considering what possible configuration they extract from the “event out there”. Just as
the nations and regions on the continent are different, so too are there different and
various challenges which have in the past two or three decades induced exile. This is so
especially in the Africans’ search for better fortunes thought as attainable in the First
World, and identified as a tendency on the part of the “formerly colonized people to turn
to migration as an option to living difficult lives” (Martha Dorkor 2005: 27).
To start with, what then are the circumstances that produce in these countries of
destination the psyche of hostility? Secondly, what in particular are the realities of exile
as an intimate experience of Africans? It is for this reason, whatever one encounters in
the works of these writers should not be seen as emanating exclusively from the authors’
experiences, but rather should appropriately be gleaned as representative of the much
larger community of African exiles for whom they have become advocates, as
“representations of colonialism, nationhood, postcoloniality, the typology of rulers, their
powers, [and] corruptions” (Aijaz Ahmad 1992:124) on the one hand; and on the other,
the purchase of western neo-liberalism as well as structures of exclusion against
immigrants along race, class, and gender lines in the First World. Therefore, even when
the experience being related can in some cases be interpreted to be personal as in the case
of the Malawian poet Jack Mapanje, it has to be gleaned more substantially as speaking
for many other fellow Africans who have fallen victim to exile. The obligation of
speaking on behalf of others by writers should not come as a surprise once we bracket
them in the category of intellectuals. For the intellectual, according to Said:
is an individual endowed with a faculty for representing, embodying, articulating
a message, a view, an attitude, philosophy or opinion to, as well as for, a public.
[He is also] someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or
corporations, and whose raison d’etre is to represent all those people and issues
that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug. (Said 1996: 11)What is more, writing with specific response to the conditions of exile and the response
of writers to it, Jane Guyer (1997: ix) avers that “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.” Thus by virtue of their artistic