selective in the way it claims its victims and patrons,^10 it is clear why it is not uncommon
to find writers whose condition of dislocation finds articulation in and reflection upon
this phenomenon. This explains why “whether their exile was voluntary or not, writers
have often found their voices most meaningful in a foreign land, and the literary world
benefits from these voices” (James Whitlark and Wendell Aycock 1992: iii). On this
score, John Peters, for instance, reflects on the “Western canon” and concludes that exile
constitutes “ the central story in European civilization” (1999: 17).
If Peters’ review revolves around Western civilization which is locatable within the
framework of the evolution of Christianity, the recency of that trails behind the Egyptian
account of Sinuhe over 4000 years ago: “to go into exile was written neither in my mind
nor in my heart. I tore myself by force from the soil upon which I stood” (cited in James
Whitlark 1992: 1). With Sinuhe’s account we are brought face to face with the reality of
exile as a phenomenon through which an individual’s claims to primordial identities in
form of geography and time are disrupted and ruptured precisely because of exile’s
simultaneity with dislocation. Such disruptions and ruptures engendered by exile within
African context, as is the case elsewhere, have been both internal and external. And when
considered from the period of chattel slavery, modern African exile experience is not
only replete with various accounts of the disruptions and ruptures by which exile is
known, it is also characterized by dislocation beyond African borders. Yet, it must be
admitted that such external displacement, especially as a coercive categorization, should
be appropriately read as beginning from the epoch of Trans-Saharan Slave Trade which
preceded chattel slavery. The traumas and the tribulations of African exile from this angle
are so enormous that they continue to draw intellectual responses from all fields of
enquiry.
Once linked to the succession of colonialism and the postcolonial dispensation that was
bred in the wake of the former, the fact of the external exile of Africans to the rest of the
10
In my view, exiles like the modernists who were taken by the “liberty” exile provided can be
distinguished from others by referring to them as “patrons” of exile as against those who have exile forced
upon them by various experiences of violence and exclusion in their homeland: these could pass for
“victims” in this context. But I also reckon that this simple dialectic is not absolute as the complexities of
exile demand further engagement.