slums on the bill of institutions like “USAID, IMF, AIC” (29) is not enough. It is more
important to look at the causes of the formation of such slums critically. If progress
cannot be a temporal and spatial absolute, because it is founded on inequality and binary
opposition, then such a notion of progress is fundamentally flawed. Jane Jacobs (1996)
offers further insight into this spectre of inequality: “imperial expansions established
specific spatial arrangements in which the imaginative geographies of desire hardened
into material specialities of political connection, economic dependency, architectural
imposition and landscape transformation” (19). It then adds up as the poem queries the
basis for the research into “3rd World Development” (28) when in actual fact the world
slums, especially those of “Accra, Lagos”, among others, are “the diseased imagination
of slum dwellers”. It is arguable that in the so-called First World cities, many Africans
still occupy a major part of such slums. The whole argument of binary alterity in the
poem could be said to extend beyond the immediate as in the last stanza the basis of
civilization is shattered: “Wilson Harris told us once upon a time:/ All civilization is built
upon a series of thefts / Beginning of course, with Prometheus” (31). The mythical and
allegorical drift of such historical innuendo centralizes and returns the discussion to the
“series of thefts” which through spatial crossings from the West to Africa, created
contemporary nation-states. As the myth goes, Prometheus’ stealing of fire from the gods
to offer as a gift to humanity for progress in the Palaeolithic Age (Karen Armstrong
2005) involves a measure of ruthlessness, perfected in the migratory journey motif to
please his homeland, just as the progress of the West is fraught with ruthlessness that was
carried out in the journey to the colonies and the establishment of empire. For the
postcolonial world in particular, this is the cause for a sort of “languishing at the margins
of global change”, and the basis for the articulation of the theme of “Third World envy
and mimicry” (Roy 69). Indeed, as Roy, argues further, “memory... forces us to mourn,
to take account of a difficult and bitter history” (65). The history of the Third World has
been for the most part that of mourning. For in considering the “proud structures of Wall
Street” in the poem, one cannot but remember the contribution of the colonies to its
making. The neo-colonial structures that empire leaves in the wake of independence have
done little or nothing to alter the privileges of the Wall Streets of the First World. This is
why in the Third World citizens’ “mimicry” of migrancy in the First World, all forms of
wang
(Wang)
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