BRUTUS, DENNIS

born Nov. 28, 1924, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia [now Harare, Zimbabwe] Brutus, 1984 in full Dennis Vincent Brutus poet whose works centre on his sufferings and those of his fellow blacks in South Africa. For 14 years Brutus taught English and Afrikaans in South Africa. His outspoken protests against racial discrimination (apartheid) resulted in an 18-month term in prison, as well as his being banned from teaching, writing, publishing, attending social or political meetings, and pursuing studies in law at the University of the Witwatersrand. After leaving South Africa in 1966 with a Rhodesian passport, Brutus made his home in England and then taught at the University of Denver (Colorado, U.S.). In 1971 he became professor of African literature at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill. In 1983, after engaging in a protracted legal struggle, he won the right to stay in the United States as a political refugee. Over the years Brutus became involved in a series of antiapartheid and related activities. Brutus' first collection of poetry, Sirens, Knuckles and Boots (1963), was published in Nigeria while he was in prison. His verse, while political in nature, is highly developed and restrained: . . . all our land is scarred with terror / rendered unlovely and unlovable; / sundered are we and all our passionate surrender / but somehow tenderness survives (from Somehow We Survive). Even in Letters to Martha and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968), which records his experiences of misery and loneliness as a political prisoner, Brutus exhibits a restrained artistic control and combines tenderness with anger. His later works include A Simple Lust (1973), China Poems (1975), Stubborn Hope (1978), Salutes and Censures (1982), and Airs and Tributes (1989).