Language Is the First Casualty of Exile

In the autumn of 2019, while Professor Femi Oyebode and I walked along Prescott Street, he told me that language is the first casualty of exile. I have watched my use of the English language lose its colonial stance for a more limber approach that is quick-witted and light-hearted.

I once sketched the outline of a poem at the Heathrow arrivals bay. I was waiting for a friend and his partner, who were relocating to London from Lagos for good. Expectedly, I called the poem ‘Arrivals’, chronicling my own arrival in London on 18 September, 2019. Back then, Uncle instructed me to ride the elevator to the topmost floor to departures, where he was in his Toyota Prius, the standard vehicle for Uber taxis, especially in South London. My uncle was ready to throttle away as soon as I dumped my luggage into the boot. There was something furtive, sneaky, subversive even about paying the five-pound drop-off tax instead of the premium tariff I would spend holding my car in the assigned basement car park while waiting for my friends at the arrivals bay. I would drive them from Hounslow southwards to Forest Hill that wintry evening. This was the equivalent of driving from Lagos to Ibadan but with better roads. I must confess that ‘Arrivals’ could have been a better poem, perhaps because I hesitated to fill it with all of my life’s anxieties and rich biographical details at the time. Instead, I opted for a snapshot of an immutable memory.  

It was pitch dark when we arrived at Forest Hill, and I was tired. It was too late for me to travel back home, so I elected to spend the night at my uncle’s residence, a home I refused to sleep in when I moved to London in 2019. The logic behind my choice was the principle of paying it forward. I was revising my arrival experience vicariously. ‘Arrivals’ opens with ‘No one was waiting for you at the Arrivals Bay.’ Choosing to wait for my friend and his partner at the arrivals bay, hurling them many miles away from my home, and sleeping on my uncle’s couch was to give them an immutable memory for the future about their arrival in London. There may have been no placards saying their names, but there was a warm presence, a jovial chauffeur, and a reliable tariff-free sedan, and they were not set back by at least 150 pounds...

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