After reading my recent article on Bongos Ikwue, which I posted on this forum, a friend of mine in Nigeria, a very productive thinker with a sharp analytical mind and a beautiful prose to boot, wrote the following words to me: “I read your piece on Bongos. It was concluded on a very fine note. But the texture is certainly too dense for home people. How do you handle that in your next intervention? Are you a post modernist?” To which I wrote the following lengthy response that bared the depth of my own anxieties over the issues he raised. Nothing troubles me more than alienation from my cultural roots and from my national and continental constituency. I know that the linguistic and stylistic zone is where alienation from the “home” audience occurs with the most profound and rapid effect. Yet because this kind of alienation is stealthy, insidious, and seemingly a product of a “normal” involuntary process of assimilation in one’s exilic abode, it is the...
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