15 - Esiaba Irobi: Poetry at the Margins

Summary

The Nigerian playwright, stage director, actor, theater theorist, scholar, and poet, Esiaba Irobi (1960–2010) was the emblematic artist as an exile and a migrant. Born on Nigeria's Independence Day and, as a result, claiming a mystical kinship with the country, he nonetheless equated his life in Nigeria with exile, embittered as he was by the country's embodiment of the typical aberrations of the postcolonial state, especially epitomized by military rule. However, regarding emigration as transcendence and fleeing the country in 1989, his adventures through the border posts of the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany revealed each of those countries to be, like Nigeria itself, a provisional station in his endless search for home and hearth. Thus, central in his exploration of his experience is Irobi's recognition of migration and exile as signal tropes of the tragic human estate itself. Given Irobi's typical inclination to formulate an alternative literary tradition and worldview by transforming Igbo cultural experience into paradigms potentially applicable to a wider humanity, he appropriates the resources of indigenous Igbo elegiac poetry and epistemology in his invocation of a representative contemporary human experience as a prefiguration of the eternal migration of death. This exploitation of a postcolonial Igbo/African imaginary to illuminate a contemporary transnational experience foregrounds a dimension of metaphysical exile that extends and complicates Edward Said's notion.

In Representations of the Intellectual Said categorizes the exilic condition into two types: actual and metaphorical exile. The former condition derives mainly from the experience of dislocation and migration, and ranges from the banishment of individuals or whole communities and peoples to their displacement by such impersonal forces like war, famine, and disease. On the other hand, Said's concept of metaphorical exile transcends the domain of social and political history and includes individuals whose sense of dissonance or dissent estranges them from their society and the pattern of morality sanctioned by the prevalent authorities and the unreflective human herd. His location of the socially responsible intellectual invariably at the margins of society derives from his insight that such an intellectual is fundamentally a dissident.