Idioms of Migration Blues in Niyi Osundare’s Entry Point Encounter
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Date
2024
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Abstract
The Nigerian literary landscape abounds with works whose main preoccupation has been with migration and attendant diasporic concerns. Writers and scholars have regularly looked at varying impacts of relocation on citizens and by implication, the nation. Migration, which could also be another word for displacement, as an activity that inevitably moves people from familiar territories to new, somewhat strange environments, is often fraught with its own apprehensions coupled with awkward experiences. Regardless of the migrant’s secret expectations of probable positive change, the arduous demands of immigration processes can render the sojourner frustrated and vulnerable. Particularly, anxieties can arise for the immigrant where admittance rules tend to fluctuate from an immigration officer’s whims to unwritten codes of qualification for admittance. As a result, a prospective immigrant’s encounters with minders of the critical intersections of immigration entry points may either exacerbate, or alleviate the immigrant’s burden. In light of the above-stated issues, this paper examined representations of typical frustrating immigration experiences presented in Niyi Osundare’s: “Entry Point Encounter” a poem in Pages from the Book of the Sun (2002). The paper was able to conclude, through a critical examination of this poem that immigrants from Africa, in this case represented by a Nigerian, that although lawfully exercising their rights to unhampered movement as citizens of a free world, are often subjected to racist treatment such as racial profiling, provocation, and other acts of deliberate disrespect of their persons based on pre-conceived, but unjustifiable discrimination.