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 addressTherefore:
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 globalization 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 (Cornelia Pearsall 2000: 68).
Adopting this style in speaking to the phenomenon of globalization thus becomes a
conscious effort to find the right artistic match for the discourse. For as Paul Zeleza
(2003: 1) intimates, globalization 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
(Peter Dicken 2003:11). Bearing this in mind and the “burden of memory” that goes with
it (Wole Soyinka 1999), as well as the necessity of positional articulations on the
discourse, since the location one occupies in the discourse of globalization determines
one’s response, Serote’s response and the choice of dramatic monologue become
understandable.