ABSTRACT
Mention Pasternak and everybody will recall the anthracite-eyed performance of Omar Sharif in Dr Zhivago. Jean-Paul Sartre realizes that the power-holders may at times exploit the writer and use his creativity for their own nefarious purposes. Dennis Brutus falls under the statutory classification, ‘coloured’, in South Africa. Brutus recovered and spent two years on Robben Island. The poet himself conceives of a good poem as one in which ‘we are conscious of a rich variegated experience which sums up the whole in a complex intellectually satisfying emotion’. Incarceration inevitably involves a reorientation in the life patterns of the individual. Reading through gaol diaries one cannot but have a feeling that a mild epidemic of Bible-philia and conversion-phobia reigns supreme in Western prisons.
