SOURCE: "Breyten Breytenbach's Prison Literature," in The Centennial Review, Vol. 30, No. 2, Spring 1986, pp. 304-13.

In the following essay, Roberts discusses Mouroir and The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, both of which Breytenbach wrote during his prison term in South Africa.

It has been said that each of us can remain mentally faithful to only one landscape, usually that of our childhood and youth. This fidelity is strongly evident in writers-in-exile, many of whom seem compelled to recreate endlessly the lost loved land—however hostile their feelings might be to the regimes of their native countries. We think immediately of Joyce, Solsenitzyn, or Milan Kundera, and of South Africans like Dan Jacobson and Breyten Breytenbach.

Breytenbach has experienced several kinds or degrees of exile. He left South Africa voluntarily in 1961 and established himself in Paris as a painter and poet with his Vietnamese-born wife Yolande. Under the racial...