From the Local to the Global: A Critical Survey of Exile Experience in Recent African Poetry‪.‬

Abstract The question of exile in contemporary African literature remains central to the understanding of its people. Of particular interest is the place of poets of the second generation in the depiction of this phenomenon. Although the paradigm of generational configuration is admittedly flexible, this paper seeks, nonetheless, to explore the perception of a few selected poets of the second generation from Anglophone Africa in order to illustrate the multidimensional approach to the engagement of the theme. By so doing, the paper is also concerned with the construction of home through its images, on the one hand, and on the other, the dissection that lies between home and exile in countries of destination in the West. The paper also hopes to explore the frustration that goes with the experience and the dilemmatic situation in which its victims are caught. It will show at the same time how from an initial standpoint of essentially internal sociopolitical and economic factors in regions and countries, things have gradually moved in the past three decades or thereabouts into an exponentially actuated and leveling stage in which globalization--as seen in its present fashion--has accelerated the spate of African citizens' vulnerability to exile, especially to the West.