less articulate in engaging with the question of exile. As a global phenomenon, the
critical neglect to which poetry is subjected in recent times finds expression in Bruce
Murphy’s essay “The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics of Other(s)”. Although
essentially a critique of the exclusion of American poetry from critical attention and
patronage compared to the other genres of literature, and although presumably for a
different reason,^6 it nonetheless serves further as a basis for the need to rise to the
occasion of restoring the critical attention that the study of poetry lacks at the moment.
This accounts for why it is possible to argue in this research that the aim of this study is
two-pronged: to explore the concept of contemporary exile in African poetry because it is
hardly given attention compared to the other two sister-genres; and to also attempt a
rescue of poetry from the general neglect and “exile” to which it has been committed in
recent times.
Scope and Limitations of Study
The proposed study, because of its consciousness of the existing tradition of exile in
African poetic discourse, will focus first on certain earlier works of exile as found in the
poetry of older poets like Sedar Senghor, Dennis Brutus, Wole Soyinka, Kofi Awoonor,
Christopher Okigbo, Lenrie Peters, David Diop, and Okot p’Bitek. This is essentially for
the purpose of setting a background for the discussion of the poetry of the selected
younger poets in this study.
The assemblage of the cast of six poets of the second generation is for the purpose of
highlighting the various ways in which they have responded to the question of exile in the
past two decades or so. Certainly their responses have not all been the same because their
task of creating generalized personas in their reflection on the issue are not bound to any
totalizing paradigm. This is also where the prospect of this study as an interesting one
lies; for, even in the diversity of approaches of these poets the unity of their purpose
cannot be denied.
6
Bruce Murphy cites the genesis of the “marginality” of poetry in America as dating to the “dawn of
modernist period, when Walt Whitman printed his first volume of poetry at his own expense.” (1990:162).
Contemporary marginality of this genre of literature is made poignant, according to Murphy, by the
inability of American poets to reflect with compelling infection on the contemporary suffering of American
communities.