CHAPTER FIVE
FROM EXILE TO RETURN: HOME, NATION AND ‘TRANSNATION’ IN
SEROTE’S POST-APARTHEID POETRY
remember
i do
since to forget that as the world did the untidy middle passage
is to repeat the evil of man
i will not forget or let it be forgotten Mongane Wally Serote, Freedom
Lament and Song
This chapter focuses on two of Mongane Wally Serote’s post-apartheid epic poems:
Freedom Lament and Song and History is the Home Address. By so doing, the chapter
hopes to explore the intersection between the two collections as speaking to the past and
the future respectively, while keeping the present consistently in view. Specifically,
Freedom Lament and Song is analyzed against the backdrop of history and memory in a
post-apartheid era. To achieve this, the chapter makes reflective enquiries on certain
questions: Why is exile central to the discussion of apartheid literature? Why is the
texture of post apartheid literature framed by the memory of exile? How does this frame
and shape engagement with the past in both collections? While the above questions seek
to guide the discussion on Freedom Lament and Song , my analysis of History is the
Home Address is animated by questions that probe how the articulation in the former is
advanced in the latter: in reacting to a post apartheid dispensation, how do the signs on
the ground anticipate a future of possible dispersal? To what extent can globalization be
said to lay the groundwork for this exile of the future? How is this prospect being
accelerated by the orientation and compromise of the state? In all this, what is the
relevance of the concept of “transnation” in the discussion of this concern? And to what
extent does the formal deployment of epic structures enhance Serote’s mission in the
poems? On this score, this aspect of the chapter deploys Bill Ashcroft’s theory of the
“transnation” to engage with the dynamics of exile and diaspora generally in the present
epoch.