world becomes all the more compelling. In choosing to operate within this timeline, the
import of Isidore Okpewho’s (1999: xiv) observation about the dispersion of Africans
gains strong cogency; for indeed, it is the African human dispersion and sedimentation
into “a global space, a worldwide web, that accounts as much for the mother continent as
for wherever in the world her offspring may have been driven by the unkind forces of
history”. In view of the “unkind forces of history” in the remote as well as recent past and
with respect to the African reality, the situation is one that is best limned as requiring
shared blame precisely because the reluctant and coercive dislocation of Africans beyond
its borders was and still is a possibility because external forces have always been found to
be in league with internal forces.
On this plane, it will be apt to allude to what Edward Said (1994:16) refers to as the
overwhelming presence of politics everywhere, to the extent that not even art can escape
it; and if so, we can infer that the engagement with exile in art cannot be without this
politicization. Always evolving within the context of human institutions which are
themselves no less politicized, the cruelty of history may then be appropriately blamed on
forces of capital and imperialism which have found a way of defining the dimension of
exile over the past four to five centuries. By focusing specifically on certain poetic works
in the second generation of modern African literary tradition, the phenomenon of exile
comes alive as a discourse which must be engaged against the socio-political and
economic sensibilities that define each of the post-colonies that produced the writers
under study. Indeed, it is a combination of these sensibilities and those of global
capitalism that has accounted for the forms of deracination that are evident in these texts.
Interestingly too, the texts are united by the fact that they can be categorized as
illustrative of some kind of “new internationalism” in which there is an accelerated
delinking from the naturalist and national topoi of nativity to be part of some kind of
rootedness in the West (Homi Bhabha 1999: x). This is essentially because the texts are
concerned, for the most part, with the dispersion of Africans to the West especially
Western Europe and America in the post-colonial era from the 1980s.