Where is your love
Nigeria? (70-71)Subsequent poems in the segment, one way or the other, are replete with the pains of the
unrequited love of homeland and the challenges posed by the inadequacies of memory
with which the poet tries to assuage the traumas of alienation. “Summer Song” is an
instance of such poems. The fantasies and excitement generated by the approach of
summer in Britain are, for instance, inadequate to erase his sense of sorrow. The burden
of conscience that borders on the space-in-between with respect to the people left behind
is enormously overwhelming. This is why amidst the excitement of “Covent Garden” and
“speeches at Hyde Park” he will still be identified by others as constituting a curious
sight. And when asked to confirm his vocation, he can only answer with a bombshell:
“yes, a poet of wounds. A man of constant sorrow/ driven from his homeland/ severed
from his kind”. Nevertheless, the primacy of his attachment to home is not in doubt; for
he imagines that when he dies in exile people will be shocked, should they open up his
“breast”, to “find within”
the barb
The flag, a map of my country
And a sea of boiling tears (74)Besides, the above lines return the discussion to the inspiration of nationalism that can be
drawn from a condition of exile, an issue hinted at earlier on in this chapter. That is,
much as the dystopian conditions of homeland act as a vector for exile and transgression
of individuals beyond the borders of the space that constitutes the site of their primordial
identity, the distance that inheres in the condition of exile can also fire up the spirit of
nationalism in a displaced individual. The remark in itself also hints at the irony that
surrounds the question of the initial disillusion with homeland which induces exile on the
one hand, and on the other, the impossibility of absolute separation of exiles, as in this
case, from the nationalist sentiments that sustain the idea of the homeland or the nation.
Therefore, whether located as space-bound, or un-moored from the physical constraints
of the nation, the apprehension of exile in Oguibe constantly keeps nationalism within
view, the limitations notwithstanding.