Tenderness Survives

Dennis Brutus is dead.

But tenderness survives.

The South African poet and former political prisoner passed away last Saturday at the age of 85 leaving behind an earthly climate still in disarray.

Yet he left us his poetry and his example.

While trying to flee South African under its oppressive apartheid rule in the 1960s, Brutus nearly died from a gunshot wound as he waited for an ambulance that would take blacks.

Whether he waited against his will or not, perhaps our health care debate here in the United States would have taken a different tone had Americans with health insurance refused care unless those without insurance received theirs for free.

But tenderness survives.

Years after creating the South African Sports Association in protest against the white supremist sports association, he refused inclusion into the South Africa Sports Hall of Fame.

Brutus explained, “It is incompatible to have those who championed racist sport alongside its genuine victims. It’s time — indeed long past time — for sports truth, apologies, and reconciliation.”

Perhaps professional sports would be more enjoyable if professional atheletes would take fewer endorsement deals from corporations using countries that actively enslave their workers to make products cheaper?

But tenderness survives.

Being a teacher in Africa reared by South African teachers, Brutus saw first hand how the Global North dominated the Global South under man-made market theology.

Thus, he preferred that no deal come out of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, this past month.

“Better that there is no deal, so that ordinary citizens can make their choices and voices heard, against the marketing excesses for the rich allowing some to gorge themselves while others starve,” he wrote in an open letter.

But tenderness survives.

For his beliefs in human equality, Brutus was jailed in the same prison as Nelson Mandela in the 1960s.

At Robben Island, he wrote the poem “Somehow We Survive:”

“All our land is scarred with terror/rendered unlovely and unlovable/sundered are we and all our passionate surrender/but somehow tenderness survives.”

This is neither the last words of a great man nor the prayer of a dying world.

It’s a call to action from one who nurtured the good in otherwise complicated creatures.

In this New Year, let us be tender.

— Nathan Diebenow