Ingrid Jonker Prize winner Jacques Coetzee on political awakening,
blindness, poetry and music
Ingrid Jonker Prize winner Jacques Coetzee reads from a Braille copy
of his collection of poems, 'An Illuminated Darkness', at his Cape Town
home, 21 July 2022. Image: David Harrison
mm
By Karin Schimke
24 Jul 2022 0
Coetzee has been writing poetry and singing since he was a child,
spurred on by his mother’s readings to the family of action-driven
narrative poems and by his two older sisters’ enthusiasm about reading
to him. He has won the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for poetry.
When Jacques Coetzee’s debut book of poetry was selected for publication
in 2020, his publisher diplomatically suggested that the book was partly
about disability too, a fact that should be mentioned in marketing
materials.
“Ten, 15 years ago, I would have been irritated if people spoke about my
work in relation to disability. But by the time the book came out, it
was fine. It’s important that the book is in Braille and I’m happy that
there is a copy of the book in Braille at the school I went to. That
means something,” Coetzee said in an interview after hearing on Monday,
18 July 2022, that he’d won the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize for a debut
poetry collection written in English.
Apart from the usual print run, 25 books were published in Braille so
that every school for the blind and library for the print-disabled in
South Africa would have one. The book was also made available in
large-text format, and Coetzee recorded an audiobook, which is available
for free on the publisher’s website.
The book, An Illuminated Darkness, takes its title from one of the poems
it contains, The Steps, which is about going to a school for blind
children, and it was chosen, Coetzee said, because it was a good
metaphor for what he does.
“It’s about darkness you have to fill by creating meaning, but also,
obviously, darkness because I can’t see. Because I am blind. And to
illuminate that. To make it sing.”
A print copy of Jacques Coetzee's Ingrid Jonker Prize winning collection
of poems, 'An Illuminated Darkness'. 21 July 2022.
A print copy of Jacques Coetzee’s Ingrid Jonker Prize-winning collection
of poems, ‘An Illuminated Darkness’, 21 July 2022. Image: David Harrison
Coetzee (49) has been writing poetry and singing since he was a child,
spurred on by his mother’s readings to the family of action-driven
narrative poems and by his two older sisters’ enthusiasm about reading
to him.
His is a well-known face on the poetry scene in Cape Town and his
steady, mellifluous readings of his poems are familiar from public open
mics, especially at Off The Wall, which was started and run by Hugh
Hodge for several decades. He also runs, with Ed Burle, Nondwe Mpuma,
Lisa Julies and Melissa Sussens, The Red Wheelbarrow poetry sessions.
Voice is not only a theme in his poetry, but in his life, and it is no
surprise that in fallow moments, even while receiving guests, Coetzee
sings and hums as he walks from room to room in the house he shares with
his wife, the artist, sculptor and writer Barbara Fairhead, his constant
collaborator since they met in 2005. Together they wrote a book of poems
called The Love Sheet (Hands-On Books, 2017).
One of the judges in this year’s competition noted that “the poet writes
with a musician’s ear and a heart’s depth of listening that consciously
unfolds the lines of the poems, particularly the shifts in rhythm”.
Coetzee is also a musician, with five albums with his band Red Earth and
Rust to his name, and he says that reading his poetry aloud and singing
give him similar feelings of being anchored in the world.
The anchors might have been necessary, because Coetzee harbours a
rebelliousness that seems to both stem from and is limited by his
sightlessness. His life in the small, conservative Afrikaans town of
Worcester in the Western Cape was one he wanted desperately to escape,
so he went to study English and philosophy and later towards a master’s
degree in creative writing under the late South African poet Stephen
Watson.
“I loved books and poetry for their own sake, but I was partly also
defending against being blind.”
An Illuminated Darkness was published by the poetry press uHlanga, which
also published other Ingrid Jonker winners, Thabo Jijana and Saaleha
Idrees Bamjee, as well as Glenna Luschei Prize for African Poetry
winners Koleka Putuma and Maneo Mohale.
Publisher Nick Mulgrew said: “When I sit down to assess a manuscript for
publication, I hope to have my sense of the world altered. Jacques’s
poetry does that immediately, both intentionally and innately.
“So much of how sighted people describe poetry and poetics is through
visual metaphor – point of view, perspective, optic – and here is a poet
who cannot rely on that. Jacques instead relies on musicality, rhythm,
changes of pace, and taking careful control over both narrative and his
own emotions. Few people can write about being prayed over by random
Christians with such grace and humour, returning the gaze, so to speak,
and claiming one’s own life and experience for oneself.”
Mulgrew said his desire to print Coetzee’s book in Braille was partially
driven by his discomfort in producing a book that its author couldn’t
read, but also by a lack of local books in Braille that could be read
for pleasure. Most books available in Braille are textbooks.
Ingrid Jonker Prize winner Jacques Coetzee reads from a Braille copy of
his collection of poems, ‘An Illuminated Darkness’, at his Cape Town
home, 21 July 2022. Image: David Harrison
Coetzee said Mulgrew had changed the landscape of poetry in South
Africa. “He manages to be political in a way that is quite unobtrusive,
and which feels very real. Nick is the reason it feels exciting to be
writing in South Africa now.”
Turning to his own understanding of how his writing is political,
Coetzee said it was a slow awakening.
“When I was 15, I was reading a lot of Breyten Breytenbach and I would
always put colours into my poems. I was writing under his influence and
colours had symbolic meanings and, of course, I thought my readers would
be sighted, right?
“It was quite a political thing to slowly realise I had to write as a
blind person. When I started, I was trying to write myself away from
blindness into a place where I had something to say. Blindness, for me,
was this rather boring external detail. Slowly I realised I had to write
about what I knew. In other words, about blindness.
“I would have to confront it, to write myself into it and make sense of
it, because it wasn’t going to go away. [Disability] makes you feel
helpless, and you want to not feel helpless and to seem like you really
know something about something other than your disability.
“But it was only after I submitted the manuscript to uHlanga that I was
ready to take on board that, because I am blind, I have a different take
that is fresh, that is new.
“One of the ways in which ableism works is that people say, ‘You’re so
wonderful!’ and in that moment you stand for all blind people, or all
disabled people. People project things onto you. The knee-jerk reaction
to that is, ‘no, I’m me’.
“Now I understand how important this book is. It’s wonderful that Nick
decided to publish me. I’m glad that this thing has come into the world
through me.”
***
Dusk Poem
Then there were the two American tourists
(a man and his girl, I think they must have been)
who wanted to pray for me at dusk.
I pretended not to understand,
(“Why me? Why not for someone else?”)
but I was too obvious a candidate
to pass over in prayer, and they
emboldened by strange surroundings,
by their faith in miracles.
I sighed; I wanted none of it.
But they were sweet, insistent,
and my guide dog and I
had only just learned to walk to that restaurant.
It would be a diversion, after all.
I was hungry to slip beneath
the surface of this moment –
anything to be a citizen
here, in this private place.
And so I let the man pray
while the girl, soft-voiced and shy, deferred;
let them pray for the return of my sight
and immediately regretted it:
the young man’s voice loud, authoritative,
desperate somehow, vulnerable.
I had done an improper thing,
willing them to believe themselves
into a corner, whether they knew it or not.
Walking away afterwards
I imagined them settling down for the night,
with desire perhaps unspoken, forbidden between them.
I thought of the cost of such refusals;
felt the old, familiar restlessness
that still sets me on my way through nights like these –
looking, looking past dawn for one more taste
of this incorrigible life,
so that one day I can say:
“I gave myself to this messy world
and tried to love it long after
I’d given up trying to change it.
No better than I should be, I didn’t
stand apart. In the end
I redeemed myself: I wasn’t a tourist.” DM/ ML
source URL:
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2022-07-24-ingrid-jonker-prize-winner-jacques-coetzee-on-how-he-wrote-himself-into-blindness-with-poetry-and-music/
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