Migrant literature and political commitment: puzzles and parables in the novels of Biyi Bandele‐Thomas*

Abstract

By circumstance and self‐designation Nigerian writer Biyi Bandele‐Thomas is a cosmopolitan postcolonial writer. Postcolonial writers whose works are considered ‘migrant’ have been suspect in regard to their commitment to national resistance politics. I assert that such an undifferentiated designation will have us overlook the different degrees of political engagement of such writers, in spite of the migrant status of their work. A close political reading of the two novels by Biyi Bandele‐Thomas, The Man who Came in from the Back of Beyond and The Sympathetic Undertaker and Other Dreams, in terms of their style, form and content, confirms the anti‐neocolonial and actively humanist positions of this novelist. Bandele‐Thomas constructs literary devices that reflect and at the same time accommodate both the postmodern and postcolonial worlds he deals with. Consequently he adopts a surrealistic approach in which he mixes the phantasmic with the naturalistic to refract Nigerian realities. Tales of cruelty, abuse of power and corruption are strung together to build parables on the moral and political questions of truth and falsity, idealism and freedom. Humour and irony lighten the horror and provide hope at the same time as they satirize systems of oppressive power. Three political themes stand out in these narratives: a description of the neocolonial wasteland; dystopic fears of dictatorship and economic stagnation; and madness (schizophrenia) as a surreal literary prop and a sign of unendurable suffering in the Fourth World. Bandele‐Thomas's two novels are transparently engaged in Nigeria's present condition and its future. I encourage that we re‐visit the politics of migrant literature.