In anticipation of tomorrow: globalisation and 'transnation' in Mongane Wally Serote's History is the Home Address.

Olaoluwa, Senayon S.

Essentially, History is the Home Address, by focusing on South Africa, takes into account the complexities that arise from the challenge of managing a nation that has come to be identified as the newest arrival to the class of the postcolonial state (Comaroff2005:129). Comaroff intimates further that one telling trope of the postcolonial state as a class or category is the systematic manifestation of "polities in motion" with integral diversities. If "motion" is integrally implied in the condition of the postcolonial state, it is made more pronounced by the fact of the demands globalisation makes on the nation-state.

For that matter, History is the Home Address becomes a preoccupation with the implications of the constitutive "motion" and the migrancy that this motion generates. It is more cogently so because, like any other state, South Africa is not impervious to the intensity of external polities that impact on African nations. Needless to say, even after the return of many from exile in the wake of apartheid, the intricacies and intrigues that are at the core of neoliberal capitalism will continue to impact on the way South African citizens perceive themselves in relation to the consciousness of "collective being-in-the-world" (Comaroff 2005:129). On another plane, however, the orientation and attitude of internal governance in itself is a crucial variable in determining the progress or otherwise that the nation makes. In other words, it is impossible to adopt a totalist criticism of globalisation by putting all the blame on the acceleration of western imperialism. To an appreciable extent, therefore, the collaboration or complicity of the home government remains crucial to how economic violence, among others, acts as a vector for migration. Appropriately, then, History is the Home Address is a response to the intimate experience of the post-apartheid South African state in an age of neo-liberal capitalism. At another level of criticism, and as inscribed in the blurb, the understanding is that the poem "examines the relationship between African identity and ancestral guidance, and the impact of colonialism on that identity".

This paper, however, aspires to transcend what is ordinarily perceptible in the poem to point at its sensitivity to the more compelling articulation of the poet. Again, the understanding of the privileging of "ancestral guidance" goes beyond mere expression of centuries-long relationship with the dead and, more substantially, must be read as providing veritable vistas into the understanding of how the abstractions of time and place can be utilised as resources for the apprehension of the present. I return to the explanation of this later in the paper. With respect to the condition of the postcolonial state, the assertion that in South Africa "the impact of current global conditions ... have forced the coincidence of liberation and liberalization" must be taken seriously (Comaroff 2005:128). To take one illustration on how the global impacts on the local, or how "liberation and liberalization" have coincided, Kelwyn Sole's account of a particular epoch in South African post-liberation history will be helpful: By the mid-1990s, it had become clear that the government was deviating from its previous position of "national democracy plus economic egalitarianism" in order to create a local climate that might gain access to and compete on world markets. The ANC's Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), formulated before the first election as the hub of its equity and development strategy, was replaced with the 1996 Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Policy (GEAR), which formulated national economic policy in terms of neoliberal principles compliant to the dictates of the global market. The GEAR policy emphasized growth of exports and foreign investment as the principal machinery for stimulating economic growth. Development goals, and the eradication of the country's huge apartheid-given legacy of social inequalities, were seen as realizable through a so-called trickle-down effect that would result from macroeconomic gains. Both the IMF and the World Bank became significant players in steering the country in this direction through advice and expertise, with policies encouraging privatization, tight fiscal discipline, downsizing, and retrenchments. Such structural adjustment policies limited autonomous policy choice on a national level. (2005:189-90)

In view of the aforegoing, the overwhelming purchase of globalisation, evident among other things in the compression of time and space, illustrates how the distance of Western economic powers does not reduce their influence on the postcolonial states. This is why a more aggressive effort must be made on the part of the postcolonial nation-state or victims of neoliberalism to negotiate the terms of their existence. The situation is what Iain Chambers (1994:110) describes as the "co-presence of globalisation and differentiation" through which the limits of the nation-state are both supplemented and interrogated. But even with this negotiation, where the autonomy of the nation-state is limited, as in the illustration by Sole, the capital flight that results or the economic hardship that it precipitates is bound to ingest a pull towards some kind of deterritorialisation. Considered against the backdrop of the South African nation-state, therefore, the logic that emerges is that institutional apartheid may have crumbled, and the exilic victims it produced may have returned, but the experience of dispersal remains still a challenge that the nation faces as a result of the contemporary world order.

The vulnerability of the postcolonial nation-state to the manipulations of globalisation and deterritorialisation that it produces must have accounted for the all-inclusive, almost fabulous, approach that Serote has adopted in the poem. Perhaps it is his own way of extenuating the level of threat of irrelevance and non-connectivity that the postcolonial nation-state faces at the postmodern moment which celebrates migrancy with intensity and perpetuity. In the process, the original connection of the subject is forgotten or erased completely. Therefore, if personages of deterritorialisation are ordinarily expected to be the living in their physical forms, Serote extends this to the abstraction of death as well. Doing this must be recognised as transcending the commonplace acknowledgement of the dead and the ancestors as being spatially located in the metaphysical realm. Such conventional demarcation between the dead and the living in the conception of time and space falls in line with the philosophically inflected remark of Simon Critchley (1997: 87) that "being-towards-death permits the achievement of authentic selfhood, which ... repeats the traditional structure of autarchy or autonomy, allowing the self to assume its fate and the community to assume its destiny".

But more than that, Serote reconfigures the existence of the dead in the imagination of the living by asserting that even in their incorporeality and transition to the metaphysical spatiality, they, contrary to popular assumption, owe their origin to the world of the living, the postcolonial nation-state. It thus negates whatever optimism of "autonomy and autarchy" that anybody would want to accord the dead. In Serote's view, the reason for this is simple, and he lays it out without any modicum of ambiguity: "for heaven is forever a strange place to live/ because we know nothing about it now" (52). Therefore, within the context of the conception of the South African nation, not for Serote the dismissive submission of Kwame Gyekye (1997: 257) that "Africans . pay unnecessarily excessive and incessant attention to their ancestors". Needless to say, if the dead in their "going" must remember this patch of earth that is their home, then it is the more so for the living for whom the tide of the global times turns and beckons to consider the attraction of other lands. In such a circumstance, the deterritorialisation that results certainly produces various categories of diasporic identities (Chambers 1994: 10).

Therefore, for both the living and the dead, the blurring of the line between the various categories of temporalities and spaces is total. As a matter of fact, the situation is one in which time, past and present, rather than being considered irrelevant, assumes a place in a temporal system that is functionally cumulative. This brings up the need to reflect further on the title of the poem itself: that is, the idea that history is essentially constituted by place. There can be no question about the centrality of place to history. This explains why where relating or recounting events and issues having to do with the past, there is

always a stress on specific places in order to bring the contexts of specific narratives to bear and invest every expression about the past with credibility. This much is apparent in the title. Yet the location of time at the other end of the spectrum in the conundrum that the title poses cannot be ignored. So, if "history" becomes "home address", the assumption is that contemporary postcolonial identities are framed by history, and if history, it is then logical to deduce that they are framed by time as well. It will thus be beside the point to consider any form of postcolonial time-past as irrelevant. The position makes greater sense when one realises that the present postmodern age of globalisation draws currency from the age of modernity; it goes without saying that the evolution of the modern age itself was enhanced through the "abstraction of time-as-history" (James 2006:175). If cumulative time was thus crucial in its abstraction as history in the old order, and in the present world order of globalisation, it still remains as germane, even if 'empty time' appears to be dominant.

Perhaps it is in response to this that Bill Ashcroft contends that though diaspora is a term that has been in active intellectual use since the 1970s, it fails alongside other similarly reckoned terms to account for the challenge of the moment. To this end, he proposes the concept of "transnation" and in the following explication he launches the term for reflection: 'The' transnation represents a state of inbetweenness not adequately accounted for by the terms 'diaspora' 'migrancy' or 'multiculturalism' but becomes a post-colonial intervention into the debates circulating around the questions of cultural identity, diaspora, language and literature in a global future. (2007b:1)

It is expedient at this junction to extend the argument about their inadequacies by looking at two of such terms: transnationalism and diaspora; transnationalism because there is the tendency to confuse it with the idea of 'transnation', and diaspora because it assumes an ubiquitous presence within the discourse of exile and migration. Various scholars with necessary disciplinary inflections of their backgrounds have attempted to tackle the term transnationalism and have come up with various definitions. From the migration-based definition of Van Amersfoort, Basch, Glick Schiller and Szanton Blanc, to the economistically constrained submission of Portes, Guarnizo and Landolt, to the abstractionist models of Clifford (Mazzucato 2004:131-2), one thing is constant, and that is the simultaneity of straddling of nations by peoples, materials, ideas and feelings. Nevertheless, the status of simultaneity of presence is fraught with its shortcomings as, more often than not, there is a feeling of absence, which is usually perceivable not in the country of destination but in the country of origin. Put differently, in this simultaneity of existence or presence, the allegiance ends up getting tilted to one side, and this is where the nation-state suffers a kind of loss both in material and abstract terms. Turning to diaspora and relying on the criticism of Ashcroft, "the diasporic community", for instance, "has been understood as fundamentally absent from the nation. In this discourse, diasporic subjects are crippled by absence, loss and alienation rather than empowered by a presence in the fluid reality of everyday life. The constitution of the nation as already in some way transnational circumvents this binary" (2007b: 5).

What is clear from the aforegoing is that within the postcolonial geography, there are anxieties over the place of the nation-state in an age that is increasingly defined and influenced by the dynamics of migration and migrancy. The natural response with relation to the implications of positionality, therefore, is to fashion, both creatively and conceptually, new tropes that can favourably and adequately provide one with the understanding of the times within a global spectrum of existential politics. Thus, in fighting for the soul of the postcolonial nation-state, the concept of transnation comes in handy for a proper integration of the nation into the ambience of relevance and primacy. This is why transnation in Ashcroft's further explication becomes: The embodiment of transformation: the interpolation of the state as the focus of power, the erasure of simple binaries of power, the appropriation of the discourses of power, and the circulation of the struggle between global and local. But most importantly, it is the fluid, migrating outside of the state that begins within the nation. (2007b:2)

The urge to challenge the nation-state to a dynamism and transformation that rises to the occasion of the present world, and which is expressed through the abstraction of "transnation" can, therefore, be said to find a creative alliance in Serote's History is the Home Address. It also explains why the analysis of the text will be largely guided by the idea of the transnation as espoused by Ashcroft. From an apparent standpoint of the concept, there is the possibility of charging transnation with some measure of intellectual fantasy and ambition. But this is where the question of utopia and the necessity of social transformation come up, particularly with respect to literature.

The idea of utopia or utopianism in this context allows a creative liberty in literature and authorises the possibility of thinking upon the horizon of potentiality. In other words, the creative artist or writer utilises the liberty of the imagination to express possibilities which at the moment may sound incongruous at best; however, such thinking often lays the foundation for an ontology of the future. The creative response itself, one must remark, never emanates out of idle intellection or without sensitivity to the currents of things within a given social imaginary. It is thus the ability to understand the semiotic significations of the present and the way they anticipate a future cast in transformative tropes. The said signs are significantly different from their antecedents, though logically emerging from the socio-political dynamism of the past. This accounts ultimately for the writer's creative projections that, in anticipation, must capture the existential ethics of the future. It also explains why Ashcroft links the novelty of the transnation to the concept of utopia: "I want to connect the transnation at this point to the concept 'utopia', or more specifically utopianism as the agency of liberation in writing. The realm of the possible, the realm of utopia is pre-eminently the realm of literature" (2007b:12). He further refers to Ernst Bloch whose appreciation of literary thinking is in terms of the narratives it produces for the purpose of having "a conception of a radically changeable world" (12). In a similar vein, David Bleich in his book, Utopia: The Psychology of a Cultural Fantasy, sheds more light on the place of utopia in modern times as an exercise placeable within the matrix of cultural investigations by which it is possible to conflate both personal and societal issues in conscious response to the necessity of social change: Such modes of understanding, aiming to unite personal and societal issues, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century in psychoanalysis and pragmatism and continuing on into the present, suggest how to revise our traditional 'naming' procedure through a new principle of understanding that accounts more regularly for the emotions involved in cultural life. (1984:12)

But it is pertinent to intimate, in addition, that the prosecution of utopia in literature can also be linked to the deployment of dialogue. As a literary device popular with the project of utopia, dialogue right from the Renaissance era, as Nina Chordas (2004:27) contends, has been deployed in matters of response to cultural exigencies. But more importantly, with respect to utopia, the "affinity for dialogical settings, is a quintessential humanist production". Yet, there is an interesting angle to the abstraction of this literary deployment which foregrounds the revelation that, in its early stage of evolution, dialogue in the context of the aforegoing discussion was also "closely allied with nascent imperialism" (27). No wonder then that when Serote opens the six-part poem, it is with a reflection on the impact of imperialism not only on South Africa, but also on Africa in general: must I believe that I asked that there was slave trade there was colonialism there was apartheid and because these were there there is racism. (10)

This leads the discussion to Serote's specific deployment of dialogue through the foregrounding of dramatic monologue in the poem. One is led into the world of his reflection on global issues of the times through his involvement with an implied female interlocutor whose name is Linda. The value of this artistic device in the work hinges on its ability to initiate his reflection from various angles and, through this, he is able to create multiple voices and characters as the occasion demands. The context of their dialogue, though hopeful of extending the horizon of alternative living in a global context, creates an atmosphere of calm where lovers intimately reach out to each other amidst the challenge of engaging issues of national and global importance. So, rather than yielding itself to boredom, the romantic interpolations and reports on the simultaneous activities of love and lovemaking, create a necessary vista of digression by which the narrative of postcolonial utopia on the politics of globalisation unfurls. For instance, the speaking voice invites one into the romantic world where the narrative character talks about their lying together (9), their turning to face each other and the passionate union that follows (12). But this also leads crucially to the mission of the poetic musing: the fact that such bathos or digressions, which adhere to Njabulo S Ndelebe's (1992) espousal of "the ordinary", are intended to point to the more political and consequential of the essence of the union of lovers. The urgency of the need to respond to the challenge of globalisation and rescue the soul of the nation thus remains the ultimate intent of this apparently romance-inspired intervention. That their reflection is on the need for the right step towards the apprehension of what becomes of the nation in the age of globalisation is evinced by the fact that the instituted atmosphere of romance is at best a means to a very crucial end. This is why: she looked at me I held her hand she held mine and the sun like someone peeping appeared we have been up all night searching for the address

Therefore: if you go away remember your home address when one day your are lost [sic] remember where you put it tsikitsikitsiki like something waking up. (26)

Indeed, the choice of dramatic monologue in addressing questions of globalisation and the centrality of the migrancy it engenders cannot be said to be fortuitous in History is the Home Address. This is because going by its very inventive definition, the dramatic monologue is typically conversational and discursive (Pearsall 2000:68). Adopting this style in speaking to the phenomenon of globalisation thus becomes a conscious effort to find the right artistic match for the discourse. For as Paul Zeleza (2003:1) intimates, globalisation in its discursiveness is "used by scholars, artists, politicians, businesspeople, and the media to refer to a wide range of complex and contradictory processes and phenomena characterizing contemporary history, it has become a powerful but malleable metaphor that accommodates widely divergent theoretical, empirical, and ideological paradigms, positions, and possibilities". The complexities and controversies that arise out of its abstraction and practice have resulted in the various meanings and attitudes that it produces in peoples and institutions today (Dicken 2003:11). Bearing this in mind and the "burden of memory" that goes with it (Soyinka 1999) as well as the necessity of positional articulations on the discourse, since the location one occupies in the discourse of globalisation determines one's response, Serote's response and the choice of dramatic monologue become understandable.

To appeal to Zeleza (2003:8) once more, progressive African intellectuals often express anxiety and reservations about globalisation because of its practices which tend to subject Africa to conditions of marginalisation redolent of the previous phases of Western capitalist imperialism. Ironically, this fact of marginality, often expressed in terms of the North-South dichotomy, has also brought with it the "migration of African intellectuals to the North [as] part of the complex processes of globalisation, a process that offers both opportunities and dangers" (401). But this is where the discussion differs with Zeleza because the truth of the matter is that the vulnerability to the North via migration and other forms of dispersal dynamics is not limited to African intellectuals. Therefore, the experiences that intellectuals relate concerning exile and diaspora are not necessarily confined to their intimate encounters, but should be more appropriately conceived as possessing a vicarious import and ramifying all cadres of African humanity. If this is Africa's experience, then South Africa is not excluded despite the respite it seems to have had from exile since the institution of non-segregatory governance. The threat of migrancy that Africa confronts in the face of globalisation also becomes the threat that South Africa faces. But in responding to this, Serote begins first with the location of history in regard to time and space of the past in order to confront the present and the future.

This understanding comes to the fore in the first part of the poem, which situates time and space within the cosmological coalescence in order to bring history into focus. The location of these variables aligns with the affirmation of the specificity of home in the transformation of the nation. The instantiation of the reflection on time and space as history and territory begins with the recognition of the ancestors, whose existence and sacrificial antecedents formed the basis of the continuity of life within the South African and African space. Being and consciousness of identity thus begin with them: "why if you believe do you doubt/ are they not your home address/ did they not make you go away by your birth?" (14) Their struggle for the retention of the autochthonous existence, even if it must be transformed, is considered a test of strength. The struggle and the resilience in the face of the previous phases of globalisation constitute a lesson for the present: believe, I said-- not because what does not end is ominous but because tribulations are a test of strength slave trade colonialism apartheid were like acid which melts flesh to powder hear me please, I said-- this, my home address, is almost a smudge a blood smudge almost like nothing I squint to see it. (14)

With a past that was so fraught with "tribulations", the tendency is to struggle against its remembrance or discard its memory altogether. The temptation to dislodge such memory becomes more compelling when the news from the nation, the poverty and the various pandemics led by HIV/ AIDS, find some comparison with the history of African post-independence crises of political instability and economic sabotage made poignant by the syndrome of "extraversion". The reflection borders specifically on African nations like Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea Conakry, DRC, Zambia, and Kenya, among others (16-19). Indeed, "all is here from the past". This may be why Linda insists her lover-co-narrator must "speak of the future" (19). But in the contemplation of the future, the past, symbolised by the ancestors, must not be forgotten. This is also a way of ensuring the place of the nation. In other words, even when you must "go away", the commitment to the land of the ancestors remains crucial: give us strength and wisdom and counsel to make life livable Africa of our ancestors of the lush and diamonds and gold of flora and fauna of dapple variety Africa of diverse languages issues forth their wisdom and knowledge knit us into land of our ancestors and let harshness of now pass for we are your children she moves, stretches and yawns and lays back on me the silver blades of dawn shimmer and birds chime and cocks crow another day is coming and the night makes way. (20)

The consciousness of rootedness in the nation, which begins in this section, yields a tone of concession in the second part of the poem. The earliest indication of this is clear in the deployment of the imagery of motion and movement in an attempt to instruct on the proper attitude "when the global village emerges" (21). Participation in the agenda of the global village is a necessity; but when the "son of Africa does this", he must exercise caution in his "walk" and simulate the wisdom of the "breeze" that "travels/ and comes from the spinning earth" (21). It is through this kind of knowledge that the migrant African can "remember your home address" (21). The whole idea of the spinning earth is an attempt to give voice to the assertion that humanity is bound by the space of the earth. Nevertheless, the oneness that this suggests does not rule out the cognition of the space in which each category of humanity is originally based. This is particularly so in view of the positivist assertion that globalisation triumphs for all when everybody is a contributor to the concretisation of its ideals. However, for some, especially in the postcolonial space, and as the poem stresses, this will necessarily involve moving beyond the borders of their nation-states. But even when there is something to contribute along this line, the nation state as well as the heritage it bequeaths to individuals should not be undermined: "for/ we can bring nothing else to the global village/ but what we dream and what we bring from home/ as others bring their baskets" (22). The view is in line with what Ashcroft considers the palpable situation that predicates the experience of displacement within the abstraction of euphoria: In the displaced postcolonial world of diasporic subjectivity utopia is the constant horizon of the present, the horizon that is at the same time the horizon of the past. This is the striking and irreducible power of the myth of return, to adumbrate, as utopia, the fusion of past and present as the perpetual horizon of the present. (2007b:13)

Therefore, the insistence on the remembrance of "the home address" and what is brought from "home" in "to the global village" has a way of speaking to the question of naming and identity. The "home address", that is, the consciousness of the inheritance of the nation-state despite the distance that migration forces between the migrant and home, becomes a vital mechanism for reconnecting or staying connected. On the one hand, it resolves the question of identity specification. On the other, because "the absence of a name is the point of potentiality at which the diasporic subject can be either recognised as cut adrift, absent from the nation, or launched into the possibility of new life" (Ashcroft 2007b:13), taking the home address along becomes a way of remaining connected to the nation-state, even when the assumption of a "new life" has become imperative.

In this regard, the demands of the present sanction a situation where the younger ones are not as space-bound as the generations that have gone before them. But even at that, the older ones must "give them the address/ and hope/ they will not forget it/ or lose it" (24). The continual implication of the past in the present also aligns itself with the recognition of the spatial origin of the nation-state in the dislocated migrant's consciousness. For the younger ones who must tread the path of migrancy because "you cannot live as we did" (27), the necessity of return remains crucial. Also, because the young constitute the "dreams" of Africa, and by implication the nation-state, if they "go away from... home", they must "remember the address where you were brought up" (27). The knowledge that must be brought with them ramifies all African experiences and the categories of time which they conjure up. Besides, Africa, as symbolised in the partitioned nation-states, must therefore constantly stay in view: in the light in the sunshine in the glitter and warmth of the day as I looked at her and saw with the eyes of a woman she looked at me and said-- Africa! we remember our home address come we come tsaaa! (29)

The primacy of remembering the "home address", which also predicates the necessity of return in the age of globalisation, speaks to the emulation of the practice of taking "the home address" seriously in the festive return of the African diaspora, which dates back to the Atlantic slave trade. Even if the narrative character reckons that the return from "Brazil ... America ... and Islands of the Caribbean" to "Accra the Ashante" may not be in the right direction, perhaps because they are on "a one way street" (30), their return provides the virtue from which those contemporary Africans faced with migration should take a cue. From another angle, here is also an attempt to show how the management of time-past merges with time-present. It then goes without saying that the inter-space dialogue that such return suggests and ingests reinforces the relevance of the African postcolonial nation-state. As well as the above, the reflection on the present drift of people from the postcolonial nation-state to the West does not end at the level of the physical. It is also crucially intellectual. However, the danger that this poses can be far greater in some instances. For the retention of the relevance and development of the nation-state presupposes that there is an abiding intellectual and cultural sympathy for any given nation-state. Where this is lacking and in its place there is an unbridled patronage of western imperial ideologies, the consequences can be dismally annihilating. Consequent upon this, the third part of the poem, among other things, addresses this menace of intellectual drift as a metaphorical form of exile and migration.

To achieve this, the narrative voice assumes the position of an old, disappointed, uneducated South African, but one who constitutes the link between the present and the past. He is also a veritable source of the prosecution and victory of the liberation struggle. The voice in its justifiable agitation displays a knowing analysis of the social malady of "the poverty [that] smells like... sweat/ and blinds and

deforms" (41) in the South African nation many years after the end of the liberation struggle. The aforegoing then forms the basis for arguing that much as globalisation impinges on the integrity and survival of the postcolonial nation-state through the perpetuation of resource dispersal and flight to the North, the resultant human flight that follows in the form of migration to the North cannot be entirely blamed on the concept. In other words, the violence and exclusion engendered by globalisation--that is, where the occasion demands a foregrounding of its shortcomings--are necessitated by the complicity of the dynamics of internal governance of the nation-states. It must therefore be admitted that where imperialism is constructed as externally motivated, it can only be effective in its expropriation and violence if it finds a willing collusion within the internal structure of the state.

With respect to the unfolding argument, there is a sense in which the violence and exclusion of apartheid can be summed up in the poverty that it bred for the subordinated group of blacks. It was largely owing to this that exile was prevalent during the apartheid dispensation. However, where the condition of the previously subordinated group fails to improve under a new socio-political order, as heralded by the institution of democracy, it then stands to reason that the current perpetration of violence and exclusion, which is congruent with apartheid in the new dispensation, will necessarily yield the same result of dispersal. To that extent, the acceleration of the dispersal that may be levelled against globalisation must also be read as obtaining significantly from the internal dynamics of the nation-state, where the leadership can as well be regarded as representative of the intellectual class that is charged with improving the lot of the formerly subordinated group. But this class has already begun to show signs of failure with respect to improving the condition of the people. Where the basic amenities are lacking, the confrontation that ensues is best captured in the following rhetorical questions: tell me, when the people are illiterate when the weight of the oppression breaks their sight when poverty smells like their sweat and when it blinds and deforms them and renders them deaf when it breaks their heads where African intellectual where are you. (41)

Obviously with the deployment of the historic present tense in the above section of the poem, it is already clear that the envisaged gains of freedom are as elusive as they had been in the days of apartheid. It then stands to reason that the elusiveness of the dividends of the liberation struggle, much as it can be blamed on the impact of neo-liberal economic agenda of globalisation, has gained ascendancy through the complicity of the intellectual class. The feeling of betrayal and disappointment this situation registers on the minds of the ordinary people who gave their support to the intellectuals, who led the struggle in the days of apartheid, is expressed further in the lines below: African intellectual, who are you what resides in your marrow... when European intellectuals plotted our demise where where were you, my deodorant brother, don't you know how with our illiteracy, ignorance and poverty we resisted we built liberation movements... (41)

The sense of betrayal that is palpable here also appropriates the feeling of desertion held by the disappointed class of the uneducated. The refusal of the intellectual class to speak in the language that their illiterate but committed elders understand constitutes a signal in the refusal of the intellectuals to remember their "home address". For they may have become famous, but the largely illiterate generation of their parents "gave the last we had" and their "children to armed struggle". The paradox that results from the struggle is the realisation that the attainment of liberation has also coincided with the ascendancy of the sentiments of "liberalisation". The retention of the soul of the nation-state from the excessive drift to the West in terms of material, capital and human resources must, therefore, begin with the cultivation of humility on the part of the intellectual class to communicate with the rest of the nation. For this, the movement in the right direction is agonisingly recommended: "we made you/ come and talk and laugh and cry with us/ come be here with us" (42).

Inter-generational dialogue becomes a vital intervention in the reclamation of the dignity of the nation from cultural and intellectual exile. When this is achieved there is definitely a sense in which it will rub off positively on the economy and on the revamping and protection of national capital and other resources from flight to the North. But where this call is not heeded, the alienation that it produces can be analogous to Akinwumi Ishola's report on the comments of a Nigerian community elder some time ago: "'We spend all our money sending them to school, but when they become capable they stop talking to us. Isn't that a big loss?'" (1992:17).

In the fourth part of the poem, there is an attempt to interrogate the perception of death with respect to the import of the finality it registers among mortals. The spatial transfer it is believed to precipitate, whether into heaven or hell, thus deserves further scrutiny. This is perhaps because "globalization ... is primarily about the transformation of space" (Delanty 2000: 83). But this is also perhaps because there is the need to engage in a reconfiguration and re-designation of spaces in a manner that will cohere with the understanding of the intervention of "transnation" in a global dispensation that threatens the place of the nation. When viewed from this angle, it becomes clear that the re-designation of "heaven" as a space that owes its existence to "the earth" is only geared towards securing and enhancing the dignity of the nation. For in the end, the attempt to stress the primacy of the earth as against heaven deconstructs the understanding of the eternity of heaven while transferring the attribute to the earth. In this transposition of spatial qualities, the earth assumes a greater sense of importance: if we leave we must remember our home address the earth for heaven is forever a strange place to live because we know nothing about it now no matter science, religion or tradition. (52)

The proposal for the extension of human memory in death in order to identify with the consciousness of the earthly sojourn in a way indicates the need for continual commitment; but it also goes beyond the borderless import it appears to present of the earth. While in the "spinning" of the earth the oneness of its dwellers is reinforced, and while the spatial transformation agenda of globalisation sanctions perennial deterritorialisation, individual categories of humanity have designated original spaces to identify formation. This is the space of the nation, which in turn yields to a "transnational" mutation. Yet, the nation strives in the present world order to remain relevant by its heritage of investment in its citizens and in which they owe it allegiance of remembrance and return, both in literal and metaphoric terms, no matter how complex this may sound:

The concept of the 'transnation' ... while incorporating the separation of state and the nation, and endorsing the utopian potentiality of the state's transformation, accommodates the constant, ubiquitous, oppressive and combative discourse of particular nation-states. It emphasizes the fact that the transnation is a product not only of the nation, existing as a kind of 'smooth space' running through it, but also a product of movement, displacement, relocation, travel.... The transnation, by seeing the movement of peoples in globalization as a fundamental feature of the spatiality, accentuates the circulation of the local in the global. (Ashcroft 2007b:11)

The reflection on the primacy of return takes other forms in the fifth part of the poem with Robben Island as a kind of space within the new South African space that deserves a revisit. Yet, even when the phenomena of migrancy and travel recur in the "breeze" and the "ocean wave" (57), one thing is certain, and that is the constancy of being "embedded in my home address" (57). It explains why in the last part, even when the poem subscribes to the Breytenbachian notion that "through expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures . everywhere is [now] exile" (De Kock 2001:263), there is nonetheless a space in contemporary terms that is for South Africans, and by implication Africans. This must be cherished at all times, even when it produces the space of the transnation. The space has definitely been reconfigured within the cumulative temporality which dates back to the incursion of the West into Africa on an imperial scale: "these six hundred years of Africa fighting" (64). The reconfiguration of space, which also has an implication for time, has consequently ingested a reconfiguration of both citizenship and Africanness. That is why there is a recognition of Africa's peoples as being cast "in shades which [range] from blue to black to ginger to honey"; and they "dance with the light of the sun and the shades of the moon" (64). Therefore, in the present temporal and spatial reckoning for these Africans, and more specifically South Africans, "black and white", the space of the nation becomes paramount even when "going away" is imminent. For that matter, even when they must go, the recurrent cautionary caveat still sounds out clearly in a tone of solemn finality: so if we go all of us will remember our home address to let the plenty of the earth from its belly bring centuries of peace to this earth which spins and spins and spins on its pin. (65)

If the hypothetical high moments of globalisation are to be measured by the degree of world peace they generate, even when many from different spaces will be caught in the vortex of the spinning of the earth, by emphasising the need to "remember the home address" Serote makes a highly useful and proactive statement on what should be South Africans' and other Africans' right attitude towards the nation. Put differently, the concept of the transnation as a counter-narrative within the discourse of postcolonialism, while pointing to the inadequacies of diaspora, has also succeeded in redefining the abstraction of diaspora in a manner that retains the form of the nation. This is the import of Ashcroft's assertion that in the end "diaspora begins at home" (2007b:8). There is no doubt that Serote's History is the Home Address speaks to this declamation in the age of globalisation.

Besides, if as Cornelia Pearsall remarks, the utility of dramatic monologues is reinforced by the transformative cause that defines them (2000:71), Serote's History is the Home Address lives up to this expectation in the way it charts a new course for the pursuit of a new diasporic identity in the age of globalisation. It is important, however, to remark that he has done this with his own unique blend, which is why it is divested of the Victorian dramatic monologues' typically destructive endings. Lastly, by initiating the monologue as essentially involving two lover-characters, the path of history and memory, which links and speaks to the present, indicates the recognition that both men and women were involved in the liberation struggle that has produced the current post-apartheid dispensation. It also speaks to the future and the recognition of gender equality in the response to the definition of the making of the African postcolonial nation in the period of globalisation mediated, among other things, through practices of migrancy. The assumptions are therefore as true for the South African nation as they are for the rest of Africa.

Acknowledgment

I wish to acknowledge The Humanities Graduate Centre of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, for the support it gave me in revising this paper which is an extract from my doctoral thesis.

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