Ingrid Jonker

Ingrid Jonker
Ingrid Jonker in 1956
Born	(1933-09-19)19 September 1933 Douglas, Northern Cape
Died	19 July 1965 (aged 32) Cape Town
Cause of death	Suicide
Nationality	South African
Education	Wynberg Girls' High School
Occupation	Writer
Known for	Poetry
Spouse(s)	Pieter Venter
Children	Simone
Parent(s)	Abraham Jonker and Beatrice Cilliers

Ingrid Jonker (19 September 1933 – 19 July 1965) (OIS), was a South African poet. While she wrote in Afrikaans, her poems have been widely translated into other languages. Jonker has reached iconic status in South Africa and is often called the South African Sylvia Plath, owing to the intensity of her work and the tragic course of her turbulent life.

Jonker was born on a farm in Douglas, Northern Cape. She was the daughter of Abraham Jonker and Beatrice Cilliers. Her parents separated before she was born, and Jonker’s mother moved back home with her two daughters. Jonker’s grandparents moved to a farm near Cape Town. Five years after the move, her grandfather died, leaving the four women destitute.

In 1943, when Ingrid was ten years old, Jonker’s mother committed suicide after her descent into depression in the years after her father had thrown his wife and children out of his life in disgrace. Jonker and her older sister Anna were then sent to Wynberg Girls’ High School in Cape Town, where she began writing poetry for the school magazine. They later moved in with their father and his third wife and their children. The two sisters were treated as outsiders, which caused a permanent rift between Jonker and her father.

Jonker started writing poems when she was six years old and, by the age of sixteen, she had started a correspondence with D.J. Opperman, South African writer and poet, whose views influenced her work greatly.

Her first collection of Afrikaans poems, Na die somer (“After the summer”) was produced before she was thirteen. Although several publishers were interested in her work, she was advised to wait before going into print. Her first published book of poems, Ontvlugting (“Escape”), was eventually published in 1956.

Jonker married Pieter Venter in 1956, and their daughter Simone was born in 1957. The couple moved to Johannesburg, but three years later they separated. Jonker and her daughter then moved back to Cape Town.

Her father, already a writer, editor and National Party Member of Parliament, was appointed chairman of the parliamentary select committee responsible for censorship laws on art, publications and entertainment. To his embarrassment, his daughter was vehemently opposed to these laws and their political differences became public. In a speech in parliament Jonker's father denied her as his daughter. During the same time period she had affairs with two writers, Jack Cope and André Brink. One of these affairs resulted in a pregnancy and she underwent an abortion (a crime in South Africa at the time). The mental distress of her father's rejection and the abortion contributed to her decision to enter the Valkenberg Psychiatric Hospital in 1961. (Jonker's mother had died at Valkenberg several years before.)