Theodor Mommsen - "Römische Geschichte Book 2"

Johann Wolfgang Goethe - "Die Mitschuldigen"

Anonymous - "The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume I"

Alan Douglas - "Afloat"

Editorial
This article explores Rohinton Mistry's novel A Fine Balance (1996), alongside his short story "Lend Me Your Light" (1987), focussing on the tensions between the politically-distanced cosmopolitan migrant and the socially-committed local activist. My readings draw on Radhakrishnan's notion of diasporic "double duty" — of accountability to, rather than irresponsible detachment from, the homeland. Mistry's representations of migrants, I contend, are centrally concerned not only with the necessity, but also the difficulty, of performing such "double duty" through a sustained engagement with India's history and politics. In this light, I argue that Mistry offers representations of migrants whose attempts to distance themselves from local and national politics are revealed as impossible and irresponsible. Moreover, I suggest that Mistry's representations reveal an anxiety over his position as a migrant writer, and his work seems to mobilize writing as a means of avoiding a problematically apolitical detachment from India. Thus, Mistry establishes a tension between his representation of the migrant within his fiction and his negotiation of his own migrant position through his fiction.

Fort Amity

A >> Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch >> Fort Amity




Down in St. Louis Street the windows have been illuminated in the old
house in which his body lay. Up in the Citadel the boom of guns
salutes his memory.

So the world commemorates its heroes, the brave hearts and high minds
that never doubted but pressed straight to their happy or unhappy
goals. But some of us hear the guns saluting those who doubted and
were lost, or seemed to achieve little; whose high hopes perished by
the way; whom fate bound or frustrated; whom conscience or divided
counsel drove athwart into paths belying their promise; whom,
wrapping both in one rest, earth covers at length indifferently with
its heroes.

So let these guns, a hundred years late, salute the meeting of two
lovers who, before they met and were reconciled, suffered much.
The flying moon crosses the fields over which they passed forth
together, and a hundred winters have smoothed their tracks on the
snow. There is a tradition that they sought Boisveyrac; that
children were born to them there; and that they lived and died as
ordinary people do. But a thriving town hides the site of the
Seigniory, and their graves are not to be found.

And north of Lake Michigan there long lingered another tradition--but
it has died now--of an Englishman and his wife who came at rare
intervals and would live among the Ojibways for a while, accepted by
them and accepting their customs; that none could predict the time of
their coming or of their departure; but that the man had, in his
time, been a famous killer of bears.


THE END.

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