The margins or the metropole? The location of home in Odia Ofeimun’s London letter and other poems

This essay locates London Letter and Other Poems, a work by the Nigerian poet, Odia Ofeimun, in the context of the growing tradition of postcolonial travel writing, underscoring its inevitable reconciliation of personal memory with colonial history. In arguing that the poet problematises the burden of self– definition, the paper suggests that Ofeimun’s elaborate exposition of his preference for the metropolitan identity that the urban space creates in his theoretical reflection is a metaphor for appropriating the hybrid constitution of postcolonial identity.