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Return to the Promised Land or Coming to Terms with Redefined Exile? – The Motif of Homecoming in Yema Lucilda Hunter’s Road to Freedom and Isidore Okpewho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name

Remy Oriaku, Department of English, University of Ibadan, Nigeria

Until now, critics have tended to be preoccupied with the motif of exile and racial consciousness in the literature of the African Diaspora, understandably because of the greater output and wider variety of such narratives by Africans of the Diaspora. Scant attention has been paid to narratives by Africans in the motherland, which focus on the motif of a return to the motherland ancestral land. This is apparently because such writings are rarer and of more recent publication. This paper attempts to explore the themes of angst and crisis of identity in two relatively recent publications, Yema Lucilda Hunter’s Road to Freedom (1982) and Isidore Okepwho’s Call Me by My Rightful Name (2004). Though both texts are fictional portrayals of experiences of the return to Africa, they have been rendered from close observation by writers who are intimately acquainted with the slave/exile mentality, identity crisis and African lore. The paper argues that with homecoming the returned exile does not experience a lifting of the pervasive moods of despair and neurosis but gets a firmer handle on his/her predicament and is better able to come to terms with his/her identity. This is understandable in the light of African’s neocolonial realities and the dissonant rhythms of life in the modern world consciousness of which has informed the writing of both novels.