I really like this book I recently read–it’s a biography of a poet named Ingrid Jonker (the “J” is pronounced as a “y”), who was an Afrikaner poet. The biography is titled Ingrid Jonker: Poet Under Apartheid. This book is interesting and insightful because it provides glimpses into the political scheme in South Africa during the oppressive years of apartheid. And yet it offers an analysis of a poet who, for all intents and purposes, wasn’t a major political activist or person of power and influence in the political realm. And so the biography tells the story of a poet, Jonker, who happened to live in the apartheid era, rather than tell the story of a major political figure or agitator. In this way, the author is able to depict an outsider’s view of South Africa’s sociopolitical reality during apartheid. She achieves this through chronicling someone who’s outside of politics.
In other words, the book explores the life of someone beyond the strictly political—someone who is a major writer, and whose life is outside of politics’ confines—rather than a political star, or someone who’s dedicated his/her life to changing negative external structures in public life, in public affairs. This opportunity that the biographer (Louise Viljoen) has is invaluable, because it allows her the opportunity to contribute to the literature on outsiders to political work—outsiders who are concerned citizens, and activists in their own way, in their own right. I’ve been reminded through reading this book that most of the population are not political leaders, nor are they indifferent, apolitical people. This biography helped me understand, and perhaps come to my own unique conclusion, that most people are in various fields and areas, trying to achieve success in their own way, in their own capacity. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t socially and politically aware. It doesn’t mean they don’t have the understanding that justice and love is the only solution to social and political ills.
And so this book is really interesting to me. I was attracted to this book because of the fact that it analyzes the life of an African poet; but under the backdrop of social oppressions and ills. It’s a good analysis of the reconciliation between art and a brutal unjust system around you—poetry and apartheid, in this case. (Ingrid Jonker; poet under apartheid.) And so it’s an interesting case study and exploration of a writer living in apartheid South Africa, with its racial segregation, violence, economic woes, and related issues.
It’s interesting to note the dichotomy between Jonker’s universal messages related to life, love, and hope, and the hostile world she inhabited in Africa’s southernmost country, at the time. It’s interesting to note the dichotomy between her focus on the human condition and issues that concern everyday humans–much of which are nuanced– and the harsh realities of life in South Africa, at that time. It might seem to some observers that Jonker focused on the wrong things in her writing. But she wrote what she wanted to say. And all of her universal messages and insights prevailed. She did it the right way, actually; she wrote about what she truly wanted to, despite the sociopolitical problems around her. And her type of work stands out the best these days. It’s an antidote to the feelings that stoke apartheid. And so it not only stood the test of time, but it’s some of the best poetry written by a South African, or any person. It’s just like how Sylvia Plath’s poetry is a testament to the human spirit, despite the injustices that shamed the United States back in her era of the 50s and 60s. (Both Plath and Jonker were, of course, white citizens of their respective countries. Jonker and Plath are often compared and contrasted with each other; Jonker is sometimes referred to as “South Africa’s Sylvia Plath.”)
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“Former President Nelson Mandela, in commenting on Jonker’s poem Die Kind (The Child), which he read out in full in his inaugural State of the Nation address to Parliament in May 1994, said, “in this glorious vision, she instructs that our endeavours must be about the liberation of the woman, the emancipation of the man and the liberty of the child”. Of Jonker herself, Mandela said that: “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.” https://www.sahistory.org.za/people/ingrid-jonker
Excerpt from Ingrid Jonker: Poet Under Apartheid, by Louise Viljoen:
“There is a tendency to emphasise Ingrid Jonker’s sexuality, her vulnerability, her artistic talent and emotional volatility to such a degree that her interest in the politics of the day is underestimated. In his 1982 book on dissident Afrikaans writers, The adversary within, Jack Cope wrote that she was ‘non-political in any party or local sense’, that she ‘at no time intentionally wrote a political poem’ and was not ‘committed or engagé in the usual drift of current clichés’.[1] Although Ingrid was never a political activist, she abhorred the injustices of apartheid. The story is told of her attacking a bus conductor who pushed a coloured passenger off a bus.[2] Her friend Berta Smit also remembered that she would often express her dismay at the daily newspapers’ reports of incidents of racial discrimination.[3] Her letters to friends not only focused on personal and literary matters, but also responded to the political events of the day. Letters written from Johannesburg in the late 1950s are critical of Verwoerd and the racial attitudes of whites, while those she wrote almost daily to Jack while he was in London in 1961 commented on South Africa’s forthcoming withdrawal from the Commonwealth, the political tension and threatened strike during the build-up to Republic Day on 31 May, parliament’s passing of the ‘Lock-up Bill’, which would enable police to detain any person without trial or bail for 12 days, the banning of meetings and gatherings until 26 June and the arrest of thousands of people. She also shared her feelings of general foreboding about the future of South Africa.”
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“As more information becomes available, the picture that we are able to draw of Ingrid Jonker will become more rounded, even though it will never be complete. Even for those closest to her there was something elusive in her personality. Freda Linde used the image of quicksilver which takes on the form of its container, to describe her.[6] Ingrid herself had a horror of fixity. After her death Jack Cope wrote that she disliked being called by her own name and had many nicknames, each expressing in its way an evasion that kept her indefinable.[7] André Brink said in an interview that she never wanted to be captured or summarised and referred to her quoting lines from Louis MacNeice’s ‘Prayer before birth’: ‘And above all do not make me a thing, a thing with one face like water held in a hand would spill me, otherwise kill me’.[8] Ingrid Jonker has no one face. Other faces are waiting to be discovered.”
Viljoen, Louise. Ingrid Jonker (Ohio Short Histories of Africa) (Kindle Locations 1073-1085). Ohio University Press. Kindle Edition.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/ingrid-jonker-louise-viljoen/1114002436?ean=9780821420485
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