confronted with some state agents who do not regard him as qualified enough to
comment on issues bordering on a disruptive riot at Brixton-Wood, not only does he tell
them about what he reckons as his place in the system, he also punctures the lack of
adequate preparation for winter that results in the closures of public places like libraries
at unusual hours. The sanitation crisis that also results from the neglect of the bin also
comes up for his criticism. But certainly the most significant of the reactions verging on
self affirmation is the need to make clear the fact that if he is regarded as a poet in his
home country, nothing stops him from being regarded as one in his country of
destination:
...And when the Brixton-Wood
Green riots blazed, they stopped my car
At Tally Ho to hear if I spoke Birmingham
Where they thought the riots originated.
Besides, you’ve never watched Notting
Hill Carnival from Chepstow Road nor
Published poems in Alan Ross’s London
Magazine with real poets! Where were
You when they knocked out Red Ken for
The socialist GLC they invented? What have
You done to dub me economic migrant?
What do you know about the economics
Migrants suffer? By your piddling dossier
You have not even run from IRA Tube
Station bomb scares! Get real then, if you
Are truly serious about global village,
This is no fleeting child of your 3-day week! (201-3)Again, the poet relies on the virtues of dramatic monologue to initiate a dialogue of
morality between himself and his county of destination. On the one hand, the reaction
illustrates the notion that within the context of transnationalism “the local politics of
belonging gets variously reinscribed and reterritorialized” (Dhooleka Raj 2003: 206). If
the preconception of his interlocutors was that of a timid African immigrant and exile
whose critical sense can be taken for granted, they are however jostled by his response.
As a keen watcher of the development of things and one conscious of his relationship to
his country of destination and the historical circumstances that informed the definition of