摘要
Reflecting profiles of the chequered existence of migrant mine laborers, Basotho miners＇ chants belong to the category of occupational folklore. As such they provide a unique window for debate about the ethics of place. Place actually amounts to three places--home, which the worker leaves behind; mine compound, the workplace in the foreign country; and then the journey in-between, connecting home and work. In the poet＇s creative consciousness, the instability of place raises ethical responses--to home, which is often romanticized; to work, which is often dramatized and ridiculed; and to the journey, which is animated. Ethical questions about loss, longing, danger feelings of guilt, and the threat of death are implied. The genre as aesthetic verbal expression, allows space for negotiating degrees of acceptance of predicament and conciliation. A historic-economic, socio-cultural, and genre-specific approach enables a concise unpacking of how aspects of the ethics of place are brought together and rearranged by this oral poetry--the difela--that developed from the migrant mine labor system
