On the page the novelist-poet questions in Kiran Bhat’s seminal work: We of the Forsaken World

The passionate outsider is people. Male people, female people, the displaced, dispossessed who live within the boundaries and structures of psychological extremes.

In a broken world of country made up of leaving our sorrows behind, painters and poets who turn into novelists everything is either temporal or temporary.We have lived in a normative depressive age for centuries with automatic thoughts of cognitive semantics, highly nuanced disordered thinking, personality disorder, dysfunctional world beliefs and we have been indoctrinated by journalists and television evangelists of the like that the world has never seen, propaganda, by war, by silent protest, art and culture and the emotive language of film. That most dramatic of all the arts. When it comes to, We of the Forsaken World the novel is mapped into sections.It teaches us by all possible dimensions, by theorisations of the elements of what drives both the tribe and the individual from the asphalt jungle of the city, to the rural countryside, to the ergonomics of the digital divide, and, by any means necessary, yes, we can look at the context in which race matters, for is it not race that matters tantamount to anything else in society. We must look at inter-faith matters with authenticity, what qualifies us to conceptualisation, anti-racialisation, the technique and style of has always been versions of the catharsis of anti-black racism, the false enchantment of ultra-democracy on the diaspora, uncommodified racism, and that yesterday’s powers are in co-existence with the science of the instrumentalist, the race of sustained commitment, unity and solidarity in defiance, the use of resources, and the under-representation of the Non-European, the African.

As it stands, the Non-European, the African is colour blind to their own potential, order, structure and shape. Ultimately, the discourse must transcend race, the elite and the establishment. The discussion must devise implementation. The complex debate must give rise to vigour and understanding our mentality, how vulnerable and conditioned our understanding of the psyche and intellect is of the marginalised, conditioned and disadvantaged tribe cast out of society because they do not conform to the norms and values of what and who a fixed and inter-dependant society thinks is relevant and socially, politically important. The elite are the wealthy, the educated, the prosperous, the intellectual, but how did they become part of the elite if they didn’t inherit their wealth, or education, or their prosperity, or their intellect. I believe it is through the clarity of the mind, the practice of perfecting the subtle nuances in the brain. All we are, are but segments of text in the ultra-nationalism of what I call the “tribalsystem”. What is the tribal system, what is it based upon, who created it, a philosopher or theologian? There is a social expectation on both genders, racial prejudice that exists between younger and older women. Labyrinths dominated by men thinking with anti-colonial non-racialism and racial prejudice.

During apartheid South Africa words such as “boycott’, “socialist”, “the order”, “non-collaboration”, “refusal to organise communities” were espoused and a door was opened into the psyche of a divided nation, highly politicised, and the aftermath of that has been xenophobia. The design and principles of Kiran Bhat’s book is the writing of an intellectual. It invents criteria. Presented as a language model to bridge situation, conflict, class, knowledge, distinction. It is the story of a poet, an open door, a master revival act, social justice around the issues of poverty, disadvantages, rise in crime and unemployment amongst university graduates as well as school leavers. This conception of the world is filled with highly multifunctional characters with political, inter-cultural, religion, social, territory, nationality, and borders as the new vocabulary, the curriculum is at work deliberately, predominantly where the interplay between the apparatus and the appraisal is connected now meets the contextual. With comparison comes language, with a new dispensation comes a new curriculum, a new government, a new cabinet, new leaders, new debate, discussion, reasoning, different expertise set into motion.

Kiran Bhat is a young lion who has the background of a poet. His ideas put forward in this book are phenomenally socio-forward-thinking. As he struggles for recognition and searching for grace, concept and narrative, style and technique and legacies of the past with their transitional figures of prophecy, realism and modernism, at the end of the day he finds himself standing in the gap of both philosopher and theologian. We think that the fixed and variant sociological ideas of a society transitioning itself into an ultra-democracy wills itself against the grain of neo-conceptualisation. For myself, I think that we live with three identities in a leading European discourse, the metamorphosis of the working classes to the Black elite in Africa, and the Black working-class individuals exist in their own pool of thought. We have to look at the social identity in the context of experimental identity and the complex identity of the co-dependent, inter-dependent and non-active participant as individuals, build their identity as such on the premise of an ultra-democratic nation built upon socialisation, social cohesion, and the integrational.

What is uppermost for me are the internal portraits of the mind which are not that nothing is played out in the scenarios of that, that have been exposed to being very powerfully overt before being rejected completely by the medical fraternity and the scientific community. What propels nature versus nurture? The brain, interpersonal relationships, social participation and interaction, social skills, the advances made in technology, artificial intelligence, the information communication technology, sexuality and exposure to the spoiled identity, the identity which does not conform, and that the agendas of consistent stigma, labelling and discrimination attaches itself to. How to we detach from alienation religions, factions, conflict situations that may lead to war and civil unrest, isolation from your peers, family and contemporaries and society due to illness, abandonment and neglect, rejecting that early and astute renaissance state of denial, denial, denial.

We must now look to past diplomatic studies, diplomatic treatises, modern diplomatic lessons in authenticity, reconciliation and negotiation as we navigate the treacherous waters of the world that we ae living in today. Understanding corruption at the highest level of government, making mental health awareness programmes mandatory for all age groups in society to prevent the cycle of depression and the narrative of mental illness and maladaptive behaviour,  phasing history back into the curriculum so that all children can understand the group dynamic of the nuclear family, their heritage, culture, tradition and social inclusion into modern society. For us to sustain life and youth, we need the renewal and vigour of both not to diminish in the face of all the problems and challenges that the world faces today.

We live in a social world that has an internal point of reference and an external locus point of control. The people in that world are oftentimes ambiguous and leave us with contradictory impressions. The conception of the world around us is what we make of it. If you only take one thing away from this nexus of this book, the interplay, the roleplaying, the flux of the nature of a digitised community advancing towards a macro-economic dystopia think of the world becoming more inter-connected, people from all walks of life inter-relating to each other on the spiritual level, with a novel understanding of each other’s cognitive, emotional and verbal reasoning. In the future we will correspond with technology in much the same way a man like Nikola Tesla did. It will become child’s play. 

Abigail George
Abigail George
Abigail George is a researcher and historian. Follow her on Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram @abigailgeorgepoet.