Exile As Motif In Lenrie Peters English Literature Essay

deport As paper In Lenrie Peters face literary works EssayChristopher Babatunde Ogunyemi is a PhD research fellow at the Department of incline, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile Ife. He was educated at the University of Uyo, Akwa Ibom State in Nigeria. He holds a Master gun specify in Comparative Literature from Dalarna University and he lectures English and Literature at Joseph Ayo Babalola University Ikeji Arakeji, Osun State in Nigeria. He is the author of Male Autobiographical Narratives and Gender Imperatives, Topical Issues in Literature and Globalization and Narratology and Contemporary Fiction which were every published by VDM-Publisher and Lap-Lambert Academic Publishing in Ger more. He has leading papers in international journals of high repute.Dr. Niyi Akingbe teaches Comparative Literature, African Literature and Protest studies at the Joseph Ayo Babalola University, Ikeji-Arakeji, Osun State, Nigeria.He has written two critical works Social Protest and the Literary Imagination inNigerian Novels and Myth, Orality and Tradition in Ben Okris Literary Landscape.His articles have appe atomic number 18d in leading journals on African Literature.Abosede Adebola Otemuyiwa is a lecturer in the Department of English, Joseph Ayo Babalola University, Ikeji- Arakeji, Osun State, Nigeria. She has published active articles in some scholarly journals.Living anonymity Exile as Motif in Lenrie Peters He Walks unsocialChristopher Babatunde OgunyemiDepartment of EnglishJoseph Ayo Babalola University, Nigeria.emailprotectedandNiyi AkingbeDepartment of EnglishJoseph Ayo Babalola University, NigeriaemailprotectedAbosede Adebola OtemuyiwaDepartment of EnglishJoseph Ayo Babalola University, NigeriaemailprotectedIntroductionExile is strangely compelling to think about but afflictive to visit.It is the unhealable rift forced between a hu spell being and a native place,between the ego and its true home its essential sadness can never besurmounted. And while it i s true that books and history containheroic romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an transitslife, these argon no more than efforts meant to chastise the achievementsof transfer permanently undermined by the loss of something leftbehind for ever. (Edward Said, 2001137)Edward Saids submission above best justifys the bedrock about piece of writings on Exile which portends either self-identity or collective identity of a assembly of people who live in a continuum. This kind of writing either informs, educates or entertains but the major motive here is to criticize and to sarcastically inform the people in spite of appearance the literary ethos about the soupcon of oust, its psychological effects, sociological effects and even its political effects on African people. Exile writing visualizes issues that bformer(a) on alienation and the quest for freedom. Writers throughout the ages have been using their literary works of humanities to show various reactions that bother with evict. Some x-ray physical throw out others psychological exile which grossly affects the psyche of the writer or the character in question.Migration and forced migration be panacea to alienation and exile. writings emanating from such(prenominal) purportings are nostalgic and thought provoking. Many writers have used their works to buttress the feelings of exile in time and space. The experience of exile literature in Lithuania is predicated on the apocalyptic second plan of attack of the soviet armies in Lithuania. This threw away many intellectual and professional away into exile. Poets arose to react critically to these p discharges. Examples of such poets are Kazys Bradunas (b.1917), Jonas Mekas (b.1922), Algirdas Landsbergs (b.1924) among others from all parts of the world. Our anguish in this paper is to examine exile as idea in Lenrie Peters poetry that is entitled He Walks only The poem explains various reasons Africans go on exile and their impressions when they feel nostalgic. Feelings for their roots, their families and their cultures give rise to some bare-assed impressions in their works of arts. However, the work uses textual synopsis to explain how Lenrie Peters uses irony and parable to portray the image of exile politically, psychologically, economically and physically as fall out motifs in his poetry. His wealth of imagery is situated within the axis of literary application in target to explain what informs migration literature in Africa. This paper is visualized in six bms the first being the incoming throws a searchlight into the concept of migration and its sequent example in Lithuania and Africa. The second probes into what constitutes the textual compend advance the trio views exile as motif in African poetry the fourth delves into Lenrie Peters preoccupation of exile the 5th movement conceptualises the application of the textual summary to the poem in question and the sixth, being the last movement con cludes the work. The paper conceptualises the textual analysis approach to indorse the intrinsic value of migration and exile in the tree trunk of the text. Daniel Chandler has done some excellent application of the textual approach to the mass media. This approach allows concrete cleverness into the dread of poetry as it moves in time and space.The textual Analysis ApproachThere are two main forms of the textual analysis of popular culture artefacts interpretive and glut analysis. This paper shall expend these two variations in its corpus.Interpretive Textual AnalysesThis include semiotics, rhetorical analysis, ideological analysis, and psychoanalytic approaches, among many others. These types of analysis seek to get ben downh the surface (de nonative) meanings and examine more implicit ( inferential) social meanings. These textual analysis approaches often view culture as a narrative or story-telling process in which incident texts or cultural artefacts (i.e., a pop song or a TV program) consciously or unconsciously link themselves to larger stories at play in the society. A key here is how texts take in subject positions (identities) for those who use them.Content analysisis a more quantitative approach that broadly surveys things identical how many instances of violence occur on a typical evening of prime time TV viewing, or how many Asian American women appear in a days worth of TV commercials. This information, especially when linked to more qualitative kinds of analysis, can be very valuable in pathetic beyond the analysts always somewhat subjective observations (http//culturalpolitics.net/popular_culture/textual_analysis).According to Jan Ifversen in Text, Discourse, Concept Approaches to Textual Analysis, he explains the textual theory using the Foucauldian discourse analysis and Begriffsgechichte which can be fruitfully combined to develop a textual analysis in any literary work, he takes into cognizance and demonstrates that account both mulish and semantic dimensions of language is the task of source criticism to establish this claim. HoweverTextual analysis, on the other hand is concerned with the linguisticforms of past representations. It must get to grips with the representationalchain that links fund to testimony and testimony to writing. Someapproaches are applied to textual analysis of historical documents.they touch aspects within textual analysis that particularly concernhistorical material and literary horizon (KONTUR nr. 7 2003 60)Meaning-oriented content analysis and interpretive and critical text analysis approaches share a subjective ontological emplacement of human action and behaviour and a methodological commitment to capturing the actual meaning and interpretations of organisational actors involved in corporate narrative reporting. Corporate narrative documents are regarded as a medium for meaning verbalism for organisational actors. However, text analysis approaches from the interpretive and the critical perspectives acknowledge the researchers subjectivity. Literary works provide overview of the research perspectives and check text analysis approaches which are further in literature. It shows the selection of text analysis approach to be determined by the research paradigm in which the researcher locates him/herself, which, in turn, consists of a specific gang of the researchers epistemological stance and the belief regarding the ontological status of human action and behaviour. (Merkl-Davies, 2009 5).We shall apply the textual approach to the poetry of Lenrie Peters in order to understand its evaluative interpretation in migration literature.Exile as Motif in African PoetryPoetry usually employs the use of epigrammatic statements, lyrics, concrete images which graphically hound incontrovertible truths in life and social justness (Maduka and Eyoh, 200014). Based on this, poets such as Williams Wordsworth, country-closet Keats, Shakespeare, Yeats etc use their po etry to explicate various motifs from innocence to experience, nature and love, unbridled quest for social justice and so on. Exile is an example of such subject matter that poetry axiomatically lends its credence on because it deployed terse words and encoded metaphor in the illumination of thematic preoccupation. Poets could successfully communicate their feelings without been harmed or without been frighten by the societal framework or instrument of power that lacks literary imagination. Similarly, poets easily call the assistance of audience to the plight of exile in order to bring about sunrise(prenominal) life and new experiences. It boils down to what is exile.According to Jacqueline Corness in a paper entitled Alienation and Freedom- A study of Dostoevskys Notes From cloak-and-dagger as it relates to the Theme of Exile, she defines exile from the perspective of Said when she opines thatExile is not, later all, a matter of choice you are innate(p) into it,or it happens t o you. For this reason, exile is often thought to be the close psychological exhausting state of removal from, for example,ones country. While some people are separated fromtheir homeland because they have freely chosen to liveelsewhere, exiles are get worded to be at mercy of externalforces (2).Exile is a upright human experimental condition that arouses many poets to show their concern and also demonstrate how they feel. Wole Soyinkas Telephone Conversation is a capsule presentation of psychological exile experienced in England when he was refused an accommodation simply because he is a black man. Arthur Nortjes Autopsy is a poem that visualises the evil effects of exile on children who were naturally born into it, they feel isolated and perverted. Buhadur Tejanis Leaving the Country is a poem in Africa that showcases the evils behind political exile and alienation. The spirit of nothingness, hollow expectations and practical dislocations are the feelings that emanate from peo ple. African poets ruminate exile situation as motif in their poetic canon.Lenrie Peters and Exile Preoccupations in PoetryAlthough, Lenrie Peters is not a victim of political exile, his exile motif in poetry is predicated on the psychological exile and alienation he experiences in Britain. The same feelings Soyinka experiences which makes him to write the Telephone Conversation Before 1965, Peters studies and lives in Cambridge, after the independence of Gambia his country, he came home to help restructure the political and economic situation. His poem He Walks Alone is a typical example of exile and alienation people suffer in foreign land. His life sentence shows thatLenrie Peters was born in Bathurst (at the time a British colony), now Banjul, Gambia on September 1, 1932. Poet,narrator, publisher, medical sawbones and opera singer. Author of the poetry books Katchikali Satellites and Collected Poems and the raw The Second Round, 1965. All his works were published by Heinemann, in London, in the collection African writers series. After making his first studies in Bathurst and in sierra Leone, he travelled to Cambridge to study Natural Sciences at Trinity College. In England, he was the president of the conjunction of African Students. He also worked as a publisher for one of the earliest Gambian newspapers, The Gambia Echo. As well as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and other writers, he belongs to the first generation of the Anglophone West African Writers in being recognized as such and being published abroad. He is an enthusiast defender of the panafricanism. A ecumenical poet, his densely packed, minimalist stanza structures clothe in the broad universal spectrum of human experience aging and death, the risks of love, the bareness of exile. In his book Satellites (1967), the poet-doctors detachment is a metaphor for the uprooted individuals painful existential isolation his scalpel penetrating at the cutting chaotic edge of things an image for the ima ginative piercing and spiritual penetration which are the literal goals of the poets quest. Although he gets furious with the frustration of the African underdevelopment, he reflects about blind and sickening models of progress that do not show a continuity with the past and destroy more than what they preserve. In his only novel The Second Round, a physicist trained in Great Britain and victim of the so called massacre of the soul brought by westernization, returns to the capital of his homeland filled up with noble ideas about the progress of Africa, but ends accepting a job in a remote jungle hospital and therefore taking roots in the traditional experience (xvii International Poetry Festival of Modelling)He Walks Alone is a poem that shows degree of alienation African students suffer in Europe. As a result of this alienation in their system, they feel exiled and Peters asks them to go home. The poem is a affluent experience from the poet who having studied abroad is critical o f the hypocritical behaviours which is sometimes found in Europe. An African student is presumptuousness quality education but refused employment by the system that educates him. The poem is sarcastic because it tries to ridicule the harsh weather and the harsh behaviours Africans face in diaspora. As a result of alienation, some Africans have lost their roots. They want to behave like the Europeans but it is not possible because their physiological traits were not tailored towards the European individuation. Africans are collective in nature, so when they demonstrate Eurocentric feelings, the Europeans could not accept them, the Africans quickly run back home in order to eat in unison, speak in one conformance, love themselves and struggle together in African communalism.Textual Analysis of Exile in He Walks AloneThe poem is written in seven stanzas of incommensurate five lines. The poet addresses exile as motif because man is an integral factor in society- Exile has caused man y untold pain, isolation and rejection. The first stanza reportsHe walks alone chief bowed with memoriesExiled in the parksome playful thing of long agoglues him to a shop windowThe poet creates an image of an African man in Europe who is looking at for an identity. He is not accepted into the system though he is a legal resident. He cannot vote and be voted for he cannot seek employment in choice places. He walks alone mentation about home, thinking about his family. Most times he goes around with his head bowed to the colour and psychological differences that exist between him and his host community. At the park, he is always given some distance as if he is a mini-human. The situation on the train is the worst, nobody sits beside him. He feels exiled and alienated. The choice of words here shows that Lenrie Peter employs some coded meanings with words like head bowed in memories. The exile is confronted by a denial by the host communitys culture. But also there is a feeling of b elonging to a different but alien culture that has no recognition, and which does not accord him any relevance in the colonial metropolis of London. Hence, his head is bowed with memories and longing for African passion usually underscored by communal gathering, scores of festivals, the warmth of comradeship and shared labour, joy of harvest and a recollection of the sparkling African blue weather of the dry season. An underlining feature of the exiles flirtation with memory is his concern for warmth and ticker sufficiently present in Africa, a memory which unobtrusively can not be obliterated by a stretch of distance from Africa.In the second stanza, the issue of exile seems more manifestFaded suit sharp linedloosely held by his proud lookshoes scaled with polishcannot comprehend likewise muchto tell of harsh experiencesThe African tries to simulate the European but he cannot really fit into the system. The exiles consciousness is sharpened against the backdrop of the drudgery of casual life in London, reverberated by faded suit, shoes scaled with polish which betrays an instalmental living on the fringes of English society. This is a description placed at the disposal of an exceptional sincerity and a compelling advise of coping with the debilitating English weather. The choice of being cladded in faded suit and a duet of shoes scaled with polish is bewildering to the exile. But how is the exile in English society expected to argue with isolation, harsh weather and cultural shock? How is he to describe and set his experiences within an historical condition which can only be understood by himself? The exile realises that only memory can be employed as a weapon of liberation to break through the walls of isolation and racial contrariety ineluctably grounded in English social milieu. Memory constitutes a bastion of recollection of negative experiences for the exile in the poem. The applications of concrete images such as proud heart shoes scaled with polish are contrasting. As an immigrant he is proud to have journeyed to other part of the world, but in the end cannot fit into the new environment. Irony is another instrument the poet uses to make his poem satiric in nature. Maduka sheds more light on this conceptThe word irony means so many things to many peoplethat its no long-life very useful as a critical idiom.The protean character of its use has resulted in anarray of terms associated with it. Thus, one frequentlyhears of such expressions as Verbal Irony.Irony of Situation, Sophoclean Irony, Irony of Life,Euripi doyen Irony, Tragic Irony, Cosmic Irony,Dramatic Irony, Irony of Things, Irony of Circumstances,Irony of Character ( 139, The Intellectual and Power Structure)Peters complicates rife racial renditions of African exiles life in Europe by challenging oversimplified historical facts. The poem problematizes a disturbing emotional turmoil to produce a poetic effect in which racial narratives are recognised as the stere otypical occurrences, but have been complicated to the point where it can no longer be definitive. Migration breeds alienation, wherein contentious ideological perspectives of the racism are organised into a fluid and recuperative narrative, which urges the subscriber to apprehend the ways in which ambiguous representations of the exile which yield a more nuanced and complex literary vision of the African racial condition than that rendered by historical documentations.In this poem, many of these ironies are applicable. The most important are irony of situation, irony of life, dramatic irony, irony of circumstances and irony of character. This is because exile explores all these feelings in the life of the African whose character is very critical in the poem. Stanzas three and four explain moreNo coward herespository of rejected talentsan ounce of earthsilted weightily in his heart.the breaking point is looking backIn this stanza, Peters commences a poetic evaluation of the signifi cance of western education to contemporary African students. Inspite of the difficulties generated by the racially stratified England, the persona does not disintegrate with the threats of racism. But has to maintain a stoical fidelity to his pursual of western education, whose immense reward will translate to the transformation of his African society. And more so, he can not afford to pack his bags and return to Africa, because the breaking point is looking back. But has to cope with the social, psychological and economic stress of England as to acquire western education at all cost. This necessitates that he deplores courage as a tool of postmodernist sensibility, towards surmounting these travails. The treatment of a sensitive socio-political issue of racism in this poem underscores James Reevess observation that, what poetry does to the mass of ordinary experience is to make permanent and memorable whatever in it is vital and significant(88). Peters in this poem ostensibly crit icises racial discrimination, and amplifies the plight of African students in their determination to confront this social malaise.Crossed the RubiconRace, nationality, ideology, religionarrowed from earth to moonfounder of a new brotherhoodan hero he not of our nation bornHere, the character in the poem is undergoing some rejections. He is grossly isolated, crossing the Rubicon is a metaphor for Atlantic Ocean. The poet is calling an attention that this character who flew across the Atlantic is now been exiled physically and psychologically. He battles racism, nationality stratification resulting into modern slavery, religious differences, ideological divergences, post-nationalism and globalization. Language to this poem is very crucial to the understanding of exile and its attendant evils. Peter concurs that African students must embrace alienation as it is transitory yet mandatory for the pursuit of western education. This reverberates Jacques Derridas explanation that reality, a nd historical representation of events that attempts to document reality must be inscribed in contradiction and ambivalence. Derrida insistsIf we have been insisting so much since the beginning on the logic of theghost, it is because it points toward a thinking of the event thatnecessarily exceeds a binary or dialectical logic, the logic that distinguishesor opposes effectivity or actuality (either present, empirical,living-or-not)and ideality (regulating or absolute non-presence). (italics true 78)Suffice to say that Derridas logic of the ghost explicates the ways in which He Walks AloneArticulates a similar contradiction that bifurcates binaries of racism to establish a more problematic historical representation of exile.The poet chooses both the connotative and denotative language to portray the colourful images and metaphors which he explores in the intervention of exile as motif in the poem He Walks Alone Stanzas five, six and seven pull in this presumption. Lenrie Peters m astery of the English language allows for an unbiased evaluation of communities imagined through language, which neither obscures specificity nor emphasize notions of fixed identity. much(prenominal) evaluation succinctly foregrounds the questioning and critical evaluation of the disadvantaged position of the exile.Known no tendernessskin a mosaic of scarsheart in fixed depositsafe from ridicule, decomposingMarionette-strings linked with starsExile go homeunder your bed a bowl of tearsleave back streetsnightmares evenings rest in pewsbrassy noises of homely firesDream and waitcoarse cauctus of desert wastesperhaps tomorrowsunflowers fading in the heatwill lie insensate at your feetIn this poem, the choice of both connotative language and denotative language is to present the motif of exile in its natural state. The poet wants to prevent equivocalness by using everydays language as connotative and implied language as denotative. The image of poverty is too conspicuous in the poem. The character lives in isolated area, some areas are exclusively reserved for immigrants and some jobs are also exclusively reserved for immigrants. Such jobs include cleaning, flushing of toilets, etc. Lenrie Peters is extremely critical about the use of language in the poem. Although he sounds very harsh, maverick and mechanical when he says exile go home. The poet seems to be worried about frustrations, psychological intimidation people in exile go through. Although this is self exile, he admonishes the Africans that they should seriously start thinking about home for the sake of development and posterity.Similarly, the arrays of metaphors which are situational make the motif of exile interesting to study. Though exile is a social factor, the poet is calling attention that kind of of constant endurance and travails, affected persons can make it good at home. Although man is powerless in the face of uncontrollable phenomenon, the poet achieves success in his artistic craft and t he handling of the theme of exile as motif in He Walks AloneThe title of the poem is symbolic because it expresses the exile experience and it emphasises individualism which is not part of African culture and tradition. Above all, it is a contribution to African literature because African literature, indeed the literature of black civilization, in modern times, has moved from the literature of protest to the literature of assertion and emancipation, which also indicates self-examination (Black Aesthetics, ix). Of paramount significance is the musical theatricality which the poem employs in its structure, which gives the poem an esthetical bravura and imaginative splendour. The significance of this regular patterning is to show that exile is a continuous phenomenon in the life of people. As African people move from one place to the other, other people too may consider relocation from one locale to the other. They would begin to consider balancing with the socio-geographical factor o f the environment they find themselves in. In the course of this, nostalgia, pain and acceptance problem sails in. The end rhyme employed by Lenrie Peters could be considered original because it neither conforms to Elizabethan nor the English type.The tone of the poem is melancholic. That is the situation exile encourages. The poet is exhibiting a practical verbalism of what it is to be in exile. The expectations are usually very high but the system is not accommodative to satisfy all the yearnings revolving in the mind. The audience would perceive He Walks Alone as a didactic poem. A didactic poem is a poem that teaches and explains the rudiments about human society and predicament. The motif of exile is an over- riding factor in this poem. The poem exegetically breaks down and overturns the European jaundiced understanding of African cultural milieu, by resisting a widely accepted, and otiose depiction of the African students sojourn in Europe as blissful, celebratory and quint essential. But Peters through a complex exteriorization of his experience in London, depicts the thorny convolutions of exile.ConclusionThe motif of exile is the main preoccupation that Lenrie Peters examines in exhaustive chunk. He uses risque imagery to demonstrate this, bearing in mind that Africans are people of historical evolution in the word of Boyin Svetlana. This poem is very sensitive to the plight of exile and identity. The use of ordinary language is to designate clear image of understanding so that the issue of ambiguity would not arise. To sum up, Lenrie Peters He Walks Alone is an exemplification of exile experience coupled with the question of identity and how these factors have dire consequences on the people. The rich artistic creation is a contribution to African literature.