Exile and narration of self/communal in Syl Cheney-Coker’s Concerto for an Exile

摘要

This essay discusses how exilic narration is used to explore personal and communal experience by Syl Cheney-Coker in Concerto for an Exile. It also focuses on how an autobiographer becomes a representative construct of a community in the process of telling personal tales as could be seen in the exposition of displacement orchestrated by colonial and postcolonial tendencies in Sierra-Leone. The poet juxtaposes the historical template of Sierra-Leone and his exilic experience to place on record the moral, cultural, political and economic consequences of colonial domination. The essay maintains that there is a noticeable symbiotic relationship between a writer and the site of his/her artistic production and that exilic narration privileges the autobiographical mode as it draws from personal experience to accentuate the collective interest of a community.