"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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/ their daily crust on farm and mine” (lines 10-11). In portraying humans as birds
Livingstone subtly points to humanity’s (ignored) connection with the animal kingdom.
Livingstone’s early ecological awareness is thus evident in this poem which criticises a
“linear” scientific view which does not acknowledge the multi-dimensional ecological
web which supports life on Earth. In “Adamastor Resuscitated” (S 12) the tenacious
power of the Earth is also explored through the image of Adamastor, Camoens’s defeated
Titan or giant who became the continent of Africa. This poem, too, juxtaposes Africa’s
robustness (through the trope of Adamastor who refuses to die) with human flippancy
and disregard for the regenerative power of the Earth.
Sjambok and Other Poems from Africa repeatedly explores humankind’s
alienation from nature, but I want to concentrate on “Falconer on a Skyscraper” and part
of “Elements”.
In “Falconer on a Skyscraper” (S 23), the falcon is read as a trope for natural
and rapturous instinct. The speaker is a falconer, a breeder and trainer of the female of
these birds of prey. This implies control over the female bird. At the end of the poem the
falconer imagines himself as the falcon who is able to mate with, or love, the female bird.
Instinct and reason are both present in the speaker who weighs up the choice between a
foregoing of his desire and a rapacious, instinctual appetite, where love would lead to
death: “should I now pitch her or love her to a sticky death?” (line 23). In pitching the
falcon he would allow her to fly away and be free to hunt, or follow her natural instinct.
The speaker’s dilemma is between his desire, which he knows to be rapacious,
and a more benevolent or protective form of fatherly love, hinted at in the monastic
connotations of “archimandrites”:
how intolerable to be viewed at once by two loves–
one cannot decide which side is to be presented,
so here we perch like archimandrites or turtledoves…
(lines 5-8)
His “two loves” could be seen as the religious and the instinctual. However, this surreal
description of the instinctual takes place against the setting of the city, “a sad wet nurse”
(line 9) whose nurture, while useful, is not satisfactory. The poem therefore explores the
tension between the urban and the natural, and between the religious and the instinctual.
The unnatural situation of a falcon trained to hunt in the city points to an unecological
position and it is this which engenders the dilemma between instinct and reason. Love is