ABSTRACT

The plight of disconnection between place and ‘elsewhere’ often finds expression in properties of exile and nostalgia. They can signify estrangement and displacement, but they also feed a nagging worry that the present is all too determinate compared to the unfixedness of times past. It seems malleable, comforting as a focal point of retreat and fascinating, for what it offers is a realm of the recessed where it is easier to dream in the darkness of modernity than in its light. In that sense, the darkness has allures peculiar to itself. It entices a sense of something worth seeking in the subterranean, some missing ingredient that would throw light on the present. Oddly, as modernity evolves into postmodernity, where all is fractured, fleeting and transient and where the self seems to have no fixed abode, the past becomes even more attractive as a resource of constitution, not least because what it offers is far more exotic and creative than that which the present can create. The outcome is a rooting back into commemoration and memorialisation, where collective memory increases in importance and not, as expected, decreases.