ALT 22 Exile and African Literature

• Concepts of exile in Dambudzo Marechera's early works, Annie H. Gagiano; mindblasts - narrative technique and iconography of sexual stereotyping as patterns of defilement/cleansing in Bessie Head's "A Question of Power" and Dambudzo Marechera's "The House of Hunger", David Kerr; shriek of nerves - the rational voice of Dennis Brutus and the poetry of exile in "Salutes and Censures", Ezenwa-Ohaeto; culturo-textual exile - the changing "faces" of African poetry, Lekan Oyegoke; shades of home and exile in Ayi Kwei Armah's novels, Nnadozie Inyama; crisis of filiation - exile and return in John Munonye's trilogy, Amechi Nicholas Akwanya; an exile writing on home - protest and commitment in the works of Bessie Head, Sophie O. Ogwude; changing states - exile and syncretism in Buchi Emecheta's "Kehinde", Ana Maria Sanchez Arce; exile and the female imagination - the Nigeria Civil War, Western ideology (feminism) and the poetry of Catherine Acholonu, Ode S. Ogede.

The concept of exile proves to be elastic, capable of covering political expulsion from the nation, region or language of one's birth, to economically enforced migration, to an inner kind of exile from one's self and surroundings more or less synonymous with psychological alienation and social anomie...one of the most admirable features of this volume and its precursors in the African Literature Today series (edited diligently by Eldred Jones over the last thirty years or so), is its promotion of African literature on the continent, and of writers who have not found their way into some readily assimilable academic niche of postcolonial world literature in English.