Splinters of a Mirage Dawn - Edited by Amitabh Mitra and Naomi Nkealah

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

Whatever I Hang - The Migrant Poetry of Femi Abodunrin

For Grace Nichols

 I

From love of Calypsos

Through theorizing about the Middle-Passage

And amazing glimpses of the ruins of a great house

I watched the new Oilgerian game of death

But some call it the game of life

Disembarking at ORT to an implausible reception

By skeptical teams of post-apartheid Customs and Excise!

“Ah! This way Sir” – I heard one sister say to a brother.

“What have you brought from Oilgeria?” She would like to know

But the bulging Ghana-Must-Go had given away the game

“Eish! These Oilgerians think they’re clever”, sister mouths wordlessly

Tubers of yams sprouted from the bulging bag and brother feigned surprise

Cassava flour emerged trailed by iru, okasi and assorted bush meat!

“What are these?” Post-apartheid sister mouthed enraged

Nothing-to-deklare brother smiled and embraced the empty Ghana-Must-Go!

It’s every day for the thief, he retorted, without bitterness!

II

But just yesterday we were theorizing about the colonial baggage

Blown wide open on the conveyor belt – exposing decades of postcolonial angst

But now can we focus on the new post- without remorse?

And is the post- in post-colonial the post- in post-racialism?

Leaving my wazobia ways to participate in this orgy of tricolored angst

And nollywood stars trailing and cursing – not to mention

Sacrilegious ‘nothing-to-deklare’ sisters, joining the macabre dance.

In Jozi we shall all meet in an arranged marriage of inconvenience

The lobola dance terminating at ABSA – while we exchange

Knowing glances of notions of home. Ah! Whatever I hang!

‘And what are these?’ post-racialist sister would like to know

‘Fixes’, nothing-to-deklare brother retorted without contrition

‘You mean those things our girls hang on their heads’ sister corrected

‘And don’t they hang beautifully?’ he would like to know

And whatever I hang, he smiled ruefully,

Is this what I shall call home?

Femi Abodunrin 

Polokwane, December 2012

Femi Abodunrin is presently Professor of English Studies and Performing Arts at the University of Limpopo, Turfloop Campus. He studied at Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria and holds a PhD degree from Stirling University, Scotland, UK. He has taught at universities in Nigeria, the UK, Germany, Malawi and Swaziland. His major publications include Blackness: Culture, Ideology and Discourse (BASS, 1996, 2008).

Migrant Poetry of Sarita Mathur

Migrant workers

On Earth,

You have a rightful place,

Life is not a race between the Have’s and the Have –Not’s

You maybe seasonal workers,

Migrating from place to place

However, you do not displace anyone else.

You enrich the earth

And take care of the soil,

Through hard work and toil,

And no one must feel threatened

By your existence on their Land,

Yet, you too have to take a Stand,

To claim your rightful place,

Even though people make the mistake of

Trying to disempowering you,

It is true,

That it is Migrant workers who they seek to exploit

Yet, you have a Voice

And the right to join in the Global Economy

It is your freedom of Choice

Not only local in flavor

Often you have to be braver

Than the normal worker

Migrant workers you have a right

So, put up a fight,

Wherever you are and whatever you do

For human dignity and honor

It is true

You are equal and can stand Tall

Rubbing shoulders with One and All.

Sarita Mathur born in India, lives in Durban. She is a Poet and an Artist. Her poems have been published in the international print poetry journal, A Hudson View  and the South African protest poetry anthology, Unbreaking the Rainbow. Her poetry book, Once Again... Love is being published.