The last poem in the section, “From Florrie Abraham Witness” is preoccupied with the
contradictions and conflicts of Christian sectarian faiths in Britain. But more importantly,
it also brings one to the issue of Mapanje’s pervasive deployment of irony in his exilic
interrogation of the concept and practice of modernity and how this contributes pivotally
to the realization of a poetic mission. His sense of irony and the attendant humour that
rules the world of his exilic reflection on the western epistemic order blends with his
boldness to confront postcolonial power in the other sections of the collection. A poetic
theorist in his own right, Mapanje is famous for having recommended for poets what he
calls “riddling”, the subtext of which “lies in the fact that it surprises the audience into
realizing that things are not ‘patterned as they appear’” (Leroy Vail and Landeg White
1991: 285). If the foregoing is true for the postcolonial façade it confronts in the rest of
the sections, it is no less true for “Sketches from London” in which it challenges the
concept of modernity and demonstrates with the curiosity and insightfulness reminiscent
of an oral poet that, its orders may not be as innocuous as they appear after all.
On the whole, “Sketches from London” demonstrates and validates at the same time bell
hook’s assertion that for the colonized or formerly colonized, “It is the act of speech, of
‘talking back’ that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our
movement from object to subject the liberated voice” (Chris Weedon 2004: 154). From
another angle, on a last note, it is important to remark that Mapanje’s experience of exile,
rather than yielding to “apathetic passivity” (Tibor Dessewffy 1998: 360) owing to the
impact of strangeness and exile in London, which is the case for some writers confronted
with the bitter reality of uprooting, serves as a catalyst for the versification of
“exceptional creativity”. However, as will be subsequently examined in the remaining
part of this chapter, return to Malawi and the bitter experience of imprisonment have
impacted on the poet in his second and present state of exile in a manner that cannot be
said to indulge the light humours of “Sketches from London.” The current challenge is
more about how to fit into a transnational identity and win a considerable measure of
inclusion despite the obvious exclusionary measures of Britain. That is, if his identity in
“Sketches from London” is that of a wanderer and stranger passing through and making