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Ari Sitas
13 quotes
“We have an adage that to arrive at the future we have to fly back in time and correct the past. For many of us in the South, and the Southern-most tip of the African Continent is quite South, we have to deal with the serious past, then the recent past before we can also deal with the future.”
“My view perhaps is too idiosyncratic but it would be preferable if we started subscribing to a post-imperial and post-racial ethic now that we are all “others” in a complicated world: that the other is not surplus non-being and therefore non-exterminable, that the other is not chattel and therefore non-exploitable and that the other is never a non-us and therefore non-excludable. After all, most of modernity’s entanglement was quite regrettable.”
“They have taught us through their orations the undesirability of a social system based on capitalism, that is inqubo yogimhelakwesabo, that is stuffing one’s own ‘stomach’ careless of other people’s hardships, and umadlandawonye, a system of socialism, or a system in which food is shared with a common community of concern.” (p.156)”
“The tragedy is that they remain, unread by the people. Or better, there is a double tragedy – they will not be read until their works become ‘orally’ accessible, and the people will not read until conditions that make reading possible prevail in their lifetime (p.171).”
“it is necessary to resist interpretations of ‘Zulu-ness’ which treat it as a populist experience ‘interpolated’ from above by either dominant ideologies and/or petty bourgeois imaginings. Rather, ‘Zulu-ness’ must be viewed as a negotiated identity between ordinary people’s attempts to create effective and reciprocal social bonds … and the political ideologies that seek to mobilise them in non-class ways…” (p.213)”
“True, my poetry has been described as a dark passage to an unknown destination. I hesitate using the word “dark” for death though, you know Buddhists see “light”, Racist religiosity has ascribed dark and most certainly black as the antipode of the aesthetic. Death yes, I had buried many people in the 1980s and early 1990s who were cut down in the violence. The first two volumes were all about violence and I suppose the continuity is there for all to see.”
“‘If the first direction of my work was all about a new labour studies, the second has been historical, starting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the last few years moving deeper into the eighth, tracing narratives from ‘that’ then to the fifteenth century in AfroAsia … What opened all this up,’ he continues, ‘was creative work in poetry and music between Indian and South African creative pioneers’.”
“It is the workers that shall lead the struggle for freedom. No other person knows the feelings of influx control that makes cheap labour; the fact that we make people rich for nothing; our time has come.”
“In refusing to deal with ‘culture’ as an institution outside production and linked to leisure or reproductive practice only, the thesis contributes to the rethinking of the interconnection between the two areas of working-class life (or, put differently, of production and reproduction).”
“Sociology has a speci!c history in this coun-try. It started from being a very conservative discipline in the 1930s. During this time, it was much about social order, and about – let me be frank – social blindness, because the Other didn’t exist. "e Other was for anthropology, not for sociology. So sociology at that time was a white social order discipline.”
“Firstly, if you imagine a highly regulated sys-tem of urban and rural controls, of homelands, of apartheid, of no freedom of movement etc., and when all of this suddenly breaks down or is transformed, a whole range of new dynam-ics are emerging. – A lot of people moving into urban areas, a lot of (illegal) immigration from the rest of the continent, because of the oppor-tunities here. Cities are changing. – !e base of the society is quite uncertain. And there is a lot of unemployment, also because of changes in work pa$erns and livelihoods, so you #nd a lot of marginal economic activity.”
“Good in the short term, because our minister of higher education was a sociologist [laughing]. – Because of its credibility as a critical and public sociology, South African sociology will survive well and will grow in the future. !e thing is to get the funding of the social sciences right, to fund well a younger generation of scholars at the PhD level, so they don’t have to work at the same time to support themselves whilst they’re researching. South Africa has got the univer-sity infrastructure to make it a success – unlike many other developing societies”
“I suppose it was a kind of release from the theatrical work we were doing- a poor people’s theatre with minimal props and no sets, where the body was everything and that material reality had to be gestured at. So, when late at night I would pen lines and the night was restless with cicadas and night-bats and the low clouds squeezing out sweat, the lines emerged without air-conditioning just with creaking ceiling fans. As I told Rob Berold ages ago there was also the sense of jazz-like sound going through my head, eruptions, solos… back to the theme, improvise, back to the theme. I was not trying to be a poet, I was writing something like poetry. This relation to nature and the ocean is stored deep, I don’t know where but it finds a way of attacking me.”