Embodying Identity: Exploring the Space and Place of the Émigré in Testimonies of Exile

Exile literature is saturated with the themes of rootlessness, loss of identity, and belonging. This article adopts an analytical perspective to explore Abena Busia’s poetry anthology Testimonies of Exile (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990) as a prototype of exile literature. To inquire into how the selected poems project the identity of émigrés in relation to place and space, stylistic analysis of the poems was employed. The findings highlight Busia’s construction of the émigré’s identity, ranging from that of an enlightened, sophisticated enthusiast to that of a stricken straddler. Busia reconstructs the spaces occupied by émigrés as vociferous, since these spaces ascribe ever-mutating identities to them. Experiences, or what Busia refers to as testimonies of exile, disrupt and alter the émigré’s identity. Drawing inferences from Edward Said’s conceptualisation of the disposition of the émigré, it is argued that the place and space of the immigrant is not only secondary and bordering on the peripherals of foreign culture, but also contemptible. The immigrant’s identity formation undergoes different stages. As his/her “arrival identity” confronts elements in the new environment, the immigrant comes to revise, adopt, and adapt what is considered an acceptable or model personality. The émigré either fully integrates into society or resists change and clings to his/her “old” self. Busia’s feminist didacticism, evidenced in her exploration of pertinent feminist issues in the context of larger immigrant concerns, is obvious in her collection. The article concludes by noting that the female émigré, especially, has to grapple with a “desecrated place” where any form of sacred insistence on self-acclamation is met with disdain. The exile experience then becomes a wound which might never heal, even as the immigrant’s identity is permanently altered.