they] engaged in various struggles towards emancipation; autonomy and citizenship”.
Again, that these cultural activities show “footprints running backways/ into lives once
lost”, lead one to another form of return from exile in the collection: undeniably
allegorical and cultural. It is interesting, for instance, to note that to date, despite the
preponderance of the mestizaje that one finds in the Haitian vodun , it still retains a great
deal of the religious practices found in West Africa. This is especially so with the
evidence available from the unique vodun practice among the Fon and Egun people of
Republic of Benin, although some Egun people are also found in Western Nigeria.^33
But if so far the discussion has dwelt on celebration of the triumph and glamour of black
diasporic culture, the last poem in the first volume, “The Homing Call of Earth” alerts
one to the limits of African postcolonial deterritorialization and cosmopolitanism. More
than anything else, it presents the dilemma of the African exile in the West. First, the
condition at home remains demoralizing. It is at this junction that one is reminded of the
primacy of the Ghanaian nation in the context of the musing. The conditions at home
stare the exile in the face:
They say our land has lost her joys
to seasons of teething pains and aches
that stupid elders and wild hunters
took and hid our hopes in foreign caves
and our offspring die of kwashiorkoric dreams (43)Struggling with the consequences of neo-colonialism made more complicated by the
complicity of the military class in power, home constitutes a nightmare to the exile.
However, the drift in exile may not possess the capacity to be perennial. This is because
the various forms of exclusionary measures of racial essentialism erected against the
African immigrant in the West cannot allow for an absolute sense of home away from
33
See Donald J. Cosentino (ed.), Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (California, USA, 1995) and Suzanne
Preston Blier, African Vodun : Art Psychology and Power (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1995) for
comparison.