CHAPTER THREE
FROM PRISON TO EXILE: CONTESTING MODERNITY’S CLAIMS IN THE
POETRY OF JACK MAPANJE
The focus on prison and exile as two sides of the experience of oppression was
almost inevitable, considering that intellectuals and creative artists who insist on
fighting oppression often end up in prison, that those who
manage to survive prison often end up in exile
Kofi Anyidoho, The Word behind Bars and the Paradox of ExileRead too often against the backdrop of a national social imaginary, Jack Mapanje’s Of
Chameleons and Gods , tends to be seen as located within the matrix of an absolutely
place-based poetic musing. Much as this is an obvious category by which the
understanding of the text can be undertaken, there is nonetheless a possibility of adopting
an alternative productive reading. The actualization of the alternative approach makes
sense I want to argue when the text is read against the backdrop of the telling tropes
of migrancy, a phenomenon that has come to define postcolonial literary and cultural
poetics. Therefore, this chapter seeks to explore the exilic angle to the collection as an
important illustration of: (1) how postcolonial migrancy replicates the antecedent travels
of colonial and imperial epochs which gained exclusive privilege over narration on the
colony; (2) how postcolonial literature remains a responsive counterweight to the
erstwhile internalized conception of modernity through the agency of colonialism; (3)
how the transgression of postcolonial national boundaries to the metropolitan cities of
empire calls for a critical reflection and circumvention of grand narratives by which
empire previously dominated the colonies; and, (4) how similarities can be drawn
between the postcolony and empire in relation to the ubiquity of infrastructural neglect.
Similarly, the chapter will also undertake a reading of The Last of the Sweet Bananas
concentrating on “New Poems”, arguing that the poems in the section advance the issues
raised in “Sketches from London”, the exilic section in Of Chameleons and Gods. But
more importantly, the poems will be explored as veritable testimonies against the notion
of the “fantasies of abundance” upon which the postcolonial state is easily built
especially in the formative stages of post-independence emergence. In the explosion of