Every soul is vast and wants to express itself fully. If it’s denied an adequate instrument (and we’re all denied that, at birth, some more than others), out comes…poetry, i.e., truth forced out through a restricted opening.

We are not ourselves when nature, being oppressed, commands the mind to suffer with the body - King Lear.

BORDER. “It takes so little, so infinitely little for someone to find himself on the other side of the border, where everything- love, convictions, faith, history- no longer has meaning. The whole mystery of human life resides in the fact that it is spent in the immediate proximity of, and even in direct contact with, that border, that it is separated from it not by kilometers but by barely a millimeter” (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting).

The modern university should be the great refueling center for that oxygen. Perhaps Aimé Césaire put it even better in his great poem Return to My Native Land, where he wrote that:

. . . it is not true that the work of man is finished,
That man has nothing more to do in the world
But be a parasite in the world
That all we now need is to keep in step with the world
But the work of man is only just beginning
And it remains to man to conquer all of the violence embedded in the recesses of his passion

And no race possesses the monopoly of beauty, of intelligence, of freedom
There is a place for all at the rendezvous of victory.

Poets are the last heretics of the world. We flung our country, our trodden, deeply divided land, open like a delightful carpet at our feet. The many colours shot out across the floor and a newborn land slipped from its membrane of languages. And it lay down. Our country lay down among us, translated into parables palpable with light.