Poetry
Rook en oker
Ingrid Jonker · 1963
Synopsis
Her second collection. Her daughter Simone holds a central place in it: several poems are addressed to her or start from her. Others, brief and playful, take on the rhythm of popular songs. The best known, dated March 1960, starts from the death of a child killed by the police in his mother's arms in Nyanga, a Black township of Cape Town; the poet said she had written it about motherhood and grief rather than about politics.
Context
The collection appeared in October 1963 from Afrikaanse Pers, in Johannesburg, shortly after a petition by writers and artists against censorship. When the author wanted to take an inscribed copy to her father, he had her told to send it by post, so as not to be seen with her. The poem about the murdered child, refused by the Afrikaans newspapers, had first appeared in the journal Contrast. Ons Erfdeel regards this book as the author's only fully accomplished collection, while citing J. C. Kannemeyer, who thought the praise that had arisen around her excessive.
Who it is for
Short poems in Afrikaans; a few can be read in English in translated selections, and the context of 1960 sheds light on the more political ones.
Prizes and reception
Prize of the Afrikaanse Pers-Boekhandel in 1964; the Nyanga poem was read in full by Nelson Mandela before the first democratic Parliament, on 24 May 1994.