Translating the Ocean

By engaging key thematic concerns in African diasporic literature such as identity, cultural negotiation, nostalgia, grief, and spirituality, this thesis—an anthology of poems titled Translating the Ocean—positions itself within a “third space” where home and diaspora interact to reflect the multi-spatiality of diasporic bodies. Alongside a diasporic framework, I incorporate other theories and techniques, including the “Portrait” and “Rest and Silence” modes of universality in lyric poetry, ambiguous loss, creolization, and transliteration, to enable interstitial discourse within the collection. I argue that diasporic writers—such as Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie, Buchi Emecheta, Romeo Oriogun, and myself—continue to embrace multiple sites of meaning-making that complicate simplistic notions of the African diasporic experiences. By juxtaposing multiple cultural worlds of the homeland and host land, Translating the Ocean interrogates the ocean as a metaphor for transit—as a journey and of time.