Another one to remember

When I’m walking by the Atlantic Ocean here in the Cape, her poems come back to me and resonate with the rise and fall of the green, mauve indigo waves, the icy surf, the skimming of stones and that medicinal iodine odour of kelp. The forests of kelp trapped in the stormy waves.

Ingrid Jonker was born on a farm near Kimberley, the daughter of Abraham Jonker and Beatrice Cilliers. Her parents had separated before her birth. Her mother moved back home to a farm near Cape Town. When her grandfather died four years later, the family was left near-destitute. Her mother dies in the mental asylum of Valkenberg where Ingrid herself will spend months incarcerated. By the age of 13, Ingrid Jonker has produced her first collection of Afrikaans poems, Na die Somer (After the Summer). Her first published book of poems, Onvlugting (Escape) is published to great acclaim.

Ingrid marries in 1956 and has a daughter, Simone. Her father is a Nationalist politician of the dominant white Afrikaner establishment and she fights openly with him on the politics of apartheid. She has affairs with the liberal writers Jack Cope and Andre Brink and has an abortion, then a crime in South Africa. She is seen as a political pariah and battles to find a publisher for her next collection of poems, Rook en Oker, (Smoke and Ochre).  Sharpeville and the shooting of unarmed black men. women and children appalls her.

She wins awards and travels abroad, but her personal life is tormented. Her lover Andre Brink announces he is returning to his wife.

Ingrid Jonker walks down to  Three Anchor Bay, a rocky inlet with a wild sea on the night of 19 July 1965 ;  she walks into the sea and drowns herself . On hearing of his daughter’s death, her father reportedly said: “They can throw her back into the sea for all I care.”

When President Nelson Mandela was inaugurated in 1994, he read aloud a poem by Ingrid Jonker and spoke of her with great tenderness and appreciation:  “She 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. In the midst of despair, she celebrated hope. Confronted by death, she asserted the beauty of life.”’

 

This is the poem he read, Die Kind.

The child is not dead
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass

The big, the small and the outspoken

 

Why I love Lizzie Skurnick.

‘”I just want to say,” I said as the meeting closed, “that we have sat here and consistently called books by women small and books by men large, by no quantifiable metric, and we are giving awards to books I think are actually kind of amateur and sloppy compared to others, and I think it’s disgusting.” (I wasn’t built for the board room.) “But we can’t be doing it because we’re sexist,” an estimable colleague replied huffily. “After all, we’re both men and women here.”

But that’s the problem with sexism. It doesn’t happen because people — male or female — think women suck. It happens for the same reason a sommelier always pours a little more in a man’s wine glass (check it!), or that that big, hearty man in the suit seems like he’d be a better manager. It’s not that women shouldn’t be up for the big awards. It’s just that when it comes down to the wire, we just kinda feel like men . . . I don’t know . . . deserve them.

The conservatives are right: affirmative action is huge blemish on the face of our nation. And until we stop giving awards to men who don’t deserve them over women who do, we’re sunk.’