if we leave
we must remember our home address
the earth
for heaven is forever a strange place to live
because we know nothing about it now
no matter science, religion or tradition, (52)The proposal for the extension of human memory in death in order to identify with the
consciousness of his earthly stay in a way indicates the need for continual commitment;
but it also goes beyond the borderless import it appears to present of the earth. While in
the “spinning” of the earth the oneness of its dwellers is reinforced, and while the spatial
transformation agenda of globalization sanctions perennial deterritorialization, individual
categories of humanity have designated spaces with which to identify originally. This is
the space of the nation, which in turn yields to a “transnational” mutation. Yet, the nation
strives in the present world order to remain relevant by its heritage of investment on its
citizens and for which they owe it allegiance of remembrance and return both in literal
and metaphoric terms, no matter how complex this may sound:
The concept of the ‘transnation’... while incorporating the separation of state and the nation,
and endorsing the utopian potentiality of the state’s transformation, accommodates the
constant, ubiquitous, oppressive and combative discourse of particular nation-states. It
emphasizes the fact that the transnation is a product not only of the nation, existing as a kind
of ‘smooth space’ running through it, but also a product of movement, displacement,
relocation, travel... The transnation, by seeing the movement of peoples in globalization as a
fundamental feature of the spatiality, accentuates the circulation of the local in the global
(Ashcroft 2007b:11).The reflection on the primacy of return takes other forms in the fifth part of the poem
with Robben Island as a kind of space within the new South African space that deserves a
revisit. Yet, even when the phenomena of migrancy and travel come up again in the
“breeze” and the “ocean wave” (57), one thing is sure, and that is the constancy of being
“embedded in my home address” (57). It explains why in the last part, even when the
poem subscribes to the Breytenbachian notion that “through expansion, skirmishing,
coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures... everywhere is [now]
exile” (Leon de Kock 2004:1), there is nonetheless a space in contemporary terms that is
for South Africans, and by implication Africans. This must be cherished at all times even
when it produces the space of the transnation. The space has definitely been reconfigured