Ingrid Jonker. Her Lives and Time. Documentary. Written, directed and edited by Helena Nogueira. At Ster Kinekor Cinema Nouveau, V&A Waterfront. Wilhelm Snyman reviews.
Director Helen Nogueira has produced a truly inspired documentary on this Afrikaans poet, elevated to nigh iconic status when Nelson Mandela, at the dawn of the new South Africa, said in parliament: "The time will come when our nation will honour the memory of those who gave us the right to assert with pride that we are South Africans, that we are Africans and citizens of the world.
"The certainties that come with age tell me that among these we shall find an Afrikaner woman Her name is Ingrid Jonker."
On that occasion he read out her poem, The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers at Nyanga.
Of course, since then much interest has been shown in Jonker, and this documentary is not the first one on her, but is by far the most effective and complete and also all the more significant because it has André Brink breaking his silence on his relationship with her.
It also contains the last interview given by Lourens van der Post, in which he emphasises Jonker's womanhood, whereas other interviewees each emphasises aspects and events in the poet's turbulent life and how she affected them.
She died by walking into the sea at Three Anchor Bay in the winter of 1965.
The documentary deftly weaves its way through the context of Jonker's life: the needless cruelty of her father, Abraham, and the stifling, constipated milieu he represented, shaped by a kind of Calvinism that sought to make everyone else as unhappy as he was.
A mother who went insane, and physical and emotional abandonment - Jonker's childhood, was, by any measure, gruelling.
Nogueira takes us to the small town of Douglas where Ingrid was born, her mother having been forced to seek refuge there with her parents, after Jonker's father refused to recognise the child as his.
The documentary goes on to explore the relationship between the poet's work and the events in her life that gave rise to specific poems.
No doubt with enormous effort and perseverance, Nogueira has managed to include heartfelt and thoughtful interviews with the likes of Brink, Breyten Breytenbach, Topsie Venter, Marjorie Wallace, James Matthews and others, including Jonker's daughter, Simone.
What Nogueira has done so well in this film is to create a harmony between the political, artistic and emotional-psychological dimensions of Jonker's life.
Wallace's accounts of Jonker are particularly vivid and often amusing.
The audience gains much from the film, too, as an account of the Afrikaans literary scene at the time while never losing sight of the claustrophobic political atmosphere that dominated South Africa in the 1960s when apartheid was at its triumphalist zenith, when the National Party insinuated itself into the private sphere of people's lives, especially among those considered to be traitorous to its cause, namely other Afrikaners. (Bram Fisher was arrested not long after Jonker's death.)
The pervasive disgust and frustration felt by these Sestiger artists as regards the apartheid state is aptly conveyed.
And Jonker, who comes across in the film as the least overtly politically-minded of them all, is the one we remember most immediately, thanks to Mandela, her poem being almost prophetic in expressing an uncompromising moral stance on the grinding injustice being meted out.
There were clearly so many apparently contradictory dimensions to the life of the poet, who died aged only 31: passionate, desperate in adulthood for the love denied her as a child, selfish, cantankerous and uncompromising and, what comes across in the film, torn between the demands of her fraught background and her creative impulse. She embodied in her time, the existential impasse of being a white South African.
It may be argued that while the majority of people in the country were being oppressed and pursued through detentions, harassment, forced removals and deprived of the most basic human rights, here we have a film that deals with the intercontinental shenanigans of a very self-conscious and select minority who sought, however valiantly, to point out the injustices and the unyielding banality of the apartheid system. They were indeed privileged, but it was not a painless privilege.
The merit in this film lies above all in showing that Jonker's was an honest voice, with a clear sense of right and wrong, in the midst of the rampant mendacity - as Tennessee Williams would call it - that underpinned apartheid South Africa.
Things haven't changed that much that we do not need to heed that voice.