In the spring of 2004, I returned to Maryland from Vermont and was immediately greeted with the news that my mother out there in Sierra Leone, West Africa, had suffered a stroke and had become speechless; two weeks later, she died without uttering a single syllable. Her death brought a lot of questions to my exilic mind. My mother died in her early sixties. She was a robust woman who had only lately been humbled by the depression brought about by Sierra Leone’s ten year war. As a child who provided for his mother until her death, I was supposed to be the son to physically lower my mother into her grave and put on her the first piece of dirt under which she was then supposed to lie in eternal peace. Yet here I was in exile, thousands of miles away, leaving the body of my mother to be buried by the sons of other mothers.
Imprisoned in the frustration of the missed opportunity to perform my duty, which also brought upon me the torment of a mother restless in her grave, I began to reflect on the larger picture that the African exile is faced with: his individuality, his nation-state and the global situation. I needed to be mathematically precise about that moment in which the exiled African writer loses the maternal warmth and other environmental securities of his homeland; that moment when, like losing a mother, the exiled writer sees an ill-fated relationship suddenly extended to him by an ungrateful landscape that he has all the while so brilliantly captured in his art. He becomes broken by the fact that all have failed to see reason in the lessons of the literature of the land, and so in the light of the hostilities toward him, he must decide between weathering the storm and going into exile. There is no pain greater than that of leaving every principality one has built in the form of family, loved ones and culture to go into the unknown. Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and environmental activist, died under that perdition of defying exile on the dictatorial landscape of Africa’s notorious despot, General Sani Abacha. He stood up to protect the interest of his impoverished Ogoni people when the Nigerian government, supported by the conglomerate Shell Oil Company rooted in the West, plundered the Ogoni land indiscriminately, drawing oil from the belly of that land without giving back meaningfully to the poor community. Saro-Wiwa had had the opportunity to escape into exile when the persecution against him got very hot, but he stayed on. In his case it was literally true that the antithesis of exile was death. The eve before he was to face the firing squad, Saro-Wiwa wrote a short story he called, Africa Kills Her Sun. It is a bitingly satirical piece. Writing his alter-ego, he turns his attention to Sazan and Jimba, two men condemned to die with him; and of them he wrote:
. . . you should see Sazan and Jimba on the cold, hard prison floor, snoring away as if life itself depends on a good snore. It’s impossible seeing them this way, to believe that they’ll be facing the firing squad tomorrow. They are men of courage. Worthy lieutenants. It’s a pity their abilities will be lost to society forever, come tomorrow morning. Sazan would have made a good general any day, possibly a president of our country in the mold of Idi Amin or Bokassa. The Europeans and Americans would have found him a useful ally in the progressive degradation of Africa.1
Now, three years after events forced me to leave my country and come into exile, I’ve come to perceive exile as a time-out, if you will: a rapturous moment during which a writer’s cup of daring no longer passes over his head. But even before I left Sierra Leone and flew to the United States on the invitation of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, an organization that had mandated me to research the use of landmines in the Sierra Leone civil war, I had failed to realize that I had been preparing for myself a claustrophobic room in the house of exile. Shortly before coming into exile, and while visiting Switzerland, Britain and Canada on three different occasions, I had granted the BBC interviews in which I had “undiplomatically” accused my government and the rebels of using landmines so indiscriminately as to maim the innocents of my country. I returned home from my sojourns to a family shaking in its boots. Some members of my family, who had admired my poetic and smart mind, no longer thought I was smart on the radio, or anywhere, for that matter, outside the pages of the poetry I wrote. Where was my intelligence if I could endanger my life with such reckless statements? My friends were no long comfortable drinking beer or palm wine with me in the open. My country began closing in on me.
Exile as a concept has the connotation of being unfathomable. It is a state of spirituality in which body and soul become disagreeable to each other because an identity has been altered. The writer is never aware of the Armageddon of exile. In other words the writer does not realize when exile really begins for him. And by the time his family mentions it to him, and his friends alienate him, he has become a full blown exile, but all the while he thinks himself a positive radical with a cause. He does not understand why members of his society, both those who fear for his life and those who want to endanger it, are suddenly upset with him. Exile has nothing to do with the Oriental nirvana of the Zen philosophy. Zen detaches the materiality from the mortal body, elevating the spirit body, whereas exile detaches the sense of pleasure from the body and the carnal material anguishes. Exile is more like a possession by demons. The Nigerian poet and Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka put it this way, “ . . . sometimes exile is indeed a place, and thus a new-found-land, to borrow the name of that desolate space, a wasteland . . . ?”2
The concept of the wasteland so astutely imagined by Soyinka facilitates a deeper understanding of the African poet as an exile. I will attempt to further explore Soyinka’s concept in thinking about different kinds of wastelands: the political, the economical, the cultural, the linguistic, and the psychological. Exile is oftentimes talked about as a provider of rich literature. In fact, many critics believe that more compelling literature has been written in exile than in any other environment. While this might seem true, it is important that we ask ourselves whether exiled writers themselves consider their exilic writings successful when compared to their writings at home. Considering that exilic writers are more often bitter and sad, perhaps we should ask if they always want to sound thus. Think about the restlessness in the poetry of Vallejo and Milosevic, the Peruvian and Polish poets respectively who ran away from the dictatorships in their countries.
To discuss the exilic experience of the African poet, one must first possess knowledge of that poet’s home experience. The following are legitimate questions: What did the African poet originally set out to put into poetry? How did his environment change into that of the wasteland? This essay will leave out the pre-colonial African poet for many reasons but only one deserves to be mentioned here: the pre-colonial African poet did not have the tripartite experience under which we shall be discussing the post-colonial African poet. However, I hasten to mention here that the exilic experience in Africa is as old as the continent itself.
Post-colonial African poets have often been discussed in the context of their tripartite heritage: that of, first, their Africaness, second, the Euro-Arab colonization and its colonizing tool, religion, and third, the furlong experience of slavery as a backgrounder against which every reaction of the African poet is expressed. African poetic is as complex as the people who make it. This is why, even after five hundred years of Euro-Arab invasion of the continent, the African oral lyric still survives in the blood of the African culture. After spending several years researching the history of just West African poetry, the British critic, Robert Fraser cautions,
Any critic embarking on a study of West African poetry ought perhaps to be accused of presumption. There are few histories of the poetry of Western Europe, and those that exist are prominent for their sketchiness. Africa is arguably a much more complicated case. To begin with, the number of potential literatures to be considered is daunting. It has been calculated that there exist between 700 and 1,250 distinct languages within sub-Saharan West Africa, an area itself larger than Western Europe. Each of these possesses an oral literature, though our knowledge of them is as yet incomplete.3
But further along, Fraser makes an erroneous statement that “There is a crying need for an integrated African poetic which would enable us to make sense of written literature in European languages within a context determined by oral performances in the vernacular.”4 No, this is not true. Fraser like most western critics fails to experience the African poetic beyond the linguistic. Within Africa itself the poetic is successfully integrated even in the very different languages and dialects. An integrated African poetic is more of what I will call a communo-cultural integer than a linguistic concern, and I daresay the cultural phenomenon is startling in the continent. Fraser is certainly being presumptuous. But of course that is the linguistic and textual exilic experience Simon Lewis is pointing to when he quotes Lekan Oyegoke. Oyegoke writes about the Ugandan poet and famous exile, Okot p’Bitek, who in his life time sojourned the English and Welsh University towns of Bristol, Aberystwyth, and Oxford. Oyegoke observes that, “. . . we apply the term exile to Okot’s poetry in English and consider the poetry as doubly exiled—linguistically from Acoli, and textually from its oral sources.”5 And many a time in trying to make our African poetic “make sense of written literature in European languages,” as Fraser desires, we disintegrate our poetic and find ourselves in exile. That kind of exile is a linguistic wasteland.
Contrary to what many believe, there has never been a watershed event that gave rise to a new kind of poetry in Africa even with the violent interruptions of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism. The oral is the root of the written. But given the spoils of slavery, the scramble and colonization of Africa, which also saw the plundering of early African civilization, much of our literature with no European value suffered the same sort of scorn from colonizers that the African Traditional Religion did in the hands of Arab and Christian missionaries. And from what we read of pre-colonial poetry handed over mostly in the oral and later transcribed, like the popular epic of Sundiata, one can only say that what we call a new kind of poetry is the mind of the new poet under a new hostile condition. Of this experience, the Somalian exiled writer, Nurudin Farah is quoted as saying, “I was born in the oral tradition . . . the move from oral tradition to a written tradition is itself one form of exile.”6
I am going to use a quote from the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, to illustrate how the introduction of foreign religions contributed to the institution of exile in the African world. In the novel, white missionaries are in the village of Umuofia telling the Africans that their god who had answered their prayers all these centuries is suddenly a dead god. The missionaries claim that the villagers’ stone god is nothing but a stone, that their sacrifices are nothing but cruelty to animals which must be killed to appease their god, that the sacrifice of twin children, killed to return them to their evil base in order to avert the wrath of the gods, is simply murder. When these white missionaries are asked where their own god is, they point to the sky. Needless to say, the elders of the village find the Christian god farfetched. The new concept is unacceptable. Thus they put up resistance; but their children quickly embrace the white man and his religion, and soon the process of conversion begins. Some members of the adult generation answer their children’s reasoning, and become Christians, defending the new faith and the insight of their children. Then, to emphasize Africa’s susceptibility, the oral poet utters what has come to be known as the most quoted words in all of African literature:
The white man is very clever. He came peaceably and quietly with his religion; and we with our stupidity allowed him to stay. Now how can we fight when our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together, and now we have fallen apart.7
Is the rest of what we know of the African condition today a result of the knife that the white missionaries put to the things that held Africans together? Have the African gods been angered, and therefore made to forsake the Africans? The response of the African poet to these queries has been swift and decisive. To him, the African leaders have become exactly like the white man, and now they are themselves, slavers, colonizers and dictators.
The tendency of the African poet to be skeptical and forthright in opinion is what makes his exilic experience permanent, whether he runs away or stays within the borders of a corrupt and unjust system. And of course this predisposition does not help the situation of the writer. Dictatorship and corruption on the part of the new African leader and the insistence of the poet to write about them separated the two forever. In Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), South Africa, and other Southern African countries, the poets were long in the struggle for political liberation from white colonialism, but those poets, like the ones in other parts of Africa, soon found themselves disagreeing with their new African leaders after independence. In the entire continent, poets were forever displaced and frustrated, and their hopes and aspirations of a nation-state were shattered. A fine but sad example of an oppressed writer is the life of the Zimbabwean writer, Dambudzo Marechera.
The late 1950s and 1960s saw the emergence of vibrant poets who had quickly established themselves on the scene. Among them were Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark from Nigeria, Kofi Awoonor from Ghana, Lenrie Peters from Gambia, Okot p’Bitek from Uganda and Dennis Brutus from South Africa. Of this lot, Tanure Ojaide, the Nigerian scholar and poet writes,
The period of nationalism immediately preceding and following the political independence of most African countries between 1958 and 1963 was a time in which African writers were in an ecstatic mood. They wanted to exhibit and defend African culture against the western rationalization of colonialism. The poets who were educated assumed the spokesmanship and cultural standard-bearing for their people and they seemed to have a foreign audience in mind.8
But later their own countrymen betrayed them exactly as in the story about the beasts of England in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Of the many wastelands of exile that exist for the African poet, that which borders on the diasporic experience is the major concern of this essay. The issue of nation-state, the Diaspora, and the global9 is very much at play in the exilic experience of the African poet.
Wole Soyinka is among the earliest poets who went into exile in the 1960s. After struggling with the rising dictatorship in his home country, he decided to turn to the former colonizers for security. He found a home in England. Or did he? An interesting experience he had is chronicled in his poem, “Telephone Conversation”.10 In this poem there lies a message for me that goes deeper than just the racial conflict between two people of different colors and orientation, or between two people reacting to the growing demands of urban challenges posed by the then highly stratified community of London. Of course on a private level, the persona of the poem could be perceived as a displaced person who must urgently adjust to his new environment, and inferentially we know that that has not yet happened, and it doesn’t look like the going has been smooth. In writing this poem, Soyinka is drawing from his exilic experience to define the wasteland. Tone is very important to the meaning of this poem. The poem has a rich psychological undertone that can be seen in the interplay between “open market economy” and “denial of association.” The plot of the poem revolves around the principles of capitalism, which the exiled persona knows is what sustains the blood of the West. Listen to the opening of the poem:
The price seemed reasonable, location
Indifferent. The landlady swore she lived
Off premises.
But the conflict in the poem is set on cultural intolerance. As I suggested earlier, the persona must have had similar brushes in his search for an apartment, and so this time he initiates the conflict:
Nothing remained
But self confession, ‘Madam,’ I warned,
‘I hate a wasted journey—I am African.’
Soyinka’s skin color is as dark as mine. However I refuse to believe that were Soyinka or his alter ego lighter in color he would have struck a renting deal. Listen to the following weird conversation in the poem after Soyinka had just told the landlady that he was African:
“ARE YOU DARK? OR VERY LIGHT?” Revelation came.
“You mean—like plain or milk chocolate?”
Her assent was clinical, crushing in its light
Impersonality. Rapidly, wavelength adjusted,
I chose, “West African sepia”—and as afterthought,
“Down in my passport.” Silence for spectroscopic
Flight of fancy, till truthfulness changed her accent
Hard on the mouthpiece. “WHAT’S THAT?” conceding
“DON’T KNOW WHAT THAT IS.” “Like brunette.”
“THAT’S DARK, ISN’T IT? “Not altogether.
Facially, I am brunette, but madam, you should see
The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet
Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused—
Foolishly, madam—by sitting down, has turned
My bottom raven black—One moment, madam!”—sensing
Her receiver rearing on the thunderclap
About my ears—“Madam,” I pleaded,” “wouldn’t you rather
See for yourself?”
Soyinka’s “Telephone Conversation,” is a beloved poem in the continent of Africa, so it must not be surprising that some twenty odd years later, another exiled poet, the Sierra Leonean writer Sheikh Umarr Kamarah, is to write about a different experience corrupting Soyinka’s title: he calls his poem, “Telephone Yawnversation.”11 “Yawnversation” is a play between the words, “yawn” and “conversation.” This second corruption of the two English words suggests not only a physically tiring event, but also a psychological tired state of mind that has lasted through the thirty years of African independence, in which the condition of the African writer, both at home an in exile, has become analogous to that of martyrs. I should like to say that in this poem, as in Soyinka’s “Telephone Conversation,” the telephone, the physical equipment itself, is anathema to the poet. The tones in both poems heighten simply because of anxiety about the unseen on the other side. Kamarah’s poem touches on the demands of capitalism on the one hand, and the lack of human warmth on the other. The nature and structure of capitalism is such that it could be said to be exploitative of the workforce, whereas the African communalism Kamarah was forced to leave behind in Africa places humanity above the rigors of money market. There is always room to socialize.
Now, in exile, Kamarah and his conversers in the poem have to deal with the pressures of their wasteland, and occasionally find a small time for a small opportunity to enquire of each other’s welfare. But what comes up in their conversation? No back home reminiscences; only the exploitation of the West, the quagmire of family relationship, and the claustrophobia of the self. In another poem, “Death in Exile,”12 Kamarah writes of exile as being an
Emptiness, loss, loneliness
No family
No ceremonies
The soil is foreign
The casket is Alien
The prayers are different
Will the Ancestors cross the Atlantic?
Will they receive my friend?
With these lines, Kamarah is actually attempting to advance a new semantic flavor to the definition of the exilic experience. Even the dead, as long as they remain buried in the wasteland, are themselves in exile. Kamarah’s use of abstract images gives a vivid picture of the African exile in a deeply claustrophobic condition. The idea of the wasteland Kamarah builds here is quite unlike that of Robinson Crusoe. Trapped on an uninhabited Island, Crusoe attempts to convince himself that the prayer he is familiar with is capable of affording him the blessing of happiness in the uninhabited island, whereas Kamarah does not see how an alien abode can accommodate his African God; for that matter he does not even understand the new kind of prayer. In “Who Else Should?”13 Kamarah turns his attention to the idea of the nation-state. And here we see that exile is, indeed, a backward looking condition. The African poet defines his role and his individuality around that of the nation-state into which he was born. So that with him now in exile, the nation-state is at risk of collapse, and here the concerns of the poet have to do with the mere absence of checks and balances, a commitment which had seen Soyinka and many other African poets falling out with the leadership in Africa.
For some African poets exile is a nightmare that has left them with more questions than answers. Therefore their poetry is much more an open-ended quest to understand the events that led them to be severed from their homeland. Like Kamarah, Liberian poet, Patricia Jabbeh Wesley left her native land to escape the bloody conflict that lasted for a decade. When Wesley writes about her homeland, whether it is about her people or the war eating at them, her culture is at the center of her art. In Wesley’s poetry, individuals or events are defined within a given cultural setting. Her poetry can be seen as a lamentation. There is a heavy sedation of the biblical culture. And what makes her poetry compelling is the fact that even in describing her setting she attributes life to objects. Exile to her is an irreparable loss for everyone concerned: the individual, the nation-state, and the Diaspora. She astutely captures this in “Africa,”14 the introductory poem in her first collection:
The calabash
now shattered
her contents
spilled
like palm wine
across the regions
of the world.
In Africa, the palm wine and the calabash are two images that define unity, progress, security, respect and sanity. Palm wine is poured from the calabash to honor or appease the dead. Elders and honorable people are served wine in a calabash. The calabash holds the contents for wedding ceremonies, and the sharing of palm wine signifies strong bonds. Therefore to see the calabash shattered, and her contents spilling like palm wine, is to witness the collapse of the nation-state, and Africa’s children going into exile, and into their individuality.
The culture of the West puts a premium on individualism. In Africa the individual is only a part of the whole. To define an individual, an understanding of the whole is required. And to understand the whole one must consult with history, sociology, environment, and a community’s methods of classification. Wesley does not see herself fitting into the classification under which she comes as an exile, and what’s more, she sees no sense in the categorization program in America. “Minority”15 is a poem of pageantry. But it is also a poem of rebellion. The poet does not wish to be classified. As a matter of fact, she cannot be classified because she feels bigger than the small corner into which exile has relegated her. The poet is seeking an answer as to why a woman connected, sometimes by marriage, rivers, forests, food, landscape, religion and lineage, to every people of the world should so be recklessly classified as a minority?
“A Dirge for Charles Taylor”16 is the penmanship of a restless exile. Charles Taylor, Liberia’s main rebel leader during the war, and later that country’s president before being forced out of office, is arguably Africa’s most notorious warlord. And here in this poem, tormented by the limitation of exile, Wesley mourns her beloved country. This poem was probably written at the hour Taylor was being sworn into office as president. Wesley is obviously tormented by the glamour into which Taylor is thrust, but the resolve is stronger even when dealing with this man “who came to town at harvest, eating/ both the harvester and the harvest.” She makes no bones about what the exiled living and their dead will do. As for the living, they “will find our way back home by the imprints/ of your bloody claws, Ghankay,” and, “Those who die abroad now send their spirits/ by boats, wading the deep waters at night/ just to get back home.”
The loss of a fellow exile is equally distressing, not so much because he or she dies, but because he or she dies in exile and not at home. I remember that when I told African friends whom I was just meeting for the first time about my mother’s death, their question was, “Did she die here in America?” For us, one may stay in exile for as long as the situation dictates, but one must not die in exile. The Kenyan firebrand writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, forced into exile twenty years ago, recently decided that he had to return. He got a rude awakening in July, 2004, a week after his return, when armed men stormed his house and not only beat him and his wife up, but also raped his wife. After their release from hospital, we all thought they would return into exile; they refused to be intimidated. Because Africans believe in kinship, this current spate of exile brought about by the at-home politico-economic insecurity has forced upon the African writer all kinds of claustrophobic depression. Wesley gives a vivid picture of her friend Dessie’s death in exile, in the poem, “Elegy For Dessie.” After the telephone call announcing Dessie’s death, Wesley goes into conversation with the absent corpse. In Africa, people hold conversations with the dead, and if the corpse is fresh, the language has to be urgent because it is an African belief that a newly dead person has the spirit for a short while before it is whisked away. Wesley captures that moment in her poem, and at once the image of the dead Dessie is vivid. It is the pangs of exile that she chooses to talk about:
In Monrovia, we would have marched you
in the Harmattan winds, moist air from the Atlantic,
sweeping grave dirt away so
you could go down. Now all over America, telephones
must be ringing in the news
that Dessie Webster has just died.
In the above stanza Wesley recalls African cavalcades for the dead, which, at the death of loved ones, is certain to take place rain or shine: the meeting of family and friends to cry long and deep, the fine speeches, and most of all the soothing of hearts for those especially afflicted by the loss. In exile, such a meeting was not always possible. People must learn, in sorrow or in happiness, to be connected by telephones.
Syl Cheney-Coker, the Sierra Leonean poet, is most urgent in his poems that deal with his exile, and he is the angriest among the poets discussed in this essay. His lines ring with pressure as he confronts his need to go away to a place where he can see the larger picture regarding his troubled continent. Of his many lines on exile, the strongest and loudest line is in the poem, “The Road to Exile Thinking of Vallejo.”
Mother I want to return into exile to be your poet!17
And indeed, Cheney-Coker, who happens to be my mentor, has returned into exile over and over. Commenting on the above quoted line, Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka, who himself is no stranger to exile has this to say:
The insistence on an exile persona that feeds on the community of the alienated is a characteristic of Syl Cheney-Coker of distant Sierra Leone, who actively sought kindred spirits from within the continent but also in literary careers from all over the world. This was strictly a younger, passing phrase for Cheney-Coker, but it retains its validity both for its time and for many others. What is significant about that phrase is that this younger Cheney-Coker confesses a need to become an exile in order to find his creative persona.
The mother is both his biological parent and the land with whom the poet has a tortured relationship, a tension of unrequited love and unfulfilled expectations; in short, the very embodiment of the poet’s alienation, which however he seeks to overcome with a willed passion of commitment. 18
Cheney-Coker is a deeply troubled poet, whose Filipino wife recently died in America. In exile, Cheney-Coker confronts both his home country and his host. At the time of this writing, Cheney-Coker has been in exile for over three years, once again in the United States. America is the other continent that has come under his fiercest attack after Africa; in particular, he criticizes the United States. Cheney-Coker is more of a reflective poet. His poems of exile are perhaps his most personal. Although physically he is away from the country he loves, its presence is everywhere for him.
I think of Sierra Leone
and my madness torments me
all my strange traditions
the plantation blood in my veins.19
In “Hydropathy” from where the above lines are quoted, we encounter the tripartite personality of a tormented poet. We are alerted to the wounds of slavery, to absurd genealogy, and to exile to which he so constantly refers in his poetry.
The image of the room is common in Cheney-Coker’s poetry of exile. He feels condemned to solitude and all its claustrophobic inanities, and so the room image carries two connotations: he is straight jacketed by the “unfamiliar” landscape of exile, and he is blinded by distance from seeing the “actualization of terror” on his country’s peasants he so loves to write about. On a psychological level, the room is the vast expanse of that part of the world that is not his home. Nevertheless he embraces his country in his heart, and, as Fraser notes, about his exile, “From Freetown to the Great Lakes, from Wisconsin to Buenos Aires, from Argentina to the Philippines, where in mid-decade he taught the literatures of Africa and Latin America, he carries his grief humped like a haversack on his back.”20 The simile of a haversack befits the description because Cheney-Coker always gives evidence of how much he is burdened by the agony he regularly leaves behind. These feelings became especially apparent when he returned into exile in America in 2001, where he served as the first writer in residence in the city of Las Vegas’ City of Asylum program. Of this experience he writes,
I longed for my country and my people. So, I was delighted to make the unexpected discovery that, every Saturday between 9 AM and noon, the public radio station on campus (KUNV 91.5 FM) devotes a program to African music as part of its world music programming. To be transported back to the rich, eclectic musical landscape of my continent, to be seduced by its beauty every week, is a wonderful gift that lessens the pain of homesickness.21
Cheney-Coker impresses it in his poetry that even the poetry of Pushkin no longer holds much worth for him, for that poet was “killed in a duel for love”, the victim of his own folly, whose work now appears distant and sensational.
Although he continues to rage in exile, Cheney-Coker becomes uncertain for whom he must rage. And so he chooses to berate Africa for “permitting a perpetual butchery of her womb/ to those who barter her on Wall Street and the World market/ muckrakers, smugglers, politicians and the like.” In “Analysis,” he rages against the father capitalist country,
to America whose pulse beats too loudly in my heart
your hands your lips your love too vicious to poets
your ladies with false eyelashes who kill your poets
America think of your involvements
those who died with napalm in their eyes
were they necessary for your salvation or for your
balance of payments?”22
Sometimes, however, he develops nostalgia for the continent of his birth. In “Freetown,” he cries, “Africa I have long been away from you/ wandering like a Fulani cow . . . ”23 He talks about how he feels Africa’s warm hands around him, for, “Africa is a centrifugal mother reaching out to your sons . . . ”24 He goes on to mock intellectuals like himself with the line, “when they come to plead/ say make us Black Englishmen decorated Afro-Saxon.”25 At the same time he considers himself one of the African urchins who will return one day because in exile, “the tomtoms of the revolution/ beat in our hearts at night.”26 In “Concerto for an Exile,” he receives news of a military coup back home; of course this is what he has been predicting. One would ask, why then is he shocked by the news? Perhaps because he knows what price the peasants will pay for their rebellion. He has been talking about the heartlessness of the politicians, speculating at the extent to which they would go to quell any rebellion by peasants. He constantly incites the peasants to rise and demand their rights to a decent life. The revolution of the peasants has begun, that which he had promised his continent he would be a part of, but at that moment he is in exile. When he hears the news,
I plunged into the streets holding the dead in my head
I deface my face with my leprous hands
I flee from a pack of hounds
tuned to the reverberations in my heart27
After the excitement of the peasant revolt, the exiled poet retreats into solitary reflection. He longs for a countryman who shares his agonies, who can share with him the experience of life in exile. He is concerned that, at home, the peasants have given up their lives to rid the country of terror while himself and other exiles are pleading to be made “Black Englishmen decorated Afro-Saxon.” He turns his attention to another exiled Sierra Leonean writer, Yulisa Amadu Maddy, a fine playwright, and then a resident of Europe. He has to have been in touch with him countless times by way of letter and telephone; he has to have thought him a bosom friend with whom he could discuss the biting winter, the white girls and their brandies, and other writers locked in exile. He must have shared his feelings about the betrayal of Africa and about the numerous discriminations of whatever nature he has experienced, otherwise he would not have written him a poem so personal and personate. Dedicated to Maddy is “Letter to a Tormented Playwright.”
The poems in this essay show that exile is a continuous process of sorrow. The exiled runs away from his native land most often to escape imprisonment, tribulation, and death. Another world provides him an abode, and very soon he is all on his own, locked within his agony. Automatically that exile is, semantically speaking, dead! An exiled artist is quite different from other exiles who are not artists in that if he must continue to be productive, he must have associations: cultural, geographical, and emotional resources to work with. When he leaves his room to get them, he is confronted repeatedly by an alien landscape. In his sadness, he returns to his abode to be condemned to solitude.
Therefore, the exiled artist does not rest well in his host’s embrace, laden with conscience. If the host should push too much of her own comfort to him, she fears he would be too suspicious of her generosity and think her a cultural proselyte, yet if she should hold back considerably, she fears he would consider her too overtly avoiding, and monolithic. The exiled artist nags because in the first place he does not want to be an exile. He wants to be among his people to document their way of life for succeeding generations; an artist who remains long in exile often returns home as a complete stranger or sometimes like a newborn baby who must learn everything anew. Soyinka, Kamara, Wesley, and Cheney-Coker understand this all too well; therefore exile has always pained them. To them exile is claustrophobia.
Endnotes
1. Saro-Wiwa, Ken. “Africa Kills Her Sun” in Under African Skies: Modern African Stories. (ed. Charles R. Larson, 1997, Farrar, Straus and Giroux), 215.
2. Soyinka, Wole. “Voices From the Frontier” in Guardian Unlimited, July 13, 2002.
3. Fraser, Robert. West African Poetry: A Critical History. (1986, Cambridge University Press), 7.
5. Lewis, Simon. “Exile and Postcoloniality in African Literatures.” (H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, July 2001).
6. Olaniyan, Tejumola. “African Writers, Exile, and the Politics of Global Diaspora.” (West Africa Review).
7. Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. (1960, Heinemann Educational Services), 176.
8. Ojaide, Tanure. “New Trends in Modern African Poetry.” (New Voices in African Literature) Research in African Literatures, March, 1995.
9. Olaniyan, Tejumola. “African Writers, Exile, and the Politics of Global Diaspora.” (West Africa Review).
10. Soyinka, Wole. “Telephone Conversation,” in Under African Skies: Modern African Stories. (ed.) Charles R. Larson, (Farrar, Straus and Giraux, 1997).
11. Kamarah, Sheikh Umarr. Singing In Exile and the Child of War, Africa Future Publishers, 2002.
