state despite the distance that travel 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” (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 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 they 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 they
conjure up. Besides, Africa, as symbolized 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 globalization, speaks to the emulation of the practice of taking “the