"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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voice and persona, much as the Portuguese and for a time Durban-based poet, Fernando
Pessoa, does. The latter’s translator, Jonathan Griffin, claims that Pessoa’s other poets
were written under heteronyms, not pseudonyms. He makes this distinction because “they
are imaginary poets with real poems in them. Fernando Pessoa was four poets in one” (9).
Likewise, Douglas Livingstone was (at least) two poets: himself and Giovanni Jacopo.
Why he took recourse in another voice and personality with a 17 th Century philosophy
offers rich material for a fascinating study.
The second area is the theme of religion or what Livingstone called “my running
battle with the Almighty” (Robbins 1992: 52). The religious theme in the poetry of
Douglas Livingstone is recurrent and striking. (This religious imagery can doubtless be
linked to Livingstone’s early education in a Catholic convent in Malaysia.) Michael
Chapman particularly has done some critical work on the religious theme. I have largely
ignored this theme, except where it has a direct ecological bearing. The religious is more
camouflaged in A Littoral Zone than it is in Livingstone’s earlier work and a study of his
shifting perspective on the nature of religion would make for a fascinating study.
In this thesis I make little reference to the physical maps on the frontispage and
the final page (63) of the book. They frame the poetry of A Littoral Zone and place the
poems in a defined geographical context. The ‘mapping’ of his journey and scientific
work along the Natal coastline contributes to my claim that the collection is a bioregional
narrative for it “presents a human being in an ethical, sustainable relationship to a place
that is defined by its human and nonhuman aspects” (Armbruster in Tallmadge 12).
Livingstone described it more poetically in an interview with David Robbins:
I think Natal is a microcosm of South Africa, South Africa of the world. Socially
we’ve got it all: the divisions between the haves and the have-nots, the racial
problems … If South Africa doesn’t make it neither will the world. Here I am
referring to the humans.
On another level, a deeper level perhaps, I see Natal as a microcosm of
Africa. Natal is a compressed version of the continent. It has everything. Terror,
beauty, and an immense sense of power emanating from the earth and the waters.
(1987: 51)
I never met Douglas Livingstone, but two of his friends and fellow poets, Marco
Fazzini and Don Maclennan, have told me that Livingstone considered A Littoral Zone to
be his finest work, that it was here that he managed to articulate his concerns most
clearly. This thesis does not use the term landscape but refers to the natural environment