Tracing the 'Missing Link' Postcolonial Reconfigurations and Diaporic Imaginations in Funso Aiyejina's Writings

<p>This essay traces the development and roles of postcolonial reconfigurations and diasporic imaginaries in Funso Aiyejina's works. At once historical, political, and poetic, yet personal and universal, Aiyejina's writing has remained committed over the years to drawing on self-reflexivity and African myths to address wider concerns of ethnicity, time, and geography. I argue that Aiyejina's image of home and dislocation articulates migrant aesthetics by evoking African epistemologies in such a way that his earlier and ongoing modes of marginality serve as an intellectual currency for connecting his earlier and current works. In this essay, my focus will be on Aiyejina's poetry books, <em>A Letter to Lynda and Other Poems </em>(1988), <em>I, the Supreme and Other Poems</em> (2006), and <em>The Errors of the Rendering</em> (2020), as well as his work of fiction, <em>The Legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories (</em>1999).</p>