The Poet and the President

[Passion of the Poets]

Nelson Mandela reciting poet Ingrid Yonker's The Child is Not Dead. (Originally uploaded by ajdgroot on Feb 6, 2011 Audio © IDTV Film.)

It has become commonplace to describe the South African poet Ingrid Yonker (Sept 19, 1933 – July 19, 1965) as her country’s equivalent to Sylvia Plath. There are similarities in the nature of how they died and they were both women who endured intensely painful lives out of which they managed to create extraordinary poetry. Yonker, however, wrote in Afrikaans and gave her voice to address the political upheavals of apartheid-era South Africa in a way that is far more confrontational than you are likely to find in works by Plath or Anne Sexton (to whom she has also be compared).

 

The film Black Butterflies represents a second coming for Yonker. It restores her place in world literature and also helps to magnify the history of exceptional women poets whose strength and creative abilities have allowed them to turn personal anguish into superior art. Yonkers has been championed by former President Nelson Mandela for “The Child Is Not Dead.” The poem at once railed against the violence practiced against Blacks during the apartheid era and prophesied the inevitable triumph of the oppressed over the oppressors. 

   THE CHILD IS NOT DEAD

 

The child is not dead
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world
Without a pass

    --by Ingrid Jonker

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