The making of an icon...
Ingrid Jonker is a South African icon often compared to Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf and Anne Sexton, due to the intensity of her writing and the tragic course of her life.
She was the shinning star of the “Sestigers” (artists of the 60’s) who gathered around poet Uys Krige, on Clifton beach in Cape Town. They were the first generation of Afrikaners to turn away from the brooding Calvinism of their fathers and look to Latin Europe for new inspiration. They scoffed at religion with its dubious morals on race and sex and, with flagrant disregard for Apartheid, mixed freely with Black artists. They had wild affairs that they wrote into novels that were banned before they were even published... in one decade they changed forever the course of Afrikaans literature. Ingrid was their brightest star. Uys called her a goddess. Jack called her his muse...
But her short life was characterized as much by genius as by torment. Rejected by her father before she was born - the prominent MP threw out his wife in disgrace - Ingrid watched her mother descend into poverty and spiral into madness until she commit suicide when Ingrid was 10. The fear of ending up like her mother haunted her all her life. Especially as she found herself rejected by men and was forced to contemplate abortion...
Writers Jack Cope and Andre Brink would fight over her, but would not commit. Ingrid could inspire wild passions, but was unable to inspire love...
Her inner turmoil was mirrored by the country’s upheaval. To the Black unrest assailing the country, PM Verwoerd responded with banning, house arrest and detention without trial. Artists and intellectuals were targeted. A censorship commission was formed - the chairman, Dr Abraham Jonker, Ingrid’s father...
And then she witnesses a shattering event: a Black baby was shot in his mother’ arms... She underlined from Dylan Thomas: “after the first death, there is no other”. And she wrote: “The child who died at Nyanga”. Like Dylan Thomas she understood that she could no longer soar above the horror and the moral collapse of her world.
Plunged in to a destructive love triangle between Jack Cope and Andre Brink, she finally committed suicide by walking into the sea at Three Anchor Bay, Sea Point. She was 31 and the greatest poet of her generation.
Her life had made her famous.
Her death made her a legend...
