The Myrrh of Parting: A Study of the Theme of Exile in South African Poetry

THE MYRRH OF PARTING: A STUDY OF THE THEME OF EXILE IN SOUTH AFRICAN POETRY JOHN F. POVEY For those who are in love and are exiled Can never be happy; looking upon the wild They see forever The cultivated acre of their pain. Roy Fuller, In Africa The decision that makes many South African poets leave their native country and spend their life in England, has something in common with the forces that make Australian and New Zealand writers COme to London, or Canadians seek renown in New York. However ardently nationalistic the dominion writer may be, there is a sense in which London and New York must represent the stimulus and competition denied him by the apparently more limited and parochial surroundings of his own country. But the South African writer has a choice more complex and painful than that facing the writers from the other dominions . He shares with other isolated writers the need which impels him to seek the literary communities of London of New York, but he also faces a national situation that doubles the pressure by repelling him from his native country and making return impossible. Even though the poets I am considering in this essay are not political exiles, their motives cannot be entirely aesthetic as they avoid a country where "politics hangs a long hand over the wall." The repudiation of country and the choice of exile appears inevitable but it is always agonizing. Concern over this decision is a repeated theme in the works of those poets who have left South Africa permanently. Even those such as Antony Delius and Guy Butler whose final decision is, at present, to remain, continually debate the necessity of their choice. A writer's sense of alienation is a commonplace topic in modern literature , but if in the poetry of other countries, such a topic is sometimes the subject of individual poems, it is seldom tied so obviously to geography nor is it repeated so obsessively. Exile is a characteristic preoccupation of South African poetry in English. More than any other group these poets revert to the alienation that is created by their exile. Volume xxxv, Number 2, January, 1966 THE MYRRH OF PARTING 159 They investigate constantly that haunted feeling of the poet cut off from his national birthright. They must cope with an environment which although intellectually free is alien and with a memory which is always tinctured with gUilt. These poets approach the subject in various tones, repeating a patriotic love for a country they have rejected but reaffirming the emotional necessity of exile in their depressed disillusion . The gamut of their moods ranges from the apparent indifference of Plomer, through the brash repudiation of Roy Campbell to the tugging nostalgia of Madge, Prince, and Wright. William Plomer and Roy Campbell were both very early exiles, for they left South Africa in the late twenties after the failure of their joint attempt to found a literary magazine entitled, with deliberate provocation , Voorslag (Whiplash). Plomer sailed to Japan and subsequently settled in England where his work, though esteemed, is so comfortably at home within the English literary milieu that it appears to owe nothing to the place of his birth. When he visited Witwatersrand University in 1956 it was his £rst visit back to Africa in thirty years. Africa now appears to have little relevance to his work. The subject returns only occaSionally as a passing memory in a stanza such as the one from The Scorpion which seems to imply more than the context of the poem would normally permit. That was the Africa we knew, Where wandering alone We saw, heraldic in the heat A scorpion on a stone. His earlier poems of Africa had been either beautifully sensitive evocations of the country as in Namaqualand after Rain or The Death of a Zulu Or sharply sardonic satires. The Pioneers are "Old rotting whales ashore [who] blowout spouts of lies." The famed Explorer is ridiculed as "Romantic subject of the Great White Queen." But Plomer's repudiation nOw seems total. His acceptance of England has been willing and open. For him there is not the inner division of spirit that marks...