The Dialectics of Exile in Dinaw Mengestu’s Children of The Revolution

Abstract

Exile constitutes a pivotal and recurrent motif in literature. Its atavistic depiction indicates that it had the capacity to provide solace, succour   or security to individuals who were confronted with some existentialist conditions and challenges and were able to overcome the situation and have a new, positiveexperience altogether. In contemporary times, however, artistic depiction of exile, which is basically linked with migration among Third- orld subjects, indicates that it is a debilitating experience characterised by rancour, anguish, and regrets. It is depicted in an avalanche ofliterary works as a precarious experience wrapped in ambivalences. This is the thrust of this study which examines the multifaceted variants of exile in Dinaw Mengestu’s Children of the Revolution with a view to broadening its conceptual framework, scope and dimension in contemporary literary discourse. The study is a qualitative one and adopts the interpretive design. The tropes deployed are the diaspora, nostalgia, identity negotiation, and return migration. Exile, the study finds, engenders and intensifies solitude and friendlessness – an exasperating condition that results in despair, depression or delusion on the part of the exile. As an enervating experience, exile is capable of killing an individual’s vision, prospects and aspirations and impinges on the exile’s yearning or wish for self- actualisation or fulfilment. Thus, rather than offering the much anticipated reprieve, exile engenders inferiority complex and intensifies frustration, retrogression, nostalgia, and all-round displacement. Contemporary migrant fictions project exile as one of the indices of gloom among postcolonial Third- World subjects in foreign lands.