Towards negotiating space/place in postcolonialdiasporic discourses: a study of isidore okpewho’s the victims and buchi emecheta’s second class citizens

In this article, we examine the root causes for which the African postcolonial subjects undertake the transnational or external dislocation, determining whether the massive flow of Africans from home to the metropolitan center actually fulfilled their dream. The socio-political, economic and cultural conditions of the displaced postcolonial subjects in their transnational space and their responses to the realities of this space are zoomed in by a postcolonial reading of Isidore Okpewho’s The Victims and Buchi Emecheta’s Second-Class Citizen. The coast-to-coast dislocation phenomenon in postcolonial Africa and the ordeal encountered by postcolonial African people in their struggle to adapt themselves with these transnational spaces are examined. The intricacies accompanying the postcolonial immigrants in their host countries, the reactions of their hosts and the strategies of the immigrants constitute the research problem not only of their daily interactions with the different people and structures, but in the transnational political space. Employing the theoretical paradigm of postcolonial theory, this work hypotheses that Isidore Okpewho’s The Victims, and Buchi Emecheta’s Second Class Citizen are postcolonial narratives that discuss the complexities of transnational displacements and migrations on the existential conditions of the postcolonial subject, and that, Okpewho and Emecheta do not consider transcontinental movement of postcolonial African subjects a really helpful alleviation of their problems. Rather, the two focal authors see the movement of these postcolonial African subjects from the periphery to the metropolitan centre as creating new challenges for the migrants. The narratives, therefore, postulate with the use of characterisation, thematic manipulation, plot development, setting and style to demonstrate that postcolonial subjects should remain in their original space and make it better for their existential habitation.