be recognised and respected,
also remember to make the children laugh
especially just before bedtime.)

I fall asleep with a smile. You've done your part, Brother B, now it's the turn of us medesterwendes to arrange the days of the week and make the children laugh.

For a while, at least.

♦ VWB ♦

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