It took a stroke of political genius by Nelson Mandela to tell the world in general and Afrikaners in particular that Ingrid Jonker ”was both a poet and a South African. She was both an Afrikaner and an African. She was both an artist and a human being.”
The timing was perfect: the first opening of Parliament by a democratically elected black president in South Africa. That gesture on May 24 1994, however, was more than just an act of generosity. It was also a veiled and necessary warning.
If on the one hand it was inclusive and conciliatory towards Afrikaners, on the other he was saying it would not be forgotten that the Nationalist strain in their make-up had literally and figuratively damned one of their brightest children, let alone the rest of their fellow men, women and children.
That Die Kind (The Child) is one of Jonker’s least representative poems is irrelevant. Its political sentiments had been festering long before and up to that moment 34 years after it had been written in March 1960; poetry has had a less illustrious career since then.
In her documentary, Ingrid Jonker: Her Lives & Time, writer/director Helena Noguera alludes to American film icon Marilyn Monroe. Or, more precisely, to Monroe singing I Want to Be Loved by You.
It’s a precocious and complex but valid allusion, since both really wanted to be loved, both made it extremely difficult to be loved, and both had lots of brains and beauty. The question is, were they merely victims of their times, being talented women in a man’s world? Or does it become even more complex, begging questions about nature versus nurture versus destiny?
In other words, would Jonker have been such a good poet if her father had loved her in a normal way instead of accusing her mother of conceiving their daughter illegitimately, thereby condemning both to forms of ostracism that led to insanity and suicide?
Whatever the case, that some kind of shadow fell across Monroe (and the likes of Sylvia Plath and Jim Morrison) and Jonker is beyond any doubt, and that both had the sense of humour that goes with their modern tragedy of abuse at least validates the allusion to a certain extent.
Meanwhile, the young poet started mingling with the literary set of the Sestigers and fell passionately in love with Jack Cope, a father figure if ever there was one – and one as flawed as her own father had been.
If Abraham Jonker, MP, had been unable to acknowledge his daughter during her lifetime, Cope had been unable to break through his British reserve and commit to a woman he was understandably concerned might devour him.
In the end she did exactly that to both of them, but in different ways. Jonker died of remorse seven months after his daughter’s suicide by drowning, Cope (perfectly voiced by Graham Hopkins) died of restraint.
The emotional catalyst in all of this, as the documentary clearly implies, was novelist André Brink. Not a favourite of Sir Laurens van der Post, who had a lot to say about Mandela’s ingratitude after 27 years in prison too, it would seem that Brink’s greatest crime in the whole affair was to stay reasonably intact on most fronts.
Noguera twice uses a colour photograph of Jonker. She is standing at a window to the left of the frame and looking out at a rainy, verdant English garden. We see her from three-quarters behind.
The photograph captures her melancholy, the looking away from ”die verraaiers van die lewe” (the traitors of life), the garden of liberty the early Sixties promised and the dark, poetic garden inside her own head. Brink was the only one who ever took colour photographs of Jonker.
In fact, Brink and Marjorie Wallace, artist and wife of Sestiger Jan Rabie, seem the most level-headed about the whole affair, which is not to say they were cold or unaffected by her; try living in the same house as someone who fills it with mirrors to confirm her sad existence and constantly threatens to commit suicide if she doesn’t get her way.
As Wallace perceptively says: ”People didn’t like her, they loved her.”
The documentary also captures the childlike qualities of Jonker by letting the closest and most important person in her life, her daughter Simone, speak. It’s all there, except that lighting never strikes twice in the same place.
Quite a few of the people featured in this documentary have since died (Van der Post, among others), so it is also a valuable document about a time that will never be again.
Ingrid Jonker:Her Lives & Time is probably as close as we can get to the real thing, which is, of course, the poetry itself.
Ingrid Jonker: Her Lives & Time will be shown at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown on July 2 and 6 at the Olive Schreiner Hall