Therefore, migrancy for all its seeming attraction and liberatory values requires critical
scrutiny in order for us to assess the extent to which it departs from exile and to at the
same time gauge the extent to which its filiations to exile construct it as another mutation
of the subject. To engage with this challenge, perhaps the first thing that deserves
attention is the remark that the fascination with migrancy as opposed to exile may have
come to us as fundamentally flawed in the sense that, like many other abstractions
through which western imperial practices seek endorsement and sustenance from the
postcolonial world, migrancy is not unconnected with modes of hegemonic discourses.
Gayatri Spivak bears this observation out when she reveals that “the whole notion of
authenticity, of the authentic migrant experience, is one that comes to us constructed by
hegemonic voices; and so, what one has to tease out is what is not there.” (Carine
Mardorossian 2002:15). This is why the fascination with the concept of migrancy that
makes it more acceptable than the erstwhile notion of exile must be limned as palliations
of Western imperialism through which the enormity of postcolonial deracination is
extenuated.
To return to the often cited crisis of modernity which catalyzed certain Western
modernists to endorse migrant existence from Joyce to Adorno the privileges that
came with such migrant style of living are today not available to the postcolonial writers
and indeed postcolonial subjects who have chosen this path especially in the West. What
is more, once we go beyond the time-line of modernist memory it becomes clear that the
privileges that accrued to Western migrants generally found enablement in the preceding
imperialist activities of the West which in varying degrees resulted in the subjugation of
the colonial world. The subjugation was totalist in approach, ramifying all spheres of the
colonial world religion, education, culture, technology race, etc. It must also be
admitted that the process of navigation from the West to the different parts of the world
for the often hyped civilizing mission was nothing but the precursory step in western
migrancy of domination. At this juncture, we need to cite but one instance of the
privileges that attended Western imperialism in the colonies: the occupation strategy and
the reversal and indeed displacement of spatial ownership that came with the obsession
with colonial naming. Achebe’s essay, “Named for Victoria, Queen of England” in