nevertheless, “the Horsemen gallop at breakneck”. The fifth part indicates the drastic
decrease in the chances of redemption from the treacherous situation: “Generals/
Sergeants/ Warlords/ feed on blood”. Having held up the nation to their whims and
caprices, the nation has obviously become helpless. Perhaps the only redemptive path yet
to be trodden would be the way backward. This is the argument in the sixth part:
The only way forward
From here is backward...
Ah!
Death knocks at the door of this nation...
Death has seized this nation in his grip
And there is no way forward...
I see the ashes of a great city
I see the ruins of a great lie...
Ah!
There is no way forward
But through the Bloodriver. (39)The above is a sad commentary on what relations of power can produce in the
postcolony. It is no longer refutable at this juncture that the poet and the people he speaks
for have become disillusioned with the governing system and concept of the nation. And
with the metaphor of “horsemen” and their “glinting swords” in the last part of the poem,
going by the structural arrangement of the collection, it is already clear that the way
backward, which signifies loss of faith in the nation, would induce all manner of escape
strategies. One of these strategies of escape is exile, which one finds in “A Song from
Exile”.^27
Basically, “A Song from Exile” illustrates what Timothy Brennan (1990: 63) calls “the
contradictory topoi of exile and nation” in the writing of the Third World. Explaining this
further, he contends that the situation is pathologized as emanating from a fusion “in a
lament for the necessary and regrettable insistence of nation-forming, in which the writer
proclaims his identity with a country whose artificiality and exclusiveness have driven
27
Although Oguibe had initially published “A Song from Exile” as a separate volume, its inclusion and
arrangement in A Gathering Fear shows how it bolsters the argument that exile is a direct consequence of
the hostility of home.