The Cerebral Catalyst

She is a ghost of her former self, but she is still in the land of the living — a tragic beauty in a state of personal turmoil and crisis. "There is no time like the future to seal my fate," she thinks to herself, with growing uncertainty. She is unbearably nervous tonight and smokes cigarette after cigarette and then dashes them in an ashtray. She feels exposed, she paces up and down, but she still attaches no serious damage or blame to her last love affair. She was gentle and loving with Simone today.

In Paris, she was already a writer in exile — cursed, perturbed and a voyeur who had high-maintenance taste. She is still unclear about what she is going to do.

Her resolve unraveled that night in the flat. Her beauty meant nothing to her. She was not conceited. What had it brought her but ill-fated relationships, rejection, pain and suffering? Nothing dulled or sated her desire for love, for life, for a hot and heavy intellectual debate, which her voice was the center of. In retrospect, living in Apartheid had made her begin to doubt what she was living for.

She wanted to be taken seriously as a woman, but more importantly, as a writer.

They were dangerously in hate with a patriarchal system.

The essence of identity being passed to her was a fate worse than death and could not guarantee security in a career.

Love will change you in an indescribable way — it will make the strong weak, strong hearts weak, render the intellectual speechless, comedians will vanish and be replaced by philosophers; the funny will be replaced by philosophy and everything that was laughable before is serious and stimulating. The challenges of the human condition become painfully obvious. Death is the ultimate sacrifice, invisible and mysterious.

Ingrid Jonker made a decision for herself that was useless.

There is no earthly justification for what she did — removing the very substance of her gift, her genius from this world, by taking her own life, by drowning herself in the sea.

As they pulled the limp body from the ocean, the subject in death mirrored life. There was a chill in her embrace. Her fingers were numb. She was haunting, pale and beautiful, lacking tenderness. Her cheeks were wet as if from tears. Her mouth is full. Her lips are cool, as if she has drunk her fill. Her appetite is sated. She sleeps to dream, she does not speak and there is no lapsed recovery from the multiple meanings of words. There will no longer be the willing prerogative of an insomniac to stay up the whole night and blot out the stain of her sins by writing.

The male policemen's hair was windswept. They talked amongst themselves.

The breeze was salty, the morning tide came in, the breakers crashed against the rocks, the foam raced towards the shore, birds circling overhead perched on rocks and altered states were trapped in a war of nerves.

Her eyes stared into the pale, blue sky. The beginning of the day was like her work, imaginative. It gave recognition to curious incidents in the still, mournful air of the morning. It concerned itself with the decline of evil and the harmful beginnings of the harvest of desolation.

The shadow of a ghost of a haunting memory refused to disappear into a hazy reverie. The poet, Ingrid Jonker, is dead. Her face has an unsmiling seriousness on it. Even in death she is angelic. Her demeanor never giving way to the trouble or unfounded insecurity that lay underneath.

She is authentic, a true original, a unique. But she will never know this in her own lifetime. Her life when held up to scrutiny in death will revere it.

She knew what the imagination was capable of, the loneliness of the heart and when it was ready to surrender to a temporary escape into a romance.

Her innocence and vulnerability reminds me of women ahead of the times they were born into, women who were visionaries, leaders, and had to endure great humiliation from powerful men, from a traditional public realm. Women like Joan of Arc, Saartjie Baartman, Susan Sontag, Princess Diana, Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe. She is barefoot in her flat. Her hair is dark, wild and free and falls across her face. Yet in her eyes there is a declaration of having been to hell and back again. There has been a radical change in her behavior since she came back from Paris that hasn't escaped her but she doesn't speak of her experiences there, of the lingering sadness that torments her. The 'unhappiness' does not have a name yet, but soon the world will know and there is nothing she can do to protect her daughter from it. Fate is like a drowned thing, an empty shell reserved for the sound of silence invoking the sound of the ocean. She has decided she is a poor activist, wife, mother, woman and lover. Simone, her daughter, wants to make her smile but she is tired of playing games. Nonetheless she plays along, pretends to catch the joke, and today, when the journalist came for the interview, there was a glimmer of a smile on her face when her picture was taken. The picture of her as the famous, prize-winning poet — the female voice of her generation — was a small consolation to her. Without her father's love she felt lost. Fame meant little or nothing to her and the turning point came now, this night. How different would things be in the morning for people that she had been estranged from for years, she wondered quietly to herself?

How many times, I wonder, did she have to redirect her focus when tears blurred her vision when she cried, when she was working? How do you survive a blessed and cursed childhood? What made her laugh, this sensitive, delicate woman? Who made her smile?

The elementary particles of light became diffused on her face. It was translucent, her face was dreamy and her lashes were damp.

There is a distracting air near the incident now as they wait for the coroner. Simone woke up in the stillness of the flat and went in search of her mother. She searched the rooms one by one and found that they were empty.

Where does this story begin? The car is hurtling down the road past everything a young Ingrid knows and loves. This is the world of a child, a babyish language, tea parties in the shade with her sister, barefoot on the sandy beach searching for beautiful feathers, smooth pebbles and colorful shells. Now history has turned the page. Their father has come to fetch them to live with him and his family. Their idyllic childhood is over forever. As the car moves forward, the shiny wheels turning around and around without an end in sight like this trip — a car ride — they are being dragged to a new future, further and further away from their old haunts. As they turn the corner they will be a stone's throw from where they watched the fishing boats at sea. Ingrid glances across at her sister on the backseat. Her eyes are bright, but she does not look out at the world out of the window. Ingrid's shoulders are hunched over as she stares out of the window and looks at the sea of her childhood. She doesn't know it yet, but she will never see it again. Yet she knows with a certainty it will always be there. Other people will fall in love with it like she has, easily.

Her father is very serious but he doesn't scare her. Ingrid doesn't scare easily.

She has already fallen in love with his spectacles, his shoes and the black suit he is wearing. He took his hat off in her grandmother's house. Ingrid wanted to take it from him and hold it in her hands. She had never seen anything quite like it before. He does not say a word to her. He ignores Ingrid and her sister completely. He looks like a bear. Ingrid would like him to pick her up and hold her. She wants him to take her hand in his and say in his gruff manner, "What are the names of your dolls? What do you like to read? Do you miss your mother?" But he says nothing and bundles them into the car. In her head Ingrid has an imaginary conversation with her father. He is silent. He stares ahead into the blue distance. "Why didn't you come to see us before? Why did you wait so long?"

"There were so many things I wanted to show you. Sometimes when we have tea parties we set a place for you. I don't know how you like your tea, with milk or without, with sugar or without, with lemon or without. I had a birthday this year. I'm a year older. I missed you. Daddy, daddy, are you listening? I love you. I always loved you. I thought you just forgot about me, about Anna, but one day I believed you'd come back to fetch us and we'd be a family again. But the important thing is that you're here now. My wish came true."

Mr. Jonker begins to perspire. He takes out a beautifully starched handkerchief and wipes his brow. He is a man of few words. How does the world look through spectacles, Ingrid wonders. She leans back into the leather seat's interior. His cheeks are puffy like he is chewing sticky sweets. Ingrid is very still. Her sister's eyes are no longer bright but watery. Her life as she knew it is disappearing before her eyes. She kicked her foot against the seat as she straightened up. Her eyes were fixed on the beach, the mouths of the dunes, the quivering branches of the trees in the wind.

Her sister started crying on the backseat of the car. Ingrid hugs her and begins to stroke her hair, saying comforting things in her ear, whispering to her so she would not disturb her father. Now she was close to tears herself. She did not know this stranger, the even stranger place where they were going. She wondered how she would cope. Would he permit her to write her stories and poetry and let the sisters have their barefoot tea parties in the garden in the shade or would they be outsiders?

Mr. Jonker was not a man moved easily by tears. Ingrid cannot translate what she is feeling into words yet. She is lost in space.

This is where it began, Ingrid Jonker said to herself in a flat in Sea Point thirty-two years later. This state of affairs was an accident waiting to happen.

Through shame, spite, the government's own brand of vitriolic censorship, a father and daughter remained estranged for decades. Did she know they had the same personality, aggressive style of debate, that they stuck to their principles and would not let go? She was her father's daughter. How could he reject her, how could she undermine him? They were both writers. Could they not see how alike they were? How could this escape both of them?

She realized as a child that it was very hard to fall in love with something and give yourself over to it completely. She communed with nature as a child because it was here she felt most comfortable, most wild and most free. She was accepted here, and nowhere else for that matter, as an adult, as a grown-up. In her poetry she wrote about the harvest of desolation, the anguish of trials by fire and error, past mistakes, lives that were wrecked by emotional scarring, the youth who were detached from and attached to violence, marches, protests, Bantu education, boycotts and the eeriness of loneliness and mental illness.

She is standing barefoot on the sandy beach. The sunlight plays on the water but she is shivering, trembling. The sky's blue dissolve lingered overhead. Ingrid Jonker is meeting her father for the first time today. She wonders if she looks anything like him. She wonders if he'll like her stories and her poems and what he will think of the idea of her being a writer one day when she is grown up.

His approval is already important to her. She cannot wait for his arrival, to welcome him. She does not know yet that she and her sister will cry themselves to sleep in their father's new home. She does not know yet that life is the cause and effect of accidents waiting to happen. She needs his love, his guidance, but she is unprepared for the future that awaits her in her stepmother's new home. Everything was already wrecked before she turned around and ran back to the house as she scrambled to put her shoes on. She didn't waste any time with regret as an adult, but with heartache she had finally found the words to translate the hunger and pain that consumed her as a child, careening away from the only home she had ever known. It was the same heartache; the same human stain that the mothers and daughters, wives and sisters of the lost but cherished and beloved men of this country had during the legacy of Apartheid.

______________________________________
Abigail George studied film and television production for a short while, which was followed by a brief stint as a trainee at a production house. She is an aspiring writer and poet.

posted 01.09.06.

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