Of peeling caches; the conduits bleak behind plate-
Glass; the concrete blocks grey, unmoved the bush
Won’t do. Plastic litterbags burst open drip in mews
Poodles’ muck on pavements, the ladies don’t mind
Refuse collectors went on strike weeks and weeks ago
Glory be! Whoever said there was a fountain here? (32)The arrival at “the source” is a validation of what Iain Chambers (1994: 23) calls “the
arrival at the centre of the previously peripheral and the marginal”. If his past was
inundated by indoctrinations about the exquisite values of the western metropolis as a
paragon of modernity, the available evidence of modernity which the colonized witnesses
in the metropolis becomes a matter for review and revision. The question then becomes
to what extent can one accept the notion of an immaculate source when the first intimate
interaction with its social and architectural formations point to the contrary, much as they
try to confirm the doctrinaire perception? It is then understandable why the persona raises
questions about various issues as encountered first-hand. The disobliging sight that he is
confronted with at the source is overwhelming. Where both the architectural and
environmental sight reeks of decay and abandon, making an eyesore of the entire
metropolitan space, it should then go without saying that the modern metropolitan
migrant figure with an antecedent of colonization can appropriately be empowered to
rewrite the narrative of the master. This is part of why his presence “disturbs a previous
order” (Chambers 23).
Further, the evidence of the disturbance that the migrant causes takes one back to the
question of cannibalism as the next stanza provides the migrant greater insight into
empire’s pretension to civility as against the barbarism of the colonized. The testimony
again calls to question the credentials of welfarism that constituted part of the informing
raisondetre for the prosecution of the agenda of modernity in the former colonies. What
is more, the whole idea of encouraging the acquisition of western knowledge especially
through formal means, as the one in which the persona is involved, is, in principle, to the
end of executing such welfarist ideals in the postcolony. But by not living up to
expectation in the estimation of the formerly colonized persona, there is an engendering
of a postcolonial critique that continually interrogates the very basis upon which the
conceptual drift was laid; this is especially because of the rift between the conceptual