South African writers often complain of South Africa as a place of confinement. J.M. Coetzee said South African literature is “literature in bondage,” “less than fully human,” “the kind of literature you’d expect someone to write from prison.”
The poet Breyten Breytenbach, when wrongfully incarcerated in actual prison, imagined his poems as birds that could fly out of the cage, existing freely in a way he couldn’t. Through his poems his thoughts could take flight while his body was held captive.
In one of his poems he writes: “I’m sending you red-breasted dove, because no one will shoot a message that is red.” He released his words from his prison window, on wings and feathers, flying out of physical confinement to reach their intended recipients.
But how do you escape the prison of your own mind? The shackles of self-censorship? When you are faced with your own barriers and restraints: the unexamined life, the stones unturned, the blind dissociation.
I’m standing in a new place, but it has become less physical and more a state of mind. A chance to recreate my interior landscape, resisting the ingrained paths of thinking, of being the same, staying the same. A place I don’t know, a place of uncertainty and uncharted terrain, a place where red-breasted messages can find me.