...Drinking water from the sources
We must turn back to the peripheral mosaics of home
Revealing the depth of their natural negatives. (33)The above poem can thus be appropriately limned as an interface between those already
treated and those others remaining in the section. This is because while previous poems
have highlighted some “natural nagatives” of Britain, beginning with the arrival scene to
the incidents of “Thames Banks” and those of “The Tower”, subsequent poems still offer
similar kaleidoscopic comments about the other “peripheral mosaics of home”. This
observation is important because it also raises questions about the status of Mapanje as an
exile whose persuasion is comparable to that of a wanderer and stranger. Not prepared to
settle down in his new space, the wanderer is critical of every situation less because of his
unwillingness to settle and be integrated than for the consciousness of returning home as
soon as his itinerary is over. This in a way explains his status in this collection, given that
his mission in Britain at this time was to fulfil one of the conditions of modernization by
completing his doctorate and returning immediately thereafter to his home country.
Viewed against this form of experience, exile inspires wandering and whets the appetite
for witnessing panoramic sights in his country of destination; this is why the sights must
keep on changing. As Tibor Dessewffy (1998: 354) contends:
The wanderer, though temporarily among us, may move on at any time, stepping out from our
collectively built everyday life and thereby questioning it... Metaphorically speaking, he is not
entitled to own the motherland, and indeed he is often literally cut off from this opportunity...
The stranger is a strange mixture of nearness and distance, for although he lives close to us,
we are always haunted by the nightmare of infinity embodied in his personality. He is a
menacing hurricane that can turn our everyday life, peacefully babbling in its gently sloping
bed, into an overflowing cataract.^43Central to the project of modernity and modernization is the fetishization of technology
and technologization. Going back to Ernest Mandel’s periodization of technological
revolution, one realizes how the success of the transition from rudimentary technology to
“machine production of electronic and nuclear-powered apparatuses” (Fredrick Jameson
2004: 569) was deployed as a key strategy in the propagation of modernity in the era of
43
The location of Mapanje within the matrix of wanderer and stranger necessary in view of the fact that
there is a detachment that pervades the tone of his exile poetry in this collection when compared with the
struggle for inclusion that one finds in his second and current form of exile as instantiated in The Last of the
Sweet Bananas and as will be shortly discussed in this chapter.