Ingrid Jonker. Louise Viljoen

      Writing Ingrid Jonker

      In using the materials available to reconstruct Ingrid Jonker’s life and interpret her work, we must remember that no document is inert or innocent. Letters, diaries, and biographical and autobiographical writings are never neutral representations of reality. They often constitute deliberate acts of self-creation, self-justification or even self-promotion that have to be reckoned with. Moreover, private documents often make use of rhetorical strategies or coded languages that are difficult to interpret. For the biographer, therefore, the task at hand is not simply a matter of decoding the available documents, but rather of cautiously interpreting them. The same goes for information gleaned from interviews conducted with people who knew Ingrid Jonker. Their memories are necessarily determined by the nature of their relationship with her and by their subjective interpretation of events. We also know that memories of the past are subject to complex processes of editing and erasure; nor are they free of self-interest and self-preservation. One could argue that the many photographs of Ingrid Jonker speak unambiguously to the viewer, that they are impervious to the passage of time and the erosion of memory. We should, however, heed Susan Sontag’s warning that ‘photography makes us feel that the world is more available than it really is’.4Photographs do not escape the mediatedness that the use of language inevitably entails.

      Any biographical endeavour is also fraught with ethical questions. When reading documents like letters and diaries, it is difficult for the biographer to escape the feeling that she is invading another’s private space. When writing about someone’s private life and intimate thoughts, it is almost inevitable that the biographer should wonder what the limits of such revelations are. It is precisely this aspect of biography that has led critics to use the tropes of thievery, voyeurism, invasion and violation. On the other hand the right to privacy is not self-evident. Paul John Eakin observes in ‘Mapping the ethics of life writing’: ‘Because we live our lives in relation to others, our privacies are largely shared, making it hard to demarcate where one life leaves off and another begins.’ For Eakin, life writing, indeed life itself, is messier than traditional ethical models suggest. As he says, it is not easy to argue that one owns the facts of one’s life, as Ted Hughes claimed in the face of the relentless biographers of his wife Sylvia Plath. Eakin identifies respect for the autobiographical subject as the basic guideline when writing either a biography or an autobiography.5

      This will be an important guideline in my own attempt to reconstruct Ingrid Jonker’s life and evaluate her work. For this reason I will not attempt to describe those parts of her life for which we have no information (a strategy perfectly acceptable in a novelised life). This brief introduction to her life and work, set against the background of her time and place, will also try to resist the temptation to romanticise a life lived in difficult circumstances or read it in terms of a single grand narrative that predetermined all the events in her life, be it political or psychoanalytical. Although I will discuss some of her literary texts and speculate about the connection between the writer’s life and her writings, my attempts will be guided by the understanding that poems and stories originate from a complex interplay between fact and fiction and are sometimes pure fiction. This biography will engage with those details available in order to arrive at yet another understanding of the phenomenon Ingrid Jonker. It also builds on the work of those who have come before, thus taking its place as one of an ongoing series of interpretations of her life which will become more nuanced as further information becomes available. As such it is, inevitably, part of the ‘industry’ around Jonker.

      2

Childhood and youth, 1933–1951

      The child in me died quietly

      neglected, blind and quite unspoilt.

      – Ingrid Jonker, ‘Puberty’ from Black butterflies

      The beginning

      The beginning was inauspicious. Ingrid Jonker was born on 19 September 1933 on a farm near Douglas in the Northern Cape where her mother Beatrice was staying with her parents, Fanie and Annie Cilliers. Beatrice had left her husband Abraham Jonker when he accused her of carrying a child that was not his. Neighbours in the Cape Town suburb of Vredehoek where the Jonkers lived told of marital tensions and frequent arguments between Abraham and his wife, after which she often fled the house with her firstborn, Anna.6Beatrice’s hurt at her husband’s accusations must have run deep. A letter, dated 16 November 1933, shows her firmly rejecting Abraham’s plea that she return to him.7The early 1930s were difficult times in South Africa. The economic depression as well as a severe drought brought great financial hardship, unemployment and poverty for many people. Although Ingrid’s grandfather Fanie had been a relatively prosperous farmer in the Boland, he also fell on hard times. A memoir by his son, the physicist A.C. (Andries) Cilliers, tells us that Ingrid’s grandfather bought a farm in the Douglas district, in all probability the one where Ingrid was born, in partnership with two of his sons in 1926. But depression and drought as well as the financial burden of caring for their divorced sister Beatrice and her two children forced them to sell the farm at a loss by 1934.8Thereafter, the small extended family, consisting of grandparents Fanie and Annie, daughter Beatrice and granddaughters Anna and Ingrid, lived on a succession of farms in the region9 before moving to Durbanville, then still a village on the outskirts of Cape Town, in 1937.

      Durbanville

      Ingrid spent her childhood years in a succession of houses, flats, boarding houses and rooms, something which would set a pattern for the rest of her life. In Durbanville the family lived in their grandfather’s house, remembered by Anna as ‘the house with the pepper-tree’. The memoir of Fanie’s son paints him as a high-spirited but also somewhat reckless man. His two granddaughters would remember him with great fondness, both referring to his exuberance as well as the jokes and laughter surrounding him despite his being bed-ridden with rheumatoid arthritis.10Information about this phase in Ingrid’s life comes to us from a biographical sketch she wrote for Die Vaderland11 and the first chapters of a memoir written by her sister Anna.12From these accounts it emerges that the years they spent in Durbanville were on the whole happy and free. Although not wealthy, they were part of a caring family; their mother and grandmother indulged them by taking part in their children’s games and they could share in their grandfather’s boisterous good humour. They roamed about freely in the rural atmosphere of Durbanville and the surrounding veld, where Ingrid was once attacked by a swarm of bees. They often visited relations in grand houses and on prosperous farms in the Paarl district. To the great consternation of their aunts, their mother allowed them to swim naked at family picnics – Ingrid once almost drowned in the Berg River. She was the more delicate of the two children, retaining a ‘weak chest’ after a bout of whooping cough.

      It was also in Durbanville, Anna remembered, that Ingrid was christened at the age of three or four at an unconventional ceremony in the garden. Anna admitted to being jealous of Ingrid in her pretty little white dress and to watching the proceedings from a hiding-place in the neighbouring garden, an admission which also tells us something about the relationship between the sisters. The name Ingrid was frowned upon by the relations because it was not a family name, but her mother didn’t pay any attention to their criticism. Their grandparents’ attitude towards the church was unconventional for the time and community of which they were part. Grandfather Fanie was not a churchgoer and could even be suspected of religious indifference, his son conceded in his memoir, sometimes treating the dignified ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church with witty insouciance.13Grandmother Annie was a devout woman who later in life preferred to preach to coloured people or attend the Apostolic Church, because they were ‘so lively and jolly’, Ingrid later wrote.14Although she was never religious in the conventional sense of the word, Ingrid would retain the childlike and enduring faith in Jesus learnt from her grandmother for the rest of her life.

      The Strand and Gordon’s Bay

      The death of their grandfather Fanie in 1938 brought an end to the relatively carefree life in Durbanville. With their grandfather gone, Ingrid and her sister Anna were now part of a household of women. In a