INTRODUCTION: AFRICAN POETRY AND THE POLITICS OF EXILE: A
CRITICAL SURVEY
Even at the most propitious of times, when a convergence of historical events
and creative ferment of the imagination appear to announce their evidence,
literary periodization remains a messy business Harry Garuba, “The
Unbearable Lightness of Being”Coping with Periodization in Modern African Poetry
This thesis is essentially focused on the politics of exile in Anglophone African poetry,
but on account of the generation of poets that is selected, this introduction begins by
making some clarifications on the next few pages on the question of periodization and the
specific category of generation into which the poets are placed. This is both in relation to
the generation that preceded them and the ones by which they are succeeded. Thereafter,
the chapter proceeds directly to engage the concept of exile with relation to African
poetry.
Although relatively recent in its evolution, modern African poetry has undergone a series
of transformations, blossoming as it does by appropriating names across time and
generations. This in turn has also developed a paradigm which incarnates with it all the
possibility and pragmatism of periodization. Concentration on poets of the second
generation presupposes a preceding first generation.^1 This position, taken further, implies
the identification of a certain distinctiveness that marks the previous generation from the
second and vice versa. This kind of clarification which is at both levels of thematic
concern and formal innovation cannot be divested from the socio-political space
inhabited by the world of the poets.
In the first generation of modern African poetry, there was an incarnation of a dominant
tendency of reaction against colonialism. Therefore, the thematic concern in the main was
1
It has to be admitted, however, that there is no cut and dried approach to the delineation of these literary
generations in African literature. Basically, the manner of study and approach often determine how these
categorizations are configured. This is because of the overlapping nature of the defining paradigm in the
literature. For instance, those writers of the first generation are still very much active and productive in the
contemporary sense even now that there is already an incipient fourth generation.