الفهرس 
Exilic Writers Crossing BordersOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Exile is basically predicated on negative connotations as dislocation, separation and loss as it brings forth feelings of alienation, detachment and bitterness. However, there are new serious endeavors of redefining and revising exile as a painful experience. These attempts are primarily prompted, activated and crystallized due to the rise of a group of distinguished writers who flourished in exile. The testimonies of these exilic writers about exile created a new body of criticism theorizing for exile as positive, stimulating and rewarding. The present dissertation studies the positivity of exile and how it influences the sphere of creativity; namely literature. It is divided into four chapters and a conclusion. The scope of application focuses on the lives and selected works of the two African authors; Ben Okri and Al-Tayeb Saleh. The analysis covers the following literary texts: Okri’s trilogy The Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment, and Infinite Riches on one hand and Saleh’s Season of Migration to the North, The Wedding of Zein, and The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid on the other hand.
Chapter one sheds light on the bright side of exile as viewed and experienced by renowned intellectuals, writers and critics. Though implied in the framework of many critical theories, the term “Pleasures of Exile” is explicitly stated by the Caribbean novelist, essayist and poet George Lamming as the title of his book The Pleasures of Exile in 1960. The term “Pleasures” is also referred to by the prominent Palestinian theorist and critic Edward Said in his book, Reflections on Exile in 2000. These two texts can be regarded as foundational texts theorizing for exile and its doubleness and points of departure for a varying understanding of exile. Chapter one displays a panoramic view of that varying understanding of exile. Despite the undeniable threats and hazards triggered by exile, pleasures are contrapuntally observed and confessed. The study postulates three of these pleasures as the basic parameters of the positivity of exile.
Chapter two studies the pleasures of recollecting home in exile. These pleasures are structured as a direct response to exile’s two-dimensional quality of geography and time. Since exile signifies the geographical and temporal departure of home, it presumably necessitates threats of amnesia and memory loss. In order to restore the lost home, the creative writer writes about home and in resisting the engulfing forces of amnesia, the creative writer resorts to various levels of retrospection.
Ben Okri and Al-Tayeb Saleh write about home (Nigeria and Sudan) immediately after their arrival in exile (England). The freshness of their arrivals secures the freshness of their memories about home. In addition to childhood as a reservoir of infinite memories, home continues to preserve a spiritual dimension that renders it avoidable to forget. Therefore, both writers experience the pleasure of recollection. In depicting home, they enjoy the pleasure of a double perspective of the insider/outsider. The writer, who was once an insider, is now an outsider; thus empowered to better see and judge home. The pleasure of depicting home is clearly manifested in the fictional works of Okri and Saleh through their use of senses contributing to the vivacity of depiction. It is also intriguing to trace the authors’ due attention to the particularities of their African village. However, it is inevitable to mention that the provoked image of home is static in so far as it represents the image of a past home left by the exilic writer and not a present one.
Due to the complex situation of the two writers in study as their host country is their former colonizer, the portrayal of the African home acquires a post-colonial significance. The Nigerian and the Sudanese villages are generally represented as homogeneous locals except for the parts influenced by colonial and post-colonial authority. The African setting is not the presumed jungle but a harmonious milieu before the advent of the distorting forces of the colonizers and their allies. Besides revealing the authors’ inherent feelings of nostalgia, the literary text plays the crucial role of re-introducing the African home which was formerly misrepresented by European canonical works. The centrality of the African setting in the African narrative contributes to other persistent endeavors of post-colonial writers in decentering the European metropolitan center or at least moving it as suggested by Ngữgĩ wa Thiong’o by subverting the binary opposition of center/periphery. Henceforth, the pleasures of writing about home instigate the pleasures of writing back.
Chapter three examines the different aspects of the pleasures of writing back. Though pleasurable, writing back in exile is largely challenging in a way yet rewarding in another way. The challenging aspect arises from the fact that the writers’ land of residence is their former colonial country. The rewarding aspect is accentuated through the effectiveness and fulfillment of the objectives of the process of writing back. It is through the distinctive practice of writing back, a wide range of writers and intellectuals with different political and historical backgrounds are grouped under the post-colonial site of affiliation and a new body of unique post-colonial literature and criticism appear.
The unifying tendency of post-coloniality, however, failed to resolve certain problematic issues as the language adequate for writing back. While some post-colonial authors support the view of the appropriateness of the foreign language to bear the burden of their native experience, others seem to value their native tongue as the language of their emotions and thoughts on one hand and the carrier of their cultures on the other. Okri prefers the English language and thus secures the immediacy of his reception to the western reader while Saleh chooses Arabic and addressees the western readership through the medium of translation. Another controversy rises from the adoption of post-colonial writers to western modes of representation as the novel and questions the capability of a western genre to express their native experience. Both Okri and Saleh comfortably adopt and adapt novel as their frame of expression and finds it a variation of authentic African and Arabic modes of storytelling as “orature” (oral literature), “qissa”, “hikaya”, “riwaya”, “ustura”, “khurafa”, “sira” and “muwashshah”.
Okri writes back to refute European stereotypical images of the African personality as childlike, idle, superstitious, ignorant, fixed and bear all abnormal differences. The analysis argues that Okri uses the child figure of Azaro who is an abiku or a spirit-child with what all its peculiarities and complexities to refute the European misconception as superficial. Abiku therefore becomes an individual identity. The introduction of Ade, Azaro’s friend, expands the scope of comprehension of that identity to become a national one that explains the complexities of Nigeria as a country. The purity of both Azaro and Ade is sharply contrasted to the wickedness of Madame Koto’s unborn triplet who are also abikus and who are the outcome of the illicit bond between their mother and an anonymous corrupt politician. Forces of good fight those of evil as Ade attempts to kill her triplet and though his attempt failed, he remained the symbol of the African’s resistance to oppression and refuted previously mentioned accusations.
Saleh, on the other hand, writes back through refuting two post-colonial patterns symbolizing the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized. The first pattern is the Robinson Crusoe-Friday pattern refuted by the portrayal of Mustafa Said in Season of Migration to the North. Mustafa Said is rendered by the ambitious British colonial project of civilization a typical Friday; a mere slave. The colonial denial of the native’s identity leads to his ultimate distortion and misery. Saleh then proceeds to refute the Prospero-Caliban pattern through the character of Al-Zein in The Wedding of Zein to uncover the superficiality of the colonizer’s perspective of the native. Caliban is the monster and Al-Zein is the village idiot. But Al-Zein is recognized by his fellow villagers as the village saint or the wali. The natives’ awareness of Al-Zein’s duality, the benign atmosphere of the village together with individual and communal actions of love and support empowered his self-esteem and accelerated his accomplishment to complete manhood. Saleh delivers the message that Caliban is not a brute, he is beautiful and charming if rightly comprehended and rightly located among his natives. Thus, Saleh holds colonization responsible for transforming a man into a savage and vice versa.
The ability of the African authors’ to write back necessitates the inevitable confrontation of the binary opposition between the self and the other. Being an exile allows the juxtaposition of both models that leads to a critical reading and an insightful assessment; the final of these proposed pleasures and the scope of chapter four. Both authors believe in the falsity of the binary opposition between the self and the other and show an appreciation of one’s native culture and openness to different cultures as manifestations of human diversity. Okri, through his essays, calls for the discard of any stereotypical image and the collaboration of civilizations. In his trilogy, Okri’s hybridity is articulated through his adoption of the English language as well as his merge between the novel and African oral tradition. It is also displayed in his adoption of the Yoruba culture despite his being an Urhobo. It is also manifested in his adaptation of the abiku identity as universal perception to see the world through. Religion serves Okri as the best cultural representation of the coexistence of different religions. The African parables also emphasizes the notion of openness on one hand and pinpoints to the founders of the binary opposition between the self and the other on the other hand.
As for Saleh, the analysis stresses the significance of the wedding of Al-Zein as a unifying cultural event that brings different ethnicities of the Sudanese community together. Then it introduces Mustafa Said as a sharp manifestation of the tension between the self and the other and contrasts him to the anonymous narrator who is capable of reconciliation similar to the old narrator in The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid.
Finally, the conclusion sums up the major findings of the dissertation as it focuses on the manifestations of different pleasures.