destination. Such articulation of trauma is best exhibited in Oguibe’s A Gathering Fear
where the dilemmatic condition of exile is so glaring as to stare one in the face.
Disgorged from home, yet unaccepted in exile, multiculturalism for the African
postcolonial subjectivity is better designated as a mirage.
The dilemma can be explored further when we turn to Isidore Okpewho (2006:69) whose
testimony suggests that even when one succeeds in escaping the difficult conditions of
Africa and joins the class of the privileged in the West, the “tales of horror that continue
to come out of Africa” requires that a greater sense of intellectual concern should be
invested in engaging with the situation at home, rather than shunning out all manner of
intellectual jargon and theories that redound little to the urgent need of a continent: “what
I am calling for is nothing short of an ethical agenda in our investigative labors. For those
of us in literary study, this will mean that we retreat a little from our pet propensities
toward theories and modes of discourse that may have advanced the horizons of
humanistic study but that have proved woefully incapable of creating the climate for
humane conduct of affairs in the world we live.” (69)
To cite one more instance this time from the African diaspora, in Carine Mardorossian’s
essay, “From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature”, the author gives a long list of
writers from South Asia and the Caribbean who have rejected the designation of exile and
have taken up that of migrant of course as a way of indicating a departure in their way of
living from that of their precursors who also migrated from these places to the West. As
discussed earlier, this exhibition of preference in nomenclature constitutes part of the
strategies exiles in contemporary times seek to employ for both survival and integration.
In this case, no strategy promises to be more propitious than the resolve to patronize
multiculturalism. After all, like Paul Gilroy has reported, the centuries-long cultural
domination of empire may have begun to suffer some setback now that birthday
celebrations in Windsor Castle include, among other things, the privileging of an “out of
Africa” dimension (Paul Gilroy 2004:116). We may even add the recent birthday
anniversary of Prince Charles that was conducted in the Nigerian-founded the Redeemed