THE DIALECTICS OF MIGRATION AND EXILE IN OKEY NDIBE’S FOREIGN GODS, INC.

Abstract

Migration and exile constitute recurrent leitmotifs in recent postcolonial narratives. Existing studies on migrant fiction focused on the clandestine and risk-laden movement of migrants in  search of greener pastures, with little attention paid to the concrete experiences of migrants in their host lands. This is the thrust of this study which examines the dialectics, travails, and ambivalences of migration and exile in Okey Ndibe’s Foreign Gods, Inc. The study adopts Cathy Caruth’s model of trauma theory as well as Irene Visser’s perspectives on trauma as its theoretical framework. Interpretive design was adopted. The text was purposively selected because of its apt inscription of migration and exilic experience. The tropes deployed are the diaspora, identity negotiation, nostalgia, and return migration. Findings reveal that disenchanting realities particularly ambivalences, displacement, alienation, solitude, travails, and hostility typify the migrant’s experience in the host land. Related tropes of rootlessness, frustration, regrets, and trauma encapsulate the exile’s experience in the United States of America. The traumatic travails the migrant undergoes in the host land finds expression in seclusion, alienation, displacement, frustration, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorders. Thus, rather than being the much anticipated Eldorado, the suffering inherent in exile becomes more severe than the ones the migrant had run away from in the native homeland. Among Third- World subjects, migration is inscribed as a phantasmal search for the ideal and an experience in disillusionment, ambivalences, and trauma.