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 the 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 globalization triumphs for all when everybody is a contributor to
the concretization of its ideals. However, for some, especially in the postcolonial space,
and as the poem stresses, this will necessarily involve trespassing the borders of their
nation-state. 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 (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-