"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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Smith, writing in the 1980s, states that “white … writing has increasingly
become a literature of dread, in contrast to the black discourse of endurance and
challenge” (67). Has South African poetry moved beyond this black-white split and
found its own ‘voice’? I submit that Douglas Livingstone’s poetry marks the start of a
new tradition of ecologically orientated poetry in South Africa.
While Livingstone’s poetry is not concerned with colonial appropriation and
postcolonial obsessions with ownership of the land, it is concerned with finding a sense
of place in Africa. For this reason Livingstone was influenced by other South African
poetry and is often linked with Roy Campbell (Chapman 1984: 74, Smith 89). Klopper
notes:
Livingstone does appear to draw on the work of Campbell. One way of describing
Livingstone is to say that he is a contemporary South African modernist who
combines the symbolic resonance of Campbell with the ironic sensibility of
William Plomer. (1990: 286)
Roy Campbell’s “symbolic resonance” is most obvious in his revival of the myth
of Adamastor, a myth which Livingstone uses in his verse play The Sea My Winding
Sheet and in “Adamastor Resuscitated” (Sjambok and other poems from Africa 12;
hereafter referred to as S). Sidney Clouts argues that Campbell believed in poetry as “‘a
pastoral art’, flowering best under conditions where the relation between man and nature
was fundamental both to life and to art” (149). This philosophy could as well be used to
describe Livingstone’s view. Campbell – like Livingstone – valorised the imagination. In
Broken Record Campbell describes himself as a Quixotic figure: “I live three-quarters of
the time in my imagination, which is the highest and purest form of the intelligence, the
discarding of which for materialistic and scientific values has caused the misery of the
modern world” (in Clouts 149). Livingstone, on the other hand, does not hold this
narrow view of the value of science and instead seeks synthesis between the imagination
and science.
In summarising Campbell’s position in English South African poetry, Clouts says:
Campbell was the first South African poet to write with a mastery of form. To a
poetry heavily dependent on conventional responses he brought the authority of
an intense and fresh lyrical control of language. The store of prosodic energies in
his work makes the English and European traditions creatively available to us,
under the pressure of a highly individual talent.
… He was applying a forceful sophistication of style to the expression of a harsh
and challenging reality. The way in which subject matter contrasts with idiom can