Human & Rousseau R135
Ingrid Jonker's fine poetry is always, unfortunately, going to be overshadowed by the fact of her death at age 31 in 1965. Mention her name and her suicide by drowning comes to mind. Much as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath's poetry and life are connected, ultimately, to their suicides, such is the case with Jonker's work.
Does it matter? I suppose not, one doesn't scour her work looking for evidence of a deep dark mind, but it's there, the fact of her death the dark themes among the lyricism. Reading the introduction to Black Butterflies, the hard dark facts of this poet's life are given a new airing. Her biography is, apparently, endlessly fascinating. A documentary of her work, shown earlier this year, was given a general release on the Art Nouveau cinema circuit.
This collection was born out of the fact that the earlier edition of her translated work, Selected Poems, edited by Jack Cope, is now out of print. This new edition was translated by novelist André Brink and poet Antjie Krog, with assistance from another South African poet, Ingrid de Kok.
The lengthy introduction provides a sort of potted biography of Jonker, interspersed with Brink's personal recollections. They were involved for a while in a tempestuous relationship; Brink was married at the time. Nevertheless their relationship could not survive Jonker's dark moods and contradictory ideas of commitment. She was also involved with poet Jack Cope.
Jonker was the daughter of Abraham, right-wing politician and would-be censor. He abandoned her mother Beatrice soon after Jonker's birth and Jonker was brought up divorced from his influence. However, when Jonker was 11 her mother died of cancer and she and her older sister were then reclaimed by the man who had rejected them. Jonker married early and had a child, Simone, but her marriage to Piet Venter did not last. Months spent in Johannesburg away from her familiar Cape Town exacerbated her unhappiness.
Jonker had begun a relationship with Jack Cope and it was also around this time that she and Brink started a relationship: "Ingrid had become a fever in the blood," Brink recalls. After winning a literary prize for her collection Rook en Oker (Smoke and Ochre) Jonker decided to use the money to explore Europe. But the trip was a disaster, meeting Brink halfway could not save her, and she spent time in a Paris institution, returning to South Africa. The following July she walked into the sea.
"Quite an industry has sprung up around her life and death," writes Brink.
"This volume is an attempt to get past the many accretions to her story, to the essence of her legacy: her poetry."
And so on to the poetry. The bulk of poems in Black Butterflies come from her volume, Rook en Oker, her second collection, rather than from her first Ontvlugting (Escape), many of which were written in her teens and published in 1956. Brink describes much of the poetry in this volume as "typical of adolescence" and the technique is heavily dependent on the use of couplets and quatrains.
Rook en Oker, in contrast, is a more mature work as is the poetry from the posthumous collection, Tilting Sun, edited by Cope and Jonker's sister, Anna. One of Jonker's more famous poems, The child who was shot dead by soldiers in Nyanga, appeared in Rook en Oker.
Themes range from the unashamedly personal to a lullaby for her daughter to Simone. Hush now the darkling man laments for dying love, to delicate eroticism, to intimations of mortality and premonitions of Jonker's own death. They are also centred on more broad themes such as children dying at the hands of soldiers or landscapes conjured up, such as in Daisies in Namaqualand.
Jonker's poetry has a lyricism and a wealth of visual detail which affirms her power as a poet and also locate her quite firmly in a South African locale. In I went to seek for the path of my body the narrator finds "only strange scars in the dust O I just wanted to know your shadow, small steenbok/and the slight weight of your body in flight."
Love turns bitter in Last night and again in We. In Last night the poet says: "My heart all mistrusting/like a chicken at a tin/ love is nothing more/than the yearning." Meanwhile We is dedicated to Brink and foretells the end of their affair, "In this way you will die off from me... /tomorrow/you die and I."
There are poems written in or about Europe, with one, Waiting in Europe, having been dedicated separately to both Cope and Brink in this selection we see a double dedication to both.
Her home country, as ever, pulls her back: in Nostalgia for Cape Town the city acts as protection, it "shelters me within the multitudes of her lap/She says my throat will not be cut/She says I'm not being put under house arrest."
This new collection serves as a remarkable introduction to Jonker's poetry. The circumstances of her life will continue to fascinate and interest other readers of her work.
And Black Butterflies serves to draw you further into the life and poems of a troubled artist.