sea breathe in and out on her”, shouting “Free at last!” But the paradox is that home is not
without the abundance of such sights of recreation and freedom. This is why when asked
“Do you remember eating porridge from/ Beach shells once?” the reply from another
tornado-turned exile is in the affirmative: “He nodded, smiling at another/ Memory of the
African lakes they were forced to/ Abandon”. What follows in the sequence of the
exchange is crucial: “‘Someday, perhaps I’ll take that home/ To celebrate!’ She said
staring into the deep sea.” Such exchange goes to justify the contention that the
transnational identity that the postcolonial identity acquires translates only into some kind
of diasporic orientation in which case the new space occupied is, even at its best, “neither
home nor not-home”(R. Radhakrishnan 2003: 324). Home, that is country of origin,
therefore, becomes a recurrent metaphor to be desired.
The image of Africa comes up automatically in this discussion. Kofi Anyidoho (1997:1),
taking a cue from Okinba Launko’s poem “Birthday Card”, reflects on this and the
relationship, as well as the paradox that it conjures up in the minds of her exiled citizens
who have suffered one form of forced migration or the other:
The writer’s persistent attachment to a home/land which history has often denied and
contemporary reality is constantly transforming into quicksand; a land reputed to be among
the best endowed in both human and material resources, and yet much better known for its
proverbial conditions of poverty; Africa, the birthplace of humanity and human civilization,
now strangely transformed into expanding graveyards and battlefields for the enactment of
some of the world’s worst human tragedies. This is the Africa of the intellectual and creative
writer’s hope and despair, the Africa of the glory of vanished civilizations and of the pain of
mass possibilities. At the root of this paradox, it may be argued, has been oppression in many
forms, oppression that imposes severe constraints on the creative, productive potential of the
land and its peoples.The status of the creative writer and intellectual is however merely generic as it can more
appropriately be gleaned as representative of what many who are left with the option of
exile face in postcolonial Africa, especially when the drift is towards the West. The
apparent relief that the idiom and practice of transnationalism offers and as mediated
through other viscerally linked projects like multiculturalism and globalization have not
proved to assuage the sense of loneliness and alienation that accompanies the
consciousness of exile. This observation is the more so in view of the last poem in the
collection “Justine Cops of Clapham Village”. The cold consciousness of loneliness and