host country, but as an immigrant-insider whose rights must be defined and defended, and
whose involvement as a stake holder in the social configurations must be taken seriously.
Simultaneously, one also finds a continual transcendental backward reach towards the
country of origin, confirming again the contention that transnationalism must be seen “as
interlocked, enmeshed, mutually constitutive social formations” (M. Smith in Irazabal
160).
The understanding of home in this case becomes doubly ambiguous. For both the country
of origin and that of destination are conjured up in the imagination of the transmigrant as
home to which he must be simultaneously attached. Not considering himself a stranger to
neither of the homes, the sense of exile that accompanies their existence is no longer
patently couched in overwhelming lamentations about the forced migration that is at the
core of their double identity. So “transmigrants take actions, make decisions, and develop
subjectivities and identities embedded in networks of relationships that connect them
simultaneously to two or more nations” (Linda Basch 1995: 7). Needless to say, that those
salient traits by which a transmigrant is identified in his home country are likely to be
utilized in his country of destination. Specifically for writers and artists for whom solidarity
with the oppressed has become a commitment, the challenge is thus that of reaching their
readers and audiences no longer in one but two or more countries with which they identify.
Their community for that matter can be limned as an “imagined transnational community”,
a coinage which Daniel Mato (2003: 282) cautions should not be read as following from
Benedict Anderson’s conception of the “imagined”. This is because there is an uncommon
immensity immanently gleaned in the proposed community and the mental image produced
of this community is greater than the ordinary, which is why the producers of transnational
representations “are not lonely spirits dreaming in a vacuum” (282). Therefore for
Mapanje, the imagined transnational community straddles both the United Kingdom and
Malawi on the one hand and perhaps Africa and the diaspora on the other; this is the import
and value of what will be encountered in The Last of the Sweet Bananas.
The section “New Poems” can be conveniently divided into two. The division however
only goes to illustrate the poet’s straddling of multiple spaces in tune with the configuration