Professional Documents
Culture Documents
9 781869 143190
Michael Chapman
GREEN I N B L A C K -A N D -W H I T E T I M E S
GREEN
IN
B L A C K -A N D -W H I T E
TIMES
Conversations with
Douglas Livingstone
Michael Chapman
GREEN
IN BLACK-AND-WHITE TIMES
Conversations with Douglas Livingstone
Michael Chapman
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Preface
xi
Obituary: Douglas Livingstone (193296)
xiii
Works by Douglas Livingstone
xviii
1. Our Uncommon Humanity
2. Grimstown
12
3. A Ventriloquists Voice
17
4. Berea Rd Hotel
25
29
5. An Unredeemable Colonial
32
37
41
46
52
55
63
72
11. Cracking the Cane at the End of the Day: The Anvils
Undertone
77
92
95
102
107
109
114
120
129
131
142
154
156
167
186
190
197
199
208
211
218
Notes
227
Preface
employed in diagnostic pathology in Broken Hill (now Kabwe) in presentday Zambia, he returned to South Africa in 1964. At the Council for
Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Durban, he devoted his
work to marine bacteriology. His doctoral thesis in biological sciences
was published as Microbial Studies of Seawater Quality off Durban (1990),
while his A Littoral Zone (1991) attaches poetry to his water-sampling
stations along the KwaZulu-Natal coast.
Holding honorary doctorates in literature from the University of
Natal and Rhodes University, Livingstone was the recipient of several
awards in the United Kingdom and South Africa, including South
Africas premier CNA Award.
His first two volumes were written while he was in Rhodesia: The
Skull in the Mud (1960) and the more substantial Sjambok, and Other Poems
from Africa (1964). These collections focus on aspects of modern life on
the subcontinent: our isolation and need for love; religious or spiritual
intimations in an age of science and the transitions of decolonisation.
Livingstones animal poems, which are often vivid reminders of
human behaviour, displayed at the outset his salient strengths of verbal
invention within intricate metrical and rhyming patterns. The poems
struck reviewers in southern Africa and abroad as utterly new.4
Livingstones inheritance is modernist: metaphors of complexity
predominate over the plain-speaking voice. Reaching towards
internationalism in Eyes Closed Against the Sun (1970), he seeks the
redeeming moment, the enriching fragment and mythic synthesis, amid
the detritus of urban experience. A Rosary of Bone (1975; with additional
poems, 1983) explores sexual attraction in a variety of styles: the volume
is as much about the making of poetry as the making of love.
Livingstones work, however, never lost touch with southern Africa.
His settings are geographically African; his concerns take power and
accent from the region. In registering the wind of change5 in the
early 1960s, he debunked the image of the heroic colonial hunter,
while remaining wary of cries of Uhuru. The Anvils Undertone (1978)
captures, sometimes directly, at other times subliminally, the temper
of the Soweto years of the 1970s. Responding to the then new black
poetry, Livingstone questioned the efficacy of what he referred to as
Polit-Lit,6 and in poems such as Under Capricorn, he shaped his own
intimations of living in the interregnum, that time when the old order
is dying and the new struggles to be born; that time in which arise
morbid symptoms:
...
Another turn of the road,
and only an old man there:
mist coiling his thin ankles,
headdress flapping, both arms raised
like Moses; smiling, bowing
from the edge of the highway,
bleating the loud ironic
blessings or curses of a
temporarily deprived
if most patient Lucifer.
(RF, p. 213)
Volumes of poetry
The Skull in the Mud (Dulwich Village: Outposts Publications, 1960).
Sjambok, and Other Poems from Africa (London: Oxford University Press,
1964; revised, Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1988).
Eyes Closed Against the Sun (London: Oxford University Press, 1964;
Cape Town: Oxford University Press, 1970).
Poems, with Thomas Kinsella and Anne Sexton (London: Oxford
University Press, 1968).
A Rosary of Bone (Cape Town: David Philip, 1975; with additional
poems, 1983).
The Anvils Undertone (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1978).
Selected Poems (Johannesburg: Ad Donker, 1984; 1990).
A Littoral Zone (Cape Town: The Carrefour Press, 1991).
Il Sonno dei miei leoni e altre poesie dallAfrica, translated by Marco Fazzini
(Venice: Supernova, 1992).
Giovanni Jacopo Meditates (on the High-IQ Haiku) (Cape Town: The
Firfield Pamphlet Press, 1995).
A Ruthless Fidelity: The Collected Poems of Douglas Livingstone, edited
by Malcolm Hacksley and Don Maclennan (Johannesburg: Ad
Donker, 2004).
Selected Poems, edited by Michael Chapman (Johannesburg: Ad Donker,
2004).
Loving: Selected Poems and Other Writings/Poesie scelte e altri scritti, translated
and edited by Marco Fazzini (Venice: Amos Edizioni, 2009).
Translations
Eight Shona Poems, translated with Phillippa Berlyn, London Magazine
7, no.10 (1968).
1
Our Uncommon Humanity
Durban, 1977
I returned to Durban from London where, as a part-time student, I
had completed a three-year Honours degree in English literature. As a
schoolteacher, my ambition was to secure a lecturing post at a university.
For that I required, at least, a Masters degree.
My tutor (London University): As a South African you wont get a
work permit here; not in the world of English. Not under a Labour
government, anyway. If you want to pursue Masters study in South
Africa, turn to your own literature. A context of significance is
important. Researching Eng Lit from afar risks marginalisation. I give
this advice to many students from the...uh, colonies. Too few take
the advice. So we have articles of little interestShakespeare among
the kangaroos.. . among the . . . spring bucks [sic]!
The core principle can be traced back to the later years of the
nineteenth century, to a radical shift of social, psychological and
perceptual understanding. Do we imitate a world out there, however
selectively (the convention of realism)? Or do we make the worldthat
is, give it shape and significancethrough our thoughts, imagination
and language (the convention of modernism)? To illustrate from the
visual arts, if a photograph can imitate the world, artsay, Picassos
cubism can do something unusual: it can re-create the world.
In this vein, Douglas Livingstones poetry struck a chord: modernist
in its startling image-making and formal/stylistic invention. In South
African literary journals and newspapers, I found several pieces on
Livingstone.1 Modernism as a concept, however, was hardly mentioned,
let alone explored.
I read assiduously on modernism.2 I read Michael Hamburger on
the truth of poetry,3 in which this German literary critic identified the
modern sensibility in tensions between the Romantic-symbolist (the
experience transfigured in image and metaphor) and the anti-poet (the
close identification between the word and the thing).
As Hamburger saw it, at the root of both reactions is what, in
modern aesthetics, is called word scepticism4: a lack of confidence in
the ability of familiar social language to communicate the tenor of a
world that has lost faith in traditional systems of value and belief. Both
reactions presume that we configure experience through language; that
language is a human and, therefore, an alterable construct. Initially, it
is deemed to derive not from sanctioned belief, but from the naming
of simple, solid entities in the natural world: rock, tree and so on. Freed
of its debt to eternal verities, language is granted the capacity to help
make new senses of reality, to be inventive and even eccentric in its
choice of images: from rock and star to rock-star. In short, an anti-poetic
dedication to the tangibility of things is not unconnected to its apparent
obverse: a dedication to the transfiguring imagination. In the light of
this background, I read Douglas Livingstones poetry.
was delivered against the emergence of what, at the time, was labelled
the new black poetry of the seventies, an overtly political poetry. With
a few of the new black poets in the audience, Livingstones discussionpanel paper, Africa within Us...?, ended with Livingstone the
marine bacteriologist upstaging Livingstone the poet:
A living body is of course subject to certain immutable laws. A body
divided against itself, as someone Im sure said, diesas in various
types of cancer, for instance, where some cells, not content with their
orderly dissimilarities yet underlying unity of purpose with the blokes
over the road, differ again from their associates and, in trying to
impose their ways on the other, destroy the whole world they occupy.
So what is crucial: tolerance, humility...discovering in the
process the miracle against which no wall or law or barbed wire can
ever prevail: our uncommon humanity.16
Dirk Klopper, returning in 1990 to Livingstones comment on PolitLit, had this to say: A crude view of biological survival appears to have
been elevated to a transcendental absolute.17 And in 2013: ...his
stylistics of provocation. One may not wish to stand where he stands,
nor see the world as he sees it, but his delineation of his situation is
lyrically and topologically compelling...To see the continent [Africa]
as both alive and other...is preferable to seeing it as a resource.18
***
21 Weinemore Court
264 Moore Rd
Durban, 4001
17/12/77
Dear Mr Livingstone,
I am a graduate of London University, and in 1978 will be attached, as
a Graduate Assistant, to the English Department at Rhodes University,
where I shall research an MA on South African poetry in English.
Your poetry will occupy an important place in my study. In fact, I
may decide to focus only on your poetry. So far, however, I have not
found much critical material on your work, but will continue searching.
I shall phone you after the end-of-year break. If you have time,
I should appreciate a brief meeting with you before I head off to
Grahamstown.
Best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.
Yours sincerely
Michael Chapman
Telephone conversation
DL: Living-STONE.
[I later learnt that -STONE had been adopted to divert the tiresome quip,
David/Dr/Mr Livingstone, I presume.]
MC: Good morning, Mr Livingstone. I hope you received my letter of
introduction.
DL: Ja, well the silly seasons over for another year. So you want to write
a Masters dissertation on my poetry. A sleuth rummaging in my soiledlinen closet?
MC: Uh...yes, I mean no, I mean, I hope not.
DL: A condition...Neither of us rummages in the others stained bed
linen.
later, as the first professor of English at what was then the University
of Natal to speak with a South African accent. (Actually, I thinkby a
yearmy colleague, Professor Tony Voss, pipped me to that particular
distinction.)
Those were the apartheid years of the mid-1980s. The University of
Natal had been decreed a white institution. I wonder what today, in
2016, would be considered by a mixed-race staff and student complement
to constitute a singular South African accent. Or, for that matter, a
singular South African identity.
***
MC: Why white African? Why not just South African?
DL: I dont buy into South African exceptionalism. In any case, our
loutish behaviour towards our only home stretches from Cape Town
to Cairo. And beyond, of course. Our great polluter, the US of A. Our
future polluter, grinding necessity coupled with over-weaning ambition
ol Shakespeare could spin a phraseChina, I predict!
DL: Im absolutely a white African.
Tony Morphet [ex-lecturer in English, Natal]: Thats an odd thing to beand
I think it shows, particularly in the later work. What it seems to involve
is very many different voices, looking in different ways at experience of
being in Africa.19
Interlude 1
The Well-Wrought Urn
Interlude 1 11