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her dedication as a proofreader, but she often felt frustrated and unfulfilled in the jobs she held.

      Although she had to become a working woman to provide for herself, Ingrid remained dedicated to the vocation of poet which she had set for herself as a schoolgirl. ‘I became an office worker, but the real thing I lived for was to write,’ she professed in the article for Drum. She continued sending her poems for publication in a variety of popular magazines like Die Huisgenoot, Naweekpos and Rooi Rose40 as well as the literary journal Standpunte. It was clear that her poems were gradually becoming more sophisticated and accomplished. During this time Ingrid also pursued other artistic interests. She took lessons with the Spanish sculptor Florencio Cuairan, and attended classes in elocution and drama. It comes as no surprise that, when one listens to tape recordings of her reading her own poetry, what impresses one is the clarity of her diction and articulation. Her voice is that of a cultured woman, calm and confident. Although she gave the impression of being vulnerable and defenceless, there must also have been a measure of resilience and determination in her character to have enabled her to overcome the deprivation of her early years and develop artistically and socially after she left her father’s house. Jack Cope would voice the same sentiment in a letter he wrote to Uys Krige in May 1959, when he said that her friends did not always ‘make allowances for her basic strength and perseverance’.41There are other contradictions in the photographs dating from this time. Some of them portray her as a pert office-worker with a high-collared dress or neat blouse behind a typewriter. Other snapshots show her as a young bohemienne in shorts with tanned legs and a cigarette between her fingers. In an interview conducted a few years later she admitted to smoking 30 cigarettes a day, adding that she did not eat much because she thought food was boring.42

      There is a tendency to define Ingrid in terms of her relationships with men and to forget her friendships and relationships with women. During these first years of her adult life she built up a wide circle of both male and female friends. Her male friends included the actor Jannie Gildenhuys and Ernst Eloff, who are shown in photographs with her. She shared a number of flats with woman friends with whom she kept up a correspondence in later years. Lena Oelofse was one of her first flatmates, and later Jean (Bambi) du Preez. Several other names would crop up in the years that followed: Bonnie Davidtsz, Marie Swart, Marie Prinsloo, Margo Holt, Hélène Roos and Elmie Watson. There were also close, possibly intimate, friendships with the writers Berta Smit (her supervisor at Citadel Press to whom she showed and read her poems) and Freda Linde (who worked for the publishers HAUM and John Malherbe). Ingrid formed strong bonds as well with older women like the artist Marjorie Wallace, who became something of a mother figure for her, and the encyclopaedist Juliana Bouws, whose friendship provided her with invaluable emotional support. In 1954, three years after she left school, she met her future husband Piet Venter at a party in Sea Point.

      First volume, Ontvlugting

      The publication of Ingrid’s first volume of poems, Ontvlugting [Escape], in June 1956 was the culmination of her desire to be a published poet. Although her debut volume attracted the attention of the important critics of the time, their reviews mostly emphasised its adolescent youthfulness and thematic ‘slimness’. While Ontvlugting may be limited in its formal and thematic scope, it was clearly the product of a self-conscious poet who took her work seriously. It suggested that Ingrid Jonker was not just an intuitive poet whose poems came effortlessly, but someone who carefully crafted and revised her work. Although the volume is technically still somewhat awkward because of its over-use of rhyming couplets, most of the poems demonstrate sensitivity for the texture and musicality of words as well as their semantic potential. Uys Krige would later refer to her ‘skulpfyn oor’ (ear as finely tuned as a sea-shell).

      The title poem sets the tone for the rest of the volume as well as for the Ingrid Jonker oeuvre, introducing the contexts, themes and images that would occur again and again in her work. Following after the Afrikaans is a translation by André Brink and Antjie Krog.

      Ontvlugting

      Uit hierdie Valkenburg het ek ontvlug

      en dink my nou in Gordonsbaai terug:

      Ek speel met paddavisse in ’n stroom

      en kerf swastikas in ’n rooikransboom

      Ek is die hond wat op die strande draf

      en dom-allenig teen die aandwind blaf

      Ek is die seevoël wat verhongerd daal

      en dooie nagte opdis as ’n maal

      Die god wat jou geskep het uit die wind

      sodat my smart in jou volmaaktheid vind:

      My lyk lê uitgespoel in wier en gras

      op al die plekke waar ons eenmaal was.

      Escape

      From this Valkenburg have I run away

      and in my thoughts return to Gordon’s Bay:

      I play with tadpoles swimming free

      carve swastikas in a red-krantz tree

      I am the dog that slinks from beach to beach

      barks dumb-alone against the evening breeze

      I am the gull that swoops in famished flights

      to serve up meals of long-dead nights

      The god who shaped you from the wind and dew

      to find fulfilment of my pain in you:

      Washed out my body lies in weed and grass

      in all the places where we once did pass.

      Although one must remember that poems are fictional constructs, the two spaces mentioned in the first lines 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],

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