Afterword

Abstract

In his acceptance speech upon being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, Derek Walcott reflects that ‘For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History’.¹ Suvendrini Perera takes us on a journey through that night, where the world maps we traverse are kept awake by history’s challenge. The poetry birthed in the interstices of those challenges becomes our co-traveller in relation to a dawn that is ever receding on one side, and, on the other, ever present as an out of reach beacon lighting our path. This book is a prolonged meditation on the politics of mobility through a tracing of the geography of inequality through poems and passports, refugees and international civil servants, law and war.