- Taken from Mystic Wayfarer
A Coloured Gedagte by Ross Rayners
Almustafa, the chosen and the beloved, who was a dawn onto his own day, had waited twelve years in the city of Orphalese for his ship that was to return and bear him back to the isle of his birth. And in the twelfth year, on the seventh day of Ielool, the month of reaping, he climbed the hill without the city walls and looked seaward; and he beheld the ship coming with the mist. Then the gates of his heart were flung open, and his joy flew far over the sea. And he closed his eyes and prayed in the silences of his soul. But he descended the hill, a sadness came upon him, and he thought in his heart: How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.
Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret? Too many fragments of the spirit have I scatterd in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a bruden and an ache. It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands. Nor is it a thought I leave behind me, but a heart made sweet with hunger and with thirst. Yet I cannot tarry longer. The sea that calls all things unto her calls me, and I must embark. For to stay, though the hours burn in the night, is to freeze and crystallize and be bound in a mould. Fain would I take with me all that is here. But how shall I? A voice cannot carry the tongue and the lips that give it wings. Alone must it seek the ether. And alone and without his nest shall the eagle fly across the sun. Now when he reached the foot of the hill, he turned again towards the sea, and he saw his ship approaching the harbour, and upon her prow the mariners, the men of his own land.
And his soul cried out to them, and he said:
Sons of my ancient mother, you riders of the tides, How often have you sailed in my dreams. And now you come in my awakening, which is my deeper dream. Ready am I to go, and my eagerness with sails full set awaits the wind. Only another breath will I breathe in this still air, only another loving look cast backward, Then I shall stand among you, a seafarer among seafarers. And you, vast sea, sleepless mother, Who alone are peace and freedom to the river and the stream, Only another winding will this stream make, only another murmur in this glade, And then shall I come to you, a boundless drop to a boundless ocean. And as he walked he saw from afar men and women leaving their fields and their vineyards and hastening towards the city gates. And he heard their voices calling his name, and shouting from the field to field telling one another of the coming of the ship.
And he said to himself:
Shall the day of parting be the day of gathering? And shall it be said that my eve was in truth my dawn? And what shall I give unto him who has left his plough in midfurrow, or to him who has stopped the wheel of his winepress? Shall my heart become a tree heavy-laden with fruit that I may gather and give unto them? And shall my desires flow like a fountain that I may fill their cups? Am I a harp that the hand of the mighty may touch me, or a flute that his breath may pass through me? A seeker of silences am I, and what treasure have I found in silences that I may dispense with confidence? If this is my day of harvest, in what fields have I sowed the seed, and in what unrembered seasons? If this indeed be the our in which I lift up my lantern, it is not my flame that shall burn therein.
Empty and dark shall I raise my lantern, And the guardian of the night shall fill it with oil and he shall light it also. These things he said in words. But much in his heart remained unsaid. For he himself could not speak his deeper secret. And when he entered into the city all the people came to meet him, and they were crying out to him as with one voice.
And the elders of the city stood forth and said:
Go not yet away from us. A noontide have you been in our twilight, and your youth has given us dreams to dream. No stranger are you among us, nor a guest, but our son and our dearly beloved. Suffer not yet our eyes to hunger for your face.
And the priests and the priestesses said unto him:
Let not the waves of the sea separate us now, and the years you have spent in our midst become a memory. You have walked among us a spirit, and your shadow has been a light upon our faces. Much have we loved you. But speechless was our love, and with veils has it been veiled. Yet now it cries aloud unto you, and would stand revealed before you. And ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation. And others came also and entreated him. But he answered them not. He only bent his head; and those who stood near saw his tears falling upon his breast. And he and the people proceeded towards the great square before the temple. And there came out of the sanctuary a woman whose name was Almitra. And she was a seeress. And he looked upon her with exceeding tenderness, for it was she who had first sought and believed in him when he had been but a day in their city.
And she hailed him, saying:
Prophet of God, in quest for the uttermost, long have you searched the distances for your ship. And now your ship has come, and you must needs go. Deep is your longing for the land of your memories and the dwelling place of your greater desires; and our love would not bind you nor our needs hold you. Yet this we ask ere you leave us, that you speak to us and give us of your truth. And we will give it unto our children, and they unto their children, and it shall not perish. In your aloneness you have watched with our days, and in your wakefulness you have listened to the weeping and the laughter of our sleep. Now therefore disclose us to ourselves, and tell us all that has been shown you of that which is between birth and death.
And he answered,
People of Orphalese, of what can I speak save of that which is even now moving your souls?
A ‘The Prophet‘ extract as writ by Kahlil Gibran
.
Khalil Gibran (born Gibran Khalil Gibran bin Mikhā’īl bin Sa’ad); January 6, 1883 – April 10, 1931), was a Lebanese American artist, poet, and writer. Born in the town of Bsharri in modern-day Lebanon (then part of the Ottoman Mount Lebanon mutasarrifate), as a young man he emigrated with his family to the United States where he studied art and began his literary career. He is chiefly known for his 1923 book The Prophet, a series of philosophical essays written in English prose. An early example of Inspirational fiction, the book sold well despite a cool critical reception, and became extremely popular in the 1960s counterculture.
Gibran was born in the Christian Maronite town of Bsharri (in modern day northern Lebanon) to the daughter of a Maronite priest. His mother Kamila was thirty when he was born; his father, also named Khalil, was her third husband. As a result of his family’s poverty, Gibran received no formal schooling during his youth. However, priests visited him regularly and taught him about the Bible, as well as the Arabic and Syriac languages. Gibran’s father initially worked in an apothecary but, with gambling debts he was unable to pay, he went to work for a local Ottoman-appointed administrator or local warlord.
Around 1891, extensive complaints by angry subjects led to the administrator being removed and his staff being investigated. Gibran’s father was imprisoned for alleged embezzlement, and his family’s property was confiscated by the authorities. With no home, Kamila Gibran decided to follow her brother to the United States. Although Gibran’s father was released in 1894, Kamila remained resolved and left for New York on June 25, 1895, taking Khalil, his younger sisters Mariana and Sultana, and his elder half-brother Peter(/Bhutros/Butrus).
>> As writ by Wikipedia <<
Valparaiso
Chase the dog star
Over the sea
Home where my true love is waiting for me
Rope the south wind
Canvas the stars
Harness the moonlight
So she can safely go
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso
Red the port light
Starboard the green
How will she know of the devils I’ve seen
Cross in the sky, star of the sea
Under the moonlight, there she can safely go
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso
Valparaiso
And every road I walked would take me down to the sea
With every broken promise in my sack
And every love would always send the ship of my heart
Over the rolling sea
If I should die
And water’s my grave
She’ll never know if I’m damned or I’m saved
See the ghost fly over the sea
Under the moonlight, there she can safely go
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso
Valparaiso
Valparaiso
Valparaiso
>> Sting <<
The South African government needs to “take a hard look” at its race-fuelled myopia and create the conditions that encouraged productive South Africans — including whites and minority groups — to stay and contribute to growth, says official opposition Democratic Alliance leader Tony Leon.
In his regular online column on Friday, SA Today, Leon noted that the South African Institute of Race Relations had reported that about a fifth of white South Africans had left the country in the last 10 years and noted that “given a globalising world in which skilled individuals as well as capital investment are more mobile than ever before, and are maximizing their careers by moving elsewhere, government needs to take a hard look at its race-fuelled myopia, and create the conditions that encourage productive South Africans to stay and contribute to growth — which in the longer term is the only real answer to joblessness and poverty”.
The DA leader argued that “rather than discouraging these citizens from staying, moreover, the state should be actively and energetically soliciting the world’s very best practitioners in tackling the enormous problems that currently beset us in so many areas”.
All must be included and valued. He said: “In short: government needs to reassess its message so that all feel included and valued. Foot-dragging at best and vindictiveness at worst undermines all of our futures – most especially those South Africans for too long disadvantaged by our apartheid legacy and whose interests the ruling party professedly wants to advance.
>> Donwald Pressly <<
In 1652 a small company of employees of the Dutch East India Company were settled on the southern tip of Africa in order to establish a refreshment station for the Company’s ships en route to the Far East. From this group of Dutchmen the Afrikaners were to develop. From 1688 to 1700, they were joined by about 200 French Huguenots, Protestant refugees from Catholic France. Despite language and cultural differences, a shared commitment to the Reformed faith enabled these two groups to merge into one, and to this day many Afrikaans-speaking people in South Africa have surnames which can be traced back to the Huguenots. German refugees farther swelled their numbers. For more than a hundred years after the first settlement, the Dutch Reformed Church was the only legally permitted and established church on South African soil.
In time, groups of settlers moved away from the Cape settlement into the hinterland to develop farms there. The indigenous people of the Cape at that time were the Khoikhoi people, many of whom worked as laborers on the farms of the Dutch-speaking settlers. The Dutch government forbade enslaving indigenous people of southern Africa. They did allow the importation of slaves or indentured servants from the Malay peoples of Indonesia and Malaysia. The first Malay slaves arrived in 1657. Others slaves were imported from West Africa.
The isolation of the Cape from the Netherlands in Europe, meant that the form of Dutch spoken in the Cape gradually changed significantly from that spoken in Holland. The Cape dialect of Dutch came to be called Afrikaans (”the African language”). In the church, the law courts, educational institutions and official government circles, the official language was Dutch. But the common language of the people was increasingly Afrikaans.
Out of the interaction between the Dutch settlers and their slaves developed another South African people. The first and largest base of this people was Malay Cape Coloured, or the brown Afrikaners. The settlers also had mixed offspring with the Khoikhoi, the San and the Xhosa. The term Coloured came to be applied to all mixed people. The Coloureds share the same language and religion as the “white” Afrikaners, although separated from them by strong social and class distinctions.
One group of Coloureds escaped to the bush and lived as an African tribe, but became fearsome warriors on horses. These were the Griqua, who are still an Afrikaans-speaking tribe today. Today, there are about 7 million Afrikaans-speaking people in South Africa, over half of whom are “Coloured” people.
The Dutch settlers resented the British takeover, and some moved further inland. Two measures led to a permanent enmity. The government made English the official language in place of Dutch. In 1824, Britain freed all slaves in all British territories. The Great Trek resulted, so that by 1835, a steady visible steam of Boers (Dutch for “farmer”) was migrating north and east, establishing independent Afrikaner states, including Natal.
The final insult was the annexation of the independent northern Boer republics. The Transvaal, annexed in 1877, tried to negotiate independence and finally defeated British forces in the first Anglo-Boer War (1880-1881), winning autonomy but not total independence. Further British incursions into the Transvaal led to the second Anglo-Boer War, 1899-1902. The British defeated the Afrikaners and finally incorporated their republics into the Union of South Africa in 1910.
Author Zoe Wicomb gave this rare interview to David Robinson of the Scotsman and gives us a glimpse of life as a mixed-race person under apartheid.
Zoe Wicomb, South Africa-born but living in Glasgow for the last 11 years, is a writer of rare brilliance. On the cover of her latest book, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison and double Booker winner JM Coetzee compete to eulogise her work. She’s formidably intelligent: ‘A mind like a steel trap’, says the head of the Scottish Arts Council’s literature department, ‘one of the brightest people you could meet.’ She is, according to the pupils she has taught creative writing to at Strathclyde University, where Wicomb holds a professorship, a peerless and inspiring teacher.
Yet the chances are that you won’t have ever heard of her, because this is the first British newspaper interview she has ever given. For the 30 years she’s lived in Britain, that’s the way she liked it, and to be honest, it probably still is.
Zoe’s third book Living In The Light, is one of the most convincing novels I’ve read all year. If she’s going for the title of Scotland’s greatest unknown novelist, it’s hers on a plate.
Zoe Wicomb was born in Namaqueland, a hot, arid region on the southern fringes of the Namib desert, in 1948. The good life of white South Africa was a long way from this sparsely populated scrubland, and the nearest whites lived 20 miles away, in the town which also had the nearest shop. (Not that, as coloureds, the Wicombs were allowed to enter it, only being served from a hatch round the side). Her Afrikaans-speaking parents wanted the best for their children, something more than working in the nearby gypsum mine or as a domestic servant, which were the only local jobs going. Speaking English – as no-one did for 200 miles around – wasn’t an automatic free pass to a better life, but it was a better bet than anything else.
Secondary school meant Cape Town, where she moved to live with her aunt. A school for coloureds, followed by a university for coloureds, where she learnt about such great non-coloureds as Chaucer, Johnson, Shakespeare and Hardy. And where, for the first time, Zoe caught sight of her first “play-whites”. ‘There was a family living across the road from us, and one day they just disappeared. Our neighbours said, ‘They’ve left. They’ve turned white’. This happened all the time’
‘It’s an odd phenomenon, the play-whites,’ says Zoe. ‘We don’t even know how many of them there are. There’s no discourse, nothing in the library, because officially they don’t exist. Yet the truth of the matter, because of their history, is that many Afrikaners are mixed race. Even Verwoerd [the founder of apartheid] had a wife who looked African.’
Because skin colour is so variable even within the same family, legal definitions of whiteness were absurdly tortuous. ‘A white person,’ the government decided in 1950, ‘is someone who in appearance obviously is or is generally accepted as a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person.’ Mrs Verwoerd presumably counted as white not because she looked it but because enough people could agree that she actually was.
‘The weird thing,’ says Zoe, ‘was that there was this legislation for racial purity at the same time as the whites were tacitly boosting their own numbers by allowing some people to cross over.’
Eurasian People
Throughout the former colonial world, in many instances what are referred to as ‘hybrid communities’ have evolved. In Africa, Oceania, Asia and the Americas, different groups were born of mixed relations between the colonists and indigenous peoples. In Asia, such groups, commonly known as Eurasians, developed in differing ways. These peoples were regarded varyingly from society to society. Often seen as a privileged class in comparison with the other native peoples, with the current trend in ethnic and post colonial studies, ethnographers, historiographers and sociologists frequently class Eurasians as living in some kind of ‘hiatus’ with allegiances to no one and to nowhere. However, it can be said that these peoples were more loyal to their countries of birth and origin than has been believed. In Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (the former French Indochina), Eurasians evolved from mixed relations between the natives and French rulers. In the Philippines, Mestizos and Amerasians were born of Spanish and Filipino, and American and Filipino miscegenation. Throughout the Indian Subcontinent, Anglo-Indians emerged from mixed relations between the British and other Europeans with Indians, whilst in Sri-Lanka, Eurasians and Burghers emerged as the descendents of Singhalese and Portuguese, Dutch and British unions. In Indonesia, Dutch-Indonesians emerged, descended from colonial Dutch and Javanese miscegenation. In Burma, the Eurasian community evolved through mixed relations between the British and other settlers of European origin with the local Burmese populace, and this community came to be known in two ways: as either the Anglo-Burmans or the Anglo-Burmese.
Today’s Burma, the Union of Myanmar, is a nation situated in Southeast Asia between India and Bangladesh on the west, and Thailand, China and Laos to the north and east. Myanmar stretches more than 2,050 kilometers from north to south, and some 935 kilometers from east to west. With a population estimated at approaching some 58 million and an area of 676,577 square kilometers1, Myanmar is the largest nation of mainland Southeast Asia and joined the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1997 amidst worldwide condemnation of its military dictatorship, human rights violations and governmental policies. Formerly known as the Union of Burma, the country was renamed in 1989 shortly after the military, known as the ‘Tatmadaw’, took over control of the country. The said intention for the name change was that the term ‘Myanmar’ better reflected the indigenous name for the country, dubbing ‘Burma’ as the colonial name for the nation. Notwithstanding, it is agreed that both terms are indeed correct appellations for the country, ‘Burma’ being the informal, spoken term, and ‘Myanmar’ equating to the literary form of the name for the country. However, minority groups such as the National League for Democracy (NLD) and the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma (NCGUB)2 all oppose the name change as an indirect and subtle means of domination by the largely Burman-controlled military government. The country is officially divided into fourteen administrative units, seven States (Pyeneh) and seven Divisions (Taieen). The States are named for the dominant racial group inhabiting each territory, thus being Shan, Karen-Kawthulé, Kayah, Chin, Mon, Arakan (Rakhine) and Kachin. The Divisions are primarily located within central Burma and populated by the Burman majority and are Rangoon (Yangon), Mandalay, Tenasserim (Tanintharyi), Magwe (Magway), Sagaing, Pegu (Bago) and Irrawaddy (Ayeyarwady). In practice, the States were traditionally autonomous, whilst the Divisions were governed centrally. The current Divisions and States more or less correspond to the British methods of governance of the country whilst they ruled, the Divisions making up what was once known as ‘Ministerial Burma’ and the States corresponding to the ‘Frontier Areas’.
>> Dean Burnett <<
Marcia Yunmi Lise
I was born to a Japanese mother and an American-Italian mother. Like many other ‘racially’ or if you prefer ‘ethnically’ mixed individuals, I often think about my identity and how I sit in society. I was born and raised in Japan. I therefore consider myself to be predominantly Japanese. That is, culturally. The issue with my experience in Japan was that I was often regarded as ‘non-Japanese’. This had a great impact on my identity. Exploring the experiences of the half Japanese in relation to Japanese society somehow became a sort of a passion or a habit. I came to London in 2001 to study Sociology at university. My undergraduate thesis was on the marginalisation of Hafus, the Japanese word to refer to half Japanese people. I also recently completed a qualitative research project (submitted for MA), which was also about the half Japanese but this time focusing on how they are considered to be the ‘other’ in Japanese society.
In summer 2005, I agreed to be photographed by Natalie Maya Willer, a London based artist who was also a Hafu. She has a slightly different background with a Japanese mother and a German father. She was brought up in Germany and tells me how she had the same problem of not being recognised to have Japanese connection due to her very German look. Earlier this year we decided to put a project together combining her photography (visual arts) and my research work represented by the spoken words of the participants. The result was a one week exhibition at the Bodhi Gallery in east London last month. It was well received with over 450 visitors, half of whom I estimate to be Hafus.
The exhibition was accompanied by three events: a seminar with guest speakers from SOAS and LSE, a Hafu social night, and a Hafu family art workshop. I’m certain that the exhibition together with these events created an important contribution to the cultural dialogue about identity, culture, ‘race’ and nationhood.
>> Marcia Yumi Lise <<