"Symbiosis or Death": - Rhodes University

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Wet claims Livingstone is “a poet acutely aware of both past and contemporary social,
political and aesthetic problems” (183) and notes that “He has ironically declared that he
understands ‘the Africa within us’ to be not only the differentiated cells that compose our
bodies, but also the symbiotic organisms that help to preserve life” (183). I argue that
Livingstone is here being scientific and ecological, rather than ironic. De Wet does allude
to Livingstone’s ecological preoccupation when he claims that the poet attempts to
synthesise a seemingly chaotic and meaningless universe from the vantage points of the
scientific, the literary, the intuitive and the historical (184).
Gayatri Priyadarshini (Priya) Narismulu’s thesis, “Poetry as an Expression of the
Understanding of One’s Reality: A Study of the Work of the South African Writer
Douglas Livingstone” (1985), predates the discourse of literary ecocriticism but her
conclusion that a “monistic conceptual framework” (139) informs Livingstone’s poetry
points to an ecological reading. She explains monism as a non-dualistic way of seeing the
world “which implies a paradigm shift to a conceptual system that transcends the
mechanistic framework” (141); this “new conceptual system removes the distance
between the poet and his context, summarily resolving the dislocation and alienation that
some of his poems demonstrate” (153).
Claudio Perinot’s thesis from the University of Venice, “Douglas Livingstone’s
Poetry: Imagery and Technique” (1989), examines the semantic construction of the
poetry in detail. The introduction relies heavily on Chapman’s narrow interpretation that
Livingstone’s poetry reflects “man’s fundamental sense of isolation” (41). This thesis
does not grapple with the broader import or meaning of Livingstone’s work.
Marco Fazzini’s thesis, “The Poetry of Douglas Livingstone: Towards an Italian
Translation” (1991), mainly consists of translations of some of Livingstone’s poems into
Italian. The abstract and introduction offer astute insights into what Fazzini calls “the
meaning of his poetry”. He claims Livingstone’s poetry is “an exploration of individual
responses to everyday reality through a dramatic, and often ironic, inwardness” and that
“Livingstone shows a capacity for sifting South African history and sentiment through a
disciplined verbal mastery” (1991: 21). According to Fazzini, Livingstone “perceives a
fractured or dislocated universe” (23), but he also correctly notes a search for “a
reconciliation between the tangible and the alien, the civilized and the primitive” (29) in
the animal poems. Fazzini states that Livingstone believed in language, not politics, and