My Father Would Not Show Us — Ingrid de Kok (1988)

Ingrid de Kok is a South African poet born in 1951. She writes from a country whose recent history — apartheid, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the long post-apartheid settlement — has inevitably shaped even her most intimate work. My Father Would Not Show Us, from her 1988 collection Familiar Ground, is an elegy for her father, but it is also a meditation on reticence: on what a father did not show his children in his life, and on what his body refuses to show in death.

The title is drawn from a 19th-century poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, which de Kok quotes as an epigraph: "Which way does your face lie now?" The question — addressed to the dead father — frames the poem as a last act of looking at someone who spent his life partly turned away.

Context

Aspect	Detail
Poet	Ingrid de Kok (1951–)
Collection	Familiar Ground, 1988
Period	Late apartheid / contemporary
Form	Free verse, short stanzas
Setting	Father's lying-in / funeral preparation
Epigraph	Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The South African context is not the direct subject but is part of the atmosphere. De Kok is a poet who writes about public grief and about the private griefs that sit inside it. Here she writes about a father, but the reticence in the poem can also be read — lightly — as the reticence of an entire society about its own losses.

Short summary

The speaker and her family gather around her father's body before the funeral. She wishes to understand him — to see him fully — but his face in death is still closed to her, as it was in life. She remembers that he would not show emotion, would not show his inner life. She looks now at the body, at its stillness, at what it refuses to reveal. The poem closes on the unresolved question: a daughter asking a father, finally, "which way does your face lie?"

Voice and speaker

The speaker is the adult daughter of the dead man. Her voice is controlled, attentive, loving but clear-eyed. The poem is not an outburst of grief; it is a carefully worded act of last-looking. There is love but also a kind of frustration: we tried to see you, and you didn't let us.

This restraint is the poem's signature — and it also, in a way, is inherited from the father. The daughter has learned from him how not to say everything, even as she writes a poem that criticises his unsaying.

Form and structure

Feature	Detail
Form	Free verse
Stanzas	Short, uneven
Rhyme	Absent or very subtle
Epigraph	Wilcox's question frames the poem
Movement	Family scene → memory → direct address

graph TD
  E[Epigraph: Which way does your face lie now] --> A[Family around father's body]
  A --> B[Memory of his reticence in life]
  B --> C[Body's refusal in death]
  C --> D[Closing return to the epigraph's question]

The free verse and short stanzas produce a poem of small, slow steps. The reader is not carried; the reader is walked through a quiet room.

Language and imagery

The body as object. The father's body is observed — stilled — but is described with love, not estrangement. The adjectives are measured; there is no horror of the corpse, nor any sentimental softening.

Semantic field of concealment. "Would not show", "held back", "hid", "closed". The poem accumulates language of withholding. Reticence is the through-line.

Repeated question. The Wilcox epigraph — "Which way does your face lie now?" — hovers across the poem. The daughter keeps asking, in different forms, what the father's face reveals. The question is never fully answered.

South African resonance. The restrained, almost-ceremonial register recalls the dignity-under-loss tone of much South African writing of the period. The poem is intimate but not only private; it reads like a family version of a public mourning.

Themes

Theme	How it operates
Parental reticence	The father withheld; the daughter wishes he had not
Elegy	The poem mourns a specific person, but also a way of being
The limits of knowing	Even in death the father is closed
Inherited silence	The poem's restraint echoes the father's
Allusive tradition	The Wilcox epigraph places the poem in a long elegiac lineage

A strong reading notices that the poem does two things at once: it criticises the father's reticence and it practises a version of that reticence itself. The daughter will not shout; she will not sentimentalise; she will, like him, hold something back. The love in the poem is the more powerful for that resemblance.

Suggested comparison partners

Partner	Shared ground	Productive contrast
A Child to His Sick Grandfather	Intergenerational love; attention to a dying body	Baillie's grandfather is open; de Kok's father is closed
Nettles	Father figure, protective presence	Scannell's father is active; de Kok's father is withholding
One Flesh	Adult child observing a parent	Jennings's parents are alive; de Kok's father is dead

Worked paragraph

Both de Kok's My Father Would Not Show Us and Baillie's A Child to His Sick Grandfather are intergenerational poems that observe a parental body with love, but their family contracts differ sharply. Baillie's child speaks in simple ABAB quatrains, watching a grandfather who remains emotionally open — he has "told" and "carried", verbs the child anchors in shared past experience. De Kok's adult daughter writes in free verse and short stanzas, watching a father whose face in death refuses to answer the Wilcox epigraph's question, "Which way does your face lie now?" The father of My Father Would Not Show Us has been a practised concealer, and even his death does not release what he withheld; his body mirrors his living reticence. Both poems work through close physical attention — Baillie's "sunken cheek" and "thinner hand", de Kok's stilled face — but one poem watches a relationship still being conducted and the other watches a relationship whose terms can no longer be renegotiated. Baillie's child offers a cup; de Kok's daughter offers a question.

Key quotations to memorise

(Memorise exact wording from your anthology.)

• The epigraph: "Which way does your face lie now?" — the question the poem returns to.
• The title as a line within the poem — "My father would not show us" — the direct statement of reticence.
• A line describing the father's living withdrawal.
• A line describing the father's body after death.
• The closing lines — where does the poem leave the question?

Extended worked paragraph — comparison with Nettles