Ingrid Jonker. Louise Viljoen

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СКАЧАТЬ of this poem have a particular resonance in Ingrid Jonker’s life. Valkenburg is the psychiatric hospital to which her mother was committed after a breakdown; Gordon’s Bay is the seaside town where she spent part of her youth with her mother, grandmother and sister. The speaker begins by referring to the fact that she is confined in ‘this Valkenburg’ and that she escapes from this space associated with mental illness by returning to her memories of Gordon’s Bay. Although biographical information suggests that Ingrid remembered Gordon’s Bay as a place where she felt happy and secure despite her family’s poverty, the poem implies that this space already contains the germ of future unhappiness, isolation and death. When the speaker thinks herself back in Gordon’s Bay, the images of herself that come up are those of someone carving swastikas in a tree-trunk, a lonely dog on the beach, a hungry seagull and a god who creates in order to ‘fulfil’ pain. The poem’s final lines present yet another image that confirms the sombre content of the childhood paradise, that of the speaker’s corpse washed up on the beach in all the places she had visited in the past. These lines are among the best-known and most resonant in Afrikaans literature, because of the eerie precision with which they predicted Ingrid Jonker’s suicide by drowning. Many have said that they constituted a prophecy which she could not escape fulfilling. In his review of the volume, Rob Antonissen wrote that he found much of the volume ‘facile’, but that the poems also had a ‘curt matter-of-factness’ which provokes the reader. This is certainly true of the poem ‘Ontvlugting’, which presents us with the first of a series of disturbing images of the self in the volume, that of the lonely dog, the hungry gull, the capricious creator, the washed-up corpse.

      Even at this early stage many of the poems in the volume reflect on love’s disillusions rather than its joys, love’s failure rather than its fulfilment. They ponder resignation, dependence, the duplicitous mirror-play of reality and illusion, sorrow, farewell and the loss of innocence. An interesting feature of some of the poems is the way in which different male figures are folded into one, that of the lover, the father and God or Christ, as in the poems ‘Offerande’ [Sacrifice] and ‘Jy het vir my gesterf’ [You have died for me]. The volume also gives an indication of the poet’s ability to imagine herself, chameleon-like, in the bodies of others and to take on different voices. A few poems contain the germ of rebellion against the bourgeois values of society as well as a sensitivity to the injustices of the political situation in South Africa, especially ‘Die blommeverkoopster’ [The flower-seller], written from the perspective of a coloured woman in love with a white man.

      While the poet is able to imagine herself in the bodies and situations of others in this volume, her poetry also reveals an indisputably female consciousness. It is important to note that Ingrid Jonker’s small body of poetry, starting with the volume Ontvlugting, infused the largely male domain of Afrikaans poetry with a female thematic and lexicon. The only other strong female poets active in the Afrikaans literary tradition by the time Ingrid Jonker made her debut were Elisabeth Eybers, Olga Kirsch, Ina Rousseau and Sheila Cussons. In the poem ‘Ontnugtering’ [Disillusionment], written after a visit to Johannesburg in 1955, the speaker refers to the fact that she wanted to deceive the world by presenting herself as a doll (a toy as well as a feminine or sexual object). But the truth has come out: she is a ‘verwronge digter’ [misshapen poet] who knows she will be mocked by the world but defiantly invites it to do so. The poem reflects an awareness of the creative woman’s tenuous position in society: the doll-like woman is acceptable, the misshapen poetess is not. The journalist Dot van der Merwe’s article about the publication of Ontvlugting in Die Burger on 23 June 1956 proved the point by referring to Ingrid as the daughter of the MP Abraham Jonker and mentioning the fact that her fiancé Piet Venter found some of the poems in the volume too revealing.

      This same article put into circulation the story of Abraham Jonker’s ungenerous reaction when presented with the volume. He was reported to have said that he hoped there was something between the covers of the book and that he would look at it later, fully expecting her to have shamed him with its content.43Whether he really made this remark or not, it is true that the relationship between literary fathers and their literary daughters is always a potentially fraught one. There certainly seems to have been room for complex reciprocal feelings of admiration and envy in this case. Abraham Jonker was a published writer, even though he achieved only a modest reputation in the Afrikaans literary canon. According to friends, Ingrid was in awe of her father (she referred to him as a ‘writer of note’ in an early autobiographical piece) and desperately wanted him to acknowledge her work. On the other hand, it is possible that he felt threatened by the talent of his rebellious daughter. This may have been the reason why he treated her in the off-hand, casual way which dismayed her friends. Berta Smit observed that Ingrid was always a little self-conscious and unsure of herself in his presence, as if she felt inferior towards him.44Their relationship became more and more complex as their political views started to differ.

      A new circle of friends and the university on the beach

      Publication of her first volume of poetry provided Ingrid with entry into an exciting, new world. This happened as the result of her introduction to the writer Jan Rabie, who worked for the SABC and conducted an interview with her for radio in 1956. She soon became close friends with Jan and his wife, the painter Marjorie Wallace, who shared a house in Green Point with the painters Erik Laubscher and his wife Claude Bouscharain. Ingrid would later develop a crush on Jan, which was not reciprocated. He referred to her as Ingrid Muisvoet [Ingrid Mousefoot] because of her light little footsteps and the chaos she left in her wake.45Ingrid was taken up in the Rabies’ large circle of friends, which included Uys Krige, Jack Cope, Adam Small, Richard Rive, Peter Clarke, Breyten Breytenbach, James Matthews, Kenny Parker, Piet Philander, Gillian Jewell, Harry Bloom and Albie Sachs.46Meeting these people broadened her literary horizons by exposing her to the work of a range of writers she had not known before. She began to read the work of Spanish, Dutch, American, French and Italian poets and came to know the writing of Federico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Paul Éluard, Sybren Polet, Gerrit Achterberg, Lucebert, Dylan Thomas and e.e. cummings (one of whose poems she later translated into Afrikaans). Some of these writers she came to know through Uys Krige’s translations of poems in Spanish, French and Italian.

      Among the group of friends, she felt a special affinity for Uys Krige, who soon became her mentor. He read her poems with a sharply critical eye, advising her to revise her work constantly. Krige was so stern a reader that she referred to him as ‘the Iceman’,47a play on the name Uys and Eugene O’Neill’s play The iceman cometh. He was the one who encouraged her the most, even though he would tick her off about certain lines and sometimes laugh at her, she later said in a radio interview about her career as a poet.48It was Krige who introduced her to the work of surrealist poets like Éluard, whose work he translated into Afrikaans, leading her to experiment with free verse and abandon the formal rigidity of her first volume.

      Ingrid’s introduction to this ‘bohemian’ circle of friends also proved to be a political education. Through her contact with Jan Rabie and his friends, she became part of a social circle that was indifferent to the colour bar imposed by apartheid politics. Many of her new friends were ‘coloured’ in the racial taxonomy of the day: Richard Rive, Kenny Parker, Peter Clarke, Adam Small and Piet Philander. Although she was to a large extent free of racial prejudice (or ‘racial feelings’, as she later phrased it in the Drum article) because of the unconventional way in which she spent her early childhood, she told Peter Clarke that social interaction with people of other races was something new for her.49She became close friends with Richard Rive, whom she often visited; he remembers in his autobiography Writing black that they drove around Cape Town on a scooter, pretending to be brother and sister because Marjorie Wallace said they looked alike and she felt motherly towards both of them.50

      Another meeting place during these years was the Clifton bungalow ‘Sea Girt’ which Uys Krige shared with the writer Jack Cope from September 1958 until 1968.51Uys and Jack had known each other since the late 1940s and bought this house together after Jack’s wife Lesley left him and moved to White River in April СКАЧАТЬ