"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

190
Livingstone’s “Coronach” is about reversing the above (incorrect) perception of
representation and shows that language and music (or art) offer a way into seeing “thethings-of-nature-in-themselves”
(Bate 247).
In the final poem of this group, “The Waste Land at Station 14” (38),
Livingstone shows that the power of art, particularly poiesis or the creation of art, is
“deeper” (line 40) than the racial divisions signified by the ‘whites only’ signs of the
South African Apartheid system. The poem addresses Shozi Bhengu, Livingstone’s
“Brother-poet” (line 46), and is not about their different skin colour, but about their
common yearning to “hymn the earth” (line 45). Dirk Klopper argues the opposite:
“Livingstone finds it difficult, even in the midst of denunciation of social evils, to
relinquish a dialectical awareness of division and struggle at the heart of existence” (45).
I believe this poem is about imaginative identification rather than dialectical division.
Likewise, “Beachfront Hotel at Station 5” (19) explores Livingstone’s mutuality through
art with the writers of the Drum Decade.
Jonathan Bate argues in The Song of the Earth that poetry offers humankind a
way in which to reunify with nature, how to “hymn the earth”. He refers to this as “a
special kind of expression which may effect an imaginative reunification of mind and
nature” and names the concept ecopoetics (245). It is ironic that Livingstone, who
categorically stated that he was not a political poet, should (deliberately?) choose to
combine politics with what is the most obviously ecopoetic poem in A Littoral Zone.
Section 5 of “The Waste Land” expresses a strong ecopoetic yearning, but most of the
remainder of the poem takes the form of pale protest poetry. Ecological awareness and
political discord do not make good bedfellows and, as a result, the poem is too disparate.
The style, too, is contradictory and, in places, facile. The jocular tone of sections one and
three jars when read alongside the lyricism of the end of section four and of section five. I
suspect Livingstone is deliberately parodying protest poetry. Duncan Brown also reads
the poem as a parody and adds that Livingstone’s is an “inaccurate portrayal of important
aspects of black writing” (2002: 111-12). I argue that the poem is not about black writing,
but about writing as a whole, and therefore the poem should not be interpreted politically.
Peter Sacks' interpretation is more inclusive: “it is precisely by getting beyond the skindeep
surface that the mind may turn at last to ‘hymn the earth perhaps’” (4).