"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

may be read as the efforts of aliens to overcome the other that rendered them
alien. (60-1)
Watson quotes Sidney Clouts who said his ambition was “to create a South African
poetry and a new language for it – an aboriginal language which fulfils not present but
future aspirations” (69) and concludes that Clouts failed because of his “essentially
romantic inclination”:
He remains a coloniser poet, one neither of England nor wholly of Africa,
occupying a ground so indeterminate that it frequently appears to be groundless.
And that was his tragedy. (80)
Livingstone’s Romanticism also seeks synthesis between the dualities given by
Watson above, but his Romanticism is not localised. His search is for a global language,
if language is the correct term for his poetic articulation of the interpretation of the
‘truth’. He was acutely aware of the slippery nature of ‘truth’, the search for which, he
believed, lies partly in scientific endeavour. Livingstone’s poetry breaks free from the
coloniser’s struggle to find a narrow definition of belonging within the African
landscape. He uses Africa in all its beauty and terror as a universal trope for the power of
the Earth as humankind’s oikos or dwelling place, and so escapes the concerns of
colonialism and, even, postcolonialism. His search is not so much for an internal paradise
as for an ecological sensibility which, if realised, would return humankind to a form of
ecological equilibrium where, following biological rhythms, we could live in harmony
with the Earth. In short, Livingstone was a Romantic materialist. The problem lies not
with Livingstone’s vision but with humankind itself.
In White Writing J.M. Coetzee examines the problems of what he calls a universal
language (a means of communication which everyone can understand) and a sense of
belonging within South African poetry: “The questions that trouble white South African
poets above all are, as we might expect, whether the land speaks a universal language,
whether the African landscape can be articulated in a European language, whether the
European can be at home in Africa” (1988: 167). Coetzee does not discuss Livingstone in
White Writing, but does examine the work of his fellow poet Sidney Clouts and argues
that “Clouts provides the most radical response as yet to the burden assumed by the South
African poet of European culture: the burden of finding a home in Africa for a
consciousness formed in and by a language whose history lies on another continent”
56