The margins or the metropole? The location of home in Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems

Abstract

This paper reads Odia Ofeimun’s London Letter and Other Poems (2000) in light of contestations with regard to the conception and location of home in postcolonial travel writing. The collection is seen as preoccupied with the burden of self-location and the associated problem of self-definition in this tradition. The migrant postcolonial writer is understood as almost always caught in a dilemma once a choice has to be made between identifying with the original homeland (which in most cases also coincides with the margins) and the colonial “mother country”, the metropolis. This necessitates either appreciating the burden of self-definition in a simplistic manner or realistically affirming the complexity that the heritage of colonial history introduces to problematise it. Ofeimun’s collection is read as presenting a blunt appraisal of the postcolonial condition and an acceptance of the challenges it poses for people in the postcolonial world: the inevitability of affirming an alternative space which is in-between the metropole and the margins.