years. More specifically, however, the undertaking of the study is informed by a further
need to explore the various factors that are considered by the selected writers in their
representation and apprehension of exile. Viewing the collections singly and together,
therefore, bears the prospect of demonstrating how they constitute veritable readings
suitable for the critical challenge “of opening...spaces for new narratives of becoming
and emancipation” (Couze Venn 2006:1). This is why the study is interested in how the
writers have individually taken up the challenge of the discourse of exile against the
backdrop of the socio-political climate of their regions and countries as a way of
registering their alertness to the trend. Again, the decision to study the second generation
of African poets only, is actuated by their unique sense of creative reaction to the social
phenomenon of African dislocation. The writers of the selected collections are also united
by their focus on the West as the main destination of most Africans confronted with the
option of migration for better lives. Furthermore, the study is fascinated by the prospect
of re-reading some of the texts, especially Anyidoho’s EarthChild and Mapanje’s Of
Chameleons and Gods as texts which, contrary to the popular critical reception they have
had so far, are valuable in the discourse of African exile. Besides, not a few of the texts,
particularly those published on the threshold of the twentieth century and shortly
thereafter are interested in the complexity the discourse of exile assumes as a result of a
new world order overwhelmed by the invention of a planetary system in which the
frequency of the negotiation of space and movement across national boundaries,
especially from South to North, has become an orthodoxy.
The poets’ response to this global development in relation to Africa and African exile is
remarkable because they are also able to express the fear about the problem of historical
polarization between North and South, while at the same time making statements
concerning alternative views on the new world order. This in some cases is done by
staging strategies of ultimate return from the accelerated susceptibility to drift. The study
is further considered worthwhile because, while much attention is currently being given
to the other two sister-genres of postcolonial literature, that is, prose and drama, poetry
has suffered much critical neglect (Elleke Boehmer 2007:np). Yet it is inevitable to
remark that poetry, in spite of its typical denseness and economy of diction, has been no