CARTOGRAPHIES AND GEOGRAPHIES OF MIGRANT SPACES: A GEOCRITICAL EVALUATION OF MIGRANT SPACES IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN DIASPORA LITERATURE

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between geography, space and African literature. Using texts from three regions of Africa, this work evaluates how African diaspora literature engages in a sort of mapping to detail the experiences, silence, and patterns of and within African migrant spaces. It looks at storytelling as a form of mapping used to represent migrant spaces in Meg Vandermerwe’s Zebra Crossing, Helon Habila’s Travellers and Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence is my Mother Tongue. It further explicates these narratives to reveal the crevices and interstices hidden within migrant spaces concealed by the writer cum cartographer. It draws on ideas from Bertrand Westphal and Robert Tally Jr's geocriticism and spatiality to engage in a detailed analysis of African literature and demonstrate how African writers use their writing as cartographic designs that could guide Africans embarking on transnational journeys. This paper thus reveals that African literary writers map migrant spaces to present the African society with the realities of cross-border migration and just like maps, these kinds of narratives become guides to future Africans that want to embark on journeys across borders. It concludes that spatiality offers multidisciplinary trajectories of envisioning and understanding the African migrant spaces just as maps could guide strangers in unfamiliar terrains.