Migration and postmemorial witnessing in contemporary African poetry

Abstract

The marginality of intra-African crossings in growing critical inquiries into African migration narratives informs this essay’s focus. Examining the poetry of Nigerian writers Peter Akinlabi and Bhion Achimba (formerly Chibuihe Obi Achimba) as creative texts that broaden understandings of migration forms within the continent, the essay suggests that the poets’ engagement with familial memories and the affective impact of displacement and forced migration cases open up opportunities to interrogate migratory trajectories in Africa. The essay builds on Rebecca Fasselt’s decolonial paradigm and Tosin Gbogi’s race-centred paradigm to urge a pluriversal outlook in which African migration studies seriously attends to colonial and postcolonial histories. The diversity of routes and experiences signalled by such an approach informs a reading of texts invested in postcolonial expulsions and war-induced displacement. Akinlabi’s and Achimba’s poems expand the literary archive on intra-African migration and demonstrate what contemporary African poetry texts, in their multi-layered modes, can contribute to debates in migration scholarship and African memory studies.