“Why Are You Here?”: Multiculturalism and Migration – A Study of Splinters of a Mirage Dawn: An Anthology of Migrant Poetry from South Africa - Femi Abodunrin

 

Abstract

The primary aim of this study is to contextualise the African experience within the globalised context of the all-subsuming movement known as globalisation. With Africa itself – to paraphrase Manthia Diawara – often characterized as a continent sitting on top of infectious diseases, strangled by corruption and tribal vengeance, and populated by people with hands and mouths open to receive international aid – the migrant’s experience in South Africa provides a veritable ground to interrogate the intractable term known as globalisation or what Fredric Jameson has described as ‘a sign of the emergence of a new kind of social phenomenon, and one that falls outside the established academic disciplines’. Rodwell Makombe’s terse haiku-like poem entitled “Why are you here”, among other contributions in the anthology, Splinters of a Mirage Dawn, summarizes the migrant’s experience: “Please Sir, I can’t go back to that country/Look at the boils on my back/If you send me back there, they will finish me off”. Where “that country” is located remains an object of mere speculation but the migrant parades unabashedly the ‘boils on my back’ as an identity – an identity which the people ‘waiting to finish me off’ are ready to reinforce if ‘you send me back there’. To inhabit “riparian zones” as another contributor, Sarah Rowland Jones, has termed it, “….those which threaten infestation,/are subject to compulsory removal”. From this perspective, the study examines globalisation and the cultural, political and intellectual space it occupies, including the transcolonial situation it animates. Mapping the transcolonial situation, for example, implies an awareness of the local emergence of difference or what Jameson describes further as “specificity” against “the old universalism that so often underwrote an imperial knowledge/power system,” among other conceptual axes.  

Femi Abodunrin, PhD is a Professor in the Department of Languages, University of Limpopo, Sovenga, South Africa. This paper was presented at the English Academy Conference for Southern Africa at Durban on 28 September 2014.  

Key words: Globalisation; Migration, Multiculturalism, Transcolonial

Migrant Poetry of Kole Odutola

Immigrants at Trafalgar Square

In large numbers they are seen feeding the pigeons
And picking ‘made- in-Taiwan’ wares at London joints
Seeking the imaginary gold that lines the streets
but avoiding the biting cold enveloped in the winds.
It was not me you saw at Trafalgar Square,
I swear by the revolver that killed the April 22nd group
Who planned a coup and ended in Presidential soup.
It was not me with a festering sore at the loop
that enters the square; the fear I scoop
from the entrails of the immigration Corps
sends me too far from the famous Square

The birds fed by tourists now carry cameras
Which record roaming intellectual terrorists
Who wish to speak back to the empire
With the intent to inspire impressionable British minds
and fire the imagination of their girls.
The new Dell  I bought at Trafalgar Square
has been transferred to another owner
whose eternal sign is “body no be wood”
A soulless debt collector with white wool
as heart and a palm that morphs into puke

Kole Odutola is a Senior lecturer of Yoruba in the Department of Languages, Literature and Culture at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Florida, USA. His book  titled, Diaspora and Imagined Nationality is published by Carolina Academic Press,USA. 
You can buy/download a copy, click here

Geoffrey Haresnape writes........

Dear Amitabh

 

Sorry for the delay in replying to your message.   I've been busy writing a piece on poems of the political transition published in 1995 by Peter Horn.   Peter turns 80 later this year and a festschrift is being planned to celebrate the occasion.   Anyway, that is off and out now and I breathe again.

 

You ask about my impressions of SPLINTERS OF A MIRAGE DAWN.  I really like the general feel of the book,  its size, the bright unusual cover portraying the man in transit with his load on his head and back, and also the decorative motifs that surround the poems in most of the book.   Arpana Caur's graphic work is certainly arresting.  Among the poets I was moved by Adebole Fawole, Rodwell Makombe and Tendai Mwanaka.   The Zimbabwean story, which finds so powerful expression in NoViolet Bulawayo's WE NEED NEW NAMES,  can be sensed in the work of these Zim poets.  Your own scenes of Hillbrow present an image so different from the place I remember when I first went to a job in Joburg in the 1960s.   Being moved, being in transit is so much at the heart of South African experience.

Congratulations on your book.

 

Kind regards,

 

Geoffrey Haresnape  

Geoffrey Haresnape is a South African born poet and scholar, currently an Emeritus Professor of the University of Cape Town. He has published four books of poetry: Drive of the Tide (1976), New-Born Images (1991), Mulberries in Autumn (1996) and The Living and The Dead: Selected and New Poems (2000).

The Hard Cover/Jacket Edition of Splinters of a Mirage Dawn

HardCover / Jacket Edition of Splinters of a Mirage Dawn