Splinters of a Mirage Dawn, An Anthology of South African Migrant Poetry is the result of a conglomeration of a variety of images that I brought with me through different countries, and finally to South Africa. Poetry and pigeons are my favourite as much as the fractured Sunsets that suddenly put them to flight in timeless journeys to distant and different skies. Poems of migration by poets who reached South Africa just also happens to be another statistical variable that remains incomplete, its importance camouflaged by many other elements of stranger disbelief.
The Migrant experience in a global fraternity is as ancient and ageless as the Earth we tread on. As much as we believe in the merging of global frontiers and the onset of a space era, living beings continue to move out in not such dynamicity, only reasonable in many such memories, as these within this book. Hurts indulge in navigational afterthoughts, its realm merges in the core of their birth after demise. Odours and homelessness are the theme of consciousness of star gazers, galaxies just keep moving within.
There is a war within and there is a war without. Fighting such wars in a life threatened by barbed wires and milestones, ‘health’ sometimes is an unheard word. The bullet only grazes the subterranean cortex, fibrous scars spring out trying to patch widened surfaces. An African Bush War creeps within surreptitiously. The Somali Spaza shop owner sells bread through apertures from his shack; yet living is a tight rope walk on an immigrant value. The war in Mogadishu continues to beckon him from where he once escaped for a better living.
Poems are sheer words; they are steep and have jagged edges. Words of Prose and Poems stem from raw winds, storms in vain trying desperately to live normally. Living is these words, their magnitude magnified by just any single poem of a migrant poet from this anthology. We live in many such upheavals; poems remain the border of infinite sanity. In a long divide growth, these poems try to infuse roots in crowded memories, waiting to bloom once again
Dawn comes as usual. Poems of migration share their continuity within many such dawns.
I am grateful to Dr. Naomi Nkealah, Poet and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of Limpopo for her assistance in bringing this unique anthology together. I must offer my heartfelt gratitude to internationally acclaimed artist Arpana Caur who consented to share her art relating to the horrors of the 1947 Migration of her family from Pakistan. Without the Migrant poets living in South Africa, their poems relating to their everyday mind, this book would not have seen the light of day. I thank them too..
Amitabh Mitra
