Mapanje’s exile which has continued to date. Nevertheless, it is crucial to remark that not
being totally off the trauma line that his imprisonment constituted, the collection reflects
further on his experience. The section that directly deals with exile, “the impressions of
exile”, though unambiguous in stating the desire for a therapy “to diminish the lament of
this exile club foot” (52), can be said to be more preoccupied with the excitement and
euphoria of freedom from the suffocating inundations of imprisonment at home. Moreover,
the challenge of settling down predominates and provides some kind of therapy for trauma
with light humour here and there. This is not to say however that, overall, the collection
does not make a compelling read. For his ordeals and testimonies confirm the veracity of
the assertion that
The place of writers, at home and in exile, acutely reflects social and political conditions.
Writers’ fates provide direct testimony to those conditions, and their capacity to write makes
accessible an experience that they share with many others who are less artistically endowed.
(Jane Guyer 1997: ix)But it is to “New Poems” in the Last of the Sweet Bananas that one must turn to assess the
full impact of exile on the writer and the challenges it throws up within the ambience of
transnationalism. If this section of the chapter began with the deficits of the concept that is
not to say, however, that that is all there is to it. This is particularly so if one takes as
instructive the assertion that transnational formations “may [also] encompass the economy;
politics; the definition of individual, group, and national identities; or the territorialization
and reterritorialization of spatial practices of spatial practices” ( Clara Irazabal 2004:160).
Therefore the status that is conferred on the exile in this circumstance is no longer that of a
stranger in his country of destination; he is, furthermore, not completely severed from
happenings in his country of origin. The clarification is crucial in view of the fact that
while both the intermediate collections may have attuned one to the annunciation of a
second arrival of the exile in the United Kingdom, and its immediate attendant challenge of
settlement, it is in The Last of the Sweet Bananas that one encounters a transnational kind
of exilic existence as the poet takes up the challenge of redefining his relationship to both
countries of origin and destination. There may have been mere “reflections” on and
observations about exile in the previous collections, but The Last of the Sweet Bananas
objectifies the process of involvement in the condition of exile, not as an outsider to the