STORIES OF MIGRATION: From Here to There ... and the Stuff In-between

I went ‘home’ to South Africa for the first time, after an absence of almost ten years, during December of 2010. My first few days were ones of a strong sense of living in a waking dream. So much was familiar, but so much was new, different. One of the things that remain as I remembered is of people at the busier traffic junctions going about various ways of eliciting a financial income. Begging represents a rather common practice.

On my third day back in the country, a man came to the car window asking for a donation to help him buy food. Whilst speaking to the man it became clear that he had fled to South Africa from the atrocities being perpetrated in Zimbabwe. The picture of this man remained with me. The picture still remains with me. During the small moment in time which we had shared – him asking for money, a co-passenger conversing with him about the asking, my observation of the exchange – I was captured by a need to look into the particle of our existences that we shared. During that sliver of time I experienced an embodied knowing that urges me to inquire into this phenomenon generally referred to as migration.

I am hoping that the inquiry brings forth knowledges which persons who are considering relocating to a culture or country different to their culture of country of origin might use in their preparation to the moving. I am also hoping that the knowledges might assist already relocated persons to make sense of what is happening to them in their new environment.

Although I am aware that any inquiry positioned outside of the more positivist approaches naturally presents with certain degree of messiness, I am proposing to approach this inquiry from the stance of a relational construction and to make use of feminist relational ethnography as a guiding methodology. Within the margins of the inquiry I hope to reflect on the literature about topics such as Relational Construction, Positioning Theory, Culture, Identity, Migration, Power and Patriarchy, Meaning-making, Foucault, Deleuze and Wittgenstein.