Exile and the making of new homes in Segun Afolabi’s A life elsewhere and Chimamanda Adichie’s The thing around your neck

Abstract

This paper explores migration, exile and exilic awareness in Segun Afolabi’s collection of short stories "A Life Elsewhere" and Chimamanda’s "The Thing Around Your Neck", against the backdrop where the common conception of exile relates to absence from one’s homeland, that is, an erasure of one’s physical presence from his or her native landscape. Consequently, his essay delves deep to unravel the literary vision of Afolabi and Chimamanda, by submitting that Afolabi’s short stories offer deep interpretative insights into the phenomenon of exile from a male’s perspective while Adichie’s unravel the immigrant experience and cultural alienation following migration from a female’s perspective. These stories reveal that exile transcends the physical state to psychological displacement (loss, loneliness and disorientation) which does not necessarily imply physical absence from home. Taken together, the essay also problematises the concept of home. It affirms that while home could be the physical territory where a character finds solace, it could also entail a state of mind which affords one the opportunity to create that which has been lost and which is impossible to experience in tangible terms. Through a comparative approach, the essay analyses the differences and similarities in the themes, subject matter, style and narrative technique employed by Afolabi and Adichie in their novels.