CHRIS THURMAN: Harking back to Struggle days brings today’s struggles into focus
THE artwork this week is a simple sketch on a book cover. The book is Epitaphs and Dreams: Poems to Remember the Struggle by Patrick FitzGerald; the picture is a portrait of the author by Bruce Patterson.FitzGerald is caught in a characteristic pose: black beret, red scarf, eyes looking down (presumably at the text of a poem he is reading for an audience), finger pointed skywards (emphasising a point, but not stridently — he might equally be punctuating a sentence).In a YouTube clip posted a few weeks ago to market the collection, FitzGerald appears in similar guise, with a couple of notable exceptions. He wears glasses. The black facial hair, neatly groomed in Patterson’s sketch, has become grey and bushy.The differences marking the passage of time between these portraits of the artist as younger and older man gesture at the fundamental challenge posed by FitzGerald’s collection of poems: reconciling then and now.In the 1980s, the poet was a revolutionary, an anti-apartheid activis...
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