Waiting and watching in the city’s pleasure streets

Abstract

The third chapter offers detailed close readings of the London-based writing of Arthur Nortje, a ‘coloured’ South African poet who studied at Oxford in the late 1960s and who set many of his poems in London. The chapter focuses on Nortje’s habitation of various personae, including literary models such as Eliotian and Baudelairean approaches to the city, and queer subjectivities. London, through its literary associations as an embodiment of modernity, allows Nortje to create a nexus between physical displacement from South Africa, his ambivalence about his mixed-race origins and the psychological and social alienation intrinsic to late twentieth-century life. In Nortje’s London-based poetry, the chapter argues, he depicts his attempts to work out his identity and belonging via his engagement with the city through his body.