IGWEBUIKE: African Journal of Arts and Humanities

Exile is sometimes conceived as a detachment from the social affiliations and interactions through which individuals negotiate their inclusion and exclusion and, ultimately, their sense of belonging. This paper interrogates how Romeo Oriogun’s The Gathering of Bastards configures diasporic space through the interrelation of the labours of memory, racialisation, desire and contested home. It draws upon Avtar Brah’s notion of diasporic space through textual analysis of six selected poems. The research scrutinises the selection of language, imagery, affective nuances, and symbolic representations as well as the interaction of line arrangement and formal patterns with situational and historical context. It also appraises the local historical narrative and how it informs the selected formal constructs and theories. The research contends that borders are reconstituted by the processes of assimilation, that the materiality of exile is inscribed by migrant labour, and that return is the materialisation of a pluralistic home that is incomprehensible without the legacy of displacement. The poems articulate home neither as a lost origin nor as another place. Home is constituted through the interactions of local dwellers, migrants, memories, and routes, and every claim to belonging bears the memory of those who have been excluded. The research advances a formal analysis of Nigerian poetry and demonstrates the possibility of localising and reinterpreting contemporary theories in Nigerian literary studies by focusing on a few selected texts.

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