Jacques Coetzee
On 9 October 2022 the Ingrid Jonker Prize was presented to Jacques Coetzee for his collection An illuminated darkness (uHlanga Press). This is the presentation read to Coetzee at the event during the annual Tuin van Digters poetry festival at the Breytenbach Centre in Wellington.
Like Lear retold by Cavafy
Presentation to Jacques Coetzee: The 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize
In “The gatekeeper”, Jacques Coetzee writes, “… I was sure/ he only saw my blindness/ and not me, … trapped inside it”.
Tonight, I’d like to speak about the poet’s journey through the darkness, the blindness, to a place of his me.
Jacques Coetzee’s poetry comes across as comforting, like a bear hug, reaching out from his humanity to one’s own humanity: it is a pleasure to listen to it, to its warm voice – for this book has been published as a text, in braille and also as an audiobook, reaching out …
In preparing for this ceremony, I have been listening again and again to Coetzee’s rich tones on the audiobook.
Coetzee’s voice is comforting because even the most outrageous, painful experiences are mellowed down, spoken of with his gentle reflective voice, as crushed grapes are to wine in a glass.
Here is Coetzee’s voice – the me of him: “Once, in hospital myself at the age of six or seven/ (just before my first eye was removed, or maybe just after)”. The talking voice, the narrative uncertainty, hides the horror, almost hides the implications of the words “first eye”.
It is only deep beneath this narrative that one senses the horror, the fear, the sense of violation. I’m led to Lear by Coetzee’s own poem about that play in this collection, “To the men who changed the ending of King Lear”, a poem that argues against the softening of the tragic end, a poem in which we are “dissected”, and “… gaze and gaze/ into the darkness of ourselves”. The poem evokes – implicitly argues for – all the horror in Lear.
Thus, in the background of Coetzee’s text, I feel a greater horror: I think of Gloucester’s injury, the first eye plucked, and the second, with Cornwall’s “Out, vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?” and Gloucester’s subsequent pilgrimage, starting with Regan’s “and let him smell/ His way to Dover”. And thus began Gloucester’s dark journey towards some sense of wisdom, where his heart, “’Twixt two extremes of passion, joy and grief,/ Burst smilingly”: painfully, in his blindness, he finds hard understanding.
Now, Coetzee's pilgrimage – both internal and through the landscapes of our society – is told with that same warmth of humanity that veils the hardness of the quest. These pilgrim stories reveal the me in this text: we see him, a schoolboy, feelingly navigating the schoolyard: “How many steps were there – fifteen?” or “… my guide dog and I/ had only just learned to walk to that restaurant”.
We see the indignities, as when the American tourists insist on praying “for the return of my sight”. In our world of anger, where what could – should – evoke wrath, Coetzee’s voice is tempered by the sort of kindness that only imagination can bring. Although Coetzee allows that he does an “improper thing,/ willing them to believe themselves/ into a corner”, he describes the tourists as “sweet”, the girl “soft-voiced [like Cordelia] and shy”.
But that incident is a station on his journey to the place at the restaurant he wanted to be, where he could be me: he was aiming for a space where he could “be a citizen/ here, in this private place”. The tourists see his blindness, and not the me, nor imagine the place where he could be me.
And that place, in Coetzee’s work, is the me place to look out for, the place of promise at the end of the waterslide in “The gatekeeper”, or – again from the steps – “I would read myself/ out of that place, and into another, where hearts and ideas/ are exchanged; where you can stand/ in an illuminated darkness, having found/ a place from which to speak; to write.”
Coetzee reads the trophy with his fingers
The sensitive reader journeys with Coetzee towards his place of selfhood: and Coetzee ends his collection, as will I this commendatio, with his poem:
Manifesto
So many things I wanted, but to be
hollowed out, to be deepened by experience
until I sang more deeply, more clearly –
that, in the end, was what I wanted more:
the exultant, unpragmatic moment,
singing itself, saying “here.”
It gives me a great deal of pleasure – on behalf of the chair of the Ingrid Jonker Prize Committee, Professor Marius Crous, the committee and the judges – to present the 2022 Ingrid Jonker Prize to Jacques Coetzee.
Ingrid Jonker Prize Committee
***
An illuminated darkness
Jacques Coetzee
September 2020
ISBN: 9781990968662
uHlanga Press
A useful report, with summary of judges’ comments
- Photography: Izak de Vries