Frank Dietz 1992: 107). Yet at other times, as in the line of thought pursued in this
research, the idea of home is synonymous with the nation state and for that matter
generates discussions around issues of nationalism.
The impossibility of experiencing exile the same way, just as a unipolar construct of
home is unacceptable, then compels us to examine further other possible ways in which
exile can be configured. Therefore, beyond the recognition of the predominance of the
understanding of exile as physical separation from home, exile can among other things be
read as constitutive of a wide range of other conditions of living both literal and
metaphorical. For a number of people, physical exile is the externalization of a much
more profound separation of an individual from homeland at the psychological level. In
this case, the mind has first been many thousand miles exiled from home long before the
physical body ultimately follows suit. Exile can also be read as the consequence of
cultural dislocation (Jefferson Faye 1992: 115), an experience with which many formerly
colonized nations still battle today. In addition, the assumption that colonialism itself was
driven by the ideology of modernity also explains why exile has also come to be
synonymous with modernity in view of the holistic dislocation that the experience of
modernity still engenders (Dan Ojwang 2004:53). Furthermore, exile in some other
circumstances can be synonymous with prison; that is, the punitive measure the state
takes against transgressors of the law. But when subjected to further critical focus, exile
in this instance, especially as experienced by dissents for challenging an undesirable
status quo, becomes a political exclusionary measure the state adopts against alternative
views. One of the most recent accounts of this experience is captured in Kofi Anyidoho’s
edited work The Word behind Bars and the Paradox of Exile, a book that intimates on
individuals African writers’ experience of incarceration and imprisonment on account of
their opposition to the establishment of their various countries. As well as that, there is an
assumption that exile is a reminder and metaphor for the spiritual condition of mankind
(Dietz 107). The idea of creativity is also often connected with exile whereby an
envisioned alternative possibility is expressed by writers (Dietz 107). Closely related to
this is the association of intellection and intellectual practice with the readiness to assume