resolve to stay glued to the imperial country through an annunciation such as “a nomad
unready for home” (54), as a way of exploring all that the city of London parades as a
world centre suffers a serious setback. The said setback stems, among other things,
from the articulation of the racially inflected expletive, ‘ Nigger go home/ there is no
black in the Union Jack, ’ (17), and which constitutes an essentialist aspect of the imperial
world. Such articulation reveals, rather disappointingly, the painful but hidden reality that
frustrates and undermines any agenda of fulfilled postcolonial migrancy in the West.
Nevertheless, the nomads or migrants, as illustrated in the collection, have their moments
of pleasure and satisfaction which are best captured in the pidgin refrain in the title poem:
“ Na London we dey ... na so so enjoyment (We are in London...it is so much of
enjoyment 14). However, the fleeting span of such moments of pleasure put lie to
whatever liberatory credentials postcolonial migrancy may claim; not least because the
“so so enjoyment”, we are told in the end, does not obscure the fact that the integration or
hospitality that the migrant seeks even in the age that emphasizes and celebrates
nomadism, cannot offer the meaningful presence that migrants seek. Absence from home
in this case is no guarantee for presence in the western country of destination. This then
explains why in the end the refrain changes from being “Na London we dey... na so so
enjoyment” to “We dey for London like we no dey at all (we are in London as though we
were not at all 20).
The contradictions through which we come to terms with the cleavage lying between the
ideals of nomadism and the practice accounts for why the postcolonial subjectivities may
not attain the envisaged fulfilment of either migrancy or nomadism. The case is more so
when nomadism is placed in greater conceptual perspective; that is, the fact that those
who advocate and identify with the ideals do so in the persuasion that “nomadism is
interiorized to interweave a multiple subjectivity, which is displaced across various
paradoxical axes of difference” (Jamil Khader 1997:84). It goes without saying that the
practice hardly takes off before it is eviscerated. To put in another way, of what use is the
dissipation of efforts to ensure an interweaving of multiple subjectivities which gives way
at the instance of “axes of difference”? The question is the more pertinent in view of the
fact that the conception of such multiple subjectivities was enabled in the first place