that status, his feelings are as strong as those of others who can in the inclusive sense of
the word be regarded as natives. The process of reinscription of identity also implies the
redefinition of the recognition that goes with the configuration of art and artists. That is,
if his feelings concerning rights and relationships are not to be trifled with and his
observations about the turns of events must be uncensored, the same thing must extend to
his general assessment of the convention of inclusive practices.
Owing to his background as African he may have been previously excluded from the
privileges that accrued to writers and poets in the United Kingdom, but the contemporary
exigency of transnationalism already necessitates a disruption of the understanding of
such an initial purist perception. The exclusion, which may not be unconnected with the
unique tropes of African poetry, which may as such be at a disconsensus with British
writing, can now hardly be sustained. Therefore where he publishes now does not matter.
This is because “the ‘forced poetics’ that emerge from the prison house experience of
slavery, racism and colonialism” only reveals ‘the [previously] submerged experience
and...sensibility that lie within the standard stereotypes of English language and
literature and cultures” (Iain Chambers 2005: 68). The wall of such stereotypes are giving
way fast, however, because of the new sense of belonging that formerly colonized people
locate for themselves within the space of the western metropolis. If previously
marginalized in the metropolis, the tendency is to challenge such marginalization and
redefine the entire process of inclusion and exclusion:
While the imperial metropolis tends to understand itself as determining the periphery...,
it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis
beginning, perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its
peripheries and its others continually to itself.” (Mary Louise Pratt in Iain Chambers
2005: 69)The pervasive feeling of challenging the preconceptions of postcolonial exiles and
migrants in the imperial metropolis is extended in “After Celebrating our Asylum Stories
at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds”. Again, in this poem, the historical facts of exile as
predicated on the history of colonialism and the multiplying effects that it bred stands for
scrutiny. Besides, it constitutes a clear illustration of the tension that arises from the