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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberd.

It's a rhetorical question, sir, but where would we need without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today, you know, I often say that I'm honored, but today I really am honored.

The man with me, South African Brayton-Breatenbach,

is an internationally known writer, political activist, and dissident.

He came, in a sense, to the world's attention in Paris as a painter and poet.

He'd left South Africa at around 20 years old and painted his first paintings, wrote a book of poetry, book of prose poems. They won awards in South Africa. He attempted to return with the woman that he'd married, a Vietnamese woman. He was not allowed

to return to South Africa because of impurity, racial impurity, crossing the line. While they continued

to award his books with the highest prizes.

You wrote in Afrikaans.

Yes.

What is that?

Do you mean the language?

The language.

Well, I probably already knew at a time when I grew up and when I wrote that I was working in quite a unique tongue that in many ways is a kind of expression, the sedimentation of several centuries of hybridization, mixing of cultures, mixing of experiences that took place in a country.

But of course, at a time when I started writing in Afrika, it was still very much considered officially as

being the language of the master, a language of, they said then, of Dutch origin.

...