Yet, the desire for migrant privileges in the West, especially by the formerly colonized
people, remains as elusive in spite of the readiness to compromise the dignity of identity
affirmation. This is where the question of race and racism takes centre stage. For
instance, the diction of “migrant”, or “migrant bird” is a recurrent metaphor and reference
point in Ojaide’s When it no Longer Matters where you Live. Not only is the frequency of
the invocation of this metaphor a way of speaking to the migrant experience in the
autobiographical kitty of the author, it also serves from an apparent angle to reinforce the
currency of the fascination with the experience of migrancy among not only African
postcolonial writers, but a sizable number of Africans who remain taken by the benefits
the abstraction and practice of migrancy appears to offer. But if this is the impression one
gets in Ojaide at the beginning of the collection, it does not take long to realize in the
unfolding of the sustained argument in the text that migrancy may not after all possess
the magic wand the African postcolonial subject needs to be really at home in his
enhanced life of exile in the West. The epiphany of the unfulfilled life of migrancy comes
to full glare in the title poem when the persona reveals rather painfully that:
For all its refuge, the foreign home
remains a night whose dawn
I wish arrives before its time (77)It thus explains why in one of the concluding poems when he declares the agency of
“migrant birds” in bringing him words from home. Needless to say, there may not yet
have been found an alternative to home no matter what the privileges of migrancy
objectify.
A similar illustration of the limits of migrancy can be drawn from the response to the
closely related term of nomadism and the reality that stares us in the face in Odia
Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems. It remains, for instance, a serious matter of
contradiction which for the most part stays unresolved in the collection: the fact that
where there is a declaration of an intention to continually pursue a rootless and foot-loose
existence in the Western metropolis possibly because there is in this specific case a
sudden realization of the liberty which the colonial history that binds Lagos and London
claims to offer there is a hostile threat which dogs the path of the nomad. Therefore, the