followed on the continent, especially as colonialism was a follow-up to the antecedent of
the trade. Once this historical liberty is granted, the discourse of exile in African literature
begins to have its appeal of logic as it presents a holistic approach since the place of the
continent as a primordial homeland for its diasporas in the West cannot be obscured.
Moreover, it also provides the groundwork for the possibility of presenting an argument
about the continuum of African exile in the West, and showing how the dimensions have
changed over the centuries owing to the ever-changing historical epochs the continent has
witnessed.
Considered nonetheless with the trappings of its nuances, the engagement of poets of the
first generation with exile was basically cultural, giving a strong validity to the
“importance of the language-place disjunction” (Bill Ashcroft, et al 1989:28) in the
construction of the post-colonial realities. Beginning with the poetics of Negritude as
most exemplified by Sedar Senghor, one encounters a reaction to colonialism and its
consequences of disjunction which is that of a double alienation from African heritage
and that of the West. The attempt at reclaiming the lost African ontological space and its
endowments becomes the focal point of Senghor and other negritude artists. Among other
things, the imposition of the paradigm of western modernity on Africans and the
ambiguity of identity it created in them due to the fact that the conflation of indigenous
and western epistemological practices was indeed a crisis in itself. One way of resolving
the conflict as exemplified by Senghor was to pursue a quest for synthesis both in “life
and poetry” (Mildred Mortimer 2002:38). This brings into perspective the cultural exile
that resulted from the contact with western culture and its impact on Africa. Such
synthesis through which Senghor finds some kind of parallel between, say, “Sine and
Seine”, goes to show the dilemma of cultural exile. Senghor “combined Sine with Siene,
the rivers of Africa and Europe, knowledge of the culture and traditions of his native
Senegal with that of his adopted French heritage” (ibid.:38). This is because caught
between both ends of conflicting epistemologies, an attempt to internalize and become an
embodiment of both can be regarded as some kind of metaphorical return. This way the
cultural exile is able to utilize the knowledge of both worlds to redefine his identity.