De Kok, Ingrid 1951–

PERSONAL: Born June 4, 1951, in Johannesburg, South Africa; partner of Tony Morphet; children: one son. Education: University of Witwatersrand, B.A., 1972; University of Cape Town, B.A. (with honors), 1974; Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), M.A., 1984.

ADDRESSES: Home—Kapstadt, South Africa. Office—Centre for Extra Mural Studies, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa.

CAREER: University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa, junior lecturer, 1975–76, associate professor in Center for Extra-Mural Studies, 1988–; Khanya College, Cape Town, South Africa, planning coordinator, 1984–87.

AWARDS, HONORS: Rockefeller Foundation residency fellowship in Bellagio, Italy, 1999; Carpace/Snailpress Poetry Prize, 2000; Dalro Poetry Award, 2002; Civitella Ranieri rellowship, 2003; Herman Charles Bosman Award for English Literature, 2003.

WRITINGS:

POEMS

Familiar Ground, Ravan Press (Johannesburg, South Africa), 1988.

Transfer, Snailpress (Plumstead, South Africa), 1997.

Terrestrial Things, Snailpress (Cape Town, South Africa), 2002.

OTHER

(Editor, with Karen Press) Albie Sachs and others, Spring Is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom, Buchu Books (Cape Town, South Africa), 1990.

(Compiler, with Gus Ferguson) City in Words (poetry anthology), David Philip (Cape Town, South Africa), 2001.

Contributor to literary journals and anthologies, including Breaking the Silence: A Century of Women's Poetry, 1990; Broken Strings: The Politics of Poetry in South Africa, 1992; and Book of African Women's Poetry, 1995. Advisory editor, World Literature Today: South African Literature in Transition. Also contributor to numerous academic publications.

Author's works have been translated into Italian, French, Japanese, German, Afrikaans, and Dutch.

SIDELIGHTS: Ingrid de Kok is a poet whose work often focuses on political issues and the history of suffering and discrimination that became part of South Africa's heritage during apartheid. However, when asked by New Coin Online interviewer Susan Rich if she is actively concerned with creating a political message in her poems, de Kok replied, "It's not an intentional act or an active project. If it were, given how I work, something would go wrong." The poet also told Rich, "I think the poet's responsibility is to write a good poem. It's a social responsibility as well as an individual responsibility." Expanding on her sense of commitment, de Kok added, "I think that's how you respect your readership, engage with your community, make a contribution—by doing your best piece of work."

De Kok's first volume of poems, Familiar Ground, combines intensity with irony by probing political issues and human suffering. Writing in the Southern African Review of Books, Malvern van Wyk Smith commented that the poems in this anthology are "more about the appropriation of the terrain, here notably the remembered territory of a South African childhood spent on the edge of the desert." The reviewer also called the middle section of the anthology the "Canadian" section, referring to poems written while de Kok lived in Canada in the late 1970s and early 1980s. These poems, noted van Wyk Smith, are more "self-obsessive" compared with the "power" of the final poems, "presumably unleashed by de Kok's return to South Africa" in 1983. "The poems are largely about other people, not herself," added Smith, "and two delightfully 'found poems' about the tragicomedy of South African life suggest that back home the poems come-tumbling in on her."

It was nearly a decade after Familiar Ground before de Kok's next volume of poetry, titled Transfer, was published. In an article based on her speech at the launch of Transfer and posted on the Electronic Mail and Guardian Web site, Antjie Krog noted that these poems contain a "fearlessness, guts to transgress, an unfailing ear for the alternation of consonants on the tongue, a turn of thinking and the ability to capture in the most delicate and individual terms a devastating phenonmenon." Writing in World Literature Today, Robert L. Berner noted that the volume of twenty-nine poems can virtually be divided in half: the fourteen poems that make up the first part "deal, usually only by implication, with South African political, social, and environmental conditions." Berner described the poems in the second part of the volume as "private" and more focused on issues like "childbirth and love—and lost love."

De Kok's third volume of poems, Terrestrial Things, released in 2002, features recurring themes related to the AIDS pandemic and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a courtlike body established by the South African government to hear testimonies from both the victims and the perpetrators of racist violence under the country's former apartheid system. As a result of its hearings, the commission convicted some perpetrators and granted amnesty to others. In the poem "At the Commission," she writes about a police ambush that resulted in a group of young men being shot. The central issue in the resulting trial is whether the police shot the men in cold blood or in self-defense because they were going to be attacked. In an interview with Erica Kelly for the Brock Press Web site, de Kok explained the poem: "The question I raise is does it matter at this point what the exact truth was? No amount of explanation, of cause and effect, can take you away from the fact that they were shot and killed. It's a debate about the nature of truth."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Buck, Claire, editor, The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, Prentice-Hall General Reference (New York, NY), 1992.

PERIODICALS

Southern African Review of Books, December, 1988–January, 1989, Malvern van Wyk Smith, review of Familiar Ground.

World Literature Today, spring, 1998, Robert L. Berner, review of Transfer, p. 443.

ONLINE

Brock Press Web site, http://www.brocku.ca/press/ (May 3, 2002), Erica Kelly, "Interview with a Poet: In Conversation with South African Ingrid de Kok."

Crossing Project, http://www.devon.gov.uk/ (May 3, 2002), "Poetry by Ingrid de Kok."

Electronic Mail and Guardian, http://www.mg.co.za/ (January 19, 1998), Antjie Krog, "Defenceless in the Face of de Kok's Poetry."

H-Net, http://www.h-net.org/ (March 28, 2003), Simon Lewis, review of Terrestrial Things.

Ingrid de Kok Home Page, http://www.ems.uct.ac.za/ ingrid (September 24, 2005).

New Coin Online, http://www.ru.ac.za/institutes/isea/newcoin/ (May 3, 2002), Susan Rich, interview with Ingrid de Kok.