Migration and the African Imagination in Chris Abani’s GraceLand and Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

Migration from the postcolonial periphery to the Western metropolis is one of the defining narratives of contemporary world literature, and a comparison of Chris Abani's GraceLand and Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy illuminates how writers from South East Nigeria and Antigua construct the experience of young Africans and Caribbeans who must negotiate the complex inheritances of colonialism while building new lives in the global North. This study examined how both novels use the figure of the young migrant arriving in a metropolis (Lagos in Abani's case, New York in Kincaid's) as a vehicle for exploring the psychological costs of cultural dislocation and the construction of postcolonial selfhood. A comparative postcolonial migration theory methodology was applied. Both protagonists are young, ambitious, and deeply shaped by their colonial education and the ambivalent legacies of their home cultures. Both novels use the contrast between idealised Western culture as absorbed through colonial education and the disappointing reality of the West as actually experienced as the engine of their narrative irony. The analysis revealed that while Kincaid's Lucy is characterised by an angry feminist consciousness directed at both colonial culture and the American domestic space she enters, Abani's Elvis moves within a Lagos that is itself a site of migration and cultural hybridity before he attempts literal departure. The study recommends this pairing for undergraduate migration and literature courses at universities in the South East zone.

Keywords: migration, postcolonial identity, Abani, Kincaid, diaspora fiction