Syl Cheney-Coker: Poet of Exile, Memory, and Resistance in African Literature

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Introduction

Syl Cheney-Coker, born in 1947 in Freetown, Sierra Leone, stands as one of the most compelling literary figures in African literature. A poet, journalist, novelist, and professor, Cheney-Coker’s work is deeply informed by the political and cultural landscapes of postcolonial Africa—especially his native Sierra Leone. His poetry and prose offer powerful meditations on exile, colonialism, Creole identity, and the burden of historical memory. Through a body of work that blends personal reflection with public commentary, Cheney-Coker has become an indispensable voice in the post-independence African canon.

Early Literary Influences and Poetic Beginnings

Although Cheney-Coker is widely associated with the publication of The Graveyard Also Has Teeth (1980), he had been writing and publishing poetry since the early 1970s. His debut collection, Concerto for an Exile (1973), immediately positioned him as a poet of emotional intensity and political introspection.

Early in his career, Cheney-Coker drew upon the negritude movement, whose founding figures—particularly Léopold Sédar Senghor—influenced both his imagery and thematic focus. Negritude, which celebrated Black identity and heritage in the face of colonial erasure, offered Cheney-Coker a literary compass to navigate the complexities of race, displacement, and cultural memory. However, while negritude’s aesthetics shaped his early voice, Cheney-Coker's poetry quickly evolved into something more idiosyncratically Sierra Leonean.

Creole Identity and the Weight of History

In Concerto for an Exile, Cheney-Coker wrestles with his Creole identity—a cultural heritage rooted in the descendants of freed slaves who returned to Sierra Leone from the Americas and the Caribbean. This group, privileged during colonial times, held a complex position in Sierra Leone’s postcolonial reality. Cheney-Coker explores this cultural inheritance with sensitivity, interrogating both its legacies and its burdens.

The titular poem “Concerto for an Exile” exemplifies this thematic thrust. In it, the poet grapples with the long shadow cast by conquest, enslavement, and the dislocation of African peoples. The speaker’s exile—whether physical, psychological, or spiritual—becomes a metaphor for the wider African postcolonial condition, where freedom is always haunted by memory.

This collection reflects Cheney-Coker’s commitment to crafting a poetic idiom capable of accommodating Sierra Leone’s layered history. His language is rich with contradiction, moving fluidly between lyrical beauty and stark political critique.

From Personal Lament to Public Discourse

While Concerto for an Exile places the poet’s tormented self at the center, Cheney-Coker’s next major collection, The Graveyard Also Has Teeth (1980), shifts its focus outward. Here, the poems act as public meditations on Sierra Leone’s turbulent postcolonial landscape.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were marked by military coups, corruption, and economic instability in Sierra Leone. Cheney-Coker’s poetry from this period responds to these crises with urgency and ferocity. He reflects on political violence, extrajudicial killings, and the trauma of national disintegration. The graveyard in the title becomes a symbol not only of death, but of a nation devoured by its own contradictions.

His role in this collection is as both witness and prophet—a voice crying out against injustice, yet never detached from the despair of his people. Poetry becomes a mode of resistance, of keeping memory alive in the face of systemic amnesia.

Exile as Liberation: The Blood in the Desert’s Eye (1990)

By the time Cheney-Coker published The Blood in the Desert’s Eye (1990), his thematic focus had sharpened further. The motifs of exile and alienation remain, but exile is no longer purely tragic—it is, paradoxically, a kind of liberation.

In this collection, Cheney-Coker seems to embrace exile as a way to escape the limitations and brutalities of the postcolony. The poems are imbued with a cosmopolitan sensibility, reflecting the poet’s global perspective and diasporic identity. Here, the desert becomes a space of both spiritual testing and creative freedom—a stark yet fertile terrain for personal and political revelation.

Prose Achievement: The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar

In 1990, Cheney-Coker expanded his literary repertoire with the publication of his first novel, The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar. A sprawling, ambitious work, the novel charts the historical, cultural, and political evolution of Sierra Leone through the fictional lens of Alusine Dunbar, a descendant of freed slaves who returned from the New World.

The novel's style is heavily influenced by the Latin American Boom literature of the 1960s and 1970s, particularly the works of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. Cheney-Coker employs magical realism—a narrative mode that blends the fantastical with the real—to illuminate the spiritual and political trials of postcolonial Africa.

The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for the African Region in 1991. It is now recognized as one of the pioneering examples of magical realism in African fiction. Through it, Cheney-Coker reimagines Sierra Leone’s past as a mythic, cyclical journey marked by hope, betrayal, and survival.

Literary Legacy and Impact

Syl Cheney-Coker’s work occupies a unique space in African literature. As a Creole writer steeped in the intellectual traditions of both the African continent and the African diaspora, his literary production defies easy categorization. His poetry is at once personal and political, lyrical and philosophical. His fiction, too, resists conventional realism, opting instead for symbolic and imaginative reconstructions of African history.

More than just chronicling events, Cheney-Coker’s writing interrogates what it means to belong—to a nation, to a people, to a history. His themes of exile, identity, death, and redemption resonate not only with Sierra Leonean readers, but with anyone grappling with the legacies of colonialism and displacement.

Conclusion

Syl Cheney-Coker is more than a poet or a novelist; he is a literary cartographer of the African soul. Through his poetry and prose, he has charted the difficult terrain of memory, exile, and identity in postcolonial Africa. His work demands that we confront the ghosts of our histories and ask how art might bear witness to loss—and, perhaps, offer the possibility of renewal. In doing so, Cheney-Coker ensures that even the graveyard, too, will have teeth.