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Title: Dear Mama Author: Leroy Maisiri Date: November 9, 2015 Language: en Topics: South Africa, racism, poetry Source: Retrieved on 10th December 2021 from https://zabalaza.net/2015/11/09/dear-mama-anarchist-poetry-against-the-anti-foreigner-pogroms-in-grahamstown-south-africa/
The poem below was written by Zimbabwean Zabalaza Anarchist Communist
Front comrade Leroy Maisiri, against the backdrop of the a wave of riots
against African and Asian âforeignersâ that started to sweep
Grahamstown, South Africa, from Wednesday 21 October 2015. By Saturday,
around 300 shops, mostly small businesses, owned by people from
countries like Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Somalia, had been
targeted, many burnedand looted. Perhaps 500 people have been displaced,
many are in hiding. While university and college student protests across
town faced down the state in the fight against high fees in a heroic
struggle, mobs provoked by rumours of murders and mutilations by
âforeigners,âspurred on by malicious forces including local taxi
drivers, attacked the âforeigners.â Heroic efforts by the local
Unemployed Peoples Movement (UPM) and some other township residents were
not enough to halt the carnage. Working class, see this divide-and-rule
for what it is! You have nothing to gain from this. As the UPM says, âWe
are all the victims of colonialism and capitalism. We all need to stand
together for justice. If unemployed young men chase a man from Pakistan
out of Grahamstown they will still be unemployed and poor the next day.
The students have shown us what unity can do.â The students have shown
us the way forward.
---
Dear Mama
36 whatsapp messages, 16 missed calls later and mama still wants to know
how I am. I try and tell her:
I am okay, I am alive, I am indoors, I wonât go outside again. I am
okay, I am alive, I am indoors, I wonât go outside again.
42 whatsapp messages later, 23 missed calls and mama still wants to know
how I am.
In the midst of loudness have you ever experienced days without sound,
in the midst of feet stomping, drum beating, spear handling, have you
ever felt the weight of silence.
As the mobs approached, with the snitch of hatred, intention to kill, to
end a life based on difference, I have to imagine that type of fear is
paralyzing.
I am okay, I am alive, I am indoors, I wonât go outside again. I am
okay, I am alive, I am indoors, I wonât go outside again.
To fall in love, marry have children, watch them grow in a foreign land
long enough to watch them, get to watch you being beaten to death. To
have your 8 year old first born son get pinned down as the crowds does
whatsoever they please with his mother.
I am okay, I am alive, I am indoors, I wonât go outside again. I am
okay, I am alive, I am indoors, I wonât go outside again.
I have always thought there is nothing more industrious than a
âforeignerâ. The ability to begin again against all odds in another
land.
To never look back at what was, with no understanding of what will be,
but to be brave enough to assert themselves in new communities.
The story of a foreigner brings backs remnants of Abrahamâs story, Moses
story, Josephs story. Even Jesus as an infant had to flee into Egypt and
become a foreigner. You would think by now the story of the foreigner is
one to uplift and uphold.
62 whatsapp messages, 30 missed calls, mama desperately needs to know
how I am, the quivering fear in her voice, her insistence for me to
distance myself, to abandon heroism. To âJust stay putâ, âIt is well,
but stay putâ.
Mama wants to know how I am
I am okay, I am alive, I am indoors, I wonât go outside again. I am
okay, I am alive, I am indoors, I wonât go outside again.
Mama wants to know how I feel.
Dear Mama for the first time today, I woke up a makwerekwere [a despised
âforeignerâ]