Havelis of Gwalior

Acrylic on Paper using Impasto Technique - Amitabh Mitra

Neil Aggett

Neil Aggett ( 6 October 1953 - 5 February 1982 )was the first white medical doctor to die in detention for his anti apartheid activism. Steve Biko ( 18 Dec 1946 - 12 Sept 1977) also died due to torture and head injuries inflicted during interrogation. He was a medical student at the University of Natal.
The Ninth Annual Neil Aggett Memorial Lecture at Kingswood College , Grahamstown was delivered by Jonathan Jansen, Vice Chancellor of University of Free State on 24 Sept 2014

Neil Aggett Charcoal on Paper by Amitabh Mitra

Havelis of Gwalior

Acrylic / Charcoal on Paper - Amitabh Mitra

Irom Chanu Sharmila

Charcoal on Paper - Amitabh Mitra

Mdantsane, the Spirit of Freedom

Soft Chalk on Paper by Amitabh Mitra

“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

For Irom Sharmila

Irom Sharmila
Charcoal on Paper

For Irom

they stabbed a sun
legally
multiple times
dragged another sky in chains
declared guilty
legally and thrown in a cell
horizons cowered
in shame and shamelessness
outside dogs barked and quarreled
indecisively
the Generals continue sipping scotch
on such sky less evenings at
Imphal

Amitabh Mitra

Renowned Indian Poet Badal Saroj has translated this poem in Hindi

उन्होंने सूरज में, कानूनी रूप से, अनगिनत बार घोंप डाले चाकू
एक और आकाश को बेड़ियों में घसीट कर
मुजरिम करार दे दिया
और धकेल दिया काल कोठरी में ; सो भी पूरी तरह कानूनन
शर्म के मारे दुबक गए क्षितिज
उत्सव मनाती रही बेशर्मी
कुत्ते भौंकते और झगड़ते रहे अनवरत
और
इम्फाल की ऐसी
एक निर्वात और निरावृत्त शाम में
स्कॉच सुडकते रहे जनरल.