You know I love anything that talks about diaspora

Well, the work isn't completely over, but I now have the mental energy to post. I have plenty of experiences to share from the past month or so and will get to some of it shortly, but for now I just wanted to post a link to an interesting column about brain drain in Africa and looking beyond Africa vs. the West in the conception of this migration phenomenon.

I wonder if there is some impulse in all of us whose trajectory points towards a transnational bourgeois existence to write about the anxiety from both sides. This mixed up sociopolitical, sphere-bridging consciousness is attenuated by a need for its own justification. And when you are doing the opposite, coming from the West, but sort of not, First, Second, and Third World all mixed up in your genealogy, how do you process this encounter? In some ways both Cape Town and San Francisco feel like home, strongly characterized by these dichotomies that are not mutually exclusive. And I guess it's okay for home (heart-wise, intellectually, spiritually, and even consumptively) to be a melange of bittersweet histories of exploitation and resistance, bricolage and formality, multiple worlds wrapped into one, openness and furtiveness, stylish and ragged, distinct and syncretic. And of course the binary never holds. I mean, how can I be half one thing and half another and half yet another thing? It must make me 150% of a person.