Black Butterflies (2011)I do not understand why and how some individuals from very debilitating backgrounds overcome their dark pasts whereas others are forever bogged in their misfortunes. Whilst the former come out stronger, resilient to whatever challenges that lie their way, the latter cringe and shrivel up carrying the baggage throughout life. Nietzsche said that the one which does not kill you makes you stronger. However, a group of people just throw in the towel at the first hint of difficulty.
When Nelson Mandela opened the first session of the post-apartheid parliament, he read a poem about the struggle of the blacks during the apartheid era. It was written by an Afrikaner, Ingrid Jonker, a fragile poet who endured a life full of challenges. Living with her grandmother after her parents separated, Ingrid and her sister were grudgingly taken back by her father after her mother committed suicide and her grandmother succumbed to illness.
Growing up with her father was no bed of roses. An orthodox man of political standing, he never approved Ingrid's carefree lifestyle and her separation from her first husband. Staying with her father with her young daughter, Simone, she falls in love with a famous author. Looking for that elusive love that she never found throughout her life, she became a clingy lover to a man who was not ready to depart from his wife and family. The film shows her obsession with writing poems, her drinking problem, her histrionic personality, her attempts at suicide, her international fame for her poems, her second failed affair, her institutionalisation, electroconvulsive therapy and the subsequent loss in creativity and eventual death by suicide.
Perhaps, the logical mind which is more cut-and-dry fails to see the soft nuances and the gentle side of things in life that only a sensitive soul can appreciate. The logical mind sees things quite differently from a creative mind. One can see, look, gaze, watch, observe, perceive, recognise and comprehend or simply stare through something!
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| Ingrid Jonker [17.9.1933 - 19.7.1965] |
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
The child who was shot dead by soldiers at Nyanga
Nelson Mandela read this poem in the original Afrikaans, during his address at the opening of the first democratic parliament on May 24, 1994.
Nelson Mandela read this poem in the original Afrikaans, during his address at the opening of the first democratic parliament on May 24, 1994.
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