| Abstract: |
This paper focuses on the depiction of trauma, brutalisation and the systematic erosion of human dignity in Dennis Brutus’s poetry collection, Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968). A reading avowing that shows imprisonment with its horrors as calculated
machinery exploited by the apartheid regime to humiliate the black political detainees, its objectives include an examination of two poems (‘Letters to Martha 5 and 18’) selected from the said poetry collection to probe into how the poet utilises an epistolary format and a friendly and
unceremonious idiom to articulate an architecture of dejection, underscoring mental agony and hopelessness of detainees. It verifies violence and inhumanity of warders in addition to the apprehensions generated by the inhabitable prison cells and its debasing surroundings, echoed through expressions “walls of bleak hostility” and “arcs and fluorescence”. Again, it verifies how Brutus underlines the humiliation of human race by the deployment of scenes of sexual distortion, mental breakdown as well as the reduction of human bodies to inorganic entities, thereby depicting the “debased state of mind” generate by acute repression. Findings confirm that Letters to Martha remains a forceful, imaginative protest directed against the debasing machinery of apartheid.
Lastly, the study of these poems underscores the perception that poetry or literature can give evidence to political horror and systemic brutality, thereby defending human identity, dignity and existence in the confrontation of man’s inhumanity against man. |
