Ingrid Jonker: To Escape from the Concealing Image

Lesley Marx, July 2019

“She was difficult and complicated, but enchanting.” Suzanne Fox1

Opdrag (1999)

In his eloquent homage to Ingrid Jonker, writes that “[n]o group or category, no academically cold classification can be fitted to her. Ingrid Jonker escapes from the concealing image and will not be taken possession of or harnessed to any creed or cause save those of poetry and life”(1966, 12). But of course the attempt has been made to harness her, attempts rapidly accelerated after ’s landmark tribute to her during his inaugural address to the first democratic South African parliament in 1994: The time will come when our nation will honour the memory of all the sons, the daughters, the mothers, the fathers, the youth and the children who, by their thoughts and deeds, gave us the right to assert with pride that we are South Africans, that we are Africans and that we are citizens of the world.

1 The certainties that come with age tell me that among these we shall find an Afrikaner woman who transcended a particular experience and became a South African, an African and a citizen of the world. Her name is Ingrid Jonker. 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 with death, she asserted the beauty of life. In the dark days when all seemed hopeless in our country, when many refused to hear her resonant voice, she took her own life. To her and others like her, we owe a debt to life itself. To her and others like her, we owe a commitment to the poor, the oppressed, the wretched and the despised. (http://www.mandela.gov.za/mandela_speeches/1994/940524_sona.htm Accessed April, 2019) Mandela’s tribute offers an image of someone who encompassed several identities, personal, artistic and political, although the poem he chose to read signalled the centrality of the political and his description of her suicide implies that this was an action born of political despair.2 In the sardonic asssessment of Ryk Hattingh and Jana Cilliers’ complex, layered dramatic monologue Opdrag, Jonker was “[v]olksbesit in die ancien regime en nou, danksy Nelson Mandela, volksbesit in die nuwe bestel” (1999, 16).3 The title of the play, Opdrag, translates variously as ‘assignment,’ ‘mission,’ ‘mandate’ or ‘dedication’ and Hattingh proceeds to dramatise two quests: how to open up new possibilites for the actor, Jana Cilliers; and how to “stage” Ingrid Jonker. The play starts with Jana thinking of her past performances and how she wants to explore other possibilities. Her thoughts fold, with a cryptic blend of fascination, scepticism and delicacy, into the last words that Ingrid Jonker wrote in her diary: Nou soek ek nie meer na nice scripts nie. Ek gaan nou begin doen wat ek wil doen. Daar’s ’n verskil. ’n Goeie script sit jou daar, en jy kan nie sê nee, eintlik het ek iets anders in gedagte gehad nie. Sien. Ek wil op ’n plek wees waar ek kan beweeg. ’n Stukkie tyd, ’n spasie waarbinne ek iets kan doen, iets kan mooi maak. Vir myself. Om lekker te voel daaroor. In jou stilte. Weggebêre. Blykbaar was haar laaste woorde in ’n dagboek of ’n ding: stilte stilte stilte. As jy ’n ding drie keer sê. Hoe dit dan ernstig klink. Asof jy dit regtig bedoel. Maar so op die papier… Stilte stilte stilte… (1).4 The play is notable for several reasons: at one level a reflexive exploration of how to narrate and perform the life and art of Jonker the poet and Cilliers the actress, the play speculates with wit and irony on whether a film should be made about Jonker, or an opera or, in a comic eureka moment, a multimedia production. While the life of Cilliers is deftly woven into the play, it also offers several astute comments on the fate of Jonker and the ways in which her multiple selves have been harnessed. It lists, for example a catalogue of epithets and one-liners used to describe her by those who moved in her world and have recorded their memories: “…die kinders het wild grootgeword by die ouma/sy’t ’n bietjie ’n moeder uit almal gemaak/die vader was

2 taamlik bars teenoor hulle/…kon nooit genoeg liefde vind nie... uitstekende moeder/onprakties heerlik onprakties… (10-11). Then there is the satirical account of who donated how much to the Ingrid Jonker Prize after her death, intimating the economic value of her memory: “…Jack Cope, R14… Veertien rand. Veertien? Hoekom nie tien of vyftien nie? Veertien is mos nie ’n getal nie. Onafgerond… R48…Agt en veertig! ’n Ewe niksseggende getal. Hierdie twee mense in haar lewe, mentors, rolmodelle…Mans…Veertien. Agt en veertig…” (15). Through a variety of mood shifts and scattered images of Jonker’s life the sustained quest of the play balances on two concepts “to do something” or to “create” something with the poet’s life: “Tussen doen en skep” (1). The former suggests an instrumental approach, the latter a more complex evolution that must engage with the subject intimately and innovatively, recalling Coleridge’s lines on the secondary imagination, an echo of the primary: “It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re- create….It is essentially vital even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead” (1817;1975: 167). The ultimate goal of the play “is om by haar uit te kom. By haar.” This objective is “[n]ie so maklik nie” (3) and yet, by the end of the play, with its tentative, “Mens sou iets oor haar kan doen,” (21) a great deal has already been done and also, we might add, created. We have not only learned something about Jonker, but this knowledge has been framed by a sophisticated awareness of its own mediation and partiality. On the one hand, something new has been added to what may be accomplished on stage for and by an actor; the theatre has been refreshed. On the other, ways of seeing Ingrid Jonker have been challenged and revitalised. So, for example, even as the references to, and recitals of, Jonker’s poetry remind us of her considerable gift, the play eschews sentimentalising her. Two instances are especially striking. Firstly, there is a segue from a description of the prophetic power of “Die Kind” in that moment of Mandela’s reading of the poem (an appropriate climax, Jana/the speaker/the actor proposes, for a theatrical presentation of Jonker’s life and work), to a caustic reminder of Jonker’s own controversial motherhood. Die Kind…Die gedig, sou jy kon sê, wat haar famous gemaak het. Die Kind wat ‘n man geword het en…deur Afrika trek. En die man word ’n reus wat deur die wêreld reis. En dan die punchline: Sonder ’n pas. Profeties, om die minste te se… Want hier is die kind skielik teenwoordig in die parlement. Op die lippe van ‘n man met messiasstatus onder die reuse.

Jy sou Die Kind tot laaste bêre. As encore selfs. Jy sou… As jy nie geweet het nie. Ek praat nou van haar kind, van Simone. As jy nie geweet het Ingrid Jonker het ‘n dogter gehad nie. As jy nie geweet het sy het geslaap toe mammie besluit het sy wil nie meer leef nie en die water ingevaar… What a way to wake up! Nou weet jy dit… en jy het self kinders, en jy kyk so mooi na hulle en jy’t nie tyd om te soek na nuwe definisies vir die liefde nie. Poetiese verklarings vir hierdie verlange van jou nie. Nie tyd om emosionele besluite te neem oor jouself nie. Madame… kan nie help om kwaad te word nie. Vir haar en haar opgefokte lewe. Al daai selfsug, ydelheid… Al haar shit. (16)

The perspective on Jonker in this passage is marked by critical distance and a truculent pragmatism, effectively underscored by the language mixing that refuses a stable linguistic evocation of its subject.5

3 The second moment in Opdrag that eradicates sentimentality is the climax finally selected by the speaker/actor/playwright. It offers the provocative suggestion that Jonker’s prophesying of her own death, especially in “Ontvlugting,” found its realisation in her death as performance. After wondering what Jonker would have written today had she not “walked into the sea,” the speaker/actor suggests that, under the sign of prophecy, the desire for death enabled the poem, that writing and dying inhabit each other: Sou sy geskryf het wat sy geskryf het as sy nie in die see ingeloop het nie? … 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

Een van die eertse gedigte wat sy geskryf het. Amazing, sy het haar eie dood voorspel. Die daad by die woord gevoeg.

My lyk lê uitgespoel in wier en gras op al die plekke waar ons eenmaal was

Jy skryf dit neer want jy het dit kwansuis sien gebeur. En ’n paar jaar later loop jy in die see in en… jy verdrink en… jou lyk spoel uit… Miskien nou nie letterlik gedrapeer in seewier nie, maar naby genoeg. Dis performance. Jy kyk, jy skryf neer, en jy perform dit. Dis wat dit is. En Madame KAN perform. (20-21)

“Walking into the sea”: the expression is one frequently used to describe Jonker’s act. I recall the first time I heard of her, after we had newly moved to Cape Town in 1973. I was told (by whom? probably my teacher, Heidi Timm?) that Three Anchor Bay was where she had walked into the sea and so Three Anchor Bay remains etched in my mind as that place where a poet did not drown herself but walked into the sea, a much more ambiguous and mythicising act. Opdrag proposes that it was an act, here the final irreducible expression of the artist whose constantly changing moods and modes of behaviour, whose performances of self left those who knew her—and especially those who loved her—perpetually on a cliff edge.

So, too, we find Anna Jonker, whose attitudes towards Ingrid undergo several permutations in the interviews she conducts with L.M. van de Merwe (2006), and who also mixes English and Afrikaans in her account of Ingrid as performer:

As kind het sy dit geniet om mense tot trane te dryf met haar godsienstigeversies. She was showman enough to do that. And it was the showman in her that had to justify her threats and promises of suicide too. Sy’t altyd gekyk of daar een by is, maar daardie laaste aand was daar nie een by nie. (30) Another image of mutability, cognate with performance, is implicit in several accounts of Jonker: that of the chameleon. Here is her sister, Anna, talking of Ingrid’s life with the and their impact on her: “…vir elke mens het sy mos ’n ander kant gehad” (38) and, even more disparagingly because it denies Ingrid’s

4 agency: “Dit was soos ’n dier, jy weet. As jy aan sy kop vat, dan tril die hele stert” (38). More delicately, Cope writes: To have “eyes that see the things” that others do not see is the poet’s gift. But with her it was a gift that accompanied a peculiar personal defenselessness that left her a prey to immediate influences, for she took on unconsciously the colour that those around her gave to her. With the unspoilt and the happy she was gay, and to them her infectious laughter, delighted and impish, is the most overwhelming memory. Ringed when she thought herself by enemies, she became all hostility. (1966: 15) He comments, too, on her predilection for nicknames “expressing each in its way an evasion or make-believe” (1966: 18). Many of her letters to Cope are signed “Pie,” “Kokon” was Brink’s sexually suggestive nickname for her, while in her youth she loved the idea of being called “Gousblom.” In the light of this changeable, changeling figure, both “Ariel and Caliban,” “poet, mother and young child held in one tense vibrating unison” (to draw on Cope once more, 1966: 12,16) any attempt to represent Jonker in biography, fiction, film, poetry or song, is to test the limits of what these media may accomplish through adaptation. Moreover, as Louise Viljoen so finely argues, an ethical sensibility will both respect the subject and demonstrate an awareness that any act of “writing” a life is an act of interpretation (2012: 13-15).

Opdrag dramatises ways in which a life may be framed so that its multiple worlds are evoked as well as the interpretations of those worlds. In the case of Ingrid Jonker, the personal and the political exist in tandem and are also imbricated with each other. The way in which her death is presented will have a great deal to do, in turn, with the degree to which she is read as a subject appalled by the political horrors of her time or as the erotic and eroticised subject of desire repeatedly denied. The following pages aim to explore a variety of publications and films that have framed Ingrid Jonker. Marshalling, editing and interpreting the available details of her biography are the deeply committed books by Petrovna Metelerkamp and the absorbing interviews conducted by psychologist L.M. van der Merwe with those who knew her. ’s memoir, ’n Vurk in die Pad/A Fork in the Road (2009) devotes a key chapter to “Ingrid,” and, in 2015, her correspondence with Brink was published. Most recently, we have Leon de Kock’s revelatory 2019 biography of Brink. More overtly fictional characterisations of Ingrid Jonker appear in Brink’s Orgie (1965), Berta Smit’s Die Vrou end die bees (1964), Jack Cope’s The Dawn Comes Twice (1969), and Karel Schoeman’s early novels, Spiraal (1968) and Die noorderlig (1975). Cope’s graceful memorial words to Ingrid Jonker after her funeral and his discussion of her as a dissident Afrikaans writer several year later offer further perpectives on her. Three documentaries and one biopic have taken Ingrid Jonker as their subject, a taking that has varied from escorting her memory into the future to kidnapping and assaulting her.6

5

How many ways of seeing? Verbal and Visual Montage The term “montage” usually applies to images in dialogue or conflict with each other and invokes Eisenstein’s theories of how audiences may be actively involved in the creation of meaning through the conscious, even jarring, juxtaposition of shots, rather than the seamless editing intended to serve a more classical narrative, but it serves a useful purpose as a metaphor for what Petrovna Metelerkamp achieves using the principle of montage in Ingrid Jonker: A Poet’s Life (first published in 2003 in Afrikaans as Ingrid Jonker: Beeld van ’n Digterslewe). She describes how she collected all the extant material she could find and then faced the challenge of writing about Jonker: Rather than write a traditional biography from a certain perspective, rather than interpret or play the role of censor, I decided to proffer all the material gathered objectively, without comment. It is left to the empathetic reader to interpret the events and absorb the influences surrounding Ingrid Jonker’s life. (Foreword, Expanded English translation, Ingrid Jonker: A Poet’s Life, 2012). In the event, the book is a deeply engrossing and illuminating montage of word and image. Accounts, for example, of Ingrid’s childhood by her sister, Anna, or her sojourn in by David Lytton are presented not as one continuous narrative, but are broken up with contrapuntal entries, either of biographical facts by Metelerkamp, or by excerpts from other writers who shed further light on the events being described. One thus reads across several sources of information, several points of view while also taking account of the extraordinarily wide range of images that add their own story. Often, too, the typed document will appear over the handwritten original in a palimpsestic effect. While Metelerkamp is the presiding orchestrator of the material, she has created a mosaic—spatially and temporally—that leaves considerable freedom for the reader to enter a process of continuous discovery and reassessment. In 2018, Metelerkamp published a more conventional biography which she prefaces with comments on how Jonker wanted to read “a good full book” about one of her favourite poets, Dylan Thomas (9), and how this new biography is an attempt to respond to that idea of the definitive book on the subject. Metelerkamp engages in meticulous detail with Jack Cope’s diaries, tries to fill gaps and answers questions, asks new questions or posits new theories about contested issues such as Ingrid’s

6 supposed alcoholism (the lethal combination of prescribed, but unsupervised, medication and even small amounts of liquor); what caused her accident a few months before her death, causing her to wear a cast; and more particularly, how she died, given that the sea was calm that night, she was a good swimmer and there was not enough water for her to drown, although her unsteadiness after finally having the cast removed, her depression, her short-sightedness, and the bruises and scratches on her face, probably caused by the rocks on the beach, must be taken into account, as must the possibility that Abraham Jonker interfered with the autopsy report (371-73).7 Ingrid Jonker’s powerful and deeply moving suicide letter to Jack Cope written on 28 June 1965, but unposted, also tells of how she will take pills so that she won’t have a drawn-out dying:

Don’t worry about my being physically tormented when I’m out at sea, once there I’ve got some capsules, just enough to make me fairly unconscious—I shall die like a beast, I’ve always been a physical coward. Ingrid Jonker. PTO One may think this is heartless, defiant or all the rest, but to me it is really no more heartless than a person dying from stomach cancer. I’ve got it in the soul now. That’s all. (In Metelerkamp, 2012: 181). The letters between Ingrid and Jack are immensely rich and varied, and point to one of the many strengths of Metelerkamp’s work: Ingrid Jonker: A Poet’s Life, compiled of words and photographs on the page successfully addresses the most glaring problem faced by the documentarists, that is, the material absence of Jack Cope. In Nogueira’s film, for example, where Brink’s physical presence—the tone of his voice, his facial expressions, his elegant hands on which she repeatedly focuses, the chair he sits in—add a considerable degree of subtext to the words he utters, and where choices of camera movements offer their own commentary, all we have of Cope are still images and a voice-over reading selections from his diaries. The actor’s voice- over inevitably imposes an interpretation of Cope’s words, which are themselves merely a few of the words he wrote. Van Schaik does not include even this much of Jack’s presence, merely noting that he was the love of Ingrid’s life. No effort is made by either van Schaik or Nogueira to acknowledge this crucial aporia and the challenge it poses to fathoming their subject. The desperate triangle that developed between Ingrid, Jack and André is, inevitably, one of the great temptations for representations of Ingrid Jonker’s life in both fiction and film. Equally, the temptation to determine who was “better” for her is irrestistible for many of the interviewees, whether their words are being transcribed by L.M van der Merwe in his Gesprekke oor Ingrid Jonker, or whether they are being prodded by the documentarists. So, for example, in van der Merwe’s collection, we find W.A. de Klerk voicing disgust with how Brink used Ingrid in the novel that depended so heavily on his relationship with Ingrid: “…en toe tik hy haar in die boek in, in Orgie.” De Klerk goes on to suggest that Brink should have let time elapse before writing about his affair: “Wat hy moes gedoen het, was om dit doodstil te laat staan, vir tien jaar. Dán

7 kon hy heengegaan het en daarvan ’n hele groot ding gemaak het” (162-63). De Klerk’s annoyance with Orgie is expressed in the context of speculating that the advent of Brink was an unfortunate curve ball in Ingrid’s relationship with Jack Cope, whom de Klerk clearly believes to have been the steadier presence: “Daar was een man wat wel ’n bestendige invloed op Ingrid gehad het, en dit was Jack Cope” (2006: 162). Later in the interview, de Klerk’s wife concurs: “Jack was verskriklik danig met haar, maar Jack kon dit later nie meer staan nie” (2006: 168). In Helena Nogueira’s documentary (1997), the argument over who was better for Ingrid is handled through cuts between Topsi Venter and Marjorie Wallace. Topsi raises her eyebrows as she talks about the months Simone spent with her and Piet while Ingrid, she surmises, was going through an emotionally difficult time because of Brink: “It didn’t seem to work terribly well.” Earlier in the film she tells us that Jack was “marvellous” to Ingrid: “He really did try his darndest and I think would have loved to have devoted his life to Ingrid.” In Marjorie’s view, “The trouble was she [Ingrid] would be all with André and then Jack would suddenly reappear and would pull her back and then André would feel ‘where was he?’ And she always went back to Jack.” Earlier in the film, she says of André’s arrival on the scene: “And we all thought this was marvellous as it was someone her own age and not a father figure and there was a better sort of give and take and they developed a very good relationship and a very good intellectual exchange.” Age is a sustained factor in Marjorie Wallace’s judgement. To Saskia van Schaik, she declares impatiently that, even if Jack appeared to be the one who might have rescued Ingrid, “He was too old.” Metelerkamp’s 2018 biography takes a sympathetic view of Jack throughout. While acknowledging the ways in which he did not always rise to the occasion and caused his own harm to Ingrid (especially regarding the abortion of their child), he emerges as someone who repeatedly came to her rescue and could be depended upon to be there in times of need (208 et al). Leon de Kock’s account of Brink’s flight from sexual repression offers an insightful description of the doomed triangle and the wearying emotional chaos of the situation: Increasingly it was beginning to look as if Brink, Jonker and Cope were entranced in a kind of danse macabre driven by the restless energies of all three participants. None of them seemed able to give—or take—stability. Where would it all end? In the moment, and without the benefit of hindsight—especially in the case of Jonker—it was surely an exquisite blend of pain and pleasure. So much for the liberating pleasure of existentialism—but once out of the laager there was no way back in. (105) André Brink’s Orgie was the earliest attempt to cast Ingrid Jonker fictionally. It was written with her knowledge and collaboration and published only months before her death. Indeed, Viljoen notes that Brink admitted that “about a third of the work consists of letters that Ingrid wrote to him” (113). The novel is unabashedly about the “personal” Ingrid and allegorises the love triangle between her, Brink and Cope, drawing on autobiographical material but seeking to embed autobiography in layers of mythological and literary reference, putting Brink’s extensive reading on display. The intertexts range, inter alia, from Sumerian, Babylonian and Indian myths, Eden, Christological motifs and the Christian liturgy, to Guernica, Claudel’s Tidings Brought to Mary, Chekhov’s Seagull, Lorca’s Yerma, Antigone, Clytemnestra, Cleopatra, Ophelia (the mad scene) and Desdemona (the Willow Song). In addition to this generous dose of Eastern and Western cultural reference, the book deploys what W.A de Klerk calls “eksentrieke tipografiese toere” (eccentric typographical tricks,

8 162-63) that leave much blank space on pages and between pages with one of them dramatically black after the words “neem my die nag in” (93). It might be argued that Brink’s experiment dramatises the difficulty of representing Jonker’s many selves, were it not for the parade of erudition that characterises the book. A further troubling obstacle in the attempt to engage with the book lies in the postmortem effect it has, not only because of the plethora of deathly imagery that marks its pages, but because Brink described it as an exit from his relationship with Ingrid. Johan van Wyk, working on his PhD thesis, “Die dood, die minnaar en die oedipale struktuur in die Ingrid Jonker-teks,” under Brink’s supervision in the eighties, published the biographical material and includes a comment written by Brink in the margin of the thesis: “Van 1-5 April was ek weer in die Kaap, vir die publikasie v.Orgie. Dit was ’n besonder gelukkinge tyd. Veral kalm, sonder uitbarstings. Maar daar was tog iets van ’n afstand ook?... (Op ’n manier het die publikasie van Orgie die verhouding eintlik voltooi: ‘ons’ boek was nou openbaar… ‘ons’ lewe kon nie eintlik daar anderkant voortgaan nie…” (1999, 82). The logic seems questionable. The epigraphs to Orgie are also alarming in this context, one from Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol (“For each man kills the thing he loves”) and one from Macbeth (“And nothing is but what is not”). One might read another intertext into this statement, that of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval Portrait.” Many years later, there would be another occasion when Brink would “write” Ingrid, in the chapter devoted to her in his memoir, A Fork in the Road (2009). The most poignant moment in Brink’s recollections of Ingrid is when he frankly and astutely analyses Ingrid’s impact on him and his relationship to her in terms of fiction-making: The real problem is that from the outset it was almost impossible for me to see her clearly, cleanly, as she was, rather than as the projection of a preexisting fictional character. How could I ever again keep life and fiction apart? How could I prevent myself from attempting to turn my life into a series of stories, or to project imagined stories into events in my life?

This keen (and disturbing) insight at the start of the chapter is displaced towards the end where once again he cannot resist the temptation to recast their relationship: “Ultimately all the world can hold on to is what she has left behind: the poetry. As for me: a handful of memories, most of them ambiguous, from a few lost and never-lost years in which Dante’s doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca, did hand in hand on the dark wind drifting go” (A Fork in the Road, “Ingrid”). However lyrical this may sound, it also smacks of romantic overreaching as it attempts to locate their relationship within a sublime epic poem (where, ironically, the illicit lovers are doomed to the Inferno while their historical counterparts were killed in flagrante delicto).8 De Kock’s biography of Brink sheds further light on his proclivity for filtering real- live human beings through the lens of both the fictions he publishes and his personal, private revisioning.9 This is all part of “…an elaborate process [Brink] terms literarisering, or literarising, a coinage denoting sublimation into the literary realm, by which he ‘makes women unreachable in advance’”(13). Later, examining another of Brink’s affairs, de Kock writes that “[i]n this epistolary literarisering, the woman—typically, he claims—responds to what is essentially flattery because, as he puts it, ‘all women find it flattering to be loved’; moreover, such literarisering, he notes, ensures that she remains ‘unreachable’, excluding any possibility of

9 ‘meaningful reaction’. Brink emphatically concludes, ‘Thus do I protect myself’” (164).

De Kock subtitles the chapter on Brink’s early experience with Jonker, “the word become flesh,” invoking Brink’s view, expressed in his first letter to her, that sex with this “heerlike klein mens” was akin to the Mass, “’n soort Mis-hou waarin die transubstansiasie volkome is” (2015: 21). This first letter also has recourse to T.S. Eliot’s comment that “poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Brink proposes that the comment may be applied to people when they communicate through sex, without the need for words. The complex context for Eliot’s insight is his reading of the power of Dante’s allegory (1965: 8) that derives its effectiveness and communicability from the poet’s visual imagination, regardless of how well we know the Italian in which he writes. Eliot will, however, go on to argue that, to value the whole of the Divine Comedy, “you must in the end come to understand every part in order to understand any part” (36-37) and to perceive that, “in good allegory, like Dante’s, it is not necessary to understand the meaning first to enjoy the poetry, but that our enjoyment of the poetry makes us want to understand the meaning” (51). Eliot’s discussion of the Divine Comedy is followed by a brief exegesis on the Vita Nuova where he argues that the point of the meeting with Beatrice takes its meaning from “mature reflection” and the ability to find meaning not in “origins” but in “final causes”: “The final cause is the attraction towards God” (59). Brink, liberated from Afrikaner Puritanism, apparently has no alternative but to find his spirituality in the flesh.

The title of de Kock’s biography, The Love Song of André P. Brink obviously recalls T.S. Eliot’s ground-breaking poem about a neurotically self-conscious, vacillating figure, who nevertheless, unlike what we hear of the self-romanticising Brink, is capable of pithy and pointed self-irony. Whether such invocation trivalises the source or not may be a matter for debate. Here is Damian Lanigan’s eloquent summary of Eliot’s witty, funny, depressing, mesmerising, haunting poem: it presents us, he writes, with

the superannuated adolescent whose twilight is present in his dawn, who dare not move or even speak, who speculates with wan disgust on sex and death and deems inaction superior to either, and yet who remains a miracle, not least because of the suddenness and strangeness of his arrival in Eliot’s mind. … Although the poem is gravid with a morbidity of body and spirit, it represents an act of the utmost artistic bravery. Prufrock, not so much an antihero as an un-hero enacts an astoundingly heroic feat of imaginative renovation, finally answering the question of where to go after Swinburne:

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

The poem should be read aloud to allow its incantatory power to reveal itself. The whiff of a new kind of incense is present throughout, and there is a strong sense of

10 religion in the sepulchral atmosphere and muted antiphony. It’s not just the evening that is etherized. Prufrock himself is a sleepwalker, equidistant between life and death, the poem’s barely discernible physical spaces and disembodied human characters nothing more than distant stirrings in a highly sophisticated yet barely conscious mind. … “Prufrock” speaks of a state of murky sexual tension that borders on violence; Prufrock himself is a cipher, a narcissist, a loser. Yet from this confluence of thwarted desire and laughable insipidity:

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (2015: 54-58) 10

One might be tempted to apply some of Lanigan’s descriptions of Prufrock to Brink, but the latter, ever susceptible to casting himself more grandly, certainly never an “un-hero,” sees himself as Raskolnikov or a failed Macbeth (107). De Kock plays along and compares him with Stavrogin (108) and Hamlet (107 et al).11

Jack Cope Writes Ingrid Jonker While Jack Cope’s devotion to Ingrid Jonker’s memory is often commented on, perhaps the most moving testimony is that provided by Geoffrey Haresnape in his contribution to the special edition of New Contrast (1991, 74 & 75), commemorating Jack when he died. Haresnape was in when he heard of his friend’s death and went down to Hitchin, Hertfordshire to help Michael Cope pack up a life:

11

Then there were the artefacts entwining art and life. Ingrid Jonker flamed down from above the fireplace of the dining room. Fixed in the unchanging now of oil- paints, she was gazing forward just as provocatively as I remembered from the Sea Girt days. The bronze head of Ingrid which Jack had taken everywhere with him also filled the room with its sombre resonances. While we spoke of the young Afrikaans poet’s untimely end and of Jack’s devotion to her memory, Mike came in with a black-bound Bybel. He had found pressed between its pages two locks of hair carefully tied with silk thread. They we designated ‘Jack’ and ‘Ingrid.’ (15)

Jack Cope documented and published his relationship with Ingrid Jonker in several ways outside the diaries.There are two essays, his poems in memory of her, and most interesting for my purposes, his novel, The Dawn Comes Twice (1969), explored below. The two essays, “A Crown of Wild Olive,” published in the memorial collection after her death (1966) and reprinted in Versamelde Werke (1994, overseen by Anna Jonker) and “Poet Against the System,” published in Cope’s collection of essays, The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans (1982), form a diptych presenting the poet as “immortal beloved” and the poet as passionate political artist. In the case of the latter, Cope writes soberly and carefully of Jonker’s early influences and analyses her first collection of poetry, noting its resistance to bourgeois and paternalist expectations, figured in her “intense and ambivalent relationship” (81) with her father. He writes of the range of meanings signified by the word ‘love’ in Jonker’s life and imagination: “Love in the body and in the spirit, love of chosen friends which amounted in her to a fierce and even possessive loyalty; after her marriage and divorce, the love of her child and through her of all children; self-love, and more in the abstract, love of justice and brotherhood between all people” (81). Thus, the poem that made her “famous” was for her borne out of an empathic ability to relate personal circumstances to the wider political context. She wrote for Drum: Now let me say something about my poem ‘The Child,’ about which so much has been said. Go back to the days in March 1960, when blood flowed in this land. For me it was a time of terrible shock and dismay. Then came the awful news about the shooting of a mother and child at Nyanga. The child was killed. The mother, an African, was on her way to take her baby to the doctor. The car she was in was fired on by soldiers at a military cordon. I saw the mother as every mother in the world. I saw her as myself. I saw Simone as the baby. I could not sleep. I thought of what the child might have been had he been allowed to live. I thought, what could be reached, what could be gained by death? The child wanted no part in the circumstances in which our country is grasped. He only wanted to play in the sun in Nyanga. I am not quite sure how I came to write the poem. It grew out of my poetic technique, which I have slowly developed like any workman who improves his skill by hard work. It grew out of my own experiences and sense of bereavement. It rests on a foundation of all philosophy, a certain belief in ‘life eternal,’ a belief that nothing is ever wholly lost. I am surprised when people call it political. I am warmed when others read it and thank me for it. (In Metelerkamp, 2012: 107).

12 I have quoted this passage at length, partly because it testifies to the ability to imagine across the many divides imposed by that so impressed Sandile Dikeni in the most compelling sequences of Saskia van Schaik’s documentary, as I shall discuss more fully below. The passage also reveals much about the interweaving of the personal and the political that shaped Ingrid’s imagination; her belief in writing as a process of crafting experience; and her sustained faith in the early religious comforts (“a life eternal”) she embraced as a small girl living with her beloved Ouma Cilliers, writing verses to be read at open-air gatherings in the Strand (Metelerkamp 2018: 27- 28). In the context of Jack Cope’s book on the Afrikaner dissidents, the emphasis falls squarely on Ingrid Jonker’s growing despair in the face of the horrors perpetrated by apartheid. “Die kind wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga” becomes a touchstone for her maturation as a poet: “She had seized on every discovery she made and blended the criss-cross of influences from far and near with an astonishing ease and integrity” (1982: 84). The rest of his essay is, accordingly, devoted to the poems that reflect the impact of the tightening grip of Nationalist policies on her. “Madeliefies in Namakwaland,” writes Cope, could be “regarded as subversive” only “in a situation where nerves are raw and violence lies close beneath the surface” (84). With its deft use of contrast and anaphora, and its plea to the simple delicate world of the daisies and the mantis, this subtle poem is as compelling as the more overt effects of “Die Kind.” Uys Krige observes that for him the poem “is fyner gevesel, subtieler geskakeer, teerder, ’n volkome organiese eenheid” [more finely woven, more subtly shaded, more tender, a perfect organic whole] (1966:72). Waarom luister ons nog na de antwoorde van die madeliefies op die wind op die son wat het geword van die kokkewietjies

Agter die geslote voorkop waar miskien nog 'n takkie tuimel van 'n verdrinkte lente Agter my gesneuwelde woord Agter ons verdeelde huis Agter die hart gesluit teen homself Agter draadheinings, kampe, lokasies Agter die stilte waar onbekende tale val soos klokke by 'n begrafenis Agter ons verskeurde land

sit die groen hotnotsgot van die veld en ons hoor nog verdwaasd klein blou Namakwaland-madeliefie iets antwoord, iets glo, iets weet.

A different tone marks “Met hulle is ek” where her rage is expressed in a brutal cynicism against what Cope calls “the face of the white/bourgeois world,” followed by “identification with the mass of the underprivileged races together with all others who are mistreated by life…” (1982:90). “Ek dryf in die wind” is perhaps even more

13 powerful with what Uys Krige described as its Van Gogh crows (Metelerkamp, 2012: 226) circling over the rotten nation. Even here, though, there is a personal reference point, that of her sister to whom the poem is dedicated and whose marriage was breaking up (she finally left Attie Bairos in May 1965 [Metelerkamp, 2018: 343]): My swart Afrika volg my eensame vingers volg my afwesige beeld eensaam soos ’n uil en die vereensaamde vingers van die wêreld eensaam soos my suster My volk het van my afgevrot wat sal word van die vrot volk ’n hand kan nie alleen bid nie

Die son sal ons bedek die son in ons oë vir altyd bedek met swart kraaie

Cope concludes that at the root of her anguish, her yearning and her poetry is “the power of love both sensual and in the wider meaning of caritas”: “Especially in the circumstances of her loved and ‘afflicted land,’ her voice continues to ring on and finds a profound and ever wider response among the younger generation of ” (1982: 91). In translation, her poetry reaches across that linguistic divide and Cope is able to end his essay with reference to one of her boldest challenges: “Against a theocracy that could draft the ideology of apartheid she dared to set up the image of Judas Iscariot as the ‘verb of love’ whose role it was to fulfil the prophecy and to give the Saviour back to life”:

Master, before the veil of the first daylight With my own death on my tongue I give you back To life, with my bloodied name, mocked at, Crucified, the verb itself of love, Judas Iscariot. (91-92)12

What is evident in this essay is Cope’s serious attention to Ingrid Jonker’s poetry and the work it can do in the world. Emphasising Jonker as a politically aware poet, although “not committed or engagé in the usual drift of current clichés” (82), her sensibilities, her creative gift and her biography necessarily give birth to poems that respond to her moment in history: “…she was too near the centre to escape the baleful effects of political involvement,” writes Cope regretfully (82).

“A Crown of Wild Olive” is, as tribute to the dead poet, more lyrical, more tender, than the later more scholarly essay. But even here Cope’s devastation at her death, expressed in his diaries and in his uncharacteristic emotional collapse at her funeral, is refracted through a careful and elegant crafting of language. In an evocative passage, inspired, one assumes, by the heartrendingly lovely memoir that is Ingrid’s last prose sketch, “’n Daad van Geloof,” dated three days before she died, Cope demonstrates the gift of the storyteller as he recreates the life of “this lonely girl” (1966: 22). The passage reads like a very rich screenplay and one wishes that someone would follow

14 up (van der Oest makes a half-hearted attempt, but the script from which she is working will not allow the scene to unfold in its fullness):

A child: grey dawn and sea mist in the window. The grandmother has crept out of bed and dressed quietly not to waken the two small girls. She pulls a black shawl around her, smiles. Sad, yet a dauntless gaiety clings about her. From under the blanket the younger child watches her with one round brown eye, closing it when the old woman turns her way. She sees her take up a stringbag and some folded newspapers and go softly out. The child leaps from the bed and dresses quickly in her patched clothes. She too lets herself out silently, then races barefoot after the old woman, her almost white hair flying. She dodges behind walls to keep out of sight. Through the mist swathes on the sea the fishing boats are coming in, trailing flights of gulls. (13)

The story continues with the grandmother looking for fish heads, while the little girl charms the fishermen into giving her a whole fish which she presents delightedly to her grandmother. This is the stuff of fairytales, well suited to the tale of a poet who wrote “Kabouterliefde” and who, with her sister, “made secrets in the forest, and all along the fields near our stations. Secrets were something pretty: a feather, a few shells, pieces of shiny paper, flowers… which you covered with a piece of glass or buried in a flat tin in the field” (in Metelerkamp, 2012: 37). “On the mature woman lay the shadow of this child,” writes Cope (1966: 14), and with the help of Anna’s captivating account of their childhood years in Gordon’s Bay, it seems absurd not to give this formative period its full due, especially regarding the presiding spirit of the mothers. Of course, the girls will be banished from Eden, the moment of the Fall brought about by the death of the mother and the effective banishment of the grandmother (who died many years later).13 Beatrice’s madness and her body wracked by cancer offer the dark obverse of the joyous memories recorded by Anna. Both the dark and the light are present in the ambiguities of “Ontvlugting.” Here is the potentially epic nature of Ingrid Jonker’s story with its archetypal maternal and natural forms, but, unlike the clues given by Cope’s tribute, the documentaries and the feature film will decide to focus only on the adult years, as if Ingrid sprang—a rebel, a garden-variety Athena—fully formed out of her father’s head.

Another feature of Cope’s tribute worth noting is that he does not lose sight of the political context of Ingrid’s final surrender to the sea. So, comparing her with one of her favourite poets, Dylan Thomas, Cope writes : “She grasped the dominant theme of his poetry and she knew, after he died, that he had sought his death, sought it because his song no longer could soar above the horror and moral collapse of his world” (1966: 20). This is eloquent and of a piece with the tone of the essay, but skirts the question of Ingrid Jonker’s need for a man to love her unequivocally and unconditionally. Where Brink’s published recollections of Ingrid emphasise romantic love (see especially his astonishing account of their meeting in his introduction to : “there was no holding back, as if we were already living under the cloud of apocalypse”[2007: 10]), Cope approaches the subject more obliquely through the tone and lyricism of his language in the essays. He turns to fiction to find an even more prismatic way of encompassing as much as he can of the kinds of love he ascribes to Ingrid.

15 The Dawn Comes Twice, published in 1969, is dedicated “to the memory of Ingrid Jonker” and so invites attention to the ways in which Jonker might inform the novel without trying to submit what is a work of fiction to biographical sleuthing.14 It tells the story of Hud Hudson who trained as a revolutionary in Portugal and his engagement in political activism after he returns to . The two women whom he loves are Miriam and Jeni, one coloured, one Afrikaans. Miriam dies after aborting his child; Jeni in a violent encounter with unnamed forces after she has joined Hudson on a mission across the border in .

The first notable feature of the novel is the alternating points of view: Hudson is accorded a first-person narrative, while Jeni’s story is told in the third person. In realist terms Hudson is alive to tell his story and voice his memories, losses and regrets, while Jeni is perforce at a remove. The only access to her is through the omniscient narrator or through Hudson’s memories: the way in which they play off against each other alerts us to the mediations that limit and contain our engagement with Jeni. Miriam is even more refracted, for she is introduced to us through Jeni’s desire to meet the woman who stands in the way of her interest in Hudson.

The second key feature of the novel is that these two women become both friends and doubles of each other, partly in the merging of their images through Hudson’s desire and partly, I would suggest, through the strategy that Cope adopts of dispersing the figure of Ingrid Jonker across more than one character. This is one way of trying dramatise her many, often conflicting selves.

The first indication of twinship occurs when Jeni wonders if “perhaps in her heart there was even a flame of love for the unknown Miriam” (22) and not simply the need to know her rival. Miriam may be broadly characterised as gentle and loving, Jeni as charismatic but searching for a purpose, riven with yearning and doubt. After the two have become friends, they spend a night on a mountain in a cave whose walls are etched with paintings. The two women sit together outside the cave:

The half-moon had risen in their faces and shed over the whole world a tenderness like dew. The Karoo lay below and beyond them like a wide empty sea and no doubt they could have seen a view uninterrupted for more than a hundred miles, had the light allowed. As it was, everything before them was half imaginary, and out of the shimmering depths they could raise the turrets and spires of white cities, lakes and gloomy forests. (60)

This passage conjures a marvellous world, a fabulous otherness. The women are suspended in space and time, outside of history, above a magical landscape that promises to respond to the imagination in a way that the political realities of the time repeatedly and brutally deny. Their shared moment is outside of Hudson’s experience, written as third-person narrative, but their merging identities infuse his desire later in the novel when Hudson draws a sketch of Miriam in a letter he sends to her: “…I was disconcerted to see that it was really the face of Jeni with half-closed eyes and dreaming lips” (116). After Miriam’s death, Jeni and Hudson’s bond grows until they have their (very Lawrentian) first sexual encounter:

My mouth in the pillow went dry as if my teeth had gone through the bitter membranes of a pomegranate to the crisp juice-folded seeds. Miriam-Jeni. The

16 scent of her skin and my heart beating as though my blood were alight. Almost like a dream that I had dreamed over and over, I felt her flowing through and down the living tunnels of my bones, perfect, as someone I would never find. (183)

The I-narrator seems to use italics whenever the deepest levels of his consciousness are engaged, inflected in the above passage not only by the attempt to express the moment of intense passion but also the inescapable element of fantasy that, even in the moment of connection, creates distance in the space of desire—she is almost like a dream, she is the perfection he will not find. And we know from the italicized prologue to the novel that Jeni is dead, that Hudson’s narrative is a flashback, that death has destroyed the object of desire and thereby ensured the endlessness of that desire.

The morally and politically ambiguous figure of Judie also partakes of aspects of what we have heard of Jonker—she has a fierce temper, she is a poet who delights in provoking the establishment and she addresses Jeni as her “little sister” (76), reminiscent of Jonker’s address to Bonnie Davidtz (Metelerkamp 2012: 160ff). The shifting faces of Jeni and Judie are overtly present after Hudson has been imprisoned: “Later in the stupor and dislocation brought on in my mind by ceaseless interrogation I began against all my efforts to link Judie and Jeni together, and the fungus or cancer of doubt began to eat into my morale” (189). The moment foreshadows Jeni’s own perception. Having supper with Judie, “[s]he looked through the clear ruby wine in the glass at a distorted and lurid picture of Judie. Her other self, her little sister, as she sometimes said” (238).15

At the level of the political plot, Jeni proves herself utterly faithful, of course, while at the level of the romantic plot, Hudson’s register becomes inescapably that of Cope writing after Ingrid’s death.

You faced me, passionate and firm, even austere, like a face carved in a warm stone that I saw in an old Basque church. What you said I believed; I know there was no deception. Your face of patience—as if you knew that while you waited the pity and compassion in you and around you touched me. Behind the smoothness of your forehead and your temples, behind your eyes not anything small but the strong heart-beat, the generous acceptance was written as if streams gone dry flowed once again and I felt it through you. (109)

In “A Crown of Wild Olive,” the Basque stone becomes the “prone wrapped body” from which “the ancient Egyptian painter drew the bright-plumed bird of the spirit rising” (11), while the final paragraphs echo the themes of integrity and courage, although, in his eulogy, tempered by the ambiguity of suicide:

Absolute standards and demands challenge an absolute truth, and this lonely girl in the closing hour of calamity and despair knowingly accepted the path to inevitable defeat, too tender and sensitive, self-wounded, too weak to support the vehemence and courage of her spirit. She had no patience to wait on time, compromise she refused, and to herself she could not lie. (22)

17 The echoes of Ingrid in the novel’s characters are matched by the much clearer, because more precise, textual references to images from her poems. So for example, the politically conscious Ingrid is recalled in a sign assuring “Police Protection Guaranteed” for a dance to be held (27). The words form the ironic climax to the lively, touching Dolie poems with their frolicking rhythms, included in the posthumous collection, Kantelson (1966). A young man reassures his reluctant girlfriend:

Die kaartjies klop teen my bors de skop En jy sê nog, Dolie, nee? Op die groot plakkaat voor die saaltjie staat Police Protection Guaranteed!

The Ingrid yearning for and forsaken by love is present in the “bitterberry shrubs already in flower” when Hudson and Miriam escape for a weekend in a fisherman’s cottage (74). The sensual Ingrid is there in the image of the pomegranates: “Jou lag is ‘n oopgebreekte granaat/Lag weer/dat ek jan hoor hoe lag die granate” (“As jy lag”). Or “the face of love” (169) in its many incarnations as landscapes, women, children that Hudson mourns after Miriam’s death and that Ingrid writes of in the poem dedicated “To Jack”:

daar is geen sprake van begin daar is geen sprake van besitting daar is geen sprake van die dood gesig wat ek liefhet gesig van die liefde (“Gesig van die Liefde”)

Most significant is the repeated reference to the “broken reed,” the first time in an encounter between Jeni and Judie where they discuss Hudson. Jeni challenges her friend/dark double: “To you I’m a broken reed, let’s face it, Jude” (239). The second time Jeni uses the phrase is towards the end of the novel, where Hudson and Jeni, now in Botswana, have camped and made love in the open. Cope projects an embarrassingly flagrant male fantasy, part Lawrence, part Hemingway, of archetypal man and woman where the woman is moulded by the man and makes no demands on the man:

Without her mate a woman was only partly herself. She was more mate than he could ever be….She had come through…. The tree of Life and of Knowledge were one and Eden was a waterless desert. She looked at him now as if he were a child who would kiss her one day and go. She had broken through. She had reached him here. But the price she had paid was beyond her powers of recovery. (260)

Jeni is made to speak words that fulfil the dream of her as his woman who makes no demands to be his wife: “I might not be strong enough to be your wife, Hud, unless… Oh maybe I’m already a broken reed” (262). She tries (as the speaker does in the poem above—“daar is geen sprake van besitting”) to give him unconditional love which he cannot return, although the fantasy proposes that she accepts this: “His secretiveness and reserve were part of the shade of his manhood which fell on her and she would not have him otherwise” (263). When, later, she does, after all, ask him to marry her, he says “no” and we are returned to the reality of his resistance, her

18 longing and her final promise. Her last words are “I’ll always love you Hud. I’ll always be with you” (281).

The refrain of the “broken reed” through these last scenes has its origin in conflicting versions: Ingrid writes to Uys Krige: “Jack wrote to me a month ago, ‘Uys thinks you’re a broken reed’ which left a huge impression and I wrote a poem about the broken reeds after a short trip to the fantastic Torwana mountains” (Metelerkamp, 2012: 90). Cope’s account is different: he is quoted by Erna Sadie: “I said to her, you can’t rely on me because I’m absolutely at the extreme of my capability. I’m trying to bring up two children and educate them…and I’m just like an old broken reed.” For Cope, her appropriation of the term becomes a celebration of her poetic gift. He writes: “And she took that up and she has this marvellous image of the wind carrying the child…Look how her imagination works, it’s absolutely brilliant…She saw the whole humanity of it immediately. You know, the French say if you’ve got one line of a poem, you’ve got the poem…And if you’re a real poet you have. That’s what she did and that is how this poem [Die lied van die gebreekte riete”] originated” (Metelerkamp, 2012: 92). Cope’s praise here is of a piece with his comment in “A Crown of Wild Olive” that “[e]verything she receives becomes her own, transmuted through her senses” (1966: 19). The transmutation of the image of the broken reed is intriguing: an expression of Cope’s fragility, misread as a description of Ingrid’s, is metamorphosed by her into a poem where the promise of the world consorts with its darkness, where the mountain wind carries the world in its lap and blows across skeletons, through broken reeds, sees the day’s executioner and makes death bearable.

Die wind uit die Torwana-berge het haar skoot vol mos Sy dra ’n slapende kind sy siteer die sterre met die stem van breë waters teen die wit gebeente van die dag

Die wind uit dir Torwana-berge oewerloos sonder horison sonder seisoene het die gesig van alle mense het die aalwyn van die wêreld voor haar bors het die lam van alle veugde oor haar skouer en die laksman van elke dagbreek in haar oë

Die wind uit die Torwana-berge met haar skoot vol mos dra ’n slapende kind dra ’n nag van distels dra ’n dood sonder duisterheid

en waai deur die gebreekte riete

Against the male-fantasy element of Cope’s novel may be read the complex dialectic of the poem that had its inspiration in the image of the broken reed. Hud’s last words to Jeni, after she has died, try to balance anitheses: “You are with me, the absence of you, and speaking to you holds me a little longer in the violent landscape” (282).

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What The Dawn Comes Twice offers is a double narrative, one political, the other romantic. Jeni (who encompasses features of both Miriam and Judie) dies because she is politically committed and because she loves Hudson with scant hope of their ever finding a long-term future together. The former plot is dealt with in the conventional register of the action thriller; the second is infused with lyrical and mythicising sensuality. Jeni’s death is not a suicide (although throwing herself in the way of the assailants is an act of reckless courage) so much as the inevitable outcome of who she is, what forces created her and the decisions she makes, in keeping with Cope’s even- handed judgement in his eulogy: “By her life as a woman Ingrid Jonker partly failed, and also was failed. Poetry and love merge in the same fire which had stood between her and death until the terms were too heavy and her tired heart faltered”(1966: 22).

The Ingrid Jonker Memorial Sculpture in Gordon’s Bay, by Tyrone Appollis, 2007. Image source http://www.travelsnippets.co.za/2015/07/gordons-bay-pretty-seaside- village.html Accessed June 2019 16

Ingrid Jonker on Screen

The earliest documentary on Ingrid Jonker that I have been able to trace is Verdrinkte Hande (Gerlach, 1995), a short TV documentary that is extremely difficult to get hold of and available to me via Petrovna Metelerkamp in truncated form (the credits are missing). Nevertheless, it won an award for Johann de Lange’s script and is sober, balanced, analytically rich and interested in reminding us of Ingrid’s capacity for joy and love of life. Abraham de Vries alerts us to the way her most famous poem, “Die Kind,” can be read both personally and politically, as he points to words such as “lokasies,” which not only references apartheid geography, but is part of a line that includes “van die omsingelde hart” pointing to personal feelings of entrapment and alienation. We also get to hear a reasonable amount of Ingrid’s own clear, warm voice.

20 More readily available are the documentaries that came slightly later, those directed by Saskia van Schaik (Korreltjie niks is my dood, 2001) and Helena Nogueira (Ingrid Jonker: Her Lives and Time…, 1997, 2002, 2007).17 In the former, Ingrid’s story is handled with a discretion largely absent from Nogueira’s film, and wholly absent from van der Oest’s turgid biopic, Black Butterflies (2011). The documentaries by both Nogueira and Van Schaik depend on a juxtaposition of voices of those who knew Ingrid to create a sense of the polyglot versions of Jonker and the events of her life. Korreltjie niks is my dood, Saskia van Schaik (VPRO, The Netherlands 2001) Van Schaik’s film uses a female voice-over, an immediate sign that she is avoiding the conventional male “voice-of-God” narration so frequent in documentaries. The voice reads “Gesig van die liefde” in Dutch with subtitles in Afrikaans as a woman walks along a beach, the sea washing up on the shore, fading into a superimposition of Ingrid’s eyes, and then her face over the waves. A piano plays quietly on the soundtrack. The voice-over gives the simple facts of Ingrid’s death, but lest the opening poem suggest that the focus of the film will be on her failed love affairs, we cut to archival footage of that moment in 1994 when Nelson Mandela paid tribute to her. The voice-over informs us that her work had lain forgotten until this moment. While it is true that, as Cilliers and Hattingh note, this is the moment that made her “famous” (and led to documentaries such as Van Schaik’s), her work had scarcely lain forgotten, but clearly the emphasis of this film will be on Ingrid as drowned and resurrected political voice. Mandela’s voice-over is matched by images of strife-torn South Africa and mass funerals; they give way to those of children, at last, playing in what may be Nyanga. Four minutes are given over to an account of Ingrid’s childhood with charming images of fisherfolk, gambolling children and a church service accompanying the narrative, overlaid by a black choir singing. The interviewee here is Cathy Bairos, Anna’s daughter, an attractive, gently spoken woman who stresses that, before Abraham’s advent into her life, the world was a happy place for Ingrid. The bleak transition away from this golden time and place is dramatised through a voice-over reading “Ladybird,” Ingrid’s delicate memory of her mother, as we watch the sea disappear through the rear side window of the relentlessly speeding motor car. The standard image of Abraham Jonker looms on the screen, with his moustache, his thick-rimmed spectacles, expressionless eyes and the faintest glimmer of a smile (or a smirk?). Van Schaik does note Abraham’s frustrated literary ambitions, even cutting to an image of the books he wrote (Louise Viljoen makes the valuable point that professional jealousy may have had something to do with his antagonism towards his daughter’s work [2012: 40]).

Against this backdrop of father/daughter conflict, we are introduced to the publication of Ontvlugting. The fine crafting of Ingrid Jonker’s poetry is very effectively conveyed by drawing on the considerable reading and analytical skills of a poet who learned much from her, , another attractive and vivacious presence whose love of Jonker’s poetry is palpable, as she reads the title poem of the volume, giving full weight to every perfectly chosen word. The beauty of the Afrikaans language is given its due (subtitles are in Dutch). Ingrid’s marriage to Piet Venter, the birth of Simone, her return to Cape Town and her encounter with the group of writers and artists who lived in Clifton are events handled quietly and quickly, followed by an interview with , who knew Ingrid well, but who was not linked

21 to her romantically. In his measured tones, he tells of how exciting the period was, of the European influences on the writers and remembers Ingrid as a pretty young woman who seemed to need protection, who seemed defenseless and vulnerable and yet who was also stubborn, spoilt and provocative, both in her opinions and her behaviour, like a young Marilyn Monroe, he suggests (my translation). Marjorie Wallace, with her brisk Scots-Afrikaans speaks of Ingrid as a “dierlike moeder, altyd fisies, fisies, fisies” and Simone corroborates the memories of spending a lot of time playing on the beach with her mother. The idyllic nature of the time bears some parallels with the Jonker girls’ memories of Gordon’s Bay. In keeping with this image of an innocent time out of time, Jack Cope is simply described as “twenty years older than Ingrid, the age of her father, and the man who would become the love of her life.” This is a deft way of glossing and glossing over the “daddy issues” so beloved of many of L.M van der Merwe’s interviewees and that shape so much of van der Oest’s film. The screen time given to Michael Cope enables him to suggest interesting ways of viewing the political world inhabited by the Clifton beach ensemble: he calls them “South Africa’s last avant-garde movement, an actual identifiable movement of people with some kind of common artistic purpose” which offered a “world diametrically opposed” to that of Ingrid’s father but which “didn’t require political rebellion because it was engaged in aesthetic and [he pauses as he searches for an appropriate word, then smiles disarmingly and chuckles] vocational rebellion.” The critical distance noted earlier in Ryk Hattingh and Jana Cilliers’ play is evident here, as well as a mischievous sense of humour. Jack’s son, who was a little boy when all the sturm und drang was happening, gives a very different perspective on Ingrid from the self-aware, often self-important and pious views intoned by many other interviewers (especially in Nogueira’s documentary, to which I shall turn shortly).

The montage of interviews that follows brings us back squarely to the political context as remembered by Breytenbach, Peter Clarke and Simone. Breytenbach speaks of the schizoid world where one would spend days on the beach all the while knowing that life on the other side of the mountain was unspeakable; Peter Clarke talks of how daring it was merely to mix with other races and Simone remembers the enforced secrecy of visits by black friends to Clifton. She reads “Toemaar die Donkerman,” both a lullaby and a harbinger of death, but van Schaik presents it literally as an expression of how the otherness of the black man might be experienced in a racially divided country: the last lines of the poem are accompanied by the image of a black man walking along a street.

The centrepiece of the documentary is the presentation of the circumstances and the impact today of “Die Kind.” The poet, Sandile Dikeni is a warm and deeply appreciative spokesperson for the continued power of the poem:

Look, man, there are very few poems that captured Sharpeville or the uprisings in the 60s. If you asked me any day in a pub which poem brings the 60s back to you especially in the period of massacres and stuff like that, it would be Ingrid Jonker’s poem more than any other poem and that comes from gut. And for me the one thing that’s important, it must have been totally imaginary. In South Africa of the 60s you’re divided. I mean the whites are on the other side and for a white woman to cross the boundary, to cross the boundary and feel for another kid in Nyanga is just amazing. I mean it’s difficult enough already for black people to cross the boundary between Johannesburg and Cape Town and visualise an image in

22 Nyanga, but for a white woman in South African in the 60s it’s doubly more fascinating that that crossing has actually been made.

Antjie Krog makes the further point that Jonker is invariably represented in anthologies and educational institutions as “daughter, girl, lover,” the “playful, naïve” Ingrid, not as “mad mother” or “critical political thinker.” Van Schaik’s documentary aims to address the gap regarding her political commitment by a careful selection of what to focus on. Thus we are not told of her abortion and, most interestingly, the interview with André Brink—while certain kinds of information about his emotional experience of Ingrid are conveyed—is weighted in favour of his comments on how her relationship with her father was affected by her political views, the passion with which she entered into debate, and the ways in which she imagined Europe. Simone is given space to talk about her sadness when her mother left for Europe and then we hear the voice-over reading “Wagtyd in Amsterdam,” the poem Ingrid dedicated separately to both André and Jack—here only the dedication to Jack is noted. Four minutes are given to the European trip—a summary version of the tumult with Brink, the impasse with Cope, her collapse and admission to St Anne’s (described in Breytenbach’s always steady tones) and her return to a daughter who remembers how changed she was. This leads us to the worsening situation in the country imaged in the violent squabbling of fishermen, a counterpoint to the idyllic earlier images. Breytenbach reads her “van Gogh” poem, notes how prophetic it is and comments on how she seemed to become weaker in her struggle to live. He suggests that she died because she was so defenseless before the world. The scene that follows is both poignant and unsettling as Simone reads “Mama is nie meer ’n mens nie,” clearly and slightly nervously, with her young daughter resting on the back of her chair, listening. The voice-over tells us of Brink’s engagement to Salomi Louw, Ingrid’s abject poverty in her last days , the cold flat she was living in in July, the South African winter: these are all factors contributing to her suicide. The story of her death, funeral and the aftermath is handled conventionally by means of interviews, but there are choices made by van Schaik that open up her treatment of Jonker in very engaging— and moving—ways. We pan across the cemetery as Jonker’s own voice comes up on the soundtrack reading “Korreltjie sand.” Not only does she have a good clear voice, she reads with grace and precision and comes alive in ways not even van Schaik’s very wide and well-chosen range of photographs of her can manage.18 A further moment of grace is when Simone speaks of what Mandela’s tribute meant to her. Simone’s pretty blonde daughter has been seated behind her listening the whole time we have been watching, so that when Simone describes how the rupture with her mother was healed by Mandela’s words, there is a sense of generational connection: “When Mr Mandela read her poem in parliament, I think it changed a lot of things for me too,” she says. “He gave back what I had lost of her. I felt there was something there for me as well.” The last six-minute movement of the film is very fine. As black men and women stroll towards the camera, we hear Mandela’s voice tell us, “To her and others like her, we owe a debt to life itself. To her and others like her, we owe a commitment to the poor, the oppressed, the wretched and the despised.” We then cut to a group of schoolchildren having a class with Sandile Dikeni who tells them that he has just visited the sister of the baby who was the subject of “Die Kind.” The rest of the sequence shows us this visit. The child’s sister has never been sought out until now and this is the first time she has encountered Jonker or the poem. She tells us the

23 eighteen-month-old baby’s name was Wilberforce Mosuli Manjathi; his Xhosa name, Mosuli, means “the comforter.” Dikeni explains how Mandela read the poem in parliament and that Ingrid Jonker is also dead: “She walked into the sea.” He finds the Zulu translation of the poem. We first hear Ingrid Jonker’s now distinctive voice reading the poem and then her voice fades into that of the baby’s sister reading in Zulu. The blending of voices and languages is an affecting performance of the crossing of boundaries Dikeni sees being enacted by Ingrid Jonker’s imagination. The sister smiles sadly as Dikeni leaves the room stricken with emotion, and tells us, “I can’t explain now but I can understand what she is trying to say about the child.” We cut to waves washing up on the beach with the plangent notes of the piano on the soundtrack. Saskia van Shaik’s documentary is carefully orchestrated around the significance of “Die Kind”—the poem forms the structural spine of the film and ensures that attention will primarily be focussed on Ingrid Jonker as a poet blessed with deep empathy, an exceptionally generous imagination and the ability to offer both in enduring poetic form.

Ingrid Jonker: Her Lives and Time…, Helena Nogueira (1997, 2002, 2007) Helena Nogueira’s film, Ingrid Jonker: Her Lives and Time… is a feature length documentary and, at 107 minutes, almost exactly twice the length of van Schaik’s. Released variously in 1997, 2002 and 2007, she points out in her interview with Daniel Derckson (2007) how little information there was for her with which to work. Key triumphs for her were persuading André Brink to break his silence and securing an interview with —the last he gave before his death (interview with Adam Levin, Sunday Times, 2007). The film is more ambitious in its scope than that of van Schaik, offering footage of the times—the rise of the Nationalist party, the growing stranglehold of apartheid, the personal histories of writers like and Uys Krige—and longer interviews with a range of figures who knew Ingrid Jonker. Simone Venter, André Brink, Laurens van der Post and Marjorie Wallace are given substantial screen time; Michael Cope and Peter Clarke are called on again and Breytenbach makes a brief appearance—but there are also the faces, voices and memories of Revel and Grethe Fox, Topsi Venter, Suzanne Jonker, Albie Sachs, Nico Hagen, Terry Herbst, James Matthews and Kenneth Parker. Much interesting material has been brought together here, but Nogueira does not engage with her interpretative role in shaping this material, except to say that she “had to distill the truth from the legend, to find the real Ingrid in the myth surrounding her” (Artslink, 2007). This suggests that diligent primary research would also need to be undertaken; merely depending on the memories of interviewees thinking back over 30 years would be very risky. No account is taken of the possibility that assertively ‘distilling the truth’ may subvert the ideal of objectivity or what Nogueira calls the “freedom of expression.” She tells Derckson (2007) that her aim is to “respect other people’s views. You never impose your own views. The beauty of it is that it can be receptive to everybody else’s point of view, and that is the absolute experience of making this film that you listen to everybody. That’s why they conjure up this incredible image of Ingrid. Freedom of expression is vital. This does not mean freedom of expression in terms of chaos.”

24 And there’s the rub, of course. The freedom will be curtailed by the editorial choices Nogueira makes in order to tell her version of Jonker’s story (and she does not have access to “everybody”). An obvious instance of editorial selection is her determination to get van der Post on camera as it “links Jonker’s final choice to her unrequited love for Brink” (Levin). This is merely one reading of Jonker’s final choice and a “sensitive but objective portrayal” (Levin) would make it clear that her suicide had many complex causes. Nogueira’s documentary is adept at editing conflicting viewpoints so that a debate appears to emerge. A specially striking instance of her editing techniques may be seen in the way she cuts between Laurens van der Post’s pronouncements on the “feminine” and “woman” in Jonker and how he hopes André Brink will engage with the subject, and Brink’s self-justificatory narrative of his relationship with Jonker. Brink is clearly the key focus of contention. In her interview with Levin, Nogueira proposes that “it was important for him [Brink] to get it out after all that time.” Brink implies rather differently, writing that he felt the need, in his memoir, to give his version of the story, “without drama or melodrama” after participating in documentaries, some “unforgivably bad” (A Fork in the Road, “Ingrid”). If he saw the rough cut of Nogueira’s film before his participation, as she tells us (Levin), he would not have known how she would edit the footage with Van der Post to Brink’s distinct disadvantage (unless, of course, one finds van der Post unbearably pious and patronising, in which case they both come off badly). Elsewhere, Nogueira tells Laetitia Pople (Beeld Plus) that Brink has been treated as a scapegoat and she meant to give him the chance to tell his side of the story. If so, the act does not measure up to the intention. There is an even more devastating effect of the film intimated in Leon de Kock’s reading of Metelerkamp’s biography. He notes in his review essay of the book: Anna (Jonker) Bairos’s death from a heart attack in 1997 was quite possibly directly related to her deep dismay at Helen Nogueira’s biographical film on Jonker, for which Anna made much material in her possession available to the filmmaker. Metelerkamp reports that in 1997, when Anna watched the documentary on her television screen, she phoned Metelerkamp to express her shock, asking Metelerkamp to come to Cape Town as soon as possible to help her to “take steps” against the film and to stop it in its tracks. That same night, Anna died. It is not overly fanciful to suggest that the film contributed to, or even caused, her death” (https://www.litnet.co.za/ingrid-jonker-n-biografie-review-essay/). The overriding desire of the film seems to be not the objective recording of views of Jonker but pressing this material into the service of a verbally hyperbolic, cinematically excessive account that offers an alarming amount of misinformation. Given that key biographical texts were published from 2006 to 2012, one cannot simply lay all the blame for factual errors at Nogueira’s door, but the problem would seem less glaring if she had chosen to strike a more circumspect tone and adopt a more sophisticated and reflexive strategy. Biopics may be allowed some license in their manipulation of the facts of a life in order to admit the exigencies of the medium, but documentaries are conventionally (and this is a conventional documentary with voice-over narration, archival footage and talking heads) understood to seek out the basic facts of a life. This is so, even if the interpretation of that life will vary from one interviewee to another and finally be the product of the director’s view, especially in a case such as this where Nogueira wrote, edited and directed the film.

25 Unlike van Schaik, Nogueira uses a male voice-over—a particularly insistent one— that informs us in the first few minutes that Jonker was “the greatest poet of her generation,” “the shining star” of the sestigers and, yet again, their “brightest star.” “According to which criteria and whose judgement?” one might ask.19 The scenes that accompany these grandiose assurances are the whirling beams of a lighthouse, churning waves and a body that gets thrown up, wrists slashed. The soundtrack is filled with a confusion of voices and doom-laden chords.20 From this thriller-like opening we cut to footage of Nelson Mandela and his tribute to Jonker, with an intrusive fanfare on the soundtrack. The first segments of the interview with Revel Fox and Grethe Fox, who remember her being described by Uys Krige as a wood nymph, is accompanied by Marilyn Monroe singing “I wanna to be loved by you.” Here the song cues the links made by others (like Breytenbach in van Schaik’s film) between Monroe and Jonker.21 Later in the film, its use demonstrates dreadfully poor taste, but more of that in a moment. An aspect of the film that recurs is the frequently random matching of voice-over narrative to stock footage, like that of the Depression, or images of individuals. When we are told about the sestiger resistance to Calvinism, an image of Jan Rabie appears. Why? Then we are told that the sestigers wrote banned novels about their affairs, and an image of Uys Krige appears. Why? Uys Krige was much better known as a poet and playwright and hardly notorious for his affairs. When the Foxes describe how gorgeous and golden Ingrid and Piet were when they appeared on the beach at Clifton, the photograph of Piet fits the description, but is that Ingrid in a frumpy floral dress? She was probably pregant with Simone at the time and the picture would fit better if that were the narrative point. Here, we should surely see Ingrid in the “tiny tiny bikini” that Grethe describes and that we see a moment later. When Erik Laubscher tells of the Sestigers, a well-known photograph of Ingrid and Simone taken in the sad days after Ingrid’s return from Europe is used. It appears again when we are told that Rook en Oker was submitted for the APB Prize.22 It seems to crop up repeatedly— indeed the persistent repetition of certain favoured snapshots is a noticeable, and eventually annoying, feature of the film.23 Another, more peculiar, mismatch occurs when we are told about the girls growing up in Gordon’s Bay: the image is in fact of a photograph called “Landing Fish at Rogge Bay, Cape Town, South Africa, Garlick Wholesale Warehouse etc.” (Table Mountain has been carefully cropped. The Christmas Card that bears this image may be bought for £3).24 This cavalier treatment of landscape and topography is matched by the confused chronology offered by the narration. The grandparents, Beatrice and her daughters first moved from Douglas to Durbanville and then, after the grandfather died, they relocated to the Strand and Gordon’s Bay. Anna Jonker’s absorbing account details the kinds of place they lived in: flats, houses, a semi-detached cottage, but always within reach of the enchantments of the natural world. None of this makes its way into the documentary.25 Perhaps the most egregious mismatch is that pertaining to the account of “Die Kind.” Here we have confusing information as well as an unfortunate choice of image. Firstly we are told that Ingrid witnessed the terrible incident, then that she went to photograph troops in Nyanga and heard about the child’s death. The poem is read in English to the strains of a soprano singing an aria and, very oddly, against the image of the manuscript of “Wagtyd in Amsterdam,” Ingrid’s provocative poem dedicated to both André and Jack.

26 Misinformation continues to distract. Contrary to the narration, Beatrice did not spend the last two years of her life in Valkenburg. Shortly after the nervous breakdown that landed her in Valkenburg, she was diagnosed with cancer. From the hospital in Somerset West, she was moved to Groote Schuur and then to Conradie Hospital in Pinelands. Louise Viljoen notes that “[a]fter spending almost two years in hospital, Beatrice died on 6 August 1944” (2012: 22). Abraham Jonker has been unambiguously recognised as a destructive presence in his daughter’s life (even the tempered W.A. de Klerk decribes him as “wragtig onbeskof varkerig” [in van der Merwe, 2006: 162]). Nogueira’s film, nevertheless, embellishes: so Marjorie Wallace’s assertion that he sent both his daughters out into the world at 16 to make a living is simply not true (but the camera zooms in to the stock photo of Abraham filling the screen making him the two-dimensional villain—this trick is used repeatedly as the film proceeds). Both Anna and Ingrid matriculated from Wynberg Girls High School, Ingrid in 1951 when she was 18 (Viljoen, 2012: 29); Anna confirms her own matriculation (van der Merwe, 2006: 230). Morever, we are told that, “after Beatrice’s death he left his daughters in foster homes while he pursued the life of a dandy.” In fact, the girls were placed in lodgings for six months until Jonker could move his entire family (his third wife and their two small children) into a bigger house in Plumstead. According to Anna, these were reasonably happy times, as stepmother Lulu was pleasant to the girls on their visits. The problems started when Anna and Ingrid moved in with the family. The notion of Jonker living “the life of a dandy” is risible especially in the light of what one reads of the stern, stingy, obsessively disciplined Lulu Brewis (see Metelerkamp, 2018, chapter 2). Louise Viljoen (2012: 14-15) warns of the dangers of reading biography into poems, especially where the poems are characterised as confessional. This is not a problem for Nogueira, however. On two occasions, biography is read off the poetry and on one occasion, the short story, “Die bok,” performs a similar service. So we are told that, “Ingrid was still a minor when he [Abraham] had her committed to Valkenburg.” Inevitably, hand-held camera shots stagger along the corridors of what may be Valkenburg, badly in need of redecoration. A finger presses a button and we hear shrieking, see bolts being slammed shut and an image of a young, wide-eyed Ingrid superimposed on a barred window. (The use of horror genre effects are repeated later in the film when the head psychiatrist at Valkenberg describes the nature of ECT). “Here,” we are told by the voice-over narrative, “Ingrid predicted her death with an uncanny accuracy,” followed by Antjie Krog reading “Ontvlugting.” The sequence climaxes with the repetition of the film’s opening image of a corpse being flung out of the waves, with its wrists slashed, while the female voice performing its soaring aria shudders on the soundtrack as it will do repeatedly throughout the film. Of course, the poem is uncannily predictive, but, as Viljoen points out in her analysis of Jonker’s first collection, one of the poet’s great gifts is the ability to inhabit the worlds of others (2012: 36-39). In this case, at this time of her life, she imagines herself into her mother’s experience: Valkenburg is the place of her mother’s psychological collapse. The memory is of traumatic rupture, the loss of her mother. Ingrid’s one experience of Valkenburg took place after she admitted herself in April 1962 for reasons that may have had something to do with her anxiety over her dependency on medication and alcohol (Metelerkamp, 2018: 209-211).

27 There follows the announcement of Ingrid’s pregnancy, anxiety over which, we are told, inspired the short story, “Die bok.” I discuss this intriguing story in more deatil elsewhere. Suffice to say, here, that the story was initially inspired by a story told to Ingrid by her friend Elmie Watson in 1960, and led to the careful crafting of the story under Jack Cope’s mentorship. It was published at the end of 1961 (Metelerkamp, 2018: 159-61; 202). While the story certainly seems to reference her unhappy marriage to Piet Venter, the protagonist’s pregnancy is a source of complex pleasure. (Simone was born in 1957). The one excerpt from the story, shrieked shrewishly on the soundtrack is, of course, completely decontextualised. “Swanger Vrou” is read as evidence that Ingrid contemplated both suicide and abortion when she was pregnant with Simone, who is then interviewed and assures us that she knew how her mother felt in the poem as she is herself pregnant again: “It is exactly as she said in the poem.” The editing creates a deeply puzzling moment: Simone surely cannot mean that she has also contemplated abortion? Once again, Viljoen offers a subtle and persuasive reading of this immensely complex and disturbing poem, which, she points out, Jonker “carefully worked and reworked” in correspondence with her mentor, Uys Krige. It also shares the tone, says Viljoen, of the poems about motherhood that Sylvia Plath and Antjie Krog would write (2012: 52). It may be worth noting that Ingrid Jonker said, in an interview with Drum in 1963, that “One of my great experiences was to become a mother. Simone, my daughter, was born in 1957. Before her birth and ever since I have written many poems for and about her” (in Metelerkamp, 2018: 107). The third occasion on which literature yields biography in the film is when we are told that, after her return from Europe, “Ingrid was pregnant again and she knew without a doubt that she would have to go through another abortion. She told no-one.” Apparently we will find the evidence of this abortion in Orgie: “There, Ingrid remembers her abortion.” The novel to which she contributed so much does indeed tell of her abortion, the one she had when she was pregnant by Jack. For the rest, it is as well to recall André Brink’s narrative in A Fork in the Road: he tells of Ingrid’s “customary telegram” in early 1965 “to confirm the onset of her period: once again there was to be ‘no butterfly’….in our fraught situation expecting a child would have been catastrophic.” Finally, the inconsistent attention to Ingrid Jonker’s own voice is pervasive. Where hearing her voice uninterrupted in van Schaik’s film is one of its pleasures, in Nogueira’s that voice is usually overlaid with another voice translating, as with “Ek herhaal jou,” the radio recording of “Die bok” and the muddle of English and Afrikaans in the rendition of “Mamma.”26 “Bitterbessie Dagbreek,” read by Ingrid, is reduced to a small excerpt heightening the frustration of not being able to hear more of her. The final movement of the film has her read “Puberteit,” again with echoing and shouting voices on the soundtrack, accompanied by a series of flashbacks, themselves subjected to flashing effects. The night of her death is edited with cross- cutting between interviews, reconstructions and noir sequences of the lighthouse, the streets and the sea. A stormy night is suggested although Marjorie Wallace’s account is much more evocative (notwithstanding her typical editorialising): “It was a strange night… there was this utter silence of the sea and it looked faintly orangey with the light from the lighthouse and the beams of the lighthouse were slicing through the mist like gigantic blades and the mishoring was going

28 hooo hooo. It called you out into the sea. We stopped the car and looked at it and said, ‘Hey it’s weird tonight’. So she may have just walked in with not realising the finality of death.” Ingrid’s death, we are told by the narrator, “marked the end of an era. Shortly after, the angry young artists of the 60s fell apart and their magazine was suppressed.” Fell apart—what does that mean? And what magazine? Contrast, to which screen time is given? If so, Jack Cope’s brainchild went on to survive until it merged with Upstream as New Contrast in 1989 and is still active (http://www.newcontrast.net/about/). But perhaps Die Sestigers is meant—that magazine was short-lived (1963-65, http://diesestigers.wordpress.com/about/). The film rounds off with Nelson Mandela’s voice reading “Die Kind,” fading into that of Ingrid Jonker and ending with their voices echoing each other (with the fanfare and the aria again). The voices are effective in similar ways to the play with voice deployed by van Schaik. But just as one begins to take pleasure in this moment, it collapses in the most appallingly trivialising sound of Marilyn Monroe chirping, “I wanna be loved by you. Ta teedly teedly teedly tum. Poo poo pe doo.” Nogueira may take the search for love as the theme of Jonker’s life (Derckson) and justify her use of this ditty by commenting on how Ingrid “modelled herself on film stars” and “had her bikinis specially made to emulate them” (Pople, Beeld Plus) but this comment is not embedded and developed in the film, and the use of the song a few times at the start is simply not adequate to justify it in that most sensitive moment, as epitaph. Nogueira had intended to make a biopic of Ingrid Jonker, with participation from such luminaries as Emma Thompson and Stephen Fry. It was to be called All that Breaks. She tells Derckson (2007): “It will be a very romantic film. When Dreamworks read the script, because they do Americana [sic], they knew nothing about Ingrid and very little about South Africa. They came back and said that it will find a very big art audience, comparing it to The Hours and American Beauty.” While the projected film has not appeared (sources tell me that Paula van der Oest’s project found funding first), the comparison with The Hours and American Beauty suggests a complex script, certainly more interesting as an experiment in the genre of the biopic than the overwrought effort written by Greg Latter and directed by van der Oest.

Black Butterflies, Paula van der Oest (2011). Latter makes it clear that he depended on Jack Cope’s diaries for the shape of the script and offers this confident account of his research: “I went there and sat in a drab little room while someone with gloves brought me Cope’s diaries. Jack was the kind of guy who wrote a page a day. I sat there reading his innermost feelings about Ingrid. I couldn’t have had a better insight into her if she had told me about herself. Here was a man trying to fathom her out, giving me complete access to the incredibly complicated, wild spirit of Ingrid Jonker” (in van Schalkwyk, 2011). Where Jack can only try to “fathom her out,” Latter gains complete access to her and depends on a male perspective. Van der Oest has the simplistic view that “she didn’t get the only thing she wanted most in life, the love and recognition of her father. Her father was a member of the apartheid government and active in the censorship board. Although he must have known how talented she was, he could never show any

29 approval. It finally killed her” (Interview, Indiewire, 2011). Unsurprisingly, the film that resulted from the collaboration of van der Oest and Latter lays the emphasis squarely on Jonker’s relationship with men. The women in Jonker’s life are condensed into a character called Anna (Candice D’Arcy) who has scant connection with Ingrid’s sister and is very sketchily conceived. So, too, the black members of Ingrid’s social circle are reduced to one figure called Nkosi (Thami Mbongo), who serves largely as a plot device to propel the fabricated circumstances leading to the writing of “Die Kind.” In the film, Jack (Liam Cunningham) and Ingrid () wish to get in touch with “Nkosi’s brother” who lives in Nyanga and they run into the roadblock and murder of the little boy. Van der Oest acknowledges the invention here and argues that “to understand her rage and despair, the audience has to feel what had happened there. We decided to show the shooting, to make it more impressive, in order to understand Ingrid’s urge to write about it” (Interview, Tribeca, 2012). Well and good, although this detracts from what Dikeni describes as the extraordinary act of imagining that Ingrid Jonker accomplishes in the poem. Furthermore, the use to which the composition of the poem is put by Latter and van der Oest makes it finally subservient to the love triangle between Ingrid, Jack and André (called Eugene Maritz in the film and played by Nicholas Pauling).27 We find Ingrid making passionate phone calls to Jack and Eugene as she tries out phrases of the poem. To Jack she declares how haunted she is by the event and begs him to come and see her, a plea he curtly refuses, although there is no obvious reason for him to be so abrupt at this point. The call to Eugene starts with her telling him he could be in Cape Town for breakfast if he left at once and ends in her sniping at him, “I bet your wife doesn’t fuck you half as good as I do,” after which she slams the phone off the table.28 This muddle of the political and the personal pervades the film and does a great disservice to the characterisation of Jonker. It is worth noting, for example, that “Die Kind” was written very easily. In a radio interview shortly before she left for Europe, Ingrid was asked, “And once you have completed the poem, is there any revision?” She replies: “Sometimes yes and sometimes no. There is a poem, ‘Bitterbessie Dagbreek,’ that I rewrote many times, and then there is another poem, ‘The Child,’ that I wrote and never changed” (Metelerkamp, 2012: 131). The point is not whether Latter and van der Oest are being true to fact, but what the effects of their falsifying are. The way in which this powerful moment in Jonker’s oeuvre is adapted by the film is an index to the reading of Jonker’s life that it presents. Black Butterflies uses the poem as a way of further impressing on us Jonker’s neediness and helplesslessness in the face of the men to whom she turned. Her lack of agency is seen right at the start when Jack saves her from drowning, a scene meant perhaps to foreshadow her death, but serving at this point merely to construct her as the helpless damsel in distress and he the gallant knight (and she was, in fact, a good swimmer [see, for example, Meterkamp, 2018: 372]). The characterisation of Jonker as agentless is even more irresponsibly conveyed when the collection Rook en Oker is compiled. While she lies in bed at Valkenburg, Jack finds her poems and he and Uys excitedly type them up and sort them. Ingrid is presented with the fait accompli. Viljoen justly comments: This version of events reinforces a rather insidious image of Ingrid as the stereotypical female hysteric and paints her as a purely intuitive writer who had flashes of brilliance but could not rationally structure her own work without male guidance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Ingrid’s letters to Uys reveal

30 that she was constantly working on her poems, trying to refine and improve them. She also mentioned the possibility of a second volume in a letter to Uys as early as December 1959. (2012: 87) In the biopic, she completes “Die Kind” and takes it to her father to read in a scene that is meant to convey how vile her father is, but also has the effect of making one wonder whether the daughter has completely taken leave of her senses and is utterly uncomprehending of what he stands for. Carice Van Houten, playing Ingrid, urges her father to read the poem with a girlish smile and a reassurance that “You’re nearly there, pa!” A moment later she asks, “What do you think of it so far?” Playing Abraham Jonker, Rutger Hauer’s tone and facial expression as he reads are a mixture of disbelief, sarcasm and disgust. The answer is plain to any but the most obtuse. In fact, Ingrid invited her father to meet her at a restaurant in order to present a him with a copy of Rook en Oker and, when she won the APB prize, invited him to accompany her to the prize-giving in Johannesburg. He rejected both invitations which hurt her deeply (Viljoen 2012: 94-95). While Ingrid’s repeated attempts to win recognition from her father may be cause for wonder, these attempts were delicately made and ensure our compassion for her. Given her provocation of her father the first time we see them together as adults in the film, her subsequent attempts at rapprochement seem doubly implausible. In this early scene, Latter has her announce that her father does not write novels, merely books. She may have thought this and said as much, but it is unlikely she would have said so within his earshot as she does here. The result is that some sympathy is created for Abraham. The relationship between Ingrid, her father and literature may have been more complex. Metelerkamp notes what an enticing library Abraham Jonker had where the girls were allowed to read: “Abraham se biblioteek is vir Ingrid ’n bron van inspirasie, met al die bundels van ou skrywers en digters wat sy verslind— Shakespeare, Shelley, John Keats, Eugène Marais, C. Louis Leipoldt. Die kinders word toegelaat om daar te gaan lees, wat hulle die grootste pleasier verskaf” (Metelerkamp, 2018: 58).

Abraham Jonker heartily disapproved of what Grethe Fox (in Nogueira’s documentary) calls the “salon” on the beach at Clifton and Ingrid’s growing political consciousness was an increasing source of tension between them. This is common knowledge and has been written about extensively by Metelerkamp, Viljoen, van Wyk and others. The rift between father and daughter widened very damagingly when Muis Levin sensationalistically—and out of context—printed the headline “Dad was ridiculous, says Ingrid Jonker” at the time of the heightening of censorship (Metelerkamp 2012: 125 and 2018: 234). There is no obvious reason why the film could not, very effectively, have portrayed the political tensions of Ingrid’s relationship with her father by filming the actual circumstances of a greedy journalist pursuing her down Adderley Street for a sound-bite on her father’s dismissive pronouncements about the writers who had signed the petition against censorship. Latter, however, tells Karen van Schalkwyk that when Van der Oest came on board the title was changed from Smoke and Ochre to Black Butterflies. Van Schalkwyk (2011) adds: “Both Latter and Van der Oest are adamant that although the story is set against the backdrop of apartheid, it is about Jonker’s life. Her complexity was the key to the story.” Perhaps Latter did not use the Sunday Times story because it had too much to do with an apartheid-driven narrative? Either way, Ingrid Jonker’s complexity is forfeit.

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Michael Cope remembers, in his interview in Nogueira’s documentary, that, as a young boy, Ingrid’s presence in the lives of him and his brother was like a “vortex of chaos”—a good image for the Ingrid presented by Black Butterflies. That she is figured as a serial homewrecker is obvious not only in her pursuit of Eugene, but in the fabrication that Jack was still spending time with ‘Helen’ and his sons in Natal— he and Lesley de Villiers had parted company before Ingrid came on the scene. Nevertheless, sending Jack off to be with his wife in Natal gives Latter another opportunity for Ingrid to behave obnoxiously, phoning Jack and telling him, “If you loved me you’d be with me, you prick!” Off she goes then with Eugene, who may be the André Brink stand-in, but is presented as undistinguished, uncharismatic, nervous, a newspaper editor of The Herald in Bloemfontein. No cloud of apocalypse here. Eugene meets her in Amsterdam, but won’t go to Paris with her in an incomprehensible script choice, given that that was where they had a relatively happy time. Happy times are not what the film gives Ingrid, however. The merry, laughing, tender, generous Ingrid remembered by her friends (and evident in so many of the photographs) has no place here. She operates at high voltage for most of the film, starting with her uncontextualised aggression against a bewildered, mild-looking Piet Venter,29 continuing with her erratic behaviour with Jack, her graphic salacious overtures to Jan Rabie and her violent, exhibitionistic displays with Eugene. Two of the most alienating scenes are those where she slurps wine off the floor amidst broken shards of glass, notwithstanding the presence of her sister and her daughter, and the fabrication where she performs her own abortion, with knitting needles, of Eugene’s putative child. This is not melodrama, complex or otherwise. This is grand guignol. After the final credits, we read, “The story of this moton picture is loosely based upon actual events, however, some of the characters and incidents portrayed and the names herein are fictitious and any similarity to the name, character, or history of any person, living or dead, or any event is entirely coincidental and unintenional.” These disclaimers are invariably cause for amusement. What on earth do they mean? That André Brink should not sue the filmmakers? We are informed that the film is only “loosely” based on Jonker’s life which apparently gives the filmmakers license to fool around with the facts. As Robert Rosenstone points out, however, there is “false invention” and “true invention;” the former is false to “the discourse of history,” the latter not (1995).30 The falsifications in Black Butterflies are false to the discourse of history in that they create a relentlessly two-dimensional image of Jonker that leaves the uninformed viewer with a distorted, irredeemably limited understanding of who she was and makes nonense of the final moment where Mandela’s inaugural address is trotted out as a belated legitimation of her life (and the film). One reviewer, Sam Adams, makes the point succinctly: South African poet Ingrid Jonker was an absent mother, a faithless lover, a thankless daughter, and a vicious drunk. At least that’s the portrait that emerges from Paula van de Oest and Greg Latter’s filmed bio…. In spite of her father’s rank bigotry, Ingrid often seems like a petulant child when she’s opposing him, in part due to the shallowness of van Houten’s performance. She commits to the role, throwing herself to the floor to suck liquor from the shards of a broken bottle, but never connects. A viewer without foreknowledge of the movie’s subject might go

32 some time without realizing Ingrid is meant to be the protagonist, since Cunningham’s performance is so much more charismatic. (A.V. Club, 2012). Van Houten described her reaction to the script’s Ingrid: “When I first read the script I felt very close to her, but when I started rehearsing the role many times she made me angry. I often fight with my roles, it helps me play them.” In unconscious support of the reviewer cited above, however, she explains of her acting, “To me, that’s not the most difficult thing. To transform. I don’t really see it happen. I don’t have the feeling that I’m transforming, really. I don’t believe you can get into somebody’s character but more that somebody comes in you. You just use yourself. In everything I play, I feel like it is me. I just say different things on different times and look different” (in Derckson, The Writing Studio, n.d.). Van der Oest also confesses that she “found it hard to direct a film about a woman who is not immediately sympathetic and easy to watch” but is of the view that van Houten “finally managed to make her difficult and sensitive and moving and vulnerable at the same time” (Interview, Women and Hollywood, 2011). Whatever her intentions, the script is too set on giving us a character riven by excess and the direction and performance have not found a way to circumvent that. The film opens with a profile shot of van Houten as the voice-over reads the poem that begins “I am with those who abuse sex”—the poem goes on to challenge the South African establishment at every level and to identify with all the marginalised and oppressed. The film seems to stall at the first line. Moreover, the poems are rendered in English and not what van der Oest perplexingly calls “the South African language” (Interview with Ackerman).31 If anxiety about marketability precluded making the film in English and Afrikaans (or at least finding an innovative way of using Afrikaans when engaging with the poetry) then the choice to go with English simply argues a failure of imagination. But then this is not an imaginative biopic. Where some reviewers are impressed and buy this version of Jonker and the events delineated,32 others criticise the film for its “romantic biopic conventions,” or for being “cliché-ridden” and “sentimental.”33 The ending is especially sentimental. Ingrid visits Jack in the pouring rain to give him her prize copy of Rook en Oker inscribed with lines from Whitman and then wanders out into the rain. He lets her go. The rain falls, the waves crash and Ingrid moves glumly in slow motion towards the camera. The next morning Jack, running along the beach, sees her body being dragged up. Cut to a repeat of the scene at the start of the film of a blonde-haired child running along the beach as Mandela’s voice comes up on the soundtrack.34 Ingrid Jonker’s life and death lend themselves too easily, in broad outline, to what Dennis Bingham (2010) describes as one typical form of female biopic: “the downward trajectory.” Writing of mainstream Hollywood biopics, he observes: In contrast to Great Man films,…female biopics overall found conflict and tragedy in a woman’s success. A victim, whatever her profession, made a better subject than a survivor with a durable career and a non-traumatic personal life. Early deaths were preferable to long lives. Female biopics frequently depicted their subjects as certainly or possibly insane made so by the cruelties of a victimizing world, or by the subject’s insistence on having her own way in the world. These principles hardened into conventions. Films were made about Lillian Roth (Susan Hayward in I’ll Cry Tomorrow), not Lillian Gish; Frances Farmer (Jessica Lange in Frances), not Katharine Hepburn; Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas

33 in the Mist), not Margaret Mead; Billie Holliday (Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues), not Ella Fitzgerald. Or Ingrid Jonker, not Elisabeth Eybers. Bingham continues: “…the downward trajectory, the drama in which the public woman can only be degraded and in which drama is perceived as possible only in degradation, grows naturally out of a structure in which women are seen as outside the norm.” Black Butterflies takes its place among the many films about women artists whose lives follow a “downward trajectory:” Camille Claudel, Carrington, Sylvia. In the case of Plath, parallels are often drawn with Jonker. Of the nine reviews included in IMDB’s Metacritic section (at the time of reading), seven characterise Jonker as “the South African Sylvia Plath” on the basis of broadly similar circumstances: they died within a couple of years of each other by suicide and had “Daddy issues” (Holden, New York Times), but their biographies and their art are also profoundly different.35 Christine Jeffs and John Brownlow’s Sylvia (2003), its flaws notwithstanding, conveys an utterly different world (material, intellectual and emotional) from that inhabited by Jonker, but the depressing impulse of rushed journalists to make superficial comparisons is merely another testament to the ways in which a life may become “the latest entry in a genre” as Rosenstone (2012) so elegantly phrases it. Navigating one’s way through the literary and filmic landscape that tries to frame Ingrid Jonker reveals a widely varied topography that cannot be contained in a single point of view or one “concealing image.” She keeps escaping, as Cope warned. The poem that launched her posthumous international career frames her as a politically aware and committed artist; her death signals a complex web of needs, desires, frustrations and despair that are not only the result of apartheid but have their source in her childhood joys, dreams, losses and traumas as well as in her adult experiences of love, insecurity, self-doubt, faithlessness and betrayal—that of herself and others. Where Orgie focuses on the personal turmoil of Ingrid’s life, The Dawn Comes Twice tries to find ways of dealing with both the personal and the political, refracting Jonker as a figure across more than one character. As will be seen in another section of this project, Berta Smit deploys religious allegory in her exploration of the Ingrid figure and also has recourse to several characters in order to try and evoke her, while Karel Schoeman, writing ten years after her death, offers the distance of time, space and the shifting moods of memory to suggest the complexity and elusiveness of the Ingrid figure. The films that followed 1994’s memorable celebration start with the delicate portrait of the politically sensitive Ingrid in van Schaik’s film. Melodrama shackles her image in both Nogueira’s attempt to traverse her life as widely as possible and is the mode, in even more extreme form, that shapes Van der Oest and Latter’s misadventure, where, as one reviewer, Jason Bailey, comments, apartheid is “mostly window dressing” (https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/49547/black-butterflies/) while the personal dimensions of Jonker’s life are subjected to a drama “perceived as possible only in degradation,” in Bingham’s phrase.

There is surely a film waiting to be made that recognises the “vortex of chaos” (Michael Cope) she brought with her, but that also does justice to her “gaiety and an elusive, changing beauty. The birth marks: her loyalty, love that endures, a sense of truth” (Jack Cope, 1966: 16).

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Image source http://www.arnepurves.co.za Accessed June 2019

1 Personal correspondence, May, 2014. 2 See, too, Rita Barnard’s statement that Jonker was “a young woman who in 1965 drowned herself in the Atlantic because she could no longer tolerate the injustices of apartheid” (2001: 156). 3 My page references are to the manuscript of the play kindly sent to me by Jana Cilliers in May 2014. Here is a brief account of the first production of and responses to the play: “In 1997 première Ryk se eenvroustuk oor Ingrid Jonker getiteld Opdrag: Ingrid Jonker by die KKNK. Mark Graham was die regisseur, met Jana Cilliers as die aktrise wat ’n obsessie het met Jonker. In 1998 is dit by die Johannesburgse Stadskouburg opgevoer, in 1999 in Kaapstad en in 2002 in die Baxter-teater in Kaapstad. In The Citizen van 14 Februarie 1998 het Raeford Daniel Ryk se teks as "a brilliantly evolved text" beskryf, en in die Cape Times van 19 Maart 2002 skryf Wilhelm Snyman: "What Cilliers and others (Hattingh and Graham) have achieved is masterful and while Opdrag: Ingrid Jonker may appeal only to those familiar with the events, the times and course of , it is a play which ideally all South Africans should understand: it lies at the heart of our collective history and for that reason, as well as its superb execution, it remains as powerful as it was when first performed in Cape Town in February 1999." https://www.litnet.co.za/ryk-hattingh- 1957-2017/. Accessed April, 2019. 4 In real life Jana Cilliers began a series of superb one-woman performances with Opdrag (followed by The American Popess and Master Class, as Maria Callas, referenced in Opdrag as another gifted artist who was dumped by her lover who immediately married someone else). https://esat.sun.ac.za/index.php/Jana_Cilliers Accessed April, 2019. Petrovna Metelerkamp includes an image of the diary’s last entries (2012: 196). 5 This perspective finds its counterpoint in the often amused tone of Marjorie Wallace or the mordant recollections of Michael Cope in the interviews filmed by documentarists Nogueira (1997) and Van Schaik (2001), analysed below.

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6 Smit and Schoeman’s novels will be explored in a separate section. I need also to mention that this project focuses largely on fiction and film. Several poets have written tributes to Jonker and songwriters have adapted her poems, notably Chris Chameleon whose two albums, Ek Herhaal Jou (2005) and As Jy Weer Skryf (2011), were well received. To me, the songs are mostly indistinguishable pop versions of the poems which they mangle in order to make up the 2 ½ to 3 ½ minutes required for a song, usually by repeating certain lines or filling in with phatic sounds. Ingrid Jonker: Die Kind Is Nog Jonger - 36 Verwerkings Van Ingrid Jonker Gedigte is a double CD production released in 2016, under the auspices of Simone, Ingrid’s daughter, and produced by her husband, Ernesto Garcia Marques, and Paul Blom. The poems are adapted in a variety of different ways according to the propensities of the very different performers. Responses will obviously depend on one’s musical tastes. 7 The book is dense with details drawn from new interviews (for example with Salomi Louw, André Brink’s second wife) and material drawn from Ingrid’s own diaries that found their way to Portugal and the late Gerrit Komrij’s home when Anna (Jonker) Bairos’s son, Anthony, sold the papers to him. Metelerkamp travelled there in 2014 and established how little of serious value there is in the boxes, much of which has already made its way into print (289). 8 In 2015, shortly after his death, but with his full prior cooperation, Francis Galloway oversaw the publication of the letters between Brink and Jonker, called Vlam in die Sneeu: die liefdesebriewe van André P. Brink en Ingrid Jonker issued in Afrikaans and in English translation (by Leon de Kock and Karin Schimke) and mounted in both an “economy” hardback version and a numbered, limited prestige edition in a box, including extra photographs, a facsimile of one of Ingrid’s letters and a commissioned portrait of Brink and Ingrid on the cover of the book. In her introduction, Galloway writes of the gaps in terms of some missing letters, and Willie Burger’s fine introduction points out the lack of material pertaining to telephone calls and tapes that the couple sent to each other as well as the particular contexts of the writing of the letters or the details of what took place when they were with each other. This latter is addressed, at least from Brink’s point of view, in Leon de Kock’s 2019 publication of a biography that includes meticulous attention to Brink’s voluminous journals in which he itemised every detail of his encounters with Ingrid. For Henning Snyman’s insightful review of Vlam in die Sneeu, see https://www.litnet.co.za/litnet-akademies- resensie-essay-vlam-in-die-sneeu-die-liefdesbriewe-van-andre-p-brink-en-ingrid- jonker-redakteur-francis-galloway/ Accessed April, 2019. 9 Conversely, he reveals a capacity for believing that his fictions and fantasies are being realized, as in his sense that Ingrid was the character of Nicolette in Die ambassadeur come to life (Metelerkamp 2018: 230). 10 It strikes me that there is something to be done with the relationship beween Ingrid Jonker’s own imagination and these evocative words. 11 Shaun de Waal’s measured review of the biography also points out the anachronisms of the book’s English title. That of the Afrikaans version, he suggests, is more appropriate: André P. Brink en die spel van die liefde, “in which ‘spel’ is play as well as ‘performance’” (Mail & Guardian, May 24-30 2019: 8). 12 The original poem is called “Op pad na die dood.” 13 See Anna Jonker in van der Merwe (220). This fact is ignored by all the films and even Brink, in his 2009 memoir, thinks Ouma Annie died soon after Beatrice. 14 The documents pertaining to the novel’s interactions with censorship in the seventies may be found in Standpunte 130 (1977): 24-27. John Kannemeyer felt it should not be banned but was unimpressed by its narrative experimentation, while 36

Charles Harvey found it to be a “genuine work of literature” (24). Further views appeared by Harold Rudolph, Standpunte 132 (1977): 24-27 and Pieter B. Geldenhuys (op. cit., 28-36). 15 There is a possible link here to Ingrid’s close friendship with Bonnie Davidtz whom, according to Metelerkamp, Cope distrusted and suspected of having an affair with Ingrid, based on a miscontrual of a tape where Ingrid and Bonnie were reading the parts from the love scene in Uys Krige’s translation of Lorca’s Yerma (2018: 76). 16 “Tyrone Appollis's artwork is based on Ingrid Jonker's timeless poem, "The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga". Appollis used the image of a tricycle as the concept for this piece, inspired by a line from the poem: ‘... this child who just wanted to play in the sun ...’. He included several lines from Jonker's poem on the four sides of the plinth on which rests the sculpture he made. The lines are in polychrome mosaic and are rendered in a childlike handwriting: ‘This child who just wanted to play in the sun’ ‘The child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers’ ‘The child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world’ ‘The child is not dead’ The memorial's base is cast in concrete and the sculpture fashioned from flat iron, which was hot-dipped, galvanised and epoxy-coated. The memorial to Ingrid Jonker is installed on the seafront at Gordon's Bay where she spent some of her happiest moments as a child.” http://sthp.saha.org.za/memorial/articles/the_light_bulb_moment_the_artists_c oncept_17.htm Accessed July, 2019. 17 Pinning down a date is tricky. The film seems to have appeared on South African TV in 1997, is dated 2002 on IMDB and was given theatrical release in 2007. 18 Metelerkamp’s biography concurs: “In opnames van radio-onderhoude wat later jare met Ingrid gevoer is, is dit opmerklik dat sy besonder duidelik en genuanseerd praat. Haar gedigte lees sy ook met ’n helder diksie en goeie stemritme voor. Die aktrise Joey de Koker, voorheen senior lektor by die ADK, vertel dat sy by haar eerste ontmoeting met ‘die klein feëkindjie Ingrid’ getref is deur haar suiwer uitspraak en hoe ongelooflik mooi sy gepraat het” (2018:73). 19 Viljoen (2012: 147) notes the debate regarding how much Jonker’s early death has led to overvaluation of the poems. 20 The excessive play with visual effects here is of a piece with several other instances in the film: Ingrid’s breakdown in Paris invites clamouring voices, rapid pans and superimpositions of fragments of the Eiffel Tower. Interviews with James Matthews, Peter Clarke, Kenny Parker and Erik Laubscher on the worsening state of the country (detention without trial, the secret police) use the trick of starting with black and white, then we hear a camera shutter and the image changes to colour. Why? It’s very distracting. 21 Comparisons with Monroe or, in the field of poetry, Plath and Sexton, are frequently unexamined. Viljoen (2012) tries to flesh out the Plath connection and Joan Hambidge has done considerable work exploring the commonalities between Plath and Jonker. http://joanhambidge.blogspot.com/2013/02/ingrid-jonker-black- butterflies-2007.html et al. Accessed May, 2014. 22 The narration tells us that Ingrid’s competition for the prize included “Jack, Uys, Jan, André and all the great South African writers.” Jack never wrote in Afrikaans, which makes one suspect the rest of this list. Certainly Jonker was up against Jan

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Rabie’s Mens-alleen (Viljoen, 2012: 95 and Metelerkamp, 2012: 130). Who is included in “all”? 23 Thanks to Joy Sapieka for pointing this out a while back when I was still impressed by the film, having seen it only once and having read much less about Jonker. 24 http://www.delcampe.net/page/item/id,129568474,var,Landing-Fish-at-Rogge-Bay- Cape-Town-South-Africa-Garlicks-wholesale-warehouse-etc,language,E.html Accessed May, 2014. This link no longer operates. The image may be found here: https://www.google.com/search?q=landing+fish+at+rogge+bay&tbm=isch&source=u niv&client=firefox-b- d&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwi1h8XN9_XhAhWjRxUIHd14AlwQsAR6BAgJEAE&biw= 1440&bih=725#imgrc=P-IYx4IM1_Jz2M Accessed April, 2019. Amusingly, Metelerkamp’s 2018 biography includes Anna Jonker’s memory of how, as small girls, they explored the beach at Gordon’s Bay and named one of them “Garlicks”: “Waar ons gehoor het van Garlicks, die winkel in Kaapstad, weet ek glad nie; ons was nooit daar nie. Maar ons Garlicks het die mooiste skulpe bo-op die kruin gehad, en lang sye waarteen ons kon afgly” (31). 25 While we have the advantage of the lengthy extract from Anna’s memoir included in Metelerkamp’s 2003 book, the piece was written in 1979 and more careful research by Nogueira would have given her access to it. So, too, in regard to later information, the records of Valkenburg and Wynberg Girls High School could have been consulted. 26 Translations from Afrikaans also leave something to be desired, notably the mysterious poem (whose origin neither I nor anyone I consulted seems to know—if it’s an unpublished manuscript that should be made clear) whose lines: “…en met die verraad van die heilige skoot/ vloei my lewe terug in die roet van die dood” are bizarrely translated as “and with the treachery of the holy squirt/my life floods back into the root of death.” 27 Naming him Eugene Maritz is unfortunate, especially given that Die Wonderwerker, Katinka Heyns’s biopic on Eugène Marais, was released at almost the same time (2012). A Dutch friend of mine who enjoyed van der Oest’s film told me with great interest that Ingrid had had an affair with Eugène Marais. Ingrid did like (some) older men, but perhaps not when she was a three-year-old (her age when Marais, aged 65, shot himself). 28 Playing fast and loose with Jonker’s poetry is one of the key frustrations of the film. “One of the most challenging aspects was bringing the inner voice of the poet to life. Poetry never transfers easily to film, said Latter: ‘This is because it is so much about the “inner voice” of someone. We had to find various narrative techniques to get the poetry on to the screen as a visual entity, rather than something that is just recited or spoken. Ultimately, my approach was to make Ingrid’s character a poem in itself. That was my mantra’ ” (in Van Schalkwyk, 2011). If so, Ingrid as poem emerges as a frenzied, inchoate, pornographic poem more akin to the extreme edges of the sixties underground, than the carefully worked and reworked, profoundly affecting poetry she wrote. Much of the time her poems are seen splashed on walls, which also ignores how carefully she worked, even if she did often develop fragments on whatever pieces of paper came to hand (see Berta Smit’s comments for example [van der Merwe, 2006: pages 112-130]). 29 There is one brief exchange with her father where she tells him she and Piet have nothing in common and he points out to her that she married Piet. She slumps into her regular sullen mode.

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30 To list all the falsifications and inventions in the film would be tedious. A few of them don’t materially affect our grasp of Jonker’s life and the events that surrounded her. Others simply seem foolish as when Jack drops her off at the “Retreat Hotel,” after he rescues her from her father’s house. Retreat is a long way from the Sea Point/Clifton coast, Ingrid’s stamping ground throughout her Cape Town years, but no doubt the location scouts couldn’t resist the symbolic value of the hotel’s name? 31 I noticed while re-reading Die noorderlig that one of the Dutch characters calles the language Zuidafrikaans which she finds an “ontzettend leuk taaltjie” (60). This patronising view is shared by van der Oest when she tells the Tribeca Film Festival interviewer that she has “always loved the South African language, although it is, in a way, the language of the white suppressor (the Dutch were among the first settlers in South Africa; the language is therefore very similar to Dutch but much more poetical).” What does this mean? “Poetical”? How? 32 See, for example, The New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/movies/black-butterflies-a-biopic- about-the-poet-ingrid-jonker.html ) The Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/black-butterflies-film-review- 203336 ) The New York Observer (especially ludicrous and ill-informed). (https://observer.com/2012/02/black-butterflies-review-rex-reed-ingrid- jonker-paula-van-der-oest/ ) and Slant Magazine (https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/black-butterflies/ ) 33 Variety is more careful, if sexist: “Though refusing to paint her protagonist in a simplistically heroic light, van der Oest still subscribes to romantic biopic conventions. Despite the strong political bent of Jonker’s work, apartheid possesses little reality in the film beyond the poetess’ [sic] relation to it.” (https://variety.com/2011/film/markets-festivals/black-butterflies- 1117945072/ ). See also The New York Post (https://nypost.com/2012/03/02/black-butterflies/ ). All reviews accessed in May, 2014. 34 Needless to say the events of Ingrid’s death, the recovery of her body and Jack’s place in the narrative are immensely more complicated. (See Metelerkamp, 2018, chapter 14). 35 The catch-phrase “Daddy issues” is especially annoying and reductive. One could just as easily reduce their complicated feelings about their parents to “Mommy issues.” Either way, Ingrid and Sylvia had very different life experiences in relation to each of their parents. For an interesting take on Plath and her mother, see Katie Roiphe’s discussion, “ ‘Daddy’ is Mommy: Is Sylvia Plath’s famous poem really about her mother?” https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/02/sylvia-plaths-poem- daddy-is-about-her-mother.html Accessed April, 2019.

References: Barnard, Rita. “Speaking Places: Prison, Poetry, and the South African Nation.” Research in African Literatures 32.3 (2001): 155-176. Bingham, Dennis. Book Two, “Prologue” In Whose Lives Are They Anyway?: The Biopic as Contemporary Film Genre New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 2010. Kindle Edition.

Brink, André. Orgie. Kaapstad: Malherbe, 1965. 39

Brink, André. “Introduction.” Black Butterflies: Selected Poems by Ingrid Jonker, 9- 36. Translated by André Brink and Antjie Krog. Cape Town: Human & Rousseau, 2007. Brink, André. A Fork in the Road: A Memoir. London: Harvill Secker, 2009 (Kindle edition) Cope, Jack. “A Crown of Wild Olive.” In In Memoriam: Ingrid Jonker, 11-22. Edited by Jan Rabie. Kaapstad & Pretoria: Human & Rousseau. 1966. Cope, Jack. The Dawn Comes Twice. London: Heinemann, 1969. Cope, Jack. “Poet Against the System.” In The Adversary Within: Dissident Writers in Afrikaans, by Jack Cope, 79-92. Cape Town: David Philip, 1982. De Kock, Leon. Review Essay of Ingrid Jonker: ’n Biografie. (https://www.litnet.co.za/ingrid-jonker-n-biografie-review-essay/ ) Accessed April, 2019. (The passage appears on page 387-388 in the biography). De Kock, Leon. The Love Song of André P. Brink: A Biography. Johannesburg & Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2019. Eliot. T. S. Dante. London: Faber and Faber, (1929) 1965. Galloway, Francis, ed. Vlam in die Sneeu: Die Liefdesbriewe van André P. Brink & Ingrid Jonker. Kaapstad: Umuzi, 2015. Galloway, Francis, ed. Vlam in die Sneeu: Die Liefdesbriewe van André P. Brink & Ingrid Jonker. Kaapstad: Umuzi, 2015. #82 of 1000. Geldenhuys, Pieter B. “Literêre Meriet en Sensuur.” Standpunte 132 (1977): 28-36 Haresnape, Geoffrey. “So Much Depends.” New Contrast 74 and 75 (1991):13-16. Harvey, C.J.D. and Kannemeyer, J.C. Die Verbod op The Dawn Comes Twice. Standpunte 130 (1977): 24-27. Hattingh, Ryk. Opdrag. 21 pages. 1997. (Mansucript provided by Jana Cilliers) Jonker, Ingrid. Versamelde Werke, Derde Hersiene Uitgawe. Kaapstad & Pretoria: Human & Rousseau, 1994. Krige, Uys. “Soos in Haarself Eindelik die Ewigheid Haar Verander.” In In Memoriam: Ingrid Jonker, 51-77. Edited by Jan Rabie. Kaapstad & Pretoria: Human & Rousseau. Lanigan, Damian. “Music From a Farther Room: Celebrating 100 years of ‘Prufrock.’” New Republic 246.9/10 (2015): 54-58. Metelerkamp, Petrovna. Ingrid Jonker:’n Biografie. Cape Town: Penguin Random House, 2108. Metelerkamp, Petrovna. Ingrid Jonker: Beeld van ’n Digterslewe. Vermont: Hemel & See, 2003.

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Metelerkamp, Petrovna. Ingrid Jonker: A Poet’s Life. Hermanus: Hemel & See, 2012. Rosenstone, Robert A.”The Historical Film as Real History.” Film-Historia, V. 1 (1995): 5-23 http://www.culturahistorica.es/rosenstone/historical_film.pdf Accessed June 2014. Rosenstone, Robert. “Telling Lives.” In History on Film/Film on History 2nd Edition. Abingdon: Routledge 2012. Kindle Edition.

Rudolph, Harold. “The Dawn Has Gone—Forever.” Standpunte 132 (1977): 20-27. Snyman, Henning. Review of Vlam in die Sneeu: die liefdesebriewe van André P. Brink en Ingrid Jonker https://www.litnet.co.za/litnet-akademies-resensie- essay-vlam-in-die-sneeu-die-liefdesbriewe-van-andre-p-brink-en-ingrid- jonker-redakteur-francis-galloway/ Accessed April, 2019. Terblanche, Erika. “Ryk Hattingh (1957-2017).” https://www.litnet.co.za/ryk- hattingh-1957-2017/ Accessed April, 2019. Van Wyk, Johan. Gesig van die liefde. : Johan van Wyk, 1999. Van der Merwe, L.M. Gesprekke Oor Ingrid Jonker. Edited by Petrovna Metelerkamp. Hermanus: Hemel & See Boeke. 2006. Viljoen, Louise. Ingrid Jonker: Poet Under Apartheid. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2012.

Discography Chameleon, Chris. Ek Herhaal Jou. Sheer Publishing and Ingrid Jonker Trust, 2005. Chameleon, Chris. As Jy Weer Skryf. Chameleon Publishing, 2011. Ingrid Jonker: Die Kind Is Nog Jonger (Various artists), Compiled by Ernesto Garcia Marques and Simon Jonker. Produced by Ernsesto Garcia Marques and Paul Blom. Sound Action and Flamedrop Productions, 2016.

Filmography Black Butterflies, Paula van der Oest. Prod. Michael Auet et al. Prod Co. IDTV et al, 2011. DVD. Ingrid Jonker: Her Lives and Time…. Dir. Helena Nogueira. Prod. Shan Moodley. Presented by Prime Time International and Living Pictures, 1997/2002/2007. DVD. Korreltjie niks is my dood. Dir. Saskia van Schaik, VPRO, The Netherlands, 2001. Accessed via YouTube. Verdrinkte Hande. Dir. Christo Gerlach, screenplay by Johann de Lange, 1995. DVD.

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Online Interviews and Reviews on the films Adams, Sam. Review of Black Butterflies. March 1, 2012. https://film.avclub.com/black-butterflies-1798171773 Bailey, Jason. Review of Black Butterflies. April 23, 2011. https://www.dvdtalk.com/reviews/49547/black-butterflies/. Accessed May 2014.

Derckson, Daniel. “The Art of World Cinema: Black Butterflies.” http://www.writingstudio.co.za/page3779.html nd. Accessed May 2014 Holden, Stephen. Review of Black Butterflies. March 1, 2012. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/movies/black-butterflies-a- biopic-about-the-poet-ingrid-jonker.htmlAccessed May 2014. Nogueira, Helena. Interview with Adam Levin. Sunday Times Lifestyle, April 29, 2007. http://sthp.saha.org.za/memorial/articles/being_ingrid.htm Accessed May 2014. Nogueira, Helena. Interview with Daniel Derckson. The Writing Studio, April 23, 2007. http://www.writingstudio.co.za/page1638.html Accessed May 2014. Nogueira, Helena. “The Life of a South African Icon,” Buz Publicity Artslink.co.za, 17 April, 2007. https://www.artlink.co.za/news_article.htm?contentID=3381 Accessed May 2014. Nogueira, Helena. Interview with Laetitia Pople. “Jonker is nou in goeie geselskap.” Beeld Plus, June 8, 2001. Site no longer available. Accessed July 2014. Van der Oest, Paula. Interview with Indiewire. “Meet the 2011 Tribeca Filmmakers: “Black Butterflies” Director Paula Van Der Oest,” April 15, 2011. https://www.indiewire.com/2011/04/meet-the-2011-tribeca-filmmakers-black- butterflies-director-paula-van-der-oest-242950/ Accessed July 2014. Van der Oest, Paula. Interview with Emily Ackerman. Tribeca Film Festival. February 20, 2012. https://www.tribecafilm.com/stories/512c15c11c7d76d9a900092c-paula-van- der-oest-blackAccessed July 2014.

Van der Oest, Paula. Interview with Women and Hollywood. April 26, 2011. https://womenandhollywood.com/interview-with-paula-van-der-oest- director-of-black-butterflies-repost-e700da6089e6/ Accessed May, 2014. Van Schalkwyk, Karen. “Portrait of Poetry and Passion.” Mail&Guardian, 21 October, 2011. https://mg.co.za/article/2011-10-21-portrait-of-poetry-and- passion Accessed April 2019.

Free images: the first image from Hanne Hoft Bidtnes at www.unsplash.com, the second from Khadeeja Yasser at www.unsplash.com and the third image from Ante Hamersmit at www.pixabay.com

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