Ingrid Jonker: Poet under Apartheid by Louise Viljoen (review)

In her newest book, postmodern theorist and literary critic Louise Viljoen captures the embattled times and spaces of cultural bigotry, misogyny, racial violence, political turmoil, and national isolation that contradictorily taunted and spurred poet Ingrid Jonker’s (1933-65) lyrical genius, stormy personal life, and fascinating literary networks. Viljoen’s great accomplishment is that her book is indeed a scholarly guide, one that respects the autobiographical and biographical subject of Jonker (pronounced yän`ker), whose brief life and slender yet sensational body of social poetry guarantees the poet will be kept indefinable into perpetuity.

The book rides a popular wave of new editions and reprints of Jonker’s poems, along with a plethora of translations, documentaries, films, theatrical performances, and musical productions about Jonker’s life and poetry that have appeared rather regularly, and especially during the last 20 years. Viljoen’s presentation is informative and non-invasive, and the author argues that her study attempts to be one without “thievery, voyeurism, invasions and violation” but instead a careful lens upon the private evasions, public embraces, and poetic expressions of a singular, multi-faceted woman who was rejected by her father, her people, and her lovers (14). Among Jonker’s most autobiographical poems is “The Face of Love.” In it she opines, “There is no question of beginning / there is no question of possession / there is no question of death / face of my beloved / the face of love” (1-5).

Jonker’s life was encased in the darkest period of South Africa’s history, when whites ruled, and the system of racial segregation known as apartheid was institutionalized and set down by the state. Apartheid was imposed through legislation by the Afrikaaner-dominated National Party for 46 years, 1948-1994. Under apartheid, the rights of the black majority inhabitants in South Africa, the African continent’s most cosmopolitan and industrialized nation at the time, were curtailed and white-minority rule reigned supreme. During the 1950s and 60s, a series of popular uprisings and protests was met with the banning of opposition and the imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders, along with the segregation of residential areas, involving one of the largest mass removals of non-white people in modern history.

However, the essential focus of Viljoen’s book is less about South African and postcolonial African history, politics, apartheid, and culture, and more about biography and social networks. In essence, the book is a careful reconstruction of Jonker’s life and evaluation of her work, offering a very thorough and enlightening focus to inform curious readers, aspiring poets, and teachers. For university instructors, Viljoen has provided a scholarly text that will serve as an effective resource for teaching about creators of cultural meaning and one that recognizes the vital, living legacies which contemporary women poets provide, especially of women writing Africa.

Viljoen, an academic author, book reviewer, and poet in her own right, teaches at Stellenbosch University. In addition to this book, she also recently produced a lively study of Antjie Krog, another prominent contemporary South African poet, writer, and academic, best known for her book Country of My Skull (1998). Krog writes and translates Afrikaans literature and poetry in the style of Jonker and redefines the language of the “new” and racially-free South Africa, the very hopes and dreams that Jonker envisioned and set adrift in the wind long before Krog began composing her own poetry in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. As Viljoen’s research interest lies in the field of Afrikaans literature and literary theory with a special focus on postmodernism, postcolonialism, gender, space and identity, her study, therefore, displays academic expertise in this prolonged and proficiently-drawn critical biography.

Nevertheless, Viljoen’s task to “write Ingrid Jonker” factors in four great forces that complicated her study. The first comes from the poet’s posthumous thrust into the limelight after Nelson Mandela quoted her poem, “Die Kind wat doodgeskiet is deur soldate by Nyanga” (The Child Who Was Shot Dead by Soldiers at Nyanga), in his inaugural speech on...