8 (Rodopi Perspectives On Modern Literature 29 - Book & NTSC DVD) Michael Hanne, Michael Hanne - Creativity in Exile - Rodopi (2004)

CREATIVITY I N EXILE
Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature
29
Edited by
David Bevan
CREATIVITY I N EXILE
Edited by
Michael Hanne
Amsterdam- New York, NY 2004

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of "ISO
9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence".
ISBN: 90-420-1833-X (DVD in PAL) (Bound)

ISBN: 90-420-1843-7 (DVD inNTSC) (Bound)
©Editions Rodopi B.V, Amsterdam - New York, NY 2004
Printed in The Netherlands
CONTENTS
1 Creativity and Exile: An Introduction 1

Michael Hanne
2 Poem: 'Can You Tell Me?' 13

Yilma Tafere Tasew
3 Performance (D VD) 19
Burundi Drummers
4 Resisting the Anomie: Exile and the Romantic Self 21

Chris Abani
5 Interview and Poems: 'Ode to Joy, '1971', 'People Like 31

Us' (DVD)
Chris Abani
6 Poem for Chris Abani: 'Parts of Speech' 35

Kapka Kassabova
7 Film: Three Riders of the Apocalypse (DVD) 37

Shahin Yazdani
8 Exile and the Philosophical Challenge to Citizenship 41

Farhang Erfani and John Whitmire
9 Exile, Empire and the Convict Diaspora: The Return of 57

Magwitch
Kirsty Reid
10 Exile at the Edges of Empire: Contemporary Writing in 71

Portuguese
Isabel Moutinho
11 Audio Installation with Sculptural Images: 87

'Thought Exiled from the Tongue' (DVD)
Dolleen Manning
12 Catastrophe, Memory, and Testimony in Winona 89
LaDuke's Last Standing Woman
Hsinya Huang
13 American Literary Exiles: The Escape from Anguish 107

Peter Karsten
14 Interview, Poems, and a Short Story: 'Fingers', 119

'Kyrenia', 'Don't Forget', and 'Ledra Street' (DVD)
Nora Nadjarian
15 The Poetics of Exile in the Inter-war Novels of Irina 125

Odoevtseva
Xenia Srebrianski Harwell
16 Interview and Poems: 'Refugees', 'Coming to Paradise', 135

'Immigrant Architectures', 'My Life in Two Parts',
'In the Shadow of a Bridge' (DVD)
Kapka Kassabova
17 The Myth of the Great Return: Memory, Longing and 141

Forgetting in Milan Kundera's Ignorance
Fiona J. Doloughan
18 Exile in Redemption: S.Y. Agnon's Only Yesterday 151

Arnold J. Band
19 Exile and Revolt: Arab and Afro-American Poets in 159

Dialogue
Saddik Gohar
20 Annexing the Land of Exile: Language and History in 183

the Work of Assia Djebar
Trudy Agar
21 Creating a Poetics in Exile: The Development of an 193

Ethnic Palestinian-American Culture
Nir Yehudai
22 Poems: 'Do not live a day in a homeland's memory' 205
and 'O fire be peaceful' (DVD)
Emad Jabbar
23 Poem for Basim Furat, Emad Jabbar and Yilma Tafere 211
Tasew: 'Exiles'
Nora Nadjarian
24 Exile and Memory: Re-membering Home After the 213

Partition of Bengal
Urbashi Barat
25 Film Excerpts: A Taste of Place: Stories of Food and 227

Longing (DVD)
Shuchi Kothari and Sarina Pearson
26 Food and the Exile 229

Hilary Funnell
27 The Other Side of Exile: Malaysian Writers Who Stayed 245

Behind
Zawiah Yahya
28 The Cultivation of Exile: Qi Biaojia and His Allegory 255

Mountain
Duncan Campbell
29 A Sense of Place: Colombian Artists on Violence and 270

Exile
Marta Jimena Cabrera
30 Fading into Metaphor: Globalization and the 283

Disappearance of Exile
Rudolphus Teeuwen
1
Creativity and Exile: An Introduction

Michael Hanne
Michael Hanne was born and grew up in Britain. Following studies in

French and Italian at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow, with
periods of research in Paris and Rome, he migrated to New Zealand to
teach Italian language and literature at the University of Auckland. In
1996 he founded the university’s programme in Comparative
Literature. Over the years he has had the opportunity of travelling, for
extended periods of research and teaching, to many parts of the world,
including Australia, Canada, the USA, Italy, India, Indonesia, Japan,
Sweden, Croatia and the Republic of Georgia. He is in no sense an
exile, well aware that his extensive journeying has been undertaken by
choice and from a position of privilege. He edited a previous volume
for Rodopi, Literature and Travel (1993) and wrote The Power of the
Story: Fiction and Political Change (Berghahn, 1996). In July 2003,
he co-ordinated the conference The Poetics of Exile from which the
present project grew.
In this introduction he draws attention to the distinctive features of the
project: the great ethnic and cultural diversity of its contributors, many
with intense personal experience of geographical and cultural
dislocation; the acknowledgement it offers of the wide range of
circumstances and experiences now covered by the umbrella-term
‘exile’; its concern with the part played historically by colonization
and currently by globalization in bringing about massive
displacements of human beings around the world; its recognition of
the rich variety of means, from poetry, to film, to music, to painting
and sculpture, to cooking and the creation of gardens, with which
people in exile have expressed their creativity; its use of the DVD
format, alongside the printed volume, for the presentation of studio
interviews, readings, and creative materials in many media.
In 1956 the International PEN Club Centre for Writers in Exile, based
in London, published an impressive volume of essays, poetry, and
short stories entitled The Pen in Exile. In her Foreword to the
collection, British historian C.V. Wedgwood referred to the “fortitude
and integrity” of the contributors, as “writers who have been
compelled by harsh circumstance to leave their homes” (Tabori 1956:
3). Hungarian-born Paul Tabori, in his Editor’s Preface, described the
2 Michael Hanne
“almost impossible task” faced by writers who, having fled the threat
of imprisonment or death in their homeland, sought to communicate
something of their experiences to readers who had had no such
experience. On the one hand, he wrote, readers often found their
accounts “melodramatic, unreal, lacking credibility” (1956: 5). A
powerful poem, ‘Indictment’, by Estonian writer Maria Under,
included in that collection, may well have evoked just such a response
in some readers. It begins:
I cry with all my people’s lungs and lips:
A terrible, unbearable disease
Has struck our land – a blight of gallows-trees,
A plague of deadly fear that sears and grips.
(Tabori 1956: 100)
Other writers, said Tabori, found themselves accused of “nostalgia, of

turning to the past, refusing to face the realities of the present”, though
“what else could the exile be except nostalgic and homesick?” (1956:
6). Wedgwood, while acknowledging that it would be no great
consolation to them for the “evils and sorrows” they had endured,
noted that they were following in the footsteps of some of the greatest
writers of all time, including Dante Alighieri, who composed his
Divina Commedia in exile from the Florentine city-state (1956: 3).
Despite the quality and emotional force of much of the work
included, and the continuing validity of these comments by
Wedgwood and Tabori, readers of The Pen in Exile today will be
immediately struck by the narrow basis for selection of the writers, in
terms not only of their geographical and ethnic origins, but of the
contexts from which they had fled. While Wedgwood referred to the
volume as representing “a cross-section of modern writing” by writers
in exile, the reader in the twenty-first century will note that, of the
forty-three contributors, all except two were survivors of Nazi German
rule and/or had emigrated from the Soviet bloc – indeed, thirty-four of
them were born in Estonia, Latvia, Poland, or Hungary. The only non-
European contributor was Tung Shih-tsin, who had fled Communist
China in 1949. For the purposes of that volume, published in deepest
Cold War Britain, the category ‘exiles’ was deemed to consist entirely
of writers who had fled fascism or communism (mostly in Central and
Eastern Europe) to take up residence in Western Europe, the United
States or Israel. Most had been intellectuals in their country of origin,
who subsequently joined or formed communities of intellectuals in the
countries where they sought exile.
Creativity and Exile: An Introduction 3
Just how much has changed over the years in our conception
and depiction of ‘writers in exile’ is evident from the merest glance at
the work of International PEN today, which offers a model of global
inclusiveness and activism. The Eurocentric bias of fifty years ago has
gone. The organisation is now represented in around one hundred
countries and its Writers in Exile Committee assists refugee and
émigré writers from every continent, as well as working with human
rights advocates, diplomats, and NGOs to protect writers facing
extreme risk in their homelands. PEN Canada is at the forefront of this
activism, working in particular to establish placement opportunities
for exiled, immigrant, and refugee writers from many countries at
Canadian universities, colleges, and learning centres. Their Writers in
Exile Network lists writers from eighteen countries, ranging from
Afghanistan to Bosnia to Eritrea to Peru to Sri Lanka. Other
organisations, such as Exiled Writers Ink! (UK), offer opportunities to
writers originating in every continent, to meet and publish their work
on-line. (See their beautifully produced website at:
www.exiledwriters.co.uk, which presents not only written texts of
work in translation, but also haunting samples of work read by authors
in, for instance, the original Arabic.) Other on-line publications which
welcome the work of exiled writers include: Words Without Borders:
The Online Magazine for International Literature at
www.wordswithoutborders.org/.
The present project, Creativity in Exile, displays and examines
the extraordinary creative endeavours in a wide range of media of men
and women originating in almost every part of the world, who, for a
host of different reasons, have experienced displacement from their
homelands. It brings together papers by academics, many of whom
have experienced exile themselves, on a vast array of topics associated
with artistic production in exile, which are interspersed with poems by
contemporary writers in exile. The accompanying DVD comprises:
studio interviews with notable exiled writers, extracts from two films
relating to exile, live readings of poetry by their authors, an audio and
sculptural installation, and a performance by a group of musicians in
exile. It aims to illustrate just how productive, on the human, the
aesthetic, and the intellectual level, a broadly inclusive conception of
‘artists in exile’ can be.
Even the terminology associated with the field has altered over
the last half century. In the 1950s, the designation of someone as an
‘exile’ was widely used, as it had been through the twenties and
thirties, alternately with ‘émigré’. For both words, as Christine
4 Michael Hanne
Brooke-Rose has written, “the clanging connotations are of suffering

in banishment, but also of springing forth into a new life, beyond the
boundaries of the familiar” (Brooke-Rose 1998: 9). The implied
emphasis of both terms was on the individuality of the person who had
fled an intolerable political situation. For those who had not
personally experienced such a trauma, there was even a certain
glamour attached to the figure of ‘the exiled writer’. Since then, with
the sheer growth in numbers of those fleeing international and
intercommunal conflict, repression, and religious or ethnic
persecution, those forced to live away from the country of their birth
have come to be referred to less and less as ‘exiles’, and much more
frequently as ‘refugees’, ‘displaced persons’, and ‘asylum-seekers’, of
whom only quite a small number will be writers or artists. While each
term has its own particular weighting, their use, in the words of
Rudolphus Teeuwen in the final paper for this book, represents “a
shift in perspective away from individual distress and escape toward
international crowd control”.
The concept of exile has been further complicated, in the
context of globalization, by ever-more-massive population movements
motivated, in contributing countries, by the desire for economic
improvement and, in the host countries, by a demand for labour, at
both the skilled end of the spectrum and at the low-skilled, and low-
paid, end. Depending on their skill-level, and on their desirability in
the eyes of governmental authorities and employers in the host
countries, they are variously categorised along a continuum that runs
from ‘expatriates’ and ‘economic migrants’ to ‘guest workers’ and
‘illegal aliens’ and live their lives at points on an economic and social
scale that extends from extreme luxury to abject poverty. While all
live at a distance from their place of birth and most express a sense of
loss in relation to ‘home’, such diversity of human experience cannot
readily be conveyed by a single term, such as ‘exiles’. Russian-born
poet Joseph Brodsky opened his address to a conference on writing in
exile held in Vienna in 1987 with these salutary words:
As we gather here, in this attractive and well-lit room, on this cold
December evening, to discuss the plight of the writer in exile, let us
pause for a minute and imagine some of those who, quite naturally,
didn’t make it to this room. Let us imagine, for instance, Turkish
Gastarbeiter prowling the streets of West Germany, uncomprehending
or envious of the surrounding reality. Or let us imagine Vietnamese
boat people bobbing on high seas or already settled somewhere in the
Australian outback. Let us imagine Mexican wetbacks crawling the
ravines of Southern California, past the border patrols into the
territory of the United States. Or let us imagine shiploads of Pakistanis
disembarking somewhere in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, hungry for

menial jobs the oil-rich locals won’t do... Whatever the proper name
for these people, whatever their motives, origins, and destinations,
whatever their impact on the societies which they abandon and to
which they come may amount to – one thing is absolutely clear: they
make it very difficult to talk about the plight of the writer in exile with
a straight face. (Brodsky 1994: 3)
If the designation ‘exile’ has almost disappeared from popular

use as referring to individuals, it has nevertheless been appropriated as
an abstract term by some intellectuals and given an at least partially
metaphorical turn. As a paper by Farhang Erfani and John Whitmire
points out, twentieth-century philosophers, from Heidegger to Sartre
and beyond, came to identify being exiled as a primary human
condition: in an existential sense we are all ‘not at home’. Moreover,
as the paper by Rudolphus Teeuwen, already mentioned, suggests,
thinkers in the post-modern period have tended to embrace the
intellectual stance of the metaphorical exile, to glorify the mental
travelling, the double vision, as both insider and outsider, that such a
posture makes possible. This has had the effect of devaluing the
reality of the terror and the loss experienced by those who have fled
for their lives from war or famine, witnessed barbarities, seen family
members killed, and ended up as refugees in countries which have
often been less than wholly welcoming. In Teeuwen’s words: “Once
the designation of a horrible fate, ‘exile’ today is a term so eagerly
embraced that a deep forgetting of what it means to be an exile must
be at the root of it”. One of the first aims of the present project is to
counter such a tendency, by including work by Ethiopian Yilma
Tafere Tasew, Nigerian-born Chris Abani, and Iranian Shahin
Yazdani, whose personal experience of dislocation from their
homelands has been appallingly non-metaphorical.
Alongside these very necessary reality checks come several
others. While, to the publishers of the 1956 volume, the division
between the countries forcing writers and others into exile and the
countries receiving them seemed clear-cut – Paul Tabori wrote of
aiming to “build a few bridges between the readers of the free world
and the exiled writers” (Tabori 1956: 5) – the current project
highlights the part played historically by the countries of that so-called
‘free world’, not only in directly bringing about enforced displacement
of vast numbers of peoples through their imperial ventures, but of
establishing the political, economic, and social conditions that are, to
this day, contributing to further large-scale displacements. In the
words of Kirsty Reid, one of the contributors to this volume, exile is
6 Michael Hanne
not just an occasional or incidental effect of colonization, but one of

the ‘marks of empire’. So, for instance, Saddik Gohar’s paper alludes
to the exile to which African slaves traded to the Americas were
subjected. Isabel Moutinho’s paper reminds us of the many forms of
deportation practised by successive governments in the name of the
Portuguese Empire, ranging from the forcible transportation of two
hundred Jewish children from Portugal to the island of São Tomé off
the west coast of Africa in the 1490s, to the movement of indentured
workers from its African colonies to Timor in more recent times.
Kirsty Reid examines the practice within the British Empire in the
nineteenth century of transporting convicts to colonies as diverse as
Australia, Bermuda, and Gibraltar. The artwork of Dolleen Manning
and the paper of Hsinya Huang treat the land usurpations, enforced
resettlements, and, indeed, near eradication of indigenous peoples in
the processes by which Europeans colonised the Americas.
Other contributions focus on kinds of displacement which have
occurred following the supposed decolonization of certain territories,
in particular as a consequence of partition and other decisions relating
to boundaries. So, in her paper, Urbashi Barat explores the human
effects of the partition of Bengal between India and (initially) East
Pakistan, whereas the poetry of Nora Nadjarian (which she reads in
the interview on the DVD) relates to the nearly thirty-year partition of
Cyprus into a Turkish northern sector and a Greek southern sector.
Others again concern the double or multiple nature of many of the
processes of human displacement seen in recent times. Both Saddik
Gohar’s and Nir Yehudai’s papers treat the displacement of millions
of Palestinians by Jewish refugees, who themselves fled from
persecution in Europe and elsewhere. Nora Nadjarian refers to the fact
that her family, of Armenian origin, having first sought refuge in
Cyprus from Asia Minor, experienced a second exile with the partition
of that island.
In our conception of the present project, it seemed important
also not to limit the focus just to writing in exile, but rather to
communicate something of the rich diversity of media in which
displaced persons express their creativity. While many of the papers
do deal with poetry and narrative fiction – from Africa, from Europe,
the Middle East, India, South East Asia, and the Americas – others
treat such topics as: the way in which refugees and migrants use
cooking to maintain links with their homelands (Hilary Funnell); the
creation of a vast and beautiful garden by an exiled Chinese official in
the seventeenth century (Duncan Campbell); the anonymous personal
testimonies of ordinary people separated from their homes by the

partition of Bengal (Urbashi Barat); the expression of protest at the
mass displacements of communities in Colombia through paintings
and visual installations (Marta Jimena Cabrera); the production and
display of traditional weaving, embroidery, dresses, and other
domestic artefacts by Palestinians living in the USA (Nir Yehudai).
By considering creative work in media other than the written word, we
were able to draw into the project – and, to a striking degree, into the
conference from which these publications derive – a much wider
constituency of creative people in exile than would otherwise have
been possible.
The availability of the DVD format greatly facilitated the plan
to include work in a range of media. So, the reader/viewer/listener will
find: a musical performance (drumming by a group of refugees from
Burundi now living in New Zealand); a complete short film (by
Iranian Shahin Yazdani); a multi-layered sound recording in Ojibwe
and English by First Nations Canadian Dolleen Manning with
accompanying images; a live performance by Iraqi poet Emad Jabbar
in Arabic, with English-sub-titles; and an extract from a documentary
film by Shuchi Kothari and Sarina Pearson, A Taste of Place: Stories
of Food and Longing, showing an Ethiopian refugee preparing food
from her homeland.
Whereas Paul Tabori, back in the 1950s, saw writers in exile as
too often trapped in the binary modes of, on the one hand, outrage at
the circumstances which had made flight necessary and, on the other,
nostalgia for their lost homeland, this collection displays an almost
infinite range of emotions, thoughts, insights, and creative responses
demonstrated by people of different personal make-up and different
cultures, whose concrete experiences of displacement and alienation,
and whose linguistic, family, and educational situations, vary greatly.
I can only offer the merest hint of that range here.
Many of the works reproduced or discussed here focus directly
on the devastating sense of loss felt by those who have been cast out
of their homeland. The range of psychological states experienced –
anger, mourning, nostalgia, anxiety, loss of identity – and the imagery
employed to express them are almost infinite. So, in his paper, Saddik
Gohar quotes Mahmud Darwish, who has written of Palestinian
refugees as being both uprooted and shattered:
we are what’s left of us in exile

we are the plants of broken vase
we are what we are but who are we?
8 Michael Hanne
The anguish is all the more acute when loved ones have been left
behind and news of them is hard to get. Yilma Tafere Tasew, a
refugee from Ethiopia, in the poem which appears next in this volume,
asks:
Can you tell me?

How my Mum is doing? Is Mum hungry?
Thirsty? Sick? In agony? Naked?
For some writers and creative artists, forced to live away from
their place of birth, the first priority is to maintain their original
national and cultural identity as fully as possible, to construct a home-
away-from-home. Their subject matter, their audience, and, in the case
of writers, their language, are almost exclusively linked to the place,
and, frequently the time, they have been cut off from. Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, living in exile in a forested part of Vermont, was a
famous example of such a writer, who, many would argue,
nevertheless became increasingly cut off from the realities of his
beloved Russia. To the extent that the work of such writers records
their experience of an adoptive country, it shows the absence of real
engagement with the people and the culture they encounter, and in
some cases the perceived hostility of the local population. (In the
words of a Pakistani taxi-driver in New Zealand, quoted in Kothari
and Pearson’s film: “They like our food more than they like us.”)
Others, however, interact vigorously with their new environment, and
some go so far as to forge some kind of new, hybrid identity for
themselves. Several papers and creative pieces describe the very
different forms of hybridity which individuals may arrive at. Xenia
Srebrianski Harwell examines the work of a Russian woman émigré
writer whose young émigré characters adopt a range of identities as
they grow up in France. In general, of course, the capacity to adapt is
determined by the age at which the person migrates, but Fiona
Doloughan’s paper takes up the remarkable case of Milan Kundera
who fled Czechoslovakia for France in his mid-forties, and has not
only written increasingly of characters living outside his and their
country of origin but shifted to actually writing in French.
There are other facets to the question of language for the
creative person in exile. Indigenous peoples, who have, through
colonization, war, theft and/or legislative manipulation been
dispossessed of their land, frequently find themselves exiled also from
their language. Hsinya Huang’s paper and Dolleen Manning’s audio
installation on the DVD both deal with the attempts of First Nations
peoples in North America to resist linguistic theft. Trudy Agar’s paper
explores the complex situation of an Algerian woman writer Assia
Djebar whose French education has, to a large extent, cut her off from
the language and world of the women she grew up with. At the same
time, Djebar concedes the uncomfortable truth that her ability to write
in French, the language of ‘yesterday’s enemy’, has freed her from
some of the most fundamental features of Algerian patriarchal control.
Zawiah Yahya examines another dimension again of the ‘language
question’ in the postcolonial situation: the dilemma of English-
language writers in Malaysia after independence, as the authorities
asserted the primacy of Malay in education, journalism, and literature.
Chris Abani, in his paper and his interview, introduces some of
the many dilemmas faced by writers and, by implication, artists
working in exile, which are then taken up by other commentators. To
what extent should the fact of being in exile constitute his or her (sole)
subject matter and focus? How is the person who has suffered torture,
imprisonment, or the threat of execution in their country of origin to
handle the special consideration offered, not only by members of the
public, but even by government authorities, in the receiving country?
Bulgarian-born Kapka Kassabova, who eschews the title of ‘exile’,
declaring that she is simply an economic migrant, acknowledges in an
interview that, for her, at least, there is a strange kind of comfort to be
found in not being tied to a single location, and that being displaced
serves as a clear motivating factor for much of her writing.
Nevertheless, in the course of that interview, she reads poems in
which she identifies with those, especially refugees, who do not have
that luxury:
We must remember – memory is hope.

But quietly, for words can cut out gaps in us
So wide we’d find
Too many bodies lying there
Several contributors note a tendency among creative people in exile to

transmute their own bitter experience into an affinity with others in
distress. In Chris Abani’s words, “the condition of exile allows us to
explore an international/human identity”, to develop a universal
empathy. This is a topic explored in depth by Saddik Gohar in his
study of Afro-American poets who have delved into their own
experience of exile and alienation to find empathy with the sufferings
of the Palestinians.
10 Michael Hanne
Gohar highlights another issue which, however, divides groups

of displaced persons from each other: the question of return. For
some, the belief, however much or little rationally based, that they, or
at least their descendants, will be able to return to the homeland they
have lost is fundamental. That, he asserts, is the conviction of the
great majority of Palestinians. For other groups, all hope of a return
has been abandoned – time has passed, borders have been redrawn,
oppressive regimes have established an unshakeable grasp on power,
ethnic or religious groups have seized all the land, or a political
situation has been sanctioned by international authorities. Three
papers in this volume explore more nuanced situations. Isabel
Moutinho examines a novel set in Timor, during the Salazar regime,
in which the central character, supposedly ‘exiled’ from Portugal,
refuses not only to consider returning to the metropolis but to feel any
nostalgia for the land of his birth. The Czech-born characters in Milan
Kundera’s Ignorance, discussed by Fiona Doloughan, achieve their
long-held dream of returning to the country from which they have
been exiled, only to discover that their lives in their adopted countries
have more reality to them than what they have returned to find. The
plot of Israeli writer S.Y. Agnon’s Only Yesterday is shown by Arnold
Band to lead to an equally counter-intuitive outcome when the
idealistic hopes of the naive young Zionist settler from Galicia, who
returns to ‘the promised land’, are dashed.
There were many possible principles according to which this
publication – the book and the DVD – might have been organised. My
initial assumption was that a thematic sequence would work best, but,
as I hope this introductory essay has demonstrated, the thematic links
between items constitute an intricate network rather than a straight
line. Somewhat to my surprise, it seemed that a broadly geographical
sequence would work better, starting, as we know all human
movement did, in Africa, then proceeding to Europe, with a detour to
North America, proceeding around the Mediterranean, across the
Middle East, to India and South East Asia, with brief visits to China
and Latin America. Given that the conference to which reference has
several times been made took place in New Zealand, readers may be
surprised that there is little reference to exile as it relates to the South
Pacific, and especially to the many forms of dispossession – territorial,
cultural and linguistic – which indigenous peoples have suffered in
this region at the hands of European settlers. It is not a matter of our
focusing on tragedies occurring at a distance, while failing to notice
those which have taken place in our own backyard. It is rather that my
colleagues Hilary Chung and Leonard Bell are planning a separate

volume (publisher and title still unconfirmed), encompassing Pacific-
related materials not only from this conference, but from two earlier
conferences convened by Bell, and I invite readers of this project to
look out for it.
It seems invidious to refer too much to the conference The
Poetics of Exile (Auckland, July 2003), which most readers of this
volume will not have had the opportunity to attend. Nevertheless I feel
it is appropriate in concluding this essay to refer to the session with
which that conference ended. The conference was remarkable, not
only for the contributions by over 200 outstanding academics, writers,
and artists from forty-seven countries, who travelled long distances to
take part, but also for the participation of a large number of ‘local’
refugees and migrants – people from Afghanistan and Ethiopia, Iraq
and former Yugoslavia, China, Vietnam and Argentina who have
settled in New Zealand, and who are contributing their creativity in
many different and often unexpected ways to this country. The final
session of the conference was slated as an Open Forum. To the delight
of the organisers, it was several of the local refugees, who had often
sat quiet over the preceding days, but who now, without prompting,
stood up one by one to recount their own personal stories and to
explain the importance of having their experiences and creative
contributions acknowledged. Several academics who had prepared
brief contributions to round off the event held back from doing so,
knowing that these were the voices which would echo in our
memories of the event.
My thanks:
I offer gratitude in equal measure to those who travelled thousands of
kilometres to participate in the conference and to the many ‘local’
refugees and migrants whose writings, music, visual art work, and
moving personal testimonies ensured that the academic discussion
remained anchored in human reality. My thanks go also to Auckland
City Council and Waitakere City Council for assisting several recent
refugees to attend with grants from the Creative New Zealand
Communities Fund. Major financial assistance with the costs of
production of the DVD was received from three community funding
organisations: Pub Charity, the Scottwood Group, and the Southern
Trust. Alison Steiner, at the University of Auckland, was instrumental
in obtaining that funding. Mark Summerville and the team from
12 Michael Hanne
Zoomslide Media have done a wonderful job in production of the

DVD. Monica Conlon, Richard von Sturmer, Hilary Chung, and the
fifteen students who participated in the graduate course COMPLIT
702 Poetics of Exile, which ran alongside the conference, not only
gave much practical assistance in the running of the conference but
contributed greatly to the ongoing development of this project. Of
these students, Laura Macfehin and Ruth Diver also provided valuable
assistance with the editing and proofreading of the text. Hilary
Funnell, whose fine paper on ‘Food and the Exile’ appears in the
book, has performed the role of editorial assistant to the whole project
with tremendous intelligence, practical skill, and good humour.
Bibliography
Brodsky, Joseph. 1994. ‘The Condition We Call Exile: An Address’ in Robinson,

Marc (ed.) Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile. San Diego, New York,
London: Harcourt Brace: 3-11.
Brooke-Rose, Christine. 1998. ‘Exsul’, in Suleiman, Susan Rubin (ed.) Exile and
Creativity: Signposts, Travellers, Outsiders, Backward Glances. Durham
and London: Duke University Press: 9-24.
Tabori, Paul. 1956. The Pen in Exile: A Second Anthology of Exiled Writers. London:
International P.E.N. Club Centre.
2
Poem: ‘Can You Tell Me?’

Yilma Tafere Tasew
Yilma Tafere Tasew is from Ethiopia where he was a primary school

teacher and published small newspapers. He has always been a writer.
He was living in a small rural town in southern Ethiopia in May 1991
when rebels overthrew the Marxist Dergue regime. He heard shooting
and, not knowing what would come next, decided to move to the town
his parents were living in. With many roads blocked, he found
himself, with thousands of others, crossing the border into Kenya. He
never guessed it would be a one-way trip. The Kenyan government
was not accepting refugees as permanent residents, and for the next
eight years he lived in a series of refugee camps in arid northern
Kenya. He says of that period:
The first refugee camp where I stayed for more than two
years, 125 kms from the border of Ethiopia, was a nightmare.
Malaria, typhoid and hunger killed people every day.
Unknown armed gangs in the bush often killed refugees. You
heard guns firing every night and the sound of munitions
exploding in the camp. You didn’t know what would happen
from one day to the next.
He became a community organiser in the transit camp at Walda, and

was then transferred to the refugee-town of Kakuma, with its 47,000
residents from many countries. In September 1993, Yilma started a
refugee-run newspaper Kanebu that published news articles, short
stories, poems, artworks and interviews with UN officials about
conditions in the camps. From 1997 he was employed by UNHCR in
Nairobi as an assistant translator and transport officer. In 1999 he
moved as a refugee to New Zealand where he now lives. He is an
activist on behalf of refugees from all countries and his poetry is
central to his activism. A collection of his poems Agonising Wounds
was published in 2001 by the New Zealand Refugee and Migrant
Service. He believes that his is the first book to be published by an
African in New Zealand. He says of his own writing: ‘Through my
writings I have cried with my pain, I have shown my hunger, my
thirst, my homesickness. I have shown my views and ideas to the
world to say I am a human being who is part of the world.’
In the poem that follows, he asks the anguished questions which so
many exiles utter when they have left family members back home.
14 Yilma Tafere Tasew
Can You Tell Me?
The shining moon

Surrounded, guarded by twinkling stars
Can you tell me?
How my Mum is doing? Is Mum hungry?
Thirsty? Sick? In agony? Naked?
The shining moon

Can you tell me?
Our small cottage

Is it strong like before, or tilting?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Is my Mum’s hair full of grey?

Her face wrinkled?
Strong enough to collect firewood?
Has she planted cabbage, pumpkins, potato like before?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Is my brother alive
Who was forced to join the army ‘National Service’?
Is my sister who eloped coming back to visit Mum?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
What’s my Mother’s income?

Is she brewing local liqueur, beer, ‘Tela Arecki’?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Can You Tell Me? 15
Our neighbours
Emama Fatuma, Ababa Tolcha
Emama Aselefech, Ababa Zerayie
The rest, are they alive or dead?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
The green fertile field where I grew up

Playing, looking after cattle
Shaded by acacia trees
Does it exist?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
The attractive rivers of the village

Springs: Tegona, Tercha, Dekisa, Melebo
Are they really flowing like before?
Across the village, towards uneasy distance
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Is Alamirew still there with his ‘Washint’1

Entertaining the village
Or deceased, like my uncle?
And the other strong, sentimental people of the village?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Are there social gatherings?

Evening campfires?
Coffee ceremonies? Story telling?
That harmony – is it there?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
1
‘Washint’ – local flute
16 Yilma Tafere Tasew
The folklore, the riddles, the games I played

With friends of childhood
Are they in existence?
Or are they replaced by new ‘Play Games’?
By federalism, democracy, tribalism
Being imposed on the villagers to be played
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Are people punished who don’t play this ‘new game’?

Like before, like the time of ‘fashion play’?
‘Socialism – Communism’
Are they arrested, killed?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Do you know if Mum is alive or dead?

Joined my Father?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Do you know Mum’s feeling about me?

Her flesh, blood, elder son
Her hope, support when she ‘retired’
Whose name is changed in time
‘REFUGEE’
Who expects charity of twelve beans?
Two weeks rationing
Who is pushed to the edge of this planet?
Who is buried alive under the sandy desert?
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
Whatever happened to Mum?

Sadness or joy? Tell me!
Let me know, I am dying to know
Can You Tell Me? 17
But no energy for grief, no drop of energy

Good to know, to burn to ash
Knowing, burning! Burning, knowing!
For ‘normal’ life
Knowing is a choice for refugees
To throw away
Dry leaf. Dry stream of draining life
Tear one chapter of hope
Destroy every time
To cool down the desert heat
Save haemoglobin
Of last breath
No shock! No surprise!
All feelings drained away
By the scorching sun
Been long
Since I drained
The shining moon
Can you tell me?
CAN YOU TELL ME!

CAN YOU TELL ME!
CAN YOU TELL ME!
22 January 1999, Nairobi, Kenya

3
Burundi Drummers: Performance
This group of drummers, led by Sylvestre Gahungu, is made up of

refugees from the small central African nation of Burundi. They came
to New Zealand following the political and ethnic violence of the
1990s. On the accompanying DVD they perform live at the “Poetics
of Exile” conference, in Auckland, New Zealand in July 2003. They
all work at other jobs, but undertake public performances whenever
they have the opportunity. They explain that they play for New
Zealand audiences “to entertain and to make ourselves known.
Drumming is part of our history and our life. We drum to express
ourselves, proud of who we are.”
See DVD
4
Resisting the Anomie: Exile and the Romantic Self

Chris Abani
Chris Abani is from Nigeria and wrote his first novel at the age of 16
for which he suffered severe political persecution including
imprisonment. He has lived in exile in England and the United States
since 1991. He continues to write novels, plays and poetry, as well as
teaching at several universities. His novels are GraceLand (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2004) and Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985). His
poetry collections include Dog Woman (Red Hen, Fall 2004),
Daphne’s Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001).
He teaches in the MFA Program at Antioch University, Los Angeles
and is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California,
Riverside. A Middleton Fellow at the University of Southern
California, he is the recipient of the 2001 PEN USA Freedom-to-
Write Award, the 2001 Prince Claus Award and a 2003 Lannan
Literary Fellowship.
In the following paper, which was the opening presentation at the
conference “The Poetics of Exile” in July 2003, he explores the
uneasy dialectic which dominates the discourse of exile. On the one
hand are those who view exile as redemptive, seeing it as encouraging
a form of double-mindedness that offers great creative potential. On
the other hand are those who emphasise the sense of loss and injury
experienced by people who have suffered exile. He reflects on the
difficulty which political exiles, such as himself, have in navigating
the confused and confusing responses of those they encounter.
“What does exile mean to you?”

The question hung in the air for a few very long moments. We
all stared uncomfortably into the opaque blackness of our coffee.
Some of us stirred the half empty cups earnestly. Someone coughed. I
glanced at my watch. It was eleven a.m. and through the window, the
Pacific was a lazy stretch of blue. There were twelve of us sitting in
the corner of a coffee shop in Santa Monica, occupying three tables
pushed together. We were here for the second session of the PEN
Writers’ Café, which was created to serve as a meeting place for
intellectuals and writers in exile or interested in the theme of exile.
22 Chris Abani
Our enthusiastic host, a Los Angeles based poet, had asked the uneasy
question that hung between us.
Nearly seventy people had attended the first meeting of the
PEN Writers’ Café. It was held in the Culver Hotel in Culver City,
and we were fêted by the new owners who explained that the hotel
was famous because the Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz had stayed
here all those years ago. The bulk of the crowd were screenwriters and
television producers who had come to find the latest best plot or story
line to develop into a made-for-television movie. Business cards
changed hands quickly and there were promises to call or do lunch.
“As a poet I feel exiled from my community, my family, even
from the themes of my work,” our enthusiastic host said. “Come on
people, don’t be shy, let’s talk about what exile means to each of us.”
Next to me, my friend E., an Ethiopian journalist in exile, put
down his coffee cup and cleared his throat.
“I listened to my mother die over the telephone,” he said.
“That’s what exile means to me.”
The condition of exile and its discourse speak to an uneasy dialectic

between at least two dominant binaries, and a multiplicity of other
concerns. On the one hand are those who celebrate exile as
redemptive. Homi Bhabha and Arjun Appadurai speak to the
possibilities that displacement and exile offer. Salman Rushdie,
C.L.R. James, and George Lamming believe exile to be a vital
condition for writing, a form of alienation that produces a useful
double-mindedness. Yet this double-consciousness, common among
all ex-colonials and people of any marginalized group, requires no
physical displacement to develop. If anything, it requires a more
mental, and in many ways, more egregious breach with the self. This
of course brings us to questions about the actual nature of what
constitutes exile, and even, when exile?
Proponents on this positive, even optimistic, side of the debate
typically celebrate and even romanticize the position of the exile,
elevating the exilian to noble standing. (Exilian being a word Wole
Soyinka jokingly coined to refer to one living in a state of exile, as
though it were it a real country with real citizenship). The exilian’s
position is often difficult to reconcile with the difficult, continuous,
and ever-shifting business of remaining human, as exiled writers like
Salman Rushdie have discovered.
Resisting the Anomie: Exile and the Romantic Self 23
In “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said contends, “exile is

strangely compelling to think about, but terrible to experience” (Said
1994: 137). He describes exile as a “crippling and unhealable rift
forced between a human being and a native place.” And yet Said goes
on to point out a romantic benefit of this condition. “If true exile is a
condition of terminal loss,” he argues, “why has it been transformed
so easily into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture?
…Modern Western culture is in large part the work of exiles.”
The negative position often has tragic examples, as in the case
of Arthur Nortje, a South African poet exiled by the then-apartheid
regime who committed suicide.
Global culture – dominated by America and the myth of white
supremacy – permeates even the remote mountain ranges of the
Himalayas and is not only present but is in fact an overpowering
obstacle to self-rule in post-colonial contexts. Exceptions to this seem
to occur where the post-colonials are themselves white settlers, as in
America, Australia and possibly even New Zealand. Frantz Fanon has
made the case for the fractured and often schizophrenic self produced
as a legacy of this global whiteness in his books The Wretched of the
Earth and Black Skins, White Masks. So one need not leave one’s
home, in forced or voluntary exile, in order to experience this double-
mindedness; one need only be an ex-colonial or a descendant of
people bound over to slavery.
I was twenty when my father disowned me publicly for my actions as

an anti-government activist. That term itself still bothers me. I wasn’t
necessarily anti-government as much as anti-human rights violation or
anti-poverty and such policies of the Nigerian government that were
intended to achieve a fascist and oppressive result.
It is often difficult to define the psychological and emotional
damage something like that can have on the psyche of an Igbo, and by
extension, a Nigerian and African: in a culture where people, on
meeting you, don’t ask you your name but your father’s name, and by
implication, the clan you belong to. This is still part of modern
practice and is a way of deciding whether to continue interacting with
you, or how to interact with you.
To be disowned publicly is to be cut off from this, to be placed
in a limbo of homelessness, clanlessness, to become nothing. A ghost.
This is another form of exile, one even more damaging because you
are in the home of your birth and yet treated like a pariah. The
24 Chris Abani
question becomes – what atrocity had you committed that your own
father, your lineage would disown you? Or as my grandfather said to
me, “You have become a bat: a creature that is neither bird nor
animal. Creatures like that are feared and despised.”
Sociologists point out that one’s experience of exile depends very

much on one’s cultural and material capital. The exile of certain
individuals or even whole cultural groups places them higher or lower
on an imaginary yet paradoxically “real” hierarchy of value.
There is exile caused by war or ideological difference. There is
even self-exile as a form of protest. But there is also the exile of the
former political prisoner. The cultural, humanitarian and even
intellectual cachet of this position probably ranks highest. How do the
exiles in this situation navigate the romantic ideals placed on them and
still maintain a degree of integrity? How does one keep being human
while labouring under this imposed nobility? Is there a way to live that
faces up to the horrors and displacement felt daily, yet resists the
anomie of romance?
This romantic value is placed on exile by all cultural institutions
and everyday people. One can argue that this fascination goes back to
pre-biblical days and probably for very good reason. In a world that
wants to control and classify its relationships with all individuals and
groups, the exile is possibly the most frightening, because he or she
occupies that liminal space that defies any category. This ideal
“where” of exile, a physical, mental and imaginative place, as liminal
as it is, has a concreteness to it, and I think all exiles would agree that
one knows when one arrives there. This terra firma is however given
its dimensions and shape by those not in exile. This liminal space can
be a wasteland often difficult to conceive – not only for the outsider,
but for natives too – and so the process of rationalization begins: the
construction of a consolation.
Sitting in the poets’ lounge of Rotterdam’s Poetry International

Festival in June 2003, I was approached by an Iranian poet now living
in London. Over tea we talked about our memories of London, where
I used to live, and about being ex-political prisoners and being
tortured.
“Do you remember how you could get extra money for
healthcare if you had been tortured?” he asked me.
I remembered only too well. I also remembered the humiliation
of having to prove your torture, and also my shame at getting more
money from the state than regular exiles, who needed it just as much,
simply because I had been tortured. My new Iranian friend laughed at
this, calling it VAT.
“Value added tax?” I asked, confused.
“No, value added torture,” he replied.
The value placed on exile is immense and grows in proportion to the

cause of said exile. No national allegory or national mythology is
complete without reference to colonies of exiles, outposts of the real
state, the romantic state and the self. These colonies are usually made
up of writers, painters and other artists. From the self-exile of writers
like James Baldwin from the cultural state of America that limited his
imagination and the right to express it, to the immigration to America
of Germans and Jews between the two world wars. These intellectuals
are revered because they refused to compromise and rejected all states
of oppression. The value of the exilian grows when the process or
factors of exile are not self-chosen but imposed punitively by the
community the exile originates from, including those displaced by war
and unable to return. One question this begs is that of
creative/intellectual output, the second is the question of identity (as
in: “Am I a writer because I am in exile, or, a writer in exile?”).
In the first instance, there is the assumption that exile can,
might, or even should interrupt or enhance the creative flow. There is
also the assumption that one’s product must necessarily reflect the
themes and locale prior to exile, or else, dwell on endlessly
unravelling the nature and being of exile. This is not an imaginary
predicament, but a real constrictive aspect of the liminal limbo of
exile. Publishers and other art producers or facilitators demand this
material, which can be fed to a waiting audience desperately in need
of heroes of any kind, indulging in ambulance chasing. This of course
raises the question of whether we really value the suffering of others
as some morality tale or whether we just enjoy the suffering of others.
Are we slowly developing safe blood sports? Even an inability to
produce work can be work in itself and can sometimes gain more
popularity and cachet than actual work as one laments endlessly being
unable to produce, because we all love the myth of the tortured artist,
26 Chris Abani
and here we have one who has actually been physically tortured to
spice up the serving. Am I unduly cynical? I think not.
I am always asked – “Can you still write? What will you write
about now that you are cut off from your subject?” Always by people
who have never read my work, nor care to really. Why bother when
you can get your fix this way? Or I get the reverse – you are so noble,
after listening to what you’ve gone through, I feel ashamed to worry
about the mortgage. One day I’m going to pluck up enough courage to
say: “You’d better worry about your mortgage or else you’ll be
homeless.” I certainly do. But in this role as confessor, I realize that
the statement comes from a deeper place than even they are aware of.
It is not just a flippant, easy way to mitigate something, which Victor
Burgin refers to as “the melancholy tension of separation from all our
origins” (Burgin 1991: 29).
This melancholy tension is the wound the true self carries. It is
the thing that alerts us to our real predicament as humans: to make
sense of the state of being, whatever it is. Consider even that it is
comparable to the condition of our relationship to the grotesque, as an
aesthetic, a device even, to mediate death, as argued by Bakhtin. The
loss of that aesthetic in our literature and culture forces us to seek it
out: in the pain and suffering of others and in the subsequent
ennoblement of the sufferer. This condition of exile, perhaps more
easily identified in recent exiles, is the thing we all wrestle with –
outsiders and natives alike. An interesting binary that exacerbates the
condition rather than solving it.
And what of identity? What is it? How does one construct it and
resolve its many contradictions and then what to do with it
subsequently? While trying to steer clear of Foucault and Freud,
among others, the argument can be made that we do for the most part
construct our identity, and at an even deeper more ineffable level, the
self, from our interaction with our environment. It can even be argued
that identity is not a ‘thing’ or ‘place’ we construct or arrive at, but
simply a constant flux created by the tensions between the promptings
of our internal voice and the external forces of experience. For most of
us this is not too difficult because we are surrounded by the familiar
with regard to the external and its tensions, and so we know our place.
Any movements within this field are small and still mostly
manageable. We first begin to understand the confusion facing the
exile with regards to identity when we lose someone in our lives to
death. This is further complicated by the addition of an unresolved
tension or by the fact that we have often based our ideas of who we
are in conflict or in opposition to the one lost.
So, for instance, a mother who loses a child faces a real crisis of
identity. Who is she now? Is she still a mother? Does she have enough
of the self prior to motherhood left over to reconstitute a new one?
And what of the relationship to her husband and the broader society?
Has she failed because she couldn’t sustain the life we believe was
entrusted to her? Sad and tragic as all this is (and touching on the
sexist as this analogy is), it is still occurring within familiar territory,
within the context of a clear physical sense of belonging or
entitlement to belonging.
So while the exile is not alone in the struggle to find, negotiate,
or even construct a self, an identity, there is still something unique to
that experience. Analogies are notoriously inadequate and even
simplistic, such as likening the exile to the adoptee who has lost its
primal family and yet can never really find acceptance or possibly
even certain depths of emotional syntax. This is probably alleviated
for exiles because they at least possess memory, of the longed-for
object/subject, a memory that allows them to begin to construct new
depths of emotional syntax. Yet this very relief, this very memory, is
the source of the pain, the insatiable hunger. In The Satanic Verses
Salman Rushdie talks about exile as the dream of glorious return. He
later uses this line as the title of an essay for the New Yorker in which
he writes about his return to India after the Iranian government had
lifted the fatwa. In that essay, Rushdie also demonstrates the
disappointment of that return. There is no glory, more like a whimper.
And so the romantic desire, the dream that has made exile bearable,
finally collapses in the reality of the return to the object of desire.
As an exile, one butts up against the tensions of an unfamiliar
world. The one role that feels real is that of displacement, of not being
able to reconcile one’s internal landscape – intellectual, emotional and
mental – with the external. And if there are natives of this land in
which the bubble of the exile exists that celebrate the bubble and the
individual therein contained? And if they say, “What a thing you are!
Here, stay in this bubble so that we can be reminded of the nobility
that is possible for all of us.” Can the exile resist it? Say, “No! I am a
vile and loathsome creature at times, and I like sugar and hey, I am not
a disappointment because I eat meat, and yes, I curse and traffic does
bother me despite the fact that I have been beaten to unconsciousness
before and yes, I hate deadlines and being broke and God give me
some love please!?” And what is the cost if one does?
28 Chris Abani
There are exiles who treat their condition as freeing and in fact
a necessary precondition to working. Writers like James Baldwin and
Ben Okri come to mind. Other writers, perhaps myself included, find
that the condition of exile allows us to explore an international/human
identity both as a state of being and a focus for our work, freed from
the limiting arguments of place and its responsibility. Some exiles are
not so well adjusted and treat their host locales with an irresponsible
exploitation, an almost angry retaliation, not always directed in the
right place. Whatever the case - be it Socrates who chose death over
exile or Ovid who thought it spelt life - identity and the negotiation of
it are complex.
There are real costs to this sort of complexity, not least of which
is the withdrawal of funding that depends on an often-narrow
benevolence. But the costs also extend to the loss of sympathy that is
often necessary to achieve real changes not just in the condition of the
exile, but the very cause of it. As with any kind of human suffering
(and sufferers), an industry has grown around exiles. There are grants
to organizations that offer to treat victims of torture, re-house exiles
and refugees, and individual grants to exiles and those like them, to
assist in resettlement, research and/or publication in that field among
others. Despite a long list of criteria, there is an unwritten, unspoken
one that is applied in judging all funding applications: namely, is the
applicant enough of a victim? In this world, there is no room for grey
categories. What do I mean? In my collection of prison poetry, I make
it clear that there is an ego that walks hand-in-hand with the altruistic
impulse. That there can be some other payoffs for the activist or
intellectual who has been exiled other than the satisfaction of a job
well done. This nuance of the exile’s character is problematic because
its richness and diversity confound easy categories like nobility,
because the line between helpless victim and evil perpetrator is
blurred, because it defeats the mystification of sacrifice and confronts
us all with the inescapable guilt that we have not acted because we are
less special or because we lack courage, but simply because we
haven’t.
This goes straight to the heart of the questions about identity,
and how to resist the anomie of noble categories that attempt to erase
any complications of character. As one caught in this net, I have no
easy answers. And so we come back to the circle, the self-defeating
logic that cannot say, “This is not truth”, because that would be
arguing that this thesis is true.
*
I could tell you no end of anecdotes about exile and its misunderstood
protagonists, like the one about my arrival in Heathrow from Nigeria,
fresh from prison and its risks. Still bleeding from unhealed anal
trauma caused by repeated rape with foreign objects, I was wearing a
small sanitary pad to staunch the flow. A suspicious customs officer
pulled me aside and inspecting my passport, asked: “What is your
country of origin?”
And in that moment, I was truly confused. Was I a Nigerian? A
national of a country that has tried to kill me and to which I couldn’t
freely return to – at least not to my thinking? What was I? Mistaking
my hesitation for guilt, the customs officer opted for a full body
search. Finding my bloody pad, in a place where no pad was designed
to be, he smiled happily thinking he had caught one of the famed
Nigerian drug mules. I was X-rayed, questioned, humiliated. Nobody
believed my story about rape and prison and exile, until a doctor
confirmed that the findings of his physical exam were consistent with
the rape story. Then followed the anger from the male customs
officers, the pity from the female and the whole unsavoury business
about how best to get rid of me quickly, yet tactfully in that oh-so-
British way.
Instead I want to tell you a story about the last poem in my
prison book, Kalakuta Republic. The poem talks about a new friend
taking me out to his garden in London and showing me the spot where
his cat, Tiddles, was buried and telling me, “See, I know your loss.”
After a reading in Ireland, a woman came up to me and smiled.
“I loved your last poem especially,” she said. “Because it
speaks to me. You see I love cats, too.”
Lacan has an interesting view on desire. He maintains that the

intensity of the desire is proportionate to the distance between the
desire and the object of desire. Once the object of desire is attained,
not only does desire cease, but there is also a loss of satisfaction with
the object. It would seem then that the point is to never attain the
object of desire, and that this condition of insatiable longing is what
makes life interesting. Perhaps this is what drives the impulse to create
heroes, to romanticize those we think have stepped beyond the
measure of the ordinary.
This is good: that all our responses – inadequate, confused,
limiting and otherwise – are driven by an insatiable melancholy and
maybe even some deeper human syntax we can only guess at – that
30 Chris Abani
we value the lives of others precisely because we know the limits of

our own.
Bibliography
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Bhabha, Homi. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London, New York: Routledge.
Burgin, Victor. 1991. “Paranoiac Space” in Visual Anthropology Review 7(2): 22-30.
Fanon, Frantz. 1967. The Wretched of the Earth. With preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (tr.
Constance Farrington). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
- - - . 1968. Black Skin, White Masks (tr. Charles Lam Markmann). London:
Macgibbon & Kee.
James, C.L.R. 1992. The C.L.R. James Reader (ed. and introduction by Anna
Grimshaw). Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell.
Lamming, George. 1991. In the Castle of My Skin. Foreword by Sandra Pouchet
Paquet. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Rushdie, Salman. 1989. The Satanic Verses. New York, NY: Viking.
Said, Edward. 1994. “Reflections on Exile” (1984) in Robinson, Marc (ed.)
Altogether Elswhere: Writers on Exile. Boston and London: Faber and Faber:
137-49.
5
Interview and Poems:

‘Ode to Joy’, ‘1971’, ‘People Like Us’
Chris Abani
In the 20-minute interview presented on the accompanying DVD,

Chris Abani refers to his early writing and political activism in
Nigeria, the response of the Nigerian regime, his three periods of
incarceration, and the decision by his father, a senior government
official, to publicly disclaim any connection with him, thereby
sending him into internal exile before he was actually forced to leave
his homeland. He talks about his personal experience of exile as being
deprived of “the primal connection you have to the planet” and of the
means he has found to build a new sense of home: of belonging to a
wider, even global, humanity. He finishes by reading and talking
about three poems. ‘Ode to Joy’, from his collection Kalakuta
Republic (2001), is addressed to his fourteen-year-old cell-mate, who
was tortured to death simply for being the son of an escaped political
activist. ‘1971’ is a segment from a recently published 80-page poem
Daphne’s Lot (2003), which sets his English mother’s life against the
background of war-ravaged Nigeria. Here he imagines his mother
writing a diary entry about the kind of man, very different from her
husband, that she would want. The last piece, ‘People Like Us’, comes
from near the end of the same volume, and aims to show the
extraordinary resilience of people who have lived through war and
other forms of horror and who may achieve a kind of transfiguration
through stitching together the most ordinary moments of everyday
life.
See DVD
32 Chris Abani
Ode to Joy
John James, 14
Refused to serve his conscience up
to indict an innocent man
handcuffed to a chair; they tacked his penis
to the table
with a six inch nail
and left him there
to drip
to death
3 days later
Risking death; an act insignificant

in the face of this child's courage
we sang:
Oje wai wai,

Moje oje wai, wai.
Incensed
they went
on a
killing rampage
guns
knives
truncheons
even canisters of tear-gas,

fired close up or
directly into mouths, will
take the back
of
your head off
and many men
died singing,
that night.
Notes caught,
surprised,
Interview and Poems 33
suspended
as blows bloodied mouths
clotting into silence.
1971
Daphne’s diary spun a wish too precious to speak.

I want a man who smiles when he talks about me.
Smiles because he knows all of me and loves all

of me and does not want to change any of me.
I want a man like that. A man whose voice

is the pressure on my hips when he calls
my name. Whose shallow breathing traces

the arousal of my nipples as I cook him dinner.
Whose laugh dips between my legs, catching

me by surprise and rocking. Whose hands
are rough when he touches my face honestly.

Whose embrace is desperate as though
I were the only thing keeping him from drowning.

Whose lips are moist with desire when he kisses me
and whose eyes dance with a dangerous fire.

I want, I want, I want a man like that.
People Like Us
Standing at dawn in grandmother’s kitchen

Hot tea mists the window as it warms me
Outside soft pre-dawn light drizzles over hens
scratching for truth beneath the stunted orange tree
The mauve dawn yawns in the slow approaching heat
exhaling dark shadows
34 Chris Abani
As I sip, grandmother, arthritic, chops onions and

tomatoes ready for the sear of hot oil
Eggs crack like answers to unasked questions and I
realise that there is this stitching of life into
transfigurations.
6
Poem for Chris Abani: ‘Parts of Speech’

Kapka Kassabova
Bulgarian-born Kapka Kassabova wrote this poem after meeting Chris

Abani at the Poetics of Exile conference in Auckland in July 2003. For
her biographical details see the introduction to the DVD interview
with her at number 16 below.
Parts of Speech
for Chris Abani
There must be a verb

For when a country turns against you
Like a vengeful ex-lover
There must be an epitaph

For a human fed to crocodiles
For the sole reason of watching
There must be a sound for being

Unable to forget, yet humming
The perpetual melodies of being
I know someone
Who knows them
And translates them for the world
And when the world tires of listening

He wears them on his soul -
A talisman against silence
7
Film: Three Riders of the Apocalypse

Shahin Yazdani
Shahin Yazdani was born in Iran in 1958, into a large lower-middle

class family. He spent his childhood and teenage years in Isfahan. His
outstanding performance at school gained him free tuition at an elite
private school. At the age of eight, with the help of his brother, he
constructed a primitive projector out of a cardboard box, a magnifying
glass, a series of discs made of card with movie frames at their
circumference, and a lamp that was used as the light source. He used
the tiny amounts of money he earned selling ice-lollies to buy single
frames from famous American and Italian movies, from the local
postcard shop. In the evenings, children from the neighbourhood came
to watch the dance of shadow and light on the wall of the yard which
his father had painted white. He taught himself to paint in water
colours and oils at the age of thirteen and so impressed the owner of a
photo and camera store in Isfahan that he lent him one of the new
Super-8 movie cameras and helped him make his first short films: Cry
Under Water and Transcendence without Ascent, which addressed
social issues of the time.
In 1971-72, he led a protest in his high school against the
oppressive policies of the Shah’s regime and in support of the
university students. He was only saved from SAVAK, the Shah’s
secret police, by the school’s progressive deputy principal. A year
later he moved to Tehran where he came into contact with a circle of
university students who used theatre and creative undertakings to
comment on social and political issues. He appeared in plays and
wrote a screen adaptation of the novel Ince Memed (Memed, My
Hawk) by Turkish writer Yashar Kemal, which was banned by the
Shah’s Ministry of Culture and Art as an attack on the Shah’s policies
towards peasants and workers. He enrolled in the College of Cinema
and Television in Tehran, and became deeply involved in the
democratic movement around the 1979 Iranian revolution. The
establishment of the Islamic Regime and the subsequent closing down
of the universities throughout the country by the regime for more than
a year halted his studies and thwarted his hopes for a democratic
political system.
Between 1979 and 1985 he was arrested three times by
Revolutionary Guards of the Islamic Regime. On the first occasion,
just a few months after the revolution, in a period of widespread
popular protest and government repression, he was seized by
Khomeini followers in the street and beaten up. He was then taken to a
mosque, tied to a pole in the praying area and tortured by the guards
38 Shahin Yazdani
for some time before being transferred blindfolded to a military

barracks where he was put against a wall and threatened with
immediate execution if he didn’t inform on opponents of the regime.
After days of physical and psychological torture, he was dragged out
of his cell by Revolutionary Guards, blindfolded, humiliated, and
driven out of Tehran. In an outlying area he was first interrogated
again and then forced to walk away from his captors across a
ploughed field. He was told to stop, “make his peace with God” and
be ready to be executed. The silence was broken by the sound of
bullets whistling past him. As Shahin recalls:
It was as though, in that instant, the world contracted in my

mind’s eye and I experienced the slowest slow-motion
moment of my life. It was only later, after being found by a
few people who untied the blindfold, that I gradually came
to grasp the depth of the trauma I had gone through. The
close encounter with death in the form of a sham execution,
which is indeed one of the most inhumane acts and by the
same token one of the most horrifying experiences one can
possibly undergo, changed my outlook on life permanently.
His second imprisonment was brief and relatively benign. His third
period of imprisonment, in Tehran’s Evin Prison, was to last a horrific
three years. When he was not in a six-metre square cell with up to 100
other inmates, he was alone in a tiny cell in the torture block, or
undergoing torture himself. He says of that time:
In those bleak nights I often wondered which was more

unbearable; to be tortured or to be exposed to the seemingly
perpetual agony of hearing, day in and day out, the piercing
wailing of other inmates being tortured. This was a period
when, more immediately than ever before in my life, I
experienced the texture of calcified faith and blinkered
views, witnessed the dark abyss of deception, went down
the spiral of pain, baptised in the colour of blood, tasted the
bitter flavour of humiliation, sensed the weakness of flesh
as well as the might of spirit and the stature of will, saluted
the magnificence of endurance, pitied the poverty of
perception, the mirage of sterile beliefs, disgusted with the
stench of ignobleness and Judas’s loss of passion, longed
passionately for the dance of letters and words on the stage
of a book, inhaled the twinkle of freedom through the three
slats of the window’s metal blinds, celebrated the poetry of
communality, welcomed the concurrent absurdity and
beauty of life, and embraced the reinvigorating zephyr of
love penetrating the cold walls of my prison cell.
After his release, he was able, with the help of friends, to get work in
the film industry. In the following seven years, he wrote, co-wrote,
and re-wrote film scripts, worked as unit director or was given the task
of co-directing in a number of feature films. Nevertheless, because of
his political track record, he was never given permission by the
Film: Three Riders of the Apocalypse 39
Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (MCIG) to direct his own

work. What is more, although the few screenplays that he co-wrote
were eventually made into feature films and, after some modification
demanded by MCIG censorship committee, saw the light of day, all
but one of his own scripts were rejected on ideological grounds.
In 1990 he travelled to Germany, where his wife and one-year
old daughter were able, some months later, to join him. He attended
German classes while working in a bar at night. He was then able to
return to writing for movies, including the feature-length screenplays
Die Dämmerung (1991), Hinter der Nacht (1992), and Der Preis des
Ungehorsams (1992) as well as a treatment entitled Suche nach dem
Verlorenen (1993). He was amazed and encouraged to obtain
substantial funding for the last of these projects in competition with
some very well-known film-makers. Grief, Fear, Hope, a fifty-three-
minute docudrama which was showcased in October 1995 at the
second Festival for Iranian Films in Exile, Gothenburg, Sweden, is
another product of his time in Germany.
The rise of neo-fascism in reunified Germany, ongoing arson
attacks on refugees’ hostels and camps, and a frightening encounter
his wife had with a couple of skinheads in an underground train
station led them to migrate to New Zealand in late 1994. He
completed his long-interrupted university studies in film at the
University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, in 1999. On the creative
front he has been involved in a number of film and video productions
as writer, director, editor, director of photography, and sound designer
since his arrival in New Zealand. In 1999 he was invited to join the
staff of the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University
of Canterbury to fill the position of Technical Director and Tutor for
film. In addition to tutoring and teaching digital audio and video
editing, he has lectured on Iranian Cinema in film studies courses.
In the seven-minute film, Three Riders of the Apocalypse, presented
on the accompanying DVD, Shahin Yazdani offers a quasi-surrealistic
meditation on the atrocities which war inflicts on the body of
humanity. This film, made in 2000, was inspired by the work of
Austrian writer Karl Klaus (1874-1936). His mammoth drama Die
Letzten Tage der Menschheit (1918, The Last Days of Mankind)
satirizes the hypocrisy of Austrian attitudes to the First World War.
Yazdani’s film constitutes a brief but sustained reflection on the
relation between war and machine.
See DVD
8
Exile and the Philosophical Challenge to Citizenship

Farhang Erfani and John Whitmire
Farhang Erfani is the son of Iranian political refugees, who were

exiled in 1982. By a circuitous route, the Erfani family arrived in
France, where Farhang and his siblings went to high school. Farhang
moved to the USA for his higher education and attended the
University of the Pacific in Stockton, California, where he majored in
philosophy and pursued his interest in philosophy and political
thought. He obtained his PhD in philosophy at Villanova University,
where he currently teaches in the Philosophy and Core Humanities
programmes. His thesis, ‘Left on the Road to Utopia: Social
Imaginary in the Age of Democracy’, focused on the hermeneutics of
Paul Ricoeur and its compatibility with radical democracy, especially
in the works of Claude Lefort, Chantal Mouffe, and Ernesto Laclau.
His research is guided by a number of philosophical questions such
as the importance of collective imagination and narratives – especially
ideology and utopia – in the history of political philosophy, the
question of exile and the challenges it poses to our philosophical
understandings of identity and citizenship, and the history of French
thought, from the Enlightenment to existentialism and post-
structuralism.
John Whitmire is a native of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains,
in the USA. He studied philosophy and classics at Wake Forest
University in Winston-Salem, NC, and Casa Artom, Venice, Italy,
before moving to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to pursue a PhD in
philosophy at Villanova University. His chief research interests are the
theories of selfhood, subjectivity, and agency in the theoretical and
literary works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European
continental philosophers. He is also interested in the socio-political
ramifications of these theories and their relevance for national and
institutional identity-construction. As a Rotary Foundation
Ambassadorial Scholar, John worked in the Comparative Literature
and Philosophy Departments at the University of Auckland in 2003.
Although not an exile, his experiences as an American citizen
studying in New Zealand during that year, as well as his time in Italy
in 1996, gave him a measure of insight into the nature and importance
of hospitality towards those who have – freely or under some form of
constraint – left their own homes and native lands.
42 Farhang Erfani and John Whitmire
Their paper begins with the observation that, even though many
philosophers, especially in the twentieth century, have had personal
experience of exile, they rarely treat the topic of exile directly in their
philosophical works. Existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, it is
true, have employed exile as a metaphor for the human condition, yet
the concrete experience of political exile has been treated as somehow
lacking the universality that canonical philosophy needs. This paper
warns against the temptation to conflate the real situation of exile with
a general condition of existential unbelongingness. It goes on to trace
two major threads in the history of the philosophical treatment of
citizenship, the one deriving from Plato and the other from Kant, and
to explore their relevance to contemporary debate around the moral
and legal status of those who seek refuge abroad from war,
oppression, or other kinds of threat in their homeland. The Platonic
tradition treats citizenship as deriving primarily from association with
a land; it views foreigners as having the potential to contaminate the
polis and any citizen who spends time away from the polis as likely to
betray it. While many features of the Platonic position have not
survived to the present, it is noteworthy that, for indigenous peoples in
many parts of the world, attachment to the land remains of
fundamental importance. At the same time, though migration of many
kinds has become extremely common, some individuals and
governments in the first world still demonstrate a visceral belief that
refugees and immigrants to their country will somehow corrupt or
contaminate it. The Kantian position, by contrast, treats citizenship as,
ideally at least, cosmopolitan and global. It envisages nation states as
moving towards “an enduring and gradually expanding federation
likely to prevent war”. Consequently, the stranger seeking refuge
abroad from life-threatening persecution in his or her own country has
what Kant refers to as a “right of resort” in another country. While
Kant argues that we must therefore not show hostility to such people,
our obligations to them do not extend to philanthropic hospitality.
This assertion of a limited obligation to displaced persons forms the
basis for much contemporary discussion around the rights of refugees
and migrants. Globalization, of course, has not taken quite the form
that Kant envisaged. While the United Nations asserts the universality
of human rights, and certain clusters of countries, such as those in
Western Europe, have moved towards federation and free internal
movement of their citizens, so-called globalization has taken place
primarily on the economic, rather than the political, level. The
extreme international mobility of investment capital from first-world
countries in search of cheap labour is not currently matched by an
acceptance within such countries of the rights of third-world citizens
to migrate to their shores in search of higher wages and improved
living conditions. Finally, this paper offers a critique of both the
Platonic and the Kantian positions and argues the need in the modern
world for institutional arrangements which represent a variety of
interests and struggles across national boundaries.
Exile and the Philosophical Challenge to Citizenship 43
Why is it that philosophers rarely deal with exile? Social scientists,

such as sociologists and psychologists, examine the empirical effects
of the phenomenon, while others in the humanities focus on narratives
of exile or their literary value. Some political theorists – here Judith
Shklar comes to mind – look at exile from the point of view of the
state and the question of obligation and loyalty. But it seems that even
when philosophers do break the trend and take up the question of
exile, they almost immediately feel the need to detach themselves
from their own discipline in order to do so. In the preface to his
recently published On Immigration and Refugees, British philosopher
Michael Dummett notes that, whereas “I have a general belief that it is
the duty of intellectuals to engage in any matter of social importance
to which they see that they can contribute, [...] philosophy has not
driven me in this respect” (Dummett 2001: xii, our emphasis).
So why is philosophy not interested in exile? After all, the
twentieth century alone is teeming with philosophers who personally
experienced exile, political banishment, or the trials of immigration.
Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Levinas, Berlin, and Shklar all belong
to an impressive list of philosophers, however, who have maintained
Dummett’s division between what happened to them personally and
their philosophical works. What justifying credentials does exile, as a
philosophical problem, lack? Alexis Philonenko recently wrote a short
essay on the topic, which may provide us with a hint. He begins:
I have personal ideas about exile. Of mixed blood, born from a
Russian father and bi-racial mother (black-German), I have always
had a hard time integrating within the French community, even though
I speak and write in French. This essential distance is what I call exile-
under-the-skin. I began writing a few pages on this topic, but I
stopped: not only did it not have any academic value, the resemblance
to a confession was all too strong. In a way, it is too bad: I had dealt
with facts and not just ideas. I had approached an unusual dimension
of existence, instead of imagining or dreaming about abstractions. But
the law is the law: one must write and think as though one were
another and appear integrated, even when it is not the case.
(Philonenko 1999: 199, our translation)
Despite his “exile-under-the-skin”, in order to be academically and

professionally proper Philonenko knows that he must, qua
philosopher, appear as another – he must adopt a tone of neutrality, of
universality, that is unsuited for the experience of exile. One could
argue, then, that the experience of exile lacks the universality that
canonical philosophy needs.
Admittedly, some philosophers have tried to employ exile,

metaphorically or structurally, as a universal human condition. Martin
Heidegger is perhaps the most remarkable case here – though other
existentialists such as Albert Camus have also dealt with exile in a
similar fashion. Heidegger, in his magnum opus Being and Time, tells
us that from an “existential-ontological point of view, the ‘not-at-
home’ must be conceived as the more primordial phenomenon”
(Heidegger 1962: 234).1 For him, being exiled, ‘not being at home’, is
a primary human condition. We believe, however, that we must resist
the temptation to conflate the actual, concrete situation of exile with a
more general condition of existential un-belongingness. According to
this Heideggerian view, both the rich white American entrepreneur
living in a Miami mansion and the destitute Cuban family in the
dangerous neighbourhoods of ‘Little Havana’, fresh off a smuggler’s
boat, illegally living in the country with relatives, share the same
existential situation of not-being-at-home. Obviously, in this case, the
universalisation of exile blurs important distinctions. This is a
dangerous trend. As Eva Hoffman correctly points out, there is now
a vast body of commentary and theory that is rethinking and revising
the concept of exile and the related contrapuntal concept of home. The
basic revision has been to attach a positive sign to exile and the cluster
of mental and emotional experiences associated with it. Exile used to
be thought of as a difficult condition. It involves dislocation,
disorientation, self-division. But today, at least within the framework
of post-modern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities
of experience that exile demands – uncertainty, displacement,
fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile
becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting. Nomadism and
diasporism have become fashionable terms in intellectual discourse.
(Hoffman 1999: 44)
So, when it comes to philosophy, there is a paradox. On the one hand,

philosophy as a discipline tends to neglect exile. On the other, on the
rare occasions that philosophy addresses the topic, the result seems to
do injustice to the unfortunate fate of the exiled. We certainly have no
definite answer in this essay regarding this larger paradox. But we
would like to suggest that philosophy might look more closely at exile
and learn something from it, without trying to appropriate it altogether
as a universal medium of existence (thereby distorting its concrete
existential character). In this essay, then, we look at one facet of exile:
the philosophical challenge it poses to our understanding of
citizenship. Without trying to appropriate exile, we hope to pay
attention to the philosophical depth that is already present in the

concept.
From its Western beginnings, exile as a form of political
punishment implied a definite philosophical conception of citizenship:
to be a citizen, to be a political agent, one had to be associated with a
land. This relation between citizenship and the national land is still
very much present in our juridical definitions of citizenship. Though
there are undeniably other important facets to citizenship, it is
essential that we recognize from the beginning this tight relationship
of citizenship to a particular piece of the earth.
In the remainder of this essay, we briefly examine three
different views of political agency and participation. The first two
sections, in which we take Plato and Kant as exemplars, highlight the
traditional philosophical emphasis on land as the ground for
citizenship or political rights in the ancient and modern worlds. We
suggest in the concluding segment that the notion of citizenship must
be broadened in our current, post-modern condition. We certainly do
not deny the importance of land, and perhaps more importantly the
right to belong to a land; what we hope to challenge is the outdated
notion that sharing a land means sharing the same political ideals or
struggles.
With Plato, the question of the land – the uncontaminated land – is

present in his two most important political works: the Republic and
the Laws. For the purposes of this essay, we will focus on the Laws, as
it is there that citizenship becomes fully associated with the land.2
The Laws, a trans-political and comparative dialogue, opens
with an unidentified man, referred to only as the Athenian Stranger,
asking Cleinias (a Cretan) and Megillus (a Lacedaemonian) about the
origin and “authorship” of their laws (Plato 2000: 624). The
discussion draws its initial focus from the fact that Cleinias is in
charge of creating a new Cretan colony. Here is the dream of a
philosopher: to create a city on the right philosophical foundation.
Readers of the Republic will not be surprised to find out that the
Athenian believes the only proper foundation for a city is virtue; a
prosperous city is one where laws embody virtue, as only a virtuous
city can – if necessary – legitimately require its citizens to defend it
with their lives. Once the importance of virtue is posited, however, the
Athenian turns his attention to a prerequisite to virtue. His first
questions to Cleinias regarding the new colony are not about the
education of the future citizens (as in the Republic); they concern,

instead, the land.3 In the ensuing discussion, the Stranger
congratulates Cleinias for picking a somewhat fertile yet deserted site
(with no neighbouring states), several miles from the sea, for this new
city (Plato 2000: 704-705).4 For in order to have virtuous citizens, he
argues, one must have a city on land fertile enough to support its
population without producing the surpluses that would encourage
commerce (Morrow 1993: 96), and far enough away from the sea and
other cities that even travel would become prohibitive. In the eyes of
the Stranger, foreigners contaminate the polis with their trades, their
culture, and their sheer presence; they make the polis ‘unfaithful’ to
itself by turning the citizens’ attention and devotion away from their
political home.
To be a citizen, to be a political agent, for Plato, means being
subject to a polis, belonging to a land. In this case, since there is no
common history, language, or even religion to create a bond among
citizens, the actual land becomes uniquely important. The very
identity of the citizens is defined in their collective subjugation or
subjection to this land. In other words, the condition sine qua non for
a virtuous polis is an internal integrity entirely undisturbed by what
lies beyond its boundaries. The Athenian had promised to legislate
with nothing in view but virtue; and from the beginning virtue implies
exclusion and, indeed, exclusion firmly rooted in the land: good
citizenry is a matter of good land (Plato 2000: 705-709).
The Athenian proposes to develop this devotion much further
through the internal organization of the imagined colony. The
principles of self-sufficiency and equality in privilege necessitate that
all citizens will be farmers. Their devotion to the land is thus
heightened once more. To be a citizen is more than living on a land; it
is to work with the land; only our citizens, not the (very few)
foreigners who will be permitted to visit and work in the polis, will be
allowed to do so. Further, this land is to be divided into an equal
number of lots, which pass by inheritance but can neither be divided
nor given away (Plato 2000: 855): in this way (and others) both wealth
and poverty are kept in check.
Finally, a citizen may choose to travel outside of the city
(against the legislators’ preference), and, though this cannot be
prevented (Plato 2000: 949), significant restrictions are placed on it in
order to keep the citizens from importing a foreign culture. There is
also a sort of public safety bureau that oversees the laws of the city
and supervises its proper balance. This ‘nocturnal council’ may allow
some foreigners to come and visit, but in general the council must
approve anyone or anything that has to do with the ‘outside’, prior to
entrances and exits. Now, given the importance of the land, it should
come as no surprise that exile is the second harshest punishment, after
the death penalty. Exile becomes a political punishment, then, because
to be a citizen is to have a special rapport with the land. Accordingly,
to be banned from the land means an end to one’s political life.
Plato’s position in the Laws, though perhaps exaggerated,
represents a tradition to which we still very much belong. We still
associate our capabilities and responsibilities as citizens with a
particular land where we may participate in political life, a land we are
always trying to keep pure and uncontaminated by foreign influences
(metaphorically or more literally). All countries monitor the foreigners
who are allowed to set foot on their soil (the American Patriot Act
being only one of the more overt manifestations of this) through visa
systems, and whatever foreigners wish to bring – from agricultural to
cultural products – is rigorously controlled. Mad cow disease,
tuberculosis, obscene materials, weapons, and so forth, are just a few
of the many contaminants that contemporary nation-states may seek to
exclude, even while nominally throwing open their borders to free
trade. Our own bureaucratic versions of the nocturnal council also
restrict the distribution of passports, and thereby travel, to those
‘good’ citizens whom we trust not to import a foreign culture
inadvertently: felons and criminals forfeit not only their voting rights,
but their right to travel freely, by violating the laws of their land.
While we no longer (generally) exile our convicts – though we do
deport citizens of other lands who break our laws – we still remove
them from the land and significantly restrain their political agency by
institutionalizing them in corrections facilities. As we can see, then,
land and the rights and duties of citizenship continue to be intimately
linked. This model, however, as we will see later on, is inappropriate
for us today. Pure isolation, even as an ideal, is untenable.5
In the modern era, Kant has proposed a view of citizenship that is

more global, yet also much ‘thinner’ than the ancient model, to make
use of Geertz’s famous categories. In two important texts, the 1795
essay ‘Perpetual Peace’ and the 1784 ‘Idea for a Universal History
with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’, Kant develops his notion of
cosmopolitanism or world-citizenship. He argues – on a version of
social contract theory extended to the national level – that just as
individuals must leave the lawless state of nature in order to guarantee

their own survival, so too must states eventually unite to deal with the
problems of ungoverned antagonism. The broader argument is worked
out in the ‘Perpetual Peace’; the specific way that this will have to
occur is found in the ‘History’ essay.
The argument runs as follows. We begin with a Hobbesian state
of nature (or ‘unrestricted freedom’, a more Kantian term): each
individual, outside civil society, is in a de facto state of war with all
others. These battles are not in themselves bad, however; Kant
emphasises that antagonism is nature’s own way of developing
heightened capacities in humankind. So political life does not end
these battles; it only enforces certain restrictions within them that
allow us to flower as human beings. Individuals unite into political
bodies where justice can be administered in proportion to the “precise
specification and preservation of the limits of freedom” (Kant 2000a:
45). Kant’s teleological argument is that we are compelled by nature
to discipline ourselves via the institution of this political body, as it is
impossible for us to coexist in a state of “wild freedom” (Kant 1970a:
45-46).6
In the seventh proposition of the “History” essay, Kant
reduplicates this same move on a larger scale. Concurrently with the
administration of justice within the state, we must also solve the
external problem of the relation of state to state, because though
individuals within the various states are united in political bonds,
these states themselves still effectively exist in a state of unrestricted
freedom with regard to each other.
Eventually, after “wars, tense and unremitting military
preparations [...] many devastations, upheavals and even complete
inner exhaustion of their powers”, individual states will, Kant argues,
inevitably
take the step which reason could have suggested to them even without
so many sad experiences – that of abandoning a lawless state of
savagery and entering a federation of peoples in which every state,
even the smallest, could expect to derive its security and rights not
from its own power or its own legal judgment, but solely from this
great federation (Foedus Amphictyonum), from a united power and the
law-governed decisions of a united will. (Kant 1970a: 47)
The ultimate goal of history, then, would be “a perfect civil

union of mankind”, a “universal cosmopolitan existence [...] as the
matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may
develop” (Kant 1970a: 50). In ‘Perpetual Peace’, Kant repeats his
claim that “just like individual men, [states] must renounce their
savage and lawless freedom, adapt themselves to public and coercive
laws, and thus form an international state”, or, barring this, at least an
“enduring and gradually expanding federation likely to prevent war”
(Kant 1970b: 105). Kant is not, however, sanguine about the
possibility of an international state, which would, in fact, demand
either the dissolution of all individual states or the domination of all
the nations by a single despotic state. The former of these “is not the
will of the nations” (Kant 1970b: 105); the latter, though “the desire of
every state”, is luckily thwarted by the linguistic and religious
differences among them (Kant 1970b: 113).
The most important point here, for our purposes, is that hand in
hand with this gradual expansion of a peaceful federation goes the
concept of cosmopolitan right, which extends to what Kant calls
universal hospitality. By this he means that it is the right of every
stranger, when in someone else’s territory, not to be treated with
hostility. The stranger “can indeed be turned away, if this can be done
without causing his death, but he must not be treated with hostility, so
long as he behaves in a peaceable manner in the place he happens to
be in” (Kant 1970b: 106). Kant also refers to this as a “right of
resort”, which all human beings share by virtue of their original
communal possession of the earth’s surface. So, once again, we see a
common land as the foundation of this right.
This argument opens up not only a right of resort, then, but a
corresponding duty on the part of political societies – the duty of
hospitality. This duty, however, marks the limits of cosmopolitan right
– states and individuals are not required to go beyond it, and if they
do, extending what Kant refers to as the “right of a guest to be
entertained”, they have entered the realm of philanthropy rather than
right.7 So while a dimension of existence as a cosmopolitan subject
has been opened in the modern era by Kant, it is a rather thin one: so
long as we do not have a universal, international state, real political
participation remains effectively tied to a particular state, a particular
piece of land, as it always has.
In sum, to rely once again on Geertz’s model, we could say that

whereas Plato championed a thick model of citizenship, heavily based
on the purity of the land, Kant proposed a somewhat thinner model
based on the universal, communal right of all humankind to the
entirety of the earth’s surface.8 Both positions continue to exercise a
strong sway over contemporary political discussions on immigration,

refugees, and displaced persons: nation-states and international bodies
tread the ground uneasily between hard parochial and cosmopolitan
policies. In this concluding section, we make a few critical comments
about our current ‘post-modern’ condition, and the inadequacies of the
philosophical and political presuppositions of Plato and Kant, of the
ancients and moderns. We briefly examine some of the problems with
each model, and then propose an alternative solution. We do not offer
a valorisation of the nomadic or exilic subjectivity that, as Hoffman
has noted, is now very much in vogue within certain circles. What we
have done, however, is to try to allow the real, factical experience of
exile, of losing one’s home and with it one’s voice, one’s political
power or agency, to help us begin to formulate a kind of citizenship or
political agency that is not solely based on the land. For us, this is the
meaning of a poetics of exile lodged within the heart of philosophy.
From a philosophical perspective, Plato and Kant’s paradigms
are both grounded in essentialism, which has been largely discredited,
especially by post-structuralist thought. In the case of Plato, the purity
of the land is, of course, geographically untenable today. More
importantly, his hope for creating a city that is essentially grounded in
virtue is also irretrievable for us. Whose essences? Which virtues?
The inextricable plurality of values in the modern nation-state simply
does not lend itself to Platonic isolationism. In the case of Kant, nature
as a political matrix is quite problematic, and cultural relativism
represents a severe challenge to traditional human rights theories,
customarily grounded in natural law and universal reason.9
Equally difficult to accept is another tradition that began with
Plato and continued through Augustine, Kant, Hegel, and Marx: the
ideal of full political reconciliation. Defenders of Kantian and other
models of cosmopolitanism believe that it is possible to find a well-
governed and peaceful reconciliation of all our differences, at least as
a regulative ideal. David Held, a contemporary proponent of this idea,
tells us that we need cosmopolitanism because of “the recognition by
growing numbers of peoples of the increasing interconnectedness of
political communities” and of the need to solve problems collectively
(Held 2002: 12). We certainly agree that the political terrain is
growing beyond the domains of traditional political thought; but we
disagree with the chimerical view that hopes for the overcoming of all
such conflicts in politics.10 Even were it not for the theoretical
challenges of post-structuralism, post-colonial studies alone have
proven to us that ‘reason’ – even with the best of possible intentions –
can be oppressive, and, indeed, dangerous. In other words, from a

philosophical point of view, the essentialism and rational universalism
of the traditional cosmopolitan view make it inadequate for us.
From a political perspective, where instead of cosmopolitanism
people speak of globalization, there are still other obstacles. Here,
advocates of globalization such as Thomas Friedman and Francis
Fukuyama defend the elimination of local boundaries in the name of a
better and more global world. They see globalization as the work of
integration (Friedman 2000: 8). In their view, the expansion of
capitalism means the expansion of democracy. This conflation of
democracy and market capitalism has had disastrous consequences:
attacking capitalism – theoretically or otherwise – has meant attacking
democracy. And democratization has come to mean opening one’s
boundaries to capitalism. Yet, at the same time, the World Bank and
IMF projects in the Third World have failed at the staggering rate of
sixty to seventy percent.
We must also take into account here the massive inconsistency
in the argument of many advocates of globalization: whereas ‘free
trade’ is heard often, ‘open borders’ is not.11 ‘Globalization’ has
tended to mean that capital may flow freely between nation-states,
whereas labour remains largely restricted to those territorial
boundaries. Poor workers are often forced to become illegal aliens in
the search for better pay or working conditions. Consequently, as
corporations have learned to move from one land to another, millions
– in rich and poor countries – have lost their voices and political
capacities precisely by being restricted to their own land. Decisions
made by corporations nominally headquartered in the United States
affect millions of people from China to Mexico, people who are either
economically or legally prohibited from pursuing the consequences
entailed by a consistent globalization. This is a kind of exile in
reverse, in which ordinary people across the globe have not lost their
land, but have lost their political powers.
Even this inconsistent globalization of ‘free trade, closed
borders’, is often a ruse, however – a kind of parochialism in the guise
of cosmopolitanism. ‘Free trade’, for First World nations, more often
than not bears the qualification ‘when it benefits us’. Subsidies for
their own less-productive industries, and levies on correspondingly
more-productive industries from poorer nations, are less an exception
than a rule.
Against the failures and inconsistencies of globalization, some
on the right, and many on the left, have retreated to a kind of
parochialism. John Gray, an influential conservative, has come to

criticize globalization and has proposed measures to protect nations –
especially rich Christian nations – from savage capitalism. Many
social democrats have also proposed using national politics to combat
the evils of globalization, urging that economic control should happen
at the state level in order to protect the workers’ interests.12 Whereas
David Held and Thomas Friedman – though in different ways – are
Kantians in today’s world, these parochialists are our Platonists.
We have already seen the philosophical impossibility of a return
to the ideal purity of the nation-state inherent in its essentially (and,
we would add, productively) maculate collection of virtues and
values. Another significant consequence implicit in this retreat to
parochialism (whether tacit or open), however, is the rise of an ugly
xenophobia in many of these richer nation-states. It has been seen
rearing its head in more or less evident ways, but the most obvious of
these is the increasing impermeability of borders to those who might
otherwise have sought refuge on their far side. Those forced into exile
for whatever reasons, and who might once have been welcomed as the
tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free, thus become, to
the ‘receiving’ citizens, the contaminating influences on the polis that
Plato so feared. This fear of contamination (the residue of
parochialism), coupled with the unwillingness simply to deny entry
(the residue of cosmopolitanism) to all those fleeing from their
homelands for political, socio-economic, racial, religious, or other
reasons, gives rise to the horrifying modern phenomenon of the border
camp.13 There remains a further, dangerous corollary to the retreat to
parochialism, however, and that is the spectre of an increased level of
prejudice or hostility towards those fellow citizens who happen to
share ethnic, religious, or national origins similar to those for whom
the possibility of entry has been foreclosed.
Given that both globalization and parochialism have
considerable failures, what are we to do? As we have seen, both
operate on the model of political agency based on land: the parochials
are trying to limit and protect the land for the sake of protecting their
politics; the cosmopolitans are trying to expand the field of political
action by making the entirety of the globe its proper terrain. But, to
employ Benjamin Barber’s categories, neither Jihad nor McWorld
works for us.
In a fluid, post-modern world, which allows ideas, capital, and
even some persons to move easily around the globe, and in which all
of us are affected by others in unprecedented ways, we believe it is
necessary to recognise that political participation is no longer (if it

ever was) simply a local matter, contained within finite geographical
boundaries. We can no longer afford the luxury of thinking and acting
merely locally; indeed, the primacy of locus, or place, to political
agency is what we have been chiefly interested in problematising here.
We would argue that we must, instead, begin to think of citizenship in
terms of strategic interest, in terms of what people have in common,
and no longer solely in terms of land. Political participation must no
longer be a local issue; it should be horizontal, across the globe, where
similar political interests would be able to have a global and
associated voice. The United Nations is certainly one such forum for
discussion, but it is not, and should not be, the last word in political
representation, inasmuch as it proceeds on the often-spurious
presumption that states – and ultimately, as we have shown, all those
who are tied to a given body of land – have something like a set of
uniform political interests that override all other ties, whether these be
economic, racial, gender, or otherwise.
We can only hint, in this context, at what that model might look
like for us. Our central focus here has been economic, but we are not
trying to claim the exclusive priority of economic considerations. We
are simply arguing that the loss of political agency (if this ever
existed) of oppressed groups – including, most fundamentally, exiles
and displaced persons – must be addressed within the context of the
economic issues we have already delineated. We are certainly not
calling for a new Workers’ International; rather, there will have to be
a proliferation of sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping
global organisations representing a variety of different struggles and
movements. Economic issues are, in our view, a primary objection to
the kind of cosmopolitanism-cum-globalization we have described,
but there are other, equally legitimate struggles that must also be dealt
with here. We must not lose sight of these struggles (e.g. over
women’s rights, racial discrimination, etc.), which have already called
into doubt the legitimacy of the nation-state as the sole place where
political agency may be exercised. We must empower and foster the
growth of bodies such as the United Nations, Amnesty International,
Greenpeace, Human Rights Watch, Doctors Without Borders, and
other organisations that serve to articulate the concerns of voiceless
interests – both broad and narrow, opposing and convergent – while at
the same time insisting that they have sufficiently democratic
structures and representation, with elected and accountable officials.
We would also hasten to add that by recasting political agency

beyond its traditional, unique relationship to a land (or all land), we
are not suggesting the abolition of national citizenships or of
cosmopolitan right. Such citizenships retain many practical benefits,
and in some cases our interests are tied more or less directly to the
land.14 But by expanding political agency, we would prevent the
political death imposed on too many by exile. To utilise our earlier
categories, we are proposing a thicker cosmopolitanism not restricted
to the Kantian duty of hospitality towards the refugee, one built on the
intercontextuality of conflicts and interests rather than on a universal
hegemonic rationality.
We return, in concluding, to the question of exile. It used to be
the case that banishment from one’s own land meant the end of one’s
political life. Not to be there, on the land of one’s nation, meant
having no political voice. This is still the fate of too many people
across the globe. But we are now presented with a different, more
complicated situation in addition to this traditional quandary. The
reverse exile and consequent loss of political capacities by millions
around the globe, coupled with a ‘cosmpolitanism’ that is really an
inconsistent globalization, necessitates a genuine re-opening of the
question of political agency – that is, what we really mean when we
say we are citizens of ---, with the powers that accrue thereto. We
hope to have provided the beginnings of such a project here.
Notes
1
For more on Heidegger and the impossibility of making exile a universal human
condition, see Farhang Erfani. 2002. ‘Being-There and Being-From-Elsewhere: An
Existential-Analytic of Exile’ in Reconstruction 2 (3): Online at
www.reconstruction.ws/023/erfani.htm (consulted 25.04.2004).
2
We certainly do not mean to say that the Laws is the foundational philosophical text
on citizenship; it is, however, a very interesting text insofar as it represents an
obsession that has defined the traditional views of political participation.
3
We should notice the irony of three old men from three different lands attempting to
create a new city in which the purity of the land will be the ultimate criterion of
belongingness.
4
Regarding this atypical concern in political philosophy, see Pangle 1980: 438-439.
5
Even within Plato’s own narrative this perfect isolation is contaminated. Despite his
best efforts to keep foreigners out, teachers – a very important position in Plato’s
thought – have to be foreigners, since all citizens must be farmers.
6
For more on the teleological views of Kant (anticipating the Hegelian dialectic of
mastery and servitude in the Phenomenology of Spirit) in this respect, see Anderson-
Gold, Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, especially chapter 2, ‘Kantian
Cosmopolitanism’. She correctly points out that “Human capacities will not reach
their full development anywhere until a cosmopolitan condition exists” (Anderson-

Gold 2001: 22).
7
We must be certain not to conflate this notion of ‘hospitality’ with what Jacques
Derrida, following Emmanuel Levinas, means by the term. In the work of Levinas and
the later Derrida, ‘hospitality’ means something much more robust, far closer to what
Kant calls ‘philanthropy’ or the ‘right of a guest to be entertained’ than the stricter
notion of hospitality, qua ‘right of resort’, that Kant has in mind here. For Levinas and
Derrida, ‘hospitality’ (or ‘absolute hospitality’) means throwing open the doors of
one’s home (or nation) in a completely unreserved manner. We must credit Kant for
seeing the need for a transnational politics, even in face of his suspicion towards a
transnational state. However, although he does insist on a very limited right of resort
even within the current political situation, he never goes so far as to offer political
agency – citizenship – to those exiles residing in another state.
8
It must be noted that cosmopolitanism and globalization are not identical.
Philosophers often speak of cosmopolitanism and its benefits. Globalization is a
phenomenon that focuses more on economic expansion. There is, however, a
theoretical connection: the champions of globalization believe that the global free-
market will also contribute to the progress of human rights, peace efforts etc. which
are cosmopolitan goals.
9
See Anderson-Gold 2001 for a possible retrieval of the Kantian model.
10
For more on this, see the works of contemporary thinkers of radical democracy such
as Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who have argued that politics is, in fact,
constituted by antagonism, e.g. their Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985). That any society, according to
this view, regardless of its size, is constituted by difference is not a new idea. Hegel,
most famously, defended it. But here the fragmentation of the polis is not seen as
undesirable but as unavoidable, and the desire for a fully ‘rational’ society is critiqued
as another mode of oppression. Even though contemporary cosmopolitan defenders
are rhetorically less flamboyant than Hegel, David Held still believes that
cosmopolitanism is based on reason’s political capacities (Held 2002: 12-13).
11
We owe our inclusion of this discussion to several conversations with Mike Hanne.
12
See especially Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question
(Oxford: Polity Press, 1999). We must credit Michael Hardt’s ‘Globalization and
Democracy’, for pointing out the similarity between Gray and the social democrats.
Hardt’s essay is available on the Institute on Globalization and the Human
Condition’s website. On line at: www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/%7Eglobal/wp
hardtfinal.pdf (consulted 14.03. 2004).
13
Our analysis thus differs from Giorgio Agamben’s in suggesting that the
phenomenon proceeds from the combination of parochial and cosmopolitan attitudes,
rather than a consistently-applied Kantian right of resort.
14
This could be construed in both a broad way – viz., the interest of humanity in the
preservation of the planet as a whole – or more narrowly, as in the interest of small
communities in local politics. We believe that the European Union is a good example
of this kind of expansion of citizenship, while preserving the need for some local
politics.
Bibliography
Anderson-Gold, Sharon. 2001. Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Wales:

University of Wales Press.
Dummett, Michael. 2001. On Immigration and Refugees. London: Routledge.
Friedman, Thomas. 2000. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. New York: Anchor Books.
Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free
Press.
Gray, John. 2000. False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. New York: New
Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time (tr. J. Macquarie and E. Robinson). New
York: Harper and Row.
Held, David. 2002. ‘National Culture, the Globalization of Communications and the
Bounded Political Community’ in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and
Culture 1(3): 1-17.
Hoffman, Eva. 1999. ‘The New Nomads’ in Aciman, André (ed.) Letters of Transit:
Reflections of Exile, Identity, Language, and Loss. New York: The New York
Press: 35-64.
Kant, Immanuel. 1970a. ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’
in Reiss, Hans (ed.) Kant’s Political Writings (tr. H.B. Nisbet). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press: 41-53.
- - - . 1970b. ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ in Reiss, Hans (ed.) Kant’s
Political Writings (tr. H.B. Nisbet). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press:
93-130.
Morrow, Glenn. 1993. Plato’s Cretan City: A Historical Interpretation of the Laws.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Pangle, Thomas, 1980. ‘Interpretive Essay’ in The Laws of Plato (tr. Thomas Pangle).
Chicago: Chicago University Press: 375-511.
Philonenko, Alexis. 1990. ‘Les Puissances de l’Exil’ in Niderst, Alain (ed.) L’Exil.
Paris: Klincksieck: 199-210.
Plato. 1985. The Republic (tr. Richard Sterling and William Scott). New York:
Norton.
- - - . 2000. Laws (tr. Benjamin Jowett). New York: Prometheus Books.
9
Exile, Empire and the Convict Diaspora: The Return of

Magwitch
Kirsty Reid
Kirsty Reid grew up in the Scottish Highlands but has lived at various
periods in the US, Australia, and Zimbabwe. She is currently lecturer
in Historical Studies at the University of Bristol, UK, where she
teaches on the history of colonialism. She works on the British Empire
and diasporic communities and her research to date has particularly
focused on convict transportation to the British Australian penal
colonies. She has published a number of articles on female convict
transportation and is currently completing a book entitled Gender,
Crime and Empire: Convict Women and Colonial Australia
(Manchester University Press, forthcoming). She spends part of most
years in Tasmania, Australia.
In this paper, she studies the nature of the exile imposed by
nineteenth-century imperial British penal authorities on the convicts it
transported to Australia and its other colonies. Banished from the ‘old
world’ and abhorred in the ‘new’, convicts straddled the fault lines
between metropolis and colony in precarious and unique ways. If
empire depended upon rigid divisions between imperial and
imperialised populations, convicts undermined such spatial and
cultural boundaries. Although expunged from the ‘mother country’
and sentenced to a civic and social death, the figure of the convict
repeatedly resurfaced. Through the published narratives and speaking
tours of returned convicts such as Tolpuddle Martyr George Loveless
and Chartists such as John Frost, exile informed contemporary
cultures of radicalism and dissent. Exile also touched the everyday life
of plebeian communities in manifold ways: from shared memories of
those gone to personal letters read collectively, to prints, photographs,
and ballads, convict shadows continued to cross metropolitan streets.
The convict figure of Magwitch can be re-situated and Charles
Dickens’s Great Expectations can be re-read, not as canonical text,
but as one strand within a wider cultural array. This paper asks what
contributions convicts made to popular imaginings of empire and
explores the ways in which the figure of the returned convict, in
particular, threatened to unsettle and subvert hierarchies of
metropolitan power and systems of imperial accumulation.
58 Kirsty Reid
The return of Magwitch, the transported convict, who has haunted Pip
since their first meeting in the opening passages of Charles Dickens’s
Great Expectations, is experienced as a great horror and as a moment
of profoundly disturbing self-revelation. Pip learns through the
reunion that it is Magwitch, not Miss Havisham, who has made him a
‘gentleman’. He knows in this moment that he has turned his back on
all that was good in his life and, in particular, on the ‘simplicity and
fidelity’ of Biddy and Joe, his family, to pursue a corrupting and false
dream in which he aspires to become a gentleman, in order to gain
possession of Estella, his childhood love. Pip is lost, undone, exiled
from his heart’s desire: “O Estella, Estella!” he cries out (Dickens
1965: 338). Of the major characters, it will only be Magwitch who
achieves a reconciliation of sorts by the end of the novel, dying in
Pip’s arms he has not only escaped the hangman but also achieved a
return to his family. Pip, by contrast, is left to wander the world.
The returned convict was a recurring theme within Victorian
fiction appearing, in Dickens’s works alone, in Great Expectations,
Pickwick Papers and Dombey and Sons as well as in the novels of
numerous other nineteenth-century writers. As literary motif, the
returned convict was thus a frequent expression of social and cultural
unease.1 In Great Expectations, Dickens presents Magwitch, the
convict, in two key but contradictory ways. Firstly, as an alien other, a
character who, regardless of his return to metropolitan space, is
condemned to a permanent existence beyond the pale of the body
politic and whose illegal act of self-repatriation must be punished by
death. “The power of casting out dangerous members from its bosom
is inseparable”, the Times claimed in 1850, in an article on convict
transportation, expressing broadly similar ideas about convict
otherness, “from the notion of civil society” (1850). But in Great
Expectations, Magwitch also functions simultaneously as Everyman,
as a symbol of the universality of humanity, or at least, given
Dickens’s attachment to notions of race, the universality of Britons.
Magwitch’s difference is undoubtedly and repeatedly racially
inscribed. When Pip attempts to disguise Magwitch, for example, he
discovers:
Whatever he put on, became him less […] than what he had worn
before. […] there was something in him that made it hopeless to
attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the better I
dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on the
marshes. […] from head to foot there was Convict in the very grain of
the man. […] The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him
besides, and gave him a savage air that no dress could tame […]. In all
Exile, Empire and the Convict Diaspora: The Return of Magwitch 59
his ways of sitting and standing, and eating and drinking – of brooding
about […] in these ways and a thousand other small nameless
instances arising every minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon,
Bondsman, plain as plain could be. (Dickens 1965: 352-53)
Pip relates, “The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had
of him, the repugnance with which I shrank from him could not have
been exceeded if he had been some terrible beast” (Dickens 1965:
337).
Debates about transportation from the 1830s onwards had
systematically demonised convicts, accusing them of sodomy, child-
rape and cannibalism, among a range of other unnatural acts.2 There is
no doubt that Dickens, with a long-term interest in penal reform, was
fully aware of these images and that, against this backdrop, Magwitch
would have been read by some as a symbolic reaffirmation of the
horrors unleashed when the monstrous convict came ‘home’. By the
time Great Expectations was published, moreover, previously
‘liberalising’ discourses of moral reform, based upon the belief that
criminals could be reclaimed, had begun to falter. Many
commentators now emphasised the failures of the penitentiary system.
At the same time, transportation was also approaching its end. So
fierce was the debate produced by the prospect of this end to exile that
a moral panic about crime hit Britain. This wave of hysteria further
demonised the convict and more firmly associated the criminal class
with racial otherness by linking convicts with the debased ‘rookeries’
of London and, in particular, the Irish.3 Against this backdrop,
Dickens also shifted ground, publishing articles, for example, in which
he depicted the criminal as irretrievably savage.4 Imperial as well as
metropolitan events informed his attitudes to race: once a firm
proponent of emancipation, his opinions on slavery became
increasingly ambivalent, and in the wake of the Indian uprising and
the Morant Bay Rebellion, he adopted an increasingly shrill attitude
towards empire and a hardened racist tone, positioning himself, for
example, alongside Thomas Carlyle in the defence of Governor Eyre.5
Alternative readings of Great Expectations are, nevertheless,
possible and Dickens, indeed, seems to encourage them. Magwitch’s
return confounds and undermines supposedly fixed hierarchies of
difference. “Our ways are different ways”, Pip tells Magwitch
(Dickens 1965: 334), and yet, from its opening pages, and even in the
depictions of Magwitch as monstrous, Great Expectations interweaves
notions of difference with assertions of the universal nature of
60 Kirsty Reid
humanity. Pip, for example, deploys the spectre of Frankenstein to

emphasise the awfulness of his condition now Magwitch has returned:
The imaginary student pursued by the misshapen creature he had
impiously made, was not more wretched than I pursued by the
creature who had made me, and recoiling from him with a stronger
repulsion the more he admired me, and the fonder he was of me.
(Dickens 1965: 334)
But if Magwitch is the Frankenstein who has ‘made’ Pip, how has
Magwitch himself been made monstrous? By the time Great
Expectations was published, there was more than one answer to this
question. Since the 1830s, some proponents for the abolition of
transportation had been arguing, with great effect, that the very
experience of exile itself deformed the convict. “Unnatural deeds”, as
one abolitionist put it, emphasising the wrongs committed by the
British state, “do breed unnatural troubles” (‘P’ 1852). In the
nineteenth century, matters of penal discipline were increasingly
represented as questions for scientific analysis: criminals were to be
measured and classified, punishments were to be categorised and
calibrated. If Magwitch was a monster, perhaps it was because a
Frankenstein-like system had made him so? In Great Expectations,
this monstrous relationship is read through the lens of individual
relationships: “I lived rough”, Magwitch exclaims, in a passage which
might be read as a wider commentary upon relations between labour
and capital, colony and metropolis, “that you should live smooth, I
worked hard, that you should be above work” (Dickens 1965: 337).
The possibility that Magwitch has been made, rather than born,
a monster becomes ever stronger the more he becomes truly known.
Pip initially experiences Magwitch as a “dreadful mystery”. The
convict, Pip argues, must be made to narrate his story so that his
crimes may be fully revealed. Pip expects this process to confirm
Magwitch’s difference, to fix his character as a man whose very hands
“might be stained with blood” (Dickens 1965: 339). But when
Magwitch tells his tale, it reveals something altogether different; a
human being exiled from society at birth. “I’ve been carted here and
carted there”, Magwitch relates of his childhood,
and put out of this town and put out of that town, and stuck in the
stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. […] there warn’t a soul
that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, but wot
caught fright at him, and either drove him off, or took him up. I was
took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg’larly grow’d up took
up. This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as
much to be pitied as ever I see […] I got the name of being hardened.
(Dickens 1965: 360-361)
Despite this upbringing, Magwitch appears more capable of genuine

emotion and family sensibility than Pip. While the latter has turned his
back on his family, through a false sense of self and a corrupting
pride, Magwitch risks everything to return to his ‘son’. Magwitch’s
narrative, moreover, explicitly condemns those who judge, as Pip has
done, merely on appearances:
‘This is a terrible hardened one’, they says to prison wisitors, picking
out me. ‘May be said to live in jails, this boy’. Then they looked at
me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some on ‘em –
they had better a measured my stomach. (Dickens 1965: 361)
Condemned as a mere child, Magwitch has also suffered at the hands

of a class-bound criminal justice system which favours the aristocratic
villain Compeyson precisely because it too is unwilling to penetrate
beneath the surface of how men look.
Finally, the more Magwitch’s identity becomes fixed, the less
Pip knows himself. For it is, in fact, Pip, the character whose
autobiographical account the novel ostensibly is, who is a mystery.
Magwitch’s return forces Pip to acknowledge his undoing:
I began fully to know how wrecked I was, and how the ship in which I
had sailed was gone to pieces […] I thought how miserable I was, but
hardly knew why, or how long I had been so, or on what day of the
week I made the reflection, or even who I was that made it. (Dickens
1965: 341, 344. Emphasis added)
Biography, historian Theodore Koditschek argues, was “the most

appropriate medium” for the “inherently heroic […] world vision” of
the nineteenth-century bourgeois man; through biography, the
ideology of the self-made man could be “reified in […] narrative
recounting(s) of the individual life process” (1990: 182). Biography
thus enabled the intertwined processes of capital accumulation,
metropolitan governance and imperial domination to be naturalised.6
Yet Pip has no biography to narrate; he has not made himself, he has
been made. His identity as a ‘gentleman’ is, moreover, founded only
on surface appearances, dependent upon the symbolic presence of
objects of material value (his watch, his ring, his fine linen) purchased
for him by a convict. Unlike Magwitch, Pip depends on being judged
by his appearance.
The “prohibition placed on Magwitch’s return”, Edward Said
argues,
62 Kirsty Reid
is not only penal but imperial: subjects can be taken to places like
Australia, but they cannot be allowed to ‘return’ to metropolitan
space, which, as all Dicken’s fiction testifies, is meticulously charted,
spoken for, inhabited by a hierarchy of metropolitan personages’.
(1993: xvii)
But, in Great Expectations, Magwitch does return and his otherness is

used not to confirm but to question and undermine this “hierarchy of
metropolitan personages”. Magwitch’s return to metropolitan space
not only reveals Pip’s self-deception, but also undermines those
notions of collective difference which supposedly separated
‘gentlemen’, a class which claimed the right to possess every place,
from the criminal exiles who had been sentenced to be forever without
place.7
What gave Great Expectations such potentially destabilising power

was the extent to which it both drew upon, and was embedded within,
wider cultures of exile. Dickens was ever anxious to encourage a self-
image as a writer of ‘high’ literature. Unlike his friend, William
Harrison Ainsworth, whose Newgate novels drew openly upon
centuries-old genres of last dying speeches and true accounts of
criminal lives, Dickens was keen to distance himself from such ‘low’
associations.8 He was appalled, consequently, when some critics
linked Oliver Twist to Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard. The ‘authenticity’
of Dickens’s fiction came rather, by implication, from his powers of
observation and his ability to ‘know’ and truthfully ‘represent’ the
poor.9 So successful was he, historian Jonathan Rose has recently
argued, that many nineteenth-century working-class readers,
struggling “with the art of recording their lives cited Dickens, more
than anyone else, as the man who got it right” (2001: 112). “Perhaps”,
Rose proceeds to argue,
Dickens’s most important gift to the working classes was the role he
played in making them articulate […]. As rules for organising
experience, frames are essential tools for writing stories as well as
reading them. For people who had never been taught how to tell their
own histories, Dickens supplied the necessary lessons. (2001: 114-
115)
The relationship was, however, more multi-directional than this.

Magwitch himself alludes to the shadowy presence of a much wider
cultural ‘frame’ when he recounts his life: “’I am not a going fur to
tell you my life, like a song or a story-book’”, he assures Pip. He then
proceeds to do precisely that, following the well-worn conventions of

the criminal biography (Dickens 1965: 360). Many readers ‘knew’
Magwitch’s life before he narrated his tale. Through a vast array of
songs and story-books, and a deluge of personal letters, biographies,
popular prints, mass public meetings and other mediums, transported
convicts had, despite their physical banishment, sustained an
intimately familiar presence within metropolitan space. Convicts were
remembered through broken individual relationships, mourned as lost
family and friends. They were also kept alive within collective
cultural memories where they served as a dominant recurring motif of
exile giving meaningful symbolic form to more broadly experienced
processes of exploitation and displacement associated with the
profound socio-economic and cultural transformations of the period.
This kind of backchat was not supposed to happen. The
perceived terror of transportation was founded on the ability of the
imperial state to control and filter communication from the penal
colonies, to render the condition of the convict horrifyingly
unknowable. Dickens, perhaps revealingly, gives ironic form to this
notion in Great Expectations. When Pip visits Jaggers, the lawyer, to
verify what he has been ‘told’ by Magwitch, Jaggers cautions him:
“‘did you say ‘told’ or ‘informed’ […] told would seem to imply
verbal communication. You can’t have verbal communication with a
man in New South Wales, you know’” (Dickens 1965: 350). In truth,
however, communication with convicts had existed from the outset
and much of it was verbal. Convict voices could be heard, albeit only
as echoes, through the numerous transportation ballads sung on city
streets.10 Returning political convicts gave individual voice to the
experience of the multitude: over many decades, returned exiles like
the Chartist leader John Frost went on speaking tours throughout the
country, addressing mass audiences on the horrors inflicted by the
imperial state. Even letters had an oral quality: addressed to groups of
family and friends many were read aloud. Regularly dictated, rather
than written, because of the illiteracy of correspondents, their form
and structure reflected their spoken provenance. They were frequently
colloquial in form and re-reading them even today it is almost possible
to ‘hear’ their voices.11 While this illusion of orality was partly the
product of limited literacy, it may also have reflected the extent to
which convict letters, like those of working-class emigrants, sought to
simulate conversation in order to create a sense of presence and
immediacy (Fitzpatrick 1994: 492-94).12
64 Kirsty Reid
It was, over time, the limited ability of the imperial state to

stifle or censor these channels of communication that eventually
contributed to the system’s demise. The sheer volume of the human
flow helped to ensure that this was so. Over 160,000 men, women and
children were transported to the Australian penal colonies, and tens of
thousands of others went to other sites ranging from Bermuda to
Gibraltar.13 It was a rare neighbourhood, an exceptional community,
which did not lose at least one of its members. Personal letters and
news from exiled convicts were embedded within these wider
collectivities. Neighbourhoods continued to talk of their exiles. When
Mary Couard wrote to her husband John, she sought to anchor the
truth of recent community chat. “My dear and loving husband”, Mary
began, “overpowered with grief I sit down to write to you”,
I have been most distracted since Tuesday last when a report was
strongly circulated about this town that you was no more, which
entirely distracted me. Grantham’s wife [Grantham was also a
transported convict] and his mother was at my house, on Wednesday
morning, and said, she had got no such news in her letter […].
(Couard 1831)
John Couard was remembered in other ways too: a black sailor, he had
worked in the docks at Hull, and a petition was attached to his file,
signed by numerous of his fellow workers which asserted: “we think
Honorable Sir that he being a man of colour he has been [too] severely
sentenced for his crimes were mere trifles” (Anon 1831).
Recollections of other convicts lived on within the wider social
networks of which they had been part: when Henry Mayhew, the
famous nineteenth-century social investigator, visited a lodging house
in London in November 1849, he discovered that the men and boys he
interviewed there recalled the names of “no less than forty” of their
companions who had been transported (Mayhew 1980: 107).
Memories were long: letters seeking news of exiles continued to be
sent for decades after transportation had ended. The latest of those that
survive was postmarked 1908, sent by a Miss Hampson of Lancashire,
seeking news of her uncle, Joseph Sudell, transported over half a
century before (Hampson 1908).
When convicts thought of home they too rooted themselves
within broad communities and expansive notions of family. Thomas
Harrison was characteristic in writing for an extended audience,
sending messages of “kind love” not only to his father and mother, but
to “[my] Brothers and Sisters and my Granmother and my Hunkel and
Ant and my cusons”(Harrison 1841). When convicts dreamt of return
they also pre-figured it in collective terms: “I will stow you away my

love and you shall be safe”, Henry Dewson promised his convict
counterpart Mary Ann Jones, setting out his plans for their escape
from Van Diemen’s Land, “and I will take you home to my friends in
England in triumph” (Dewson 1833: 179-182). Other cultural forms
tell similar stories. The arms of many convict women were, for
example, decorated with long lists of initials, symbols of kith and kin,
at the centre of which were tattooed their own names. Letters, tattoos,
tokens – all these forms acted as lifelines, keeping convicts ‘alive’,
defying the power of the state to fully achieve the social and civic
death required by transportation.14
The folkloric memory of one English village tells the tale of
how one woman waited for her convict husband and son to come
home. Transported together, her son had been sentenced to seven
years, the husband fourteen. As she grew more elderly, the woman
continued to wait, sitting all day long outside her home on a chair
positioned to face the direction in which she believed Australia lay
and holding her husband’s watch in her hand. Neither of the men ever
came back (Thompson 1994: 201). Stories such as these survived into
the twentieth century because they formed part of a collective counter-
narrative, giving form to wider experiences of rupture and separation.
Implicit in some such memories were various strands of political
critique. “Monstrous hypocrites”, George Loveless, the returned
Tolpuddle Martyr, declared of the men who controlled the British
state in the 1830s:
To tear […] their […] countrymen from their native land, from the
partners of their bosom, and from the arms of their young and helpless
families […] what hypocrisy and deceit is here manifested! (1838: 1,
16)
Loveless, like others, broadened his critique outwards, situating

transportation amidst a range of other coercive experiences ranging
from the workhouse to pauper emigration which were all too routinely
familiar in many plebeian communities. In a pamphlet which achieved
wide circulation he wrote:
those hypocrites who […] have solemnly pronounced ‘What God hath
joined together, let no man put asunder’ are some of the first to
separate man and wife, to send some to banishment, and others to the
Poor-law prisons; to oppress the fatherless and [the] widow [. . .].
(Loveless 1838: 23)
66 Kirsty Reid
“I am now here in my country”, Chartist John Frost announced to a

packed public meeting in 1856, “for the purpose of showing the good
people of England what sort of rulers they have […]” (Frost 1973:
11). “Never”, Frost claimed, striking at the heart of notions of empire
as civilising mission,
in any age or country, has society existed in so depraved a state as I
have witnessed in the penal colonies, produced, too, by laws not
equalled in severity in any part of the civilized world.
When William Ashton returned from Van Diemen’s Land he

too related his experiences to a mass audience of working men and
women. For theatrical effect he dressed for the occasion in the
supposedly stigmatising, parti-coloured convict uniform. Empire, he
argued, was the deeply flawed product of the ‘blood-stained’ British
state. This, he concluded, was no surprise. “Look at the annals of
[this] country”, Ashton counselled,
keep in mind the Manchester massacre […] the butcherings at Derby
and other places […] bear in mind […] the disgusting, cruel and
deliberate sacrifice of life under the New Poor Law Bill, and then say
are there not Englishmen to be found […] to perpetrate any act that
the fiendish heart of man can devise? […] even English laws at home
are not sufficient to protect the poor and weak from the tyrannical
despotism of oppressors.
Going further than most, Ashton used the symbol of the transported
convict to link the oppression of working people within the British
Isles with the experiences of indigenous peoples under colonial rule.
The natives of Van Diemen’s Land, he told his audience, were also
exiles, for they
have been driven from the land that had hitherto afforded them
subsistence, and which they considered as their own, and their
children’s inheritance […] they […] have been hunted like beasts of
prey, and murdered by hundreds of those cruel invaders of the soil
[…] in some instances, whole nations have been exterminated off the
face of the earth […] refrain from being a supporter of bloodshed,
carnage, and violation […]. (1839: 23)
Exile, Edward Said contends, is “fundamentally a discontinuous

state of being” which is experienced “contrapuntally”. Empire
depended upon the maintenance of rigid divisions and fixed
hierarchies between imperial and imperialised populations. Convicts,
straddling the fault-lines between metropolis and colony, undermined
such spatial and cultural boundaries. Their exilic contrapuntality
helped to establish at least the germ of an idea that “there was only
one worldly cultural space […] in which to wage the struggle for
liberation and inclusion” (2000: xxviii). “Our strategy”, Arundhati Roy
told the World Social Forum in Brazil in early 2003,
should be not only to confront Empire but to lay siege to it. To
deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music,
our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer
relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. (2003)
In their ballads, letters, poems, speeches, folklore, oral memories, and

a range of other written, spoken and visual forms, convicts, and those
they were forced to leave behind, relentlessly told their own stories
throughout the period of transportation and beyond. Magwitch was but
a reflection and re-affirmation of such forms.
Notes
1
For discussion of some of the nineteenth-century novels in which returned convicts
appear, see: Patrick Brantlinger, 1988: esp. 120-21, 124, and Lansbury, 1970: esp. 92-
93, 100-101, 153.
2
For a discussion of these issues, see Reid, forthcoming.
3
See, for example, Davies, 1980: 190-214.
4
On Dickens’s changing attitudes to crime, see Collins, 1962.
5
On Dickens’s attitudes to slavery, see Chaudhuri, 1989: 3-10. On the Governor Eyre
case and the politics of race in 1860s Britain, see Hall, 1992.
6
As Said notes, “stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about
strange regions of the world […]. The power to narrate, or to block other narratives
from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and
constitutes one of the main connections between them.” (1993: xiii)
7
Many studies of Great Expectations position Magwitch as Pip’s alter ego. While
readings of the novel clearly support this, Great Expectations can also be read
productively against a much broader geo-political and cultural backdrop. As
Brantlinger suggests, both Magwitch and John Edmunds, the returned convict in
Pickwick Papers, represent a collective or “sociological return of the repressed”
(Brantlinger 1988: 120-21). The problem of wholly individualistic readings of the
Magwitch-Pip dynamic is that they tend to be part of a much wider reluctance to
consider Dickens as a writer about empire. As Said notes, most readings of Great
Expectations “situate it squarely within the metropolitan history of British fiction,
whereas I believe that it belongs in a history both more inclusive and more dynamic
than such interpretations allow” (1993: xii), Brantlinger’s comments are also relevant
here: “imperialism”, he argues, “influenced not only the tradition of the adventure tale
but the tradition of ‘serious’ domestic realism as well. Adventure and domesticity,
romance and realism, are the seemingly opposite poles of a single system of
discourse, the literary equivalents of imperial domination abroad and liberal reform at
home. In the middle of the most serious domestic concerns, often in the most unlikely
68 Kirsty Reid
texts, the Empire may intrude as a shadowy realm of escape, renewal, banishment, or
return for characters who for one reason or another need to enter or exit from scenes
of domestic conflict” (Brantlinger 1988: 12). The tendency to sideline empire in
readings of Dickens often persists even when his novels are read more broadly. Thus,
although, for example, Susan Walsh’s fascinating critique of Great Expectations
situates the novel within contemporary debates about gender and the mid-Victorian
economy, it once again tends to downplay the imperial dimension not only of the
novel itself but also of these debates (1993-94: 73-98). The insights offered by
Brantlinger and Said are yet to be systematically applied to Dickens’s studies.
8
“I got all my patter”, Ainsworth openly acknowledged, for Rookwood, his novel
about Dick Turpin, from James Hardy Vaux’s autobiographical account of convict
transportation (quoted in Himmelfarb 1984: 422).
9
The proprietorial and exploitative nature of this relationship is something which
Peter Carey powerfully evokes in Jack Maggs, his recent reworking of Great
Expectations. Jack, puzzled by author Tobias Oates’s offer to remove the phantoms
which haunt his soul, asks, “‘what is it to you, Sir? It is my pain after all?’ ‘I am a
naturalist’, Oates [for whom read Dickens] replies, ‘I wish to sketch the beast within
you’. […] Tobias Oates […] gazed down at Jack Maggs. He would be the
archaeologist of this mystery; he would be the surgeon of this soul” (Carey 1997: 46-
47, 54).
10
On the broader cultural meanings of transportation ballads within the working-class
communities in which they were sung, see Eva 1996. Eva suggests that transportation
ballads were simply one part of a broader cultural phenomenon and that exile was a
more general “pervasive voice in […] broadside songs”. That this was so, he argues,
“suggests a sense of dislocation and dispossession as a common condition; the voice
of the stranger, the isolated outsider, was that of a shared, general structure of feeling”
(1996: 194).
11
As Tamsin O’Connor notes, the semi-literacy of convicts often meant that “oral and
literary cultures collide(d) to reveal the sound of an exile’s lament” in their letters and
petitions (2001: 154).
12
On the broader cultural functions of orality within epistolary discourse, see Altman
1982.
13
It is impossible to know how many convicts ever returned. It seems likely, however,
that the proportions were tiny. Political exiles were perhaps the main exception: both
the Tolpuddle Martyrs and John Frost, the Chartist leader, were, for example,
eventually brought home as a result of popular pressure. However, both legal and
financial obstacles stood in the way of the majority of convicts. Those transported to
the penal settlements in Eastern Australia required an Absolute Pardon to enable them
to return within the period of their original sentence. Many of those sentenced to life
received a Conditional Pardon. This gave them their freedom in the colonies but
permanently excluded them from returning to Europe. To do so, just as to return
before one’s time was served, was, as Magwitch’s story reveals, to invite a death
sentence at worst or re-transportation under a new sentence at best. Time-expired
convicts (those who had originally been sentenced to either 7 or 14 years) were,
unlike lifers, able eventually to become ‘free-by-servitude’. At this point they
regained their full legal right to return. Nevertheless they still had to pay their own
passages home. This was often impossible and was, in addition, harder for women
than men. The latter were able, in some cases, to work their passages home by serving
as crew on ships. Higher wages for male workers in the colonies presumably also
helped. Finally, by the time many convicts regained the right of return, they had
become part of new social, economic and emotional networks within the colonies.
Therefore, some probably stayed because to leave would have meant a new round of
rupture and loss.
14
On tattoos and tokens, see: Field & Millett (eds) 1998; Duffield & Maxwell-Stewart
2000: 118-35. On letters, see Reid 2003.
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Anon. Petition. 8 May 1831. Archives Office of Tasmania, Colonial Secretary’s
Office 1/377/8578/31.
Ashton, William. 1839. A Lecture on the Evils of Emigration and Transportation,
Delivered at the Town-Hall, Sheffield, on July 23rd 1838. Sheffield: J.
Lisgard.
Brantlinger, Patrick. 1988. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism,
1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Carey, Peter. 1997. Jack Maggs. London: Faber & Faber.
Chaudhuri, Brahma. 1989. ‘Dickens and the Question of Slavery’ in Dickens
Quarterly 6(1): 3-10.
Collins, Philip. 1962. Dickens and Crime. London: Macmillan.
Couard, Mary. 30 June 1831. Letter. Archives Office of Tasmania, Colonial
Secretary’s Office 1/377/8578/31.
Davies, Jennifer. 1980. ‘The London Garotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the
Creation of a Criminal Class in Mid-Victorian London’ in V.A.C. Gatrell et
al (eds) Crime and the Law. London: Europa: 190-214.
Dewson, Henry. 1833. Letter to Mary Ann Jones. 28 November. Archives Office of
Tasmania, Colonial Secretary’s Office 19/4. 179-82.
Dickens, Charles. 1965. Great Expectations 1860-61. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Duffield, Ian and Hamish Maxwell-Stewart. 2000. ‘Skin-Deep Devotions: Religious
Tattoos and Convict Transportation to Australia’ in Caplan, Jane (ed.) Written
on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History. London:
Reaktion: 118-35.
Editorial. Times. 17 April 1850.
Eva, Philemon. 1996. Popular Song and Social Identity in Victorian Manchester. PhD
thesis. University of Manchester.
Field, Michele and Timothy Millett (eds). 1998. Convict Love Tokens: The Leaden
Hearts the Convicts Left Behind. Adelaide: Wakefield Press.
Fitzpatrick, David. 1994. Oceans of Consolation: Personal Accounts of Irish
Migration to Australia. Cork: Cork University Press.
Frost, John. 1973. The Horrors of Convict Life. 1856. Hobart: Sullivan’s Cove.
Hall, Catherine. 1992. White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and
History. Oxford: Polity.
Hampson, J.A. 1908. Letter to the Governor of Tasmania, Australia. 12 November.
Archives Office of Tasmania, Governor’s Office 39/9.
Harrison, Thomas. 1841. Letter. April 25. Archives Office of Tasmania. Non-State
Records 1493/2.
70 Kirsty Reid
Himmelfarb, Gertrude. 1984. The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial
Age. London: Faber & Faber.
Koditschek, Theodore. 1990. Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society:
Bradford, 1750-1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lansbury, Coral. 1970. Arcady in Australia: The Evocation of Australia in
Nineteenth-Century English Literature. Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne
University Press.
Loveless, George. 1838. The Victims of Whiggery. A Statement of the Persecutions
Experienced by the Dorchester Labourers; with a Report of their Trial; also a
Description of Van Diemen’s Land and Reflections upon the System of
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O’Connor, Tamsin. 2001. ‘Raising Lazarus’ in Frost, Lucy and Hamish Maxwell-
Stewart (eds) Chain Letters: Narrating Convict Lives. Carlton, Victoria:
Melbourne University Press: 148-161.
‘P’. 1852. Letter. Times, 11 September.
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10
Exile at the Edges of Empire: Contemporary Writing in

Portuguese
Isabel Moutinho
Isabel Moutinho was born and educated in Lisbon, Portugal, and

moved to Australia some twenty years ago, for reasons of love rather
than exile. Now lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese in the School of
Historical and European Studies, La Trobe University, Australia, her
main research area is contemporary Portuguese literature, particularly
novels dealing with the colonial wars in Africa. She is co-editor of a
recent volume, The Paths of Multiculturalism (2000).
In this paper, she refers to several forms of enforced displacement of
people undertaken in the name of the former Portuguese Empire.
These range from the enslavement and transportation of indigenous
peoples to the deportation to occupied territories of convicts and
others who were burdensome in the metropolis, to, in the Empire’s
final years, the exile of opponents of the Salazar regime to its
colonies. Specifically, she examines three contemporary narratives
dealing with exile to Portugal’s (former) overseas colonies, two by
Portuguese novelists and one by a Timorese author living in Portugal
and writing in Portuguese. Both Alexandre Pinheiro Torres’s A Nau
de Quixibá (published in 1977, but written in the 1950s) and Mário
Cláudio’s Oríon (2003) are set in São Tomé and Príncipe. Luís
Cardoso’s Crónica de Uma Travessia (1997) is set in Timor and
Portugal. The central character of A Nau de Quixibá was sent to São
Tomé as a colonial administrator and, while severely alienated, rejects
any feeling of nostalgia for his homeland because of his opposition to
the Salazar regime and its colonial policies. Oríon is an historical
novel with a strong metaphorical dimension which treats the lives of a
handful of the 200 Jewish children forcibly transported from Portugal
to São Tomé in the 1490s, several of whom later became rich from
buying and selling slaves. Crónica de Uma Travessia recounts the
biography of the author’s father, a Timorese nurse posted to an island
off the main island of Timor, in the context of a wider treatment of
political exile by the Portuguese authorities – within the colony, from
colony to colony, and from the metropolis to the colony. The paper
concludes with a discussion of language issues associated with the
writing and publishing of colonial exile narrative.
The basic goals of colonialism — namely enforcing occupation,

legitimising political sovereignty, and ensuring the economic
72 Isabel Moutinho
exploitation of a territory or state by a foreign country — have been

well served over the centuries by regimes which have used their
colonies as dumping grounds for citizens who have become
burdensome in one way or another to their central government.
Portugal, with its long colonial history, is no exception to this
coincidence of interests between colonialism and deportation.
Portuguese literature, like so many others in the European heritage, is
rich in poetry and prose dealing with exile, both in the form of official
expulsion from one’s homeland with interdiction to return and in the
less technical sense of necessary or voluntary expatriation.
Nevertheless, the conjunction between exile and colonialism as late as
the second half of the twentieth century, often depicted in
contemporary literature in Portuguese, makes for a special case within
European culture.1
Portuguese literature of exile is, of course, not always
connected with colonialism,2 or with the imperial venture at its origin,
but this is certainly a capital element in it. Such a combination is not
surprising in the case of a country that built its national identity
around the experience of voyaging and discovering new lands.
Historically, the voyaging of the explorer always implied a feeling of
inevitable (though not necessarily undesired) removal from one’s
home country, with the attendant yearning for the absent homeland.
Moreover, the canonical texts of Portuguese maritime history bear
witness to the fact that the crown used convicts as the basis for its
earliest imperial efforts. So, for example, Camões writes in The
Lusiads of the Portuguese fleet commander’s sending a convict ashore
in Calicut, upon arrival in India, in 1498, to obtain much needed
information. So, too, does Pêro Vaz de Caminha, in his Letter to King
Manuel about the finding of Brazil, refer to convicts being left behind
for the same purpose of acquisition of knowledge, and consequently
power, for the Portuguese authorities. On a more personal note, at the
end of the same Letter, Caminha begs the King to recall his son-in-law
from exile in São Tomé, as a reward for the scribe’s good services.3
But of the feelings of such exiles at the beginnings of empire we know
nothing, nor indeed of the despair of those dragged into the most
extreme form of exile, not usually included in this category, that of the
slaves transported from continental Africa to colonial plantations in
Brazil, in Cape Verde, or in São Tomé and Príncipe, islands in the
Gulf of Guinea. These two groups, which nowadays often constitute
the research focus of historiography, have previously been the most
Exile at the Edges of Empire: Contemporary Writing in Portuguese 73
forgotten, for it was not until recent times that literature began to turn
its attention to the subjectivity of history’s underlings.4
Later on, as the newly occupied territories progressively
became colonies, the preservation of which turned into an obsession
of the Portuguese dictatorship of the middle decades of the twentieth
century, the country’s literature often reflected the exile experiences
of yet another social group: those of twentieth-century opponents of
colonialism and of the regime that sustained it well into the mid-1970s
despite all the winds of change blowing in Africa.
Contemporary fiction in Portuguese alludes to or focuses on
various types of exile, directly or indirectly related to colonialism.
These include: self-imposed removal from Portugal in the case of
authors who experienced unbearable ideological alienation in their
own country; actual political banishment of opponents to Salazar’s
Estado Novo and its colonial policies; the special case of the
Portuguese military who fought in the colonial wars and often
experienced their conscription to Africa as a deportation; and even
various forms of social ostracism perceived as an exile imposed on
those who did not conform to the regime’s internal and colonial
policies.
This study examines three contemporary narratives dealing with
exile to Portugal’s former overseas colonies, two by Portuguese
novelists and one by a Timorese author living in Portugal and writing
in Portuguese. Both Alexandre Pinheiro Torres’s A Nau de Quixibá
(1977) and Mário Cláudio’s Oríon (2003) are set in São Tomé and
Príncipe. Luís Cardoso’s Crónica de Uma Travessia (1997) is set in
Timor and Portugal. Tempting as it would be to compare these with a
much larger corpus to include also novels of exile set in the heart of
Portugal’s African empire (Angola and Mozambique), this study
concentrates only on narratives set at the very edges of the empire,
where the feelings of exile and abandonment are strongest as a
consequence of geographical isolation.
Alexandre Pinheiro Torres’s A Nau de Quixibá (The Quixibá
Caravel) was written in 1957 but not published until twenty years
later. The long gap between composition date and publication date is
indicative of the severity of censorship during the Salazar regime. The
book appeared only after the overthrow of the dictatorship, which
opened the way to the independence of the former colonies. It is an
autobiographical novel, dedicated to the memory of the author’s
father, whose life it retraces, with the name of the textual author and
first-person narrator coinciding with that of the book’s empirical
74 Isabel Moutinho
author. In A Nau de Quixibá, the 17-year old Alexandre, who lives in

Portugal with his mother and conservative family, visits his
outspokenly anti-Salazarist father, who lives in semi-exile in São
Tomé, in 1939. The Portuguese side of the family clearly supports the
values of Salazar’s regime which considered the colonies to be an
inseparable part of Portugal, a right which the country had earned,
even a gift from God.
The father’s position as a semi-exile is always ambiguous in the
novel. Having arrived in the Portuguese colony of São Tomé many
years before with his wife and family, he oversees the historical Roça
de Monte Café, still an active cocoa plantation. His wife and children
have long left him behind and resumed their lives in Portugal.
Nevertheless, both he himself and his whole family in Portugal, who
thoroughly disapprove of his life, constantly speak of his exile - or
Deportation with a capital D, as he calls it. The capital D is important
because the father explicitly opposes it to the capital S of everything
he hates: the S for Salazar and the S for saudade, a Portuguese word
with multiple meanings, namely homesickness, nostalgia, and
yearning for lost happiness. When the son asks him if he does not feel
saudade, meaning simply homesickness for family and home in
Portugal, the reply is terse: “A saudade […] é património nacional.
[…]. Não: a saudade até se escreve hoje com S grande” (Torres 1977:
37; ‘saudade is the national heritage… What is more: saudade is even
written with a capital S nowadays’, my translation throughout).
The explanation that follows makes the connection between
saudade (nostalgia) and imperialism clearer, and warns of the danger
the father sees for his son’s generation of growing up with nostalgia as
a national value:
… para já, filiaram-te na Saudade do Império […]. A Saudade, com S
grande, sempre com S grande, é a base teórica do nosso Nacional-
Socialismo. A Saudade dá a instituição política saudosa, o Estado
saudoso. Saudoso de quê? Do Passado, é claro. E também do Futuro
[…]. Mas um Futuro que reedifique o Passado, o reconstrua. (Torres
1977: 38)
... to begin with, they enlisted you in the Nostalgia of Empire […].
Nostalgia with a capital N, always with a capital N, is the theoretical
basis for our National-Socialism. Nostalgia produces the nostalgic
political institution, the nostalgic State. Nostalgic for what? For the
Past, of course. And also for the Future […]. But a Future that re-
edifies, that reconstructs the Past.5
Maria Alzira Seixo writes of exile “as a division felt by the

consciousness of the writer concerning space or time,” indeed space
and time, which always implies “developing a specific notion of
parallel time that opposes the past and the present” (Seixo 2001: 72
and 68). There is no doubt that political militancy in an exile situation
is normally associated with an overcoming of adversities suffered in
the past, and a living for the present, which amounts to making
positive choices for the future. However, in A Nau de Quixibá, the
father’s perception of Portugal’s time as being linked to the
intoxicating notion of Empire is more complex than a simple rejection
of the past, because it corresponds to the evaluation of a specific
Portuguese historical conjuncture. The father views this as arrested in
time, not only anchored in the past but, worse still, anachronistically
prolonged into a present that denies, even now, any possibility of
change for the future. This is, no doubt, the reason why this outspoken
“anti-monarchist […], Jacobin, republican, anarchist”
(“antimonárquico […], jacobino, republicano, anarquista”; Torres:
1977: 32) chooses or accepts to remain in the colony in self-imposed
exile, because there is no alternative. Even militancy, either in the
colony or in the metropolis, ceases to make sense when there is no
space for him in a home country that persists in looking backwards in
time. Typically, the narrative of exile emphasises a sense of loss and
dispossession, but not so for this man, because he would feel even
more displaced and dispossessed in a country that is living outside the
normal rules of time. Hence his abhorrence of any kind of nostalgia –
including the personal homesickness he refuses to feel, as it is too
dangerously close to political nostalgia for empire. For this man there
is no dream of homecoming, only that need for impassioned raging
that Dylan Thomas so vehemently encouraged in his father. The only
consolation left for him must be “the fact that the act of withdrawal,
perceived as a mode of rejection of the prevailing norms, [is] by
nature an act of subversion” (Lahiri 2001: 3).
This time without a future is the borrowed time of Portuguese
colonialism in the mid-twentieth-century, as the allegory of the
father’s obsession with shipwreck history makes abundantly clear.
The pictures of wrecked ships, which fill his house and initially puzzle
his son, are in fact the visual representation of the father’s critique of
the regime’s imperial delusions and persistence in sustaining a
colonialism more and more out of date and untenable. The Empire
came with the voyages of the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century caravels,
the countless wrecks of which were already then a warning of the
76 Isabel Moutinho
precariousness of the enterprise. But five centuries later the regime

persists in its blindness, refusing to see the signs of a time inexorably
past. So, even Salazar’s name, beginning with the S of saudade,
represents a nostalgia that must, in the end, be read as a morbid
attachment to the past.
Nevertheless, this novel of semi-exile, with its recognition of
impotence in the face of a regime that institutes the past as a rule for
the future, is not devoid of hope, because the son’s visit to São Tomé
ends with his conversion to the father’s opposition to the regime. This
deep change is again symbolised by a shipwreck: father and son visit
the remnants of a caravel wrecked on the adjacent islet of Quixibá,
which gives the book its title. There the son throws a stone, which
accidentally sinks the carcass that has withstood for centuries. The
torch is thus handed on, as it were, and the son will continue the
father’s struggle, so that we can say with Antonio Skármeta, about one
of his own exiled characters: ‘este hombre que viene de la derrota no
es un derrotado’ (Délano 1978: 3; ‘this man, who comes from a
background of defeat, is not defeated’, my translation).
Mário Cláudio’s Oríon, published in early 2003, is a striking
example of a novel about exile in the service of colonialism. It deals
with the lives of a group of Jewish children forcibly transported to the
archipelago of São Tomé and Príncipe, by order of the Portuguese
King John II in the 1490s. The first-person narrator, one of about two
hundred children thus exiled to these unhealthy islands, is supremely
conscious of his Jewish origins as well as of the similarities between
his personal fate and that of his race, the quintessential victims of
mass deportation over more than two-and-a-half millennia. The novel
is based on historical, though little documented, events. As São Tomé
and Príncipe were uninhabited at the time of discovery, the peopling
of the islands became the immediate priority; King John II did indeed
arrange for Captain Álvaro Caminha to take with him not only a large
number of convicts, but also the children of the so-called Portuguese
Jews. The latter had taken refuge in Portugal after their expulsion
from Spain, but having overstayed their period of grace in Portugal,
they had become subject to slavery.6
However, the novel is not primarily historical but metaphorical.
Once the basic historical situation is set, the narrator, the most
contemplative of the seven children whose lives the book explores,
concentrates on the universal fear of the unknown and the yearning for
family love and past happiness forever lost, as well as on the excesses
which the tropical environment induces these children to indulge in as
they grow up. The book raises some disturbing questions: several of
these children (Raquel, Caim, Séfora, and in particular Jairo), who all
come from the persecuted Jewish minority, soon become persecutors
themselves once they adapt to São Tomé’s colonial society. Abel (the
narrator) and Raquel, his first wife, both buy slaves and become
wealthy managers of a sugar-cane plantation. Caim even betrays the
leader of the quilombo, the king of the runaway slaves who first saved
his life. Worst of all, Jairo grows filthy rich as a slave trader and falls
into the most abject personal decadence and sexual promiscuity.
Is this a parable referring to present day developments in the
conflict between Israelis and Arabs, in which Israeli Jews, historically
so subject to persecution themselves, have become the persecutors of
the Palestinians? Is it to be viewed rather as a consequence of African
excess? Or is it, as one suspects, an allegory of the evils of
colonialism? These children were, after all, exiled in the name of the
same colonialism which was to thrive on the traffic of slaves and on
cruel repression of indigenous populations who rebelled in vain
against the imposition of foreign rule. The previously uninhabited
island of São Tomé came to be governed and exploited under the same
rule as other Portuguese colonies, with slave labour imported from
other African regions to establish and work on vast colonial
plantations. It would be easy to add to this list of evils the image of the
virile metropolis raping the colonised territories, viewed as feminine
and weak, which feminist cultural criticism has developed in the wake
of Edward Said’s Orientalism.7 Indeed, the story of at least one of
these Jewish children exiled to São Tomé would support this reading:
Débora, raped by the colony’s judge, Gonçalo Anes, becomes a
prostitute and loses her sanity. Insanity, as Fanon’s pioneering work
hauntingly exposed, is a common pathological consequence of the
colonial encounter. Débora’s story, tied as it is with that of one of the
few male, Portuguese, historical figures diegetically included in the
novel, can thus be seen as a figuration of the rape of the colony itself
(though she is not, in fact, a native). But we must not forget that at
least two other Jewish young women in this novel, Raquel and Séfora,
achieve positions of power within the colony, thereby illustrating
women’s aptitude both in exile and in the colonial context, when other
elements are at stake.
Finally we must look at Perpétua, the only non-Jewish character
of the central group, an African slave acquired by Abel, who becomes
his constant companion after his wife’s death. Whereas all the Jewish
children have Biblical names with specific symbolic connotations,
78 Isabel Moutinho
Perpétua has a Catholic saint’s name, which already represents the

violation of her African identity and religion as a consequence of her
enslavement in the colonial plantations. Unlike the Jewish children
who either temporarily or more lastingly manage to make a mark in
the colonial life of São Tomé and Príncipe, Perpétua remains
(perpetually) a slave – Abel’s companion, but still a slave, because she
dies before manumission. Abel, the exiled Jew, and Perpétua, the
African slave, are the meditative characters in this novel of exile and
colonialism. Abel, now an old man, writes the stories of the other
children, who all pursued active lives. He himself, however, having
been a successful plantation manager, has lost everything and prefers
to dwell on the past and on his misfortunes. This is a characteristic he
shares with Perpétua, who obsessively repeats the tale of her people’s
disempowerment and enslavement by the European invaders. Abel
feels compelled to write this, his book of memoirs, with his written
narrative corresponding to Perpétua’s oral one, often told and retold.
But each finds little therapeutic value, he in his writing and she in her
telling: “estava Perpétua muito mais interessada em me guardar como
ouvinte do seu fado do que em escutar episódios dos infortúnios que
eu padecia” (Claudio 2003: 91; “Perpétua was much more interested
in keeping me listening to the story of her fate than in listening to an
account of the misfortunes I suffered”). Unfortunately for both
characters, this reveals an inability to overcome the past, with both
remaining anchored in their self-pity and implicitly accepting exile as
a defeat.
Appropriately, then, the book has a circular structure: distant
past (departure from Lisbon, arrival in São Tomé) – more recent past
(achievements of fellow exiles) – and a present (the moment of
remembering and writing) which inevitably leads back to the
traumatic memory of the distant past. The act of telling, and especially
the act of writing (which gives any narrator a demiurgic power similar
to God’s), might have become a way of overcoming grief, of engaging
with a new environment and finding a positive side in the experience
of the new world. But that is not the path chosen by either Abel or
Perpétua. Both are irremediably lost in the contemplation of their
misfortunes, ‘perpetuating’ them into the present. Tellingly, in the
penultimate chapter, the once again repeated recollection of the
moment of departure from Lisbon to exile in São Tomé is now written
in the present tense, so that the past becomes present even
grammatically, completely obliterating the possibility of any real life
in the present.8 This fictional engulfing of the present by the past is, in
the end, in keeping with a common perception of Jewish history. In

the unfolding of Abel’s experience of deportation, the individual story
merges into the collective history of the Jews, seen as the perennial
victims of exile.
Unlike A Nau de Quixibá and Oríon, Luís Cardoso’s Crónica
de Uma Travessia (Chronicle of a Crossing) is not primarily fictional.
Maria Luísa Leal sees the book as representative of a tendency in
postcolonial prose, that of the “novel ‘contaminated’ by other
registers, namely the non-fictional, which is to be found in the ‘récit
de vie’” (“um romance ‘contaminado’ por outros registos,
nomeadamente o não ficcional que se encontra no ‘récit de vie’”, Leal
2001: 5). The book reads, above all (initially), as a biographical
account of the life of the author’s father (not unlike A Nau de
Quixibá), progressively turning into an Erziehungsroman of sorts,
becoming also a powerful memoir of Timor’s recent history.
There are, in fact, many crossings in this narrative, real and
metaphorical: that of the author’s family from the main island of
Timor to the smaller one of Ataúro; the author’s much longer crossing
to Portugal, where he goes to further his education and ends up
redefining his identity; and finally, that of his parents to the mother-
country, in retirement. But the weightier crossing is fundamentally the
son’s journey from following his father’s firm belief in living by the
rules and dying under the shadow of the Portuguese flag (mate-
bandera-hum, in the Tetum expression), to his slow awakening to the
cause of political independence for Timor. With this, the son’s
personal journey of discovery, comes also that of his fellow Timorese,
caught in the Indonesian invasion which followed Portugal’s
withdrawal from its former colony. For them there were difficult
choices to make: siding with the ex-coloniser, accepting Indonesian
annexation, or fighting for the independence which Timor finally
obtained four years after the publication of this book.
Nor is Crónica de Uma Travessia a narrative of exile proper.
Nevertheless, the reality of political exile in three varieties — namely
within the colony itself, from colony to colony, and from the
metropolis to the colony — is often mentioned in the book’s pages
and in such a casual manner that we realise what a common
occurrence it is. The first chapter sets the scene. The author’s father, a
trained nurse, is considered exiled by his profession (“desterrado pela
profissão”, Cardoso 1997: 20), when he is posted to the island of
Ataúro. This, we learn during the family’s sea crossing, is a sort of
floating prison for all exiles, surrounded by shark-infested waters. On
80 Isabel Moutinho
the same boat that carries the family over to Ataúro, there is a real
exile, the prisoner Simão, escorted by a cipaio (a member of the
‘native’ police).9 The convict Simão is Timorese, from the main
island, but the connection between colonialism and exile becomes
more evident in the reference to the origin of his ‘native’ policeman, a
descendant of Mozambican exiles who realises that he too is being
exiled to Ataúro. This implies that the common colonial ruler has the
power to exile its subjects from one colony to another, but also, more
disturbingly, that all ‘natives’ from the various colonies are in fact
indistinguishable in the eyes of the metropolis, reduced to a common
denominator as ‘natives’. The secret purpose of this transportation
between colonies is revealed: “Embora as autoridades considerassem
que um nativo era um bom guarda de outro […]. Assim se foram
livrando também deles aos poucos” (Cardoso 1997: 32; “The
authorities […] [knew] that, when trained for the purpose, one native
could be used to guard another […]. And thus they gradually got rid of
them as well”, 2000: 23).
Exiles come to Timor from other Portuguese colonies as well:
there is an exile from Macau (“um desterrado macaísta”, 1997: 81),
and, on the island of Ataúro, Mário Lopes, originally exiled from São
Tomé and Príncipe, now runs a prosperous business (1997: 33).
Success, then, is within the reach of those banished to Timor; the once
deported shop-owner is not even barred from some degree of political
activity, dealing in “contrabando de livros e ideias subversivas” (1997:
34; “he smuggled books and subversive ideas”, 2000: 26), but above
all, perorating at funerals, “culpabilizando as autoridades pelos
enterrados e desterrados” (1997: 34; “placing the blame fairly and
squarely on the authorities for those banished by death or exile”, 2000:
26).
No secret is made of the fact that the colony is used for the
specific purpose of dumping convicts. Of Timor’s Portuguese
governor himself (and we must not forget that these are historical, not
fictional, figures) we are told:
Tinha por missão e vontade arrancar os Timorenses e Timor do
esquecimento a que fora devotado durante longos anos, então com a
finalidade de ser um simples depósito de agentes subversivos. (1997:
78)
His mission and his desire was to drag Timor and the Timorese out of
its oblivion as a dumping ground for subversives. (2000: 71)
Indeed, some of the now internationally known figures of Timor’s

transition to independence are the children of exiles from the
metropolis. Mário Carrascalão, a prominent politician whose name the
tragic news of Indonesian massacres in Timor made internationally
known, is presented in the book as the son of a man from the South of
Portugal, deported to Timor for political activities against the Salazar
regime (1997: 83). As a political exile on the island of Ataúro, he is
said to have had a very difficult life (1997: 103). But not only did he
eventually succeed in making good in Timor as “a prosperous coffee-
grower” (2000: 78; “agricultor próspero de café”, 1997: 83); he even
managed to redeem himself in the eyes of the colonial authorities:
“posteriormente recuperado pelas autoridades para funções de
presidente da Câmara Municipal de Díli” (1997: 83; “later
rehabilitated by the powers-that-be and made the President of the town
council in Díli”, 2000: 78). José Ramos-Horta, whom Luís Cardoso
describes as already then “dotado dum espírito subversivo” (1997:
102; “endowed with a naturally subversive turn of mind”, 2000: 97),
went to study in Díli, “continuando a exercitar o seu génio de
revoltado, herdado do pai, que fora desterrado para Timor por actos
anti-salazaristas” (1997: 102; “where he continued to exercise the
genius for revolt inherited from his father, who had been exiled to
Timor for anti-Salazar activities”, 2000: 98). Exiles, then, come to
Timor from Mozambique, Angola, Macau, São Tomé, and Príncipe, as
well as from Portugal, turning the territory into a multicultural melting
pot, which is simultaneously and ironically a hotbed for political
insurgency.
Developments in recent Timorese history, from colony to
(eventually) independent nation, are thus inextricably bound up with
the fact that Timor was used for years and years as a dumping ground
for political exiles, especially from Portugal, in that so many of the
new country’s politicians are the children of deported Portuguese anti-
colonialists. Ironically, even those who adopted a pro-Indonesian
position during the Indonesian occupation can be seen as deriving
their stance from Timor’s historical association with colonial exile:
Osório Soares, also a public figure, well-known as a pro-Indonesian
activist, would distribute “panfletos pró-indonésios […] como uma
forma de se vingar das autoridades coloniais que desterraram o seu tio
para os Açores” (1997: 106; “pro-Indonesian leaflets […] as a way of
avenging himself on the colonial authorities for exiling his uncle to
the Azores”; 2000: 102). The weapon then can cut both ways, but it
clearly shows that there are deep historical reasons why the colony
82 Isabel Moutinho
was to feel so profoundly betrayed by a mother-country that

eventually granted it independence but behaved rather as a neglectful
step-mother: “Mas a mãe-pátria fora sempre distraída com Timor e
desta vez tinha o comportamento duma madastra [sic: madrasta]”
(1997: 84; “Always neglectful of her maternal responsibilities to
Timor, Portugal at this time behaved like a wicked step-mother”,
2000: 79).
The author’s father, originally from the most rebellious region
of Timor (remembered for the Manufahi rebellion against colonial
rule), but who was trained in a missionary school and deeply
acculturated, is, in the end, the most tragic figure of exile in the book.
Indeed, the story of his life stands metonymically for the fate of a
people truly exiled from their own sense of identity, estranged from
any collective cultural coherence, by centuries of Portuguese
colonialism.
*
A final word is due here about the question of language in these

narratives of colonial exile. The loss of the mother-tongue, with its
concomitant sense of cultural disorientation and deprivation, is a
constant element of all literature of exile, which, as a single example,
David Malouf has made so palpable to all who have read An
Imaginary Life. This question, however, partly loses significance in
the case of narratives dealing with exile to the edges of a colonial
empire, where one common language is — at least officially — in
existence. All the characters in these books could, in principle, have
continued to speak Portuguese in the remote colonies. In the case of A
Nau de Quixibá, all characters, being Portuguese by birth and
education, would naturally have spoken Portuguese in São Tomé and
Príncipe. In Oríon, the question is easily brushed aside: if this were
history rather than literature, neither the so-called ‘Portuguese’ Jews
(more likely Sephardi speakers of Ladino), nor certainly the African
slaves, would necessarily have spoken any Portuguese. But the fiction
of exile in the Portuguese colony makes the situation plausible in a
literary sense as the few dialogues presented are between people
exiled while they were children growing up in Portugal, where they
would have learned to speak Portuguese. As to the narration itself,
since both novels are by Portuguese authors, the language of narration
is naturally Portuguese.
Nevertheless, in postcolonial writing, the matter of
estrangement from the mother-tongue acquires special importance. So
it is that in Crónica de Uma Travessia Luís Cardoso explores the issue
discreetly. At the time he wrote this book, the author was living in
Portugal, in the ambiguous position of having been born in a distant
island which was no longer the Portuguese colony it had been for
centuries, nor yet an independent country. But the book reveals
aspirations that are common in literatures of postcolonial countries –
such as the vindication of a distinct cultural identity – and this is, no
doubt, the reason why the issue of the coexistence of several
languages gains weight in it. The narrator tells us of each character’s
different linguistic origins, demarcating Timor as a separate,
multilingual entity, thus revealing the “conscience de la multiplicité
des langues, expérience d’une manière d’éclatement du discours”
which Alain Ricard identifies in other postcolonial literatures (Ricard
1995: 6). But the book is written for a Portuguese-reading public, so
that Tetum (and other) expressions used in it appear translated in brief
footnotes. That is, the book must be written in Portuguese for practical
reasons: the need to be understood, the need to find a publisher, even
the fact that the author was educated in Portuguese and seems to have
chosen (for the moment) Portugal as his country of residence. But that
does not mean that he is prepared to abrogate his right to a different
linguistic reality, which still informs his uneasy sense of identity.10
The claim is made already in the subtitle of the book: A Época do Ai-
Dik-Funam, which a Portuguese reader can only understand in the
very last line of the narrative, and even then only partially. (A footnote
in the Portuguese edition explains one of the Tetum words, Funam,
also giving the botanical name for the untranslated tree-name. The
English edition gives a complete translation: “In the season when the
coral tree flowers”; Cardoso 2000: 152).
Thematically, narratives of exile are of necessity built upon an
axis of physical displacement and cultural dislocation, frequently
leading to a questioning of origins and sense of self. Structurally, they
almost always intertwine two spatial and two temporal paradigms: the
place of origin versus the place of exile, the past versus the present. It
is common for narratives of exile to stress situations of hardship and
dispossession. However, a shifting emphasis on either of the two
locations as well as a preference for the past or the present moment
(even looking forward to the future) can determine whether the
experience of exile is valued negatively or positively.
The three narratives here examined share a setting at the edges
of empire, but each evaluates exile on a different scale. In Oríon, the
memory of the past continues to oppress the narrator, thus preventing
any positive overcoming of the deportation. On the contrary, in A Nau
84 Isabel Moutinho
de Quixibá, the past is all but annulled by the narrator’s complete

rejection of its memory and any kind of nostalgia: political militancy
is not possible for him in exile, but his undeterred dissidence allows
for a viewing of exile in the colony as a means of maintaining
ideological coherence. In Crónica de Uma Travessia, the memory of
the past functions precisely as a tool for redefining an identity
alienated by the experience of colonialism and, as such, as a
springboard for the future. In the early colonial setting, then, and
without a political conscience (Oríon), the experience of exile is
destructive and morally ruinous. In the later colonial settings,
however, both A Nau de Quixibá and Travessia underline the
importance of political commitment to a positive evaluation of exile.
Notes
1
For an introduction to related questions within African literature, see Carvalho,
2001.
2
Maria Alzira Seixo, 2001, also includes the experience of Portuguese economic
migration to richer European countries in her analysis, given the similarities in the
feelings of displacement and yearning for return to the home country.
3
For the text of the letter in Portuguese and English and a discussion of its
significance, see: www.auburn.edu/~downejm/sp/cpcmain.htm (consulted
20.03.2004).
4
For a fascinating account of early colonial circumstance in Luanda, Angola, through
the eyes of a slave, see the novel by Angolan writer Pepetela, A Gloriosa Família,
(Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1998).
5
I choose to translate saudade as ‘nostalgia’ because both the N and the S appear in
National-Socialism, and the N is in the nau (caravel) of the title, as much as the S is in
the shipwrecks (naufrágios) mentioned further below.
6
João de Barros. 1946. Décadas, Livro I, Selecção, prefácio e notas de Antonio
Baiao. Lisbon: Sa da Costa. See also Enciclopédia Luso-Brasileira de Cultura
(Lisbon: Verbo, n.d.), ‘Judaísmo’, ‘Judeus em Portugal’, and ‘São Tomé e Príncipe’.
7
See, for example, Gayatri C. Spivak. 1985. ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of
Imperialism’ in Critical Inquiry 12(1), reprinted in Warhol, Robyn R. and Diane Price
Herndl, (eds). Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press: 1997): 896-912.
8
The seventh Jewish child must here be briefly mentioned: Benjamim, a Messianic,
mystical character, more magical than real, from whom all others expect salvation.
The yearning for his return is remarkably similar to the details of the Portuguese
Sebastian myth. The persistent hope for the return of the lost King Sebastian as for
that of the disappeared Benjamim, each expected to come back to redeem the
Portuguese and the Jewish people respectively, is likewise indicative of a morbid
attachment to the past.
9
Standard Portuguese sipaio, English ‘sepoy’, is normally a person of Indian origin.
10
It is worth mentioning in passing the example of another postcolonial writer in the
Portuguese language, the Angolan José Luandino Vieira: his first book, Luuanda, was
initially published with a glossary of Kimbundo words used in the text, subsequent
editions of the same book dispensed with the glossary, and later, for example in his
Nós, Os de Makulusu, Kimbundo phrases and sentences appear interspersed in the
Portuguese text without any explanation at all, a sign that the author has reached full
postcolonial confidence. Similarly, Luís Cardoso no longer includes translations of
Tetum or other Timorese expressions in his second book, Olhos de Coruja, Olhos de
Gato Bravo (2001), thus subtly disempowering readers who have no knowledge of
Timor’s own languages.
Bibliography
Cardoso, Luis. 1997. Crónica de Uma Travessia. A Época do Ai-Dik-Funam, Lisbon:

Dom Quixote, translated by Margaret Jull Costa, with a foreword by Jill
Jolliffe, as The Crossing. A Story of East Timor. London: Granta Books,
2000.
- - - . 2001. Olhos de Coruja, Olhos de Gato Bravo. Lisbon: Dom Quixote.
Carvalho, Alberto. 2001. ‘Travel and Metaphors of Exile in African Literature in
Portuguese’ in Lahiri, (2001): 76-85.
Cláudio, Mario. 2003. Oríon. Lisbon: Dom Quixote.
Délano, Poli. 1978. ‘Antonio Skármeta, un exilio creativo’ in La Semana de Bellas
Artes (México) 35: 3. London: Granta Books.
Lahiri, Sharmistha. 2001. ‘Introduction’ in her Inhabiting the Other. Essays on
Literature and Exile. New Delhi: Aryan Books International: 2-15.
Leal, Maria Luísa. 2004. ‘Autobiografia e memória em espaços literários pós-
coloniais’. Actas do IV Congresso da Associação Portuguesa de Literatura
Comparada (University of Évora, May 2001). Online at: www.eventos.
uevora.pt/comparada (consulted 30.06.2004).
Malouf, David. 1978. An Imaginary Life. London: Chatto and Windus.
Ricard, Alain. 1995. Littératures d’Afrique noire. Paris: Karthala.
Seixo, Maria Alzira, John Noyes, Graça Abreu and Isabel Moutinho (eds). 2000. The
Paths of Multiculturalism. Lisbon: Cosmos.
- - - . 2001. ‘Faces of Exile in Portuguese Literature’ in Lahiri (2001): 68-75.
Torres, Alexandre Pinheiro. 1989. A Nau de Quixibá. 2nd edition. Lisbon: Caminho.
11
Audio Installation with Sculptural Images

‘Thought Exiled from the Tongue’
Dolleen Manning
A First Nations Canadian scholar and artist of the Anishinaabeg

Ojibwe people, Dolleen Manning grew up in an off-reserve context in
South Western Ontario with English as her first language, but close to
an older generation of Ojibwe speakers. Having studied fine arts at
both the University of Windsor and Simon Fraser University, she is
now a graduate student in the Centre for the Study of Theory and
Criticism at the University of Western Ontario.
Her presentation on the DVD consists of a multi-layered sound
recording of the voices of her mother Rose Manning and singer Cody
Cardinal from Sad Lake Alberta coupled with a slowly changing
sequence of eleven photographs of Rose, Dolleen, and a number of
Dolleen’s artworks. The two voices, speaking in English and Ojibwe,
build into a sensuous chorus of indistinguishable utterances. Evidence
of grappling with articulation is subtly woven into the soundscape in
the hesitation and pauses of the speaker. This work explores the
notion of exile within one’s own homeland and the schizophrenic state
of thought which arises when the speaker is cut off from her/his own
language and strains to communicate with an imposed colonial
tongue. The artist depicts the tensions that arise from the de-
territorialisation and re-territorialisation of aboriginal people’s cultural
identities, as they resist, emerge, and recede in relation to traditional,
indigenous, western, and hybrid expressions. Dolleen Manning gives
abundant thanks to her mother and teacher Ojibwe speaker Rosalie
(Elijah) Manning; Cree drummer/singer Cody Gilbert Cardinal; and
Toronto-based filmmaker and sound editor Anna Malkin for
contributing their time, voices and expertise. The portrait of her
mother and herself was taken by Toronto photographer Lorne Fromer.
‘Thought Exiled from the Tongue’ was originally presented as a sound
installation, entitled ‘The Transmutation of Language: Ojibwe in
Translation’, but, for the DVD, sculptural images of separate
independent art works by Dolleen Manning have been included to add
a visual dimension.
Chi-Miigwech.
See DVD
12
Catastrophe, Memory, and Testimony in Winona

LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman
Hsinya Huang
Hsinya Huang was born in Taiwan, in 1961. Her late father was a
Chinese ‘forty-niner’, who came to Taiwan in 1949 when the
Communists took over mainland China, and thereafter lived a
diasporic life on the island. When he passed away in 1994 and she had
to communicate with his family in China about his funeral, the
condition of displacement which he had experienced and recounted to
her struck her with belated force of consciousness and assumed
inexpressibly poignancy. While the rift separating her father from his
native place constitutes an essential sadness, Huang’s sense of
displacement was reinforced by the fact that she migrated many times
in both directions across the Pacific Ocean. Though she finally settled
with her husband and their only son in her childhood hometown,
migration has nonetheless become a way of thinking, a structure of
feeling, and a memory in the blood, which can never be surmounted.
She is now Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature
at National Kaohsiung Normal University on Taiwan and has
published numerous articles on post-colonial exilic literature. Her
monograph, entitled (De)Colonizing the Body: Disease, Empire, and
(Alter)Native Medicine in Contemporary Native American Writings, is
scheduled to be published in September of 2004.
In this paper, Huang details the many dimensions of the involuntary
exile of Native Americans from their own territories, resulting from
the Euro-Indian wars, land usurpation, and legislative manipulation
over five hundred years. This kind of exile, of indigenous people in
what are now First World settler nations, has been neglected by
scholars in postcolonial studies. Huang writes of the catastrophic
decline of Native populations through war and introduced diseases,
and the environmental degradation through industrial exploitation and
pollution of their traditional lands and modern reservations. She
examines here the novel by Native activist Winona LaDuke, Last
Standing Woman (1997), which traces the history of loss and struggle
by her own Anishinaabeg people, over seven generations, from the
1860s to the present and beyond. She shows how LaDuke treats tribal
memory over the generations as a means of resistance, of recovering
identity in relation to the land to which the tribe is spiritually linked.
The oral nature and the circular structure of LaDuke’s narrative and its
continuation into the future, to the year 2018, counteract the linear
pattern and the written basis of first world history.
90 Hsinya Huang
Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabeg from the Makwa Dodaem (Bear Clan)

of the Mississippi Band of the White Earth reservation in northern
Minnesota, is a leading spokesperson and activist for indigenous
rights. She became involved in Native American environmental issues
when she met Jimmy Durham, a well-known Cherokee activist, at
Harvard University. At the age of 18 she spoke to the United Nations
regarding Native American issues and since then has become well-
known as a voice for indigenous environmental and social concerns
throughout the US and internationally. LaDuke moved to White Earth
after she graduated from Harvard and started to engage in lawsuits to
recover lands originally held by the Anishinaabeg and taken illegally
by the federal government.1 After exhausting the resources of the legal
system, she founded the White Earth Land Recovery Project to raise
funds to purchase original White Earth land holdings. She proclaims
the intimate connection between tribal identity and land, maintaining
that, to control their own destiny, tribal people must regain control of
their land. She has published numerous articles on environmental
issues and testified at government hearings. In an article of 1996, she
wrote:
Across the continent, on the shores of small tributaries, in the shadows
of sacred mountains, on the vast expanse of the prairies, or in the
safety of the woods, prayers are being repeated, as they have been for
thousands of years, and common people with uncommon courage and
the whispers of their ancestors in their ears continue their struggles to
protect the land and water and trees on which their very existence is
based. And like small tributaries joining together to form a mighty
river, their force and power grows. This river will not be dammed.
(LaDuke 1996: 38)
In an interview with David Barsamian, LaDuke contends that

Native American ancient rights to the land need to be recognized and
protected by the American Constitution. White expansionists created a
frontier mythology according to which the lands they seized were an
untamed wilderness awaiting civilised cultivation, in the words of
Walter Prescott Webb, “a vast body of wealth without proprietors,” an
“empty land,” several times the size of Europe, a land “whose
resources had not yet been exploited” (quoted in Arnold 1996: 110). It
is clear from research over the last 60 years that the pre-Columbian
Americas had a native population of over 100 million, with perhaps
10-18 million living in what are now the United States and Canada
(Stannard 1993: 266-268). By the mid-eighteenth century it is
estimated that the Native population of these North American
territories had dropped to a mere two hundred and fifty thousand.
Catastrophe, Memory, and Testimony in Winona LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman 91
There has been debate about the extent to which this “great holocaust”
(LaDuke 1999: 1) was the direct consequence of war initiated by the
colonists and the extent to which smallpox and other diseases served
as the cutting edge of European imperialism. 2 While the impact of
epidemic diseases may have been the immediate cause of mortality,
the ultimate responsibility lies in the rapacity of colonists and their
contempt for native tribal civilisation. Native Americans have been
largely banished from the American psyche except in the high
proportion of states, towns, rivers, and so on, which bear indigenous
names. For LaDuke, America has for five hundred years been “in the
process of denial of holocaust” (Barsamian 2003: 4). 3
The prime target for LaDuke’s criticism is the colonial
destruction of native land and environment. As a renowned native
ecologist, LaDuke strategically links natives with other people of
colour in the term “environmental racism”. While the environmental
movement, by and large, emerges out of a white and middle-class
preserve, LaDuke underscores environmental threats faced by native
communities, as she launches a scathing attack not only on earlier
frontier exploitation but on more contemporary ecological
catastrophes: two-thirds of the uranium resources in the country, one-
third of all the low-sulphur coal, and the single largest hydroelectric
project are all on Indian lands, and the federal government is
proposing nuclear waste dumps on reservations. In her book All Our
Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life, LaDuke associates
environmental catastrophe with native trauma. Nonetheless, while
over two thousand nations of indigenous peoples have become extinct
in the western hemisphere, those who remain, like LaDuke’s people,
the Anishinaabegs, continue to transform their grief into grievance,
affect into active resistance.
*
LaDuke’s novel Last Standing Woman depicts the history of native

loss and resistance. Her story commences around 1862 with the Sioux
uprising in Minnesota and its impact on the Anishinaabeg community,
and ends in 2018 with the prospect of a tribal future. The year 2018 is
seven generations from the Sioux uprising, and seven is a mythical
number in North American tribal culture, central to tribal spiritual
practices. There are, for instance, “the seven ways of the medicine
woman,” as indicated in Paula Gunn Allen’s Grandmothers of the
Light,4 as well as seven sacred rites, which are all common in Plain
Indian tribal healing.5 By extending the temporal frame beyond the
time of writing, LaDuke suggests the continuing effort that will be
92 Hsinya Huang
required for tribal survival. She first dramatises a recovery of tribal

lands taken by Euro-Americans over the past five hundred years.
Upon regaining the tribal home-base, there is then a ceremonial return
of the ancestral spirit, which LaDuke envisions as sustaining and
continuing the tribal legacy. The novel ends with life in continual
regeneration. As the narrator, Last Standing Woman, writes at the end
of a 2018 journal entry: “What carries us through is the relationship
we have to creation and the courage we are able to gather from the
experience of our aanikoobijigan, our ancestors, and our
oshkaabewisag, our helpers” (1997: 299). At the centre of the present
discussion of LaDuke’s chronicle of Native land loss and recovery,
consequently, is a demonstration of how home as ‘root’ is transmuted
into ‘route’ in a quest for tribal identity, of how a homing desire is
inscribed through a wish to return to a place of origin, of how the
dynamics of history and memory work to regain a native home-base,
and of how LaDuke’s distinctive form of story-telling testifies to tribal
exilic experience.6
In Writers in Exile, Andrew Gurr highlights the way in which
“colonialism has peopled the world with exiles, whether through the
forcible deracination of the middle passage into slavery, or through
the subtler forms of colonial provincialism” (Gurr 1981: 27). While
the work of Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Nico Israel, and the like has
ensured that the subject of post-colonial exile in the Middle East,
India, and the Caribbean has been well studied, the specificity of the
indigenous experience needs to be more fully articulated. It is
important, as Arnold Krupat points out, not to conflate the experience
and writings of indigenous peoples, who have been overwhelmed by
European settlement within so-called First World countries, with those
of Third World peoples. Native Americans, for instance, suffer
continuing internal colonialism or domestic imperialism, which results
in their being strangers at home, forever exiled in their homeland.
George Manuel and Michael Posluns define this different experience
as that of “the Fourth World”: “The Aboriginal World has so far
lacked the political muscle to emerge; it is without economic power, it
rejects Western political techniques; it is unable to comprehend
Western technology” (Manuel and Posluns 1973: 6).
Behind the exilic experience of American Natives lie US
government policies, including: the removal of tribes west of white
settlement areas (1830), involving dislocation from ancestral lands;
the allotment of land into individual rather than tribal ownership
(1887), thereby discouraging the maintenance of larger tribal
communities; the reorganisation of traditional tribal leadership into

‘democratically’ elected Tribal Councils (1934), which allowed little
self-government on reservations; and the termination of Native
American nations (1950), which encouraged further dislocation into
urban centres. All this federal action, as Susan Forsyth suggests, has
aimed at resolving the problem that Native American Nations pose to
the US, of these “vanishing Americans […who] stubbornly refuse to
disappear” (Forsyth 2000: 146).
According to Forsyth, the first collection to include an essay by
a Native American writer about native displacement was Dangerous
Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, an
anthology of post-colonial critical writings, published in 1997. James
Clifford’s ethnography of travel and cultural traffic of the same year,
Routes, also engages questions of Native American exilic experience.
Ward Churchill, a few years earlier, had perceived and pursued
“strategies and courses of action designed to lead to decolonization
within the colonizing ‘mother country’” (Churchill 1993: 24-26) – the
most spectacular of these strategies include the occupations of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington, D.C. and the AIM
(American Indian Movement) armed resistance at Wounded Knee in
1973, which drew world attention to the resonantly symbolic site of
tribal protest.7 All this resistant history is dramatised in LaDuke’s Last
Standing Woman and establishes the core of her representation of
tribal exilic experience. Strikingly, therefore, tribal exilic discourse
discloses not only ‘loss’, but the recovery of a sense of ‘history’ and
‘home’. It shows how the “unhealable rift forced between a human
being and a native place” (Said 1987: 357) may, after all, be healed by
a re-connection to tribal history and native home through
memory/story-telling as testimony.
LaDuke represents the tribal milieu in its historical and
geographical specificity, with precise dates and places. Beginning in
1862, her tribal vision extends through the intervening years and into
the future as far as the year 2018. In chronicling more than 150 years
of conflicts between cultures and peoples, and the imposition of a
violent system of governance and legal campaign, LaDuke in effect
provides a paradigm for baring the roots of five hundred years of
American history since 1492. She underscores the subject of tribal
land loss under expansionist usurpation by enumerating the states,
rivers, lakes, and numbers of acres as evidence, in a way that white
historians have not done. She ‘maps’ the tribal lost lands:
94 Hsinya Huang
The Dakota had lost over thirty million acres of Iowa, Minnesota, and
the Dakota Territory due to the treaties and papers which they didn’t
understand. They had retained only a “reservation” ten miles wide and
one hundred and fifty miles long bordering the Minnesota River.
(LaDuke 1997: 29)
The government would terminate the Anishinaabeg reservations of

Gull Lake, Sandy Lake, Pokegama, Oak Point, and others because of
the Dakota’s Little Crow’s War with the government and
Bugonaygeeshig’s raiding the white men as revenge for white men’s
invasion and cheating. (LaDuke 1997: 32)
LaDuke takes up the argument of Michel Foucault and others

that, rather than a single history, there are always contradictory
histories or ‘counter histories’. To reclaim history for Native
Americans means to challenge the ruling race’s ideology in order to
reconstruct and re-write their own tribal history. Official American
history starts in 1492 when Christopher Columbus discovered the
New World, or rather, in 1607 when John Smith arrived on the banks
of James River. But what Europeans took to be an ‘empty land’ with
an uncultivated landscape has now been shown to have been inhabited
and worked by Native Americans for thousands of years before the
arrival of the white men. There was a pre-European landscape that
represented the achievements of tribal generations, and it is upon this
landscape, both geographical and cultural, that Euro-American
patterns of land use and settlement have been superimposed. LaDuke
has responded to distorted official documentation and the unfair
treatment of Native Americans by presenting a colonial history in the
voice of the conquered, in what Homi Bhabha refers to as “the native
subject’s cultural resistances” (Bhabha 1994: 152). Or rather, it is
tribal memory woven together through LaDuke’s story-telling that
should eventually substitute History with an upper-case H.
Pierre Nora makes a distinction between history and memory.
He contends that history is:
the reconstruction always problematic and incomplete, of what is no
longer […]. History is a representation of the past […]. History binds
itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations
between things. (Nora 1989: 8-9)
History always responds to and represents dominant ideology. By

contrast, according to Nora,.
memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It
remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering
and forgetting […]. It is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond
tying us to the eternal present. […]. Memory takes root in the

concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects. (Nora 1989: 8-9)
By referring to “the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects”

(Nora 1989: 9), LaDuke appeals to her tribal memory. Memory is
needed not merely to realise the past, but to relate one to the present:
“memory is a crucial tool and agent for insisting on the identity and
the place in the world” (Weissberg 1999: 10). Memory as resource of
resistance and identity has been confirmed and repeatedly examined
by post-colonial exilic writers and critics (Hall 1997: 52). Homi
Bhabha asserts “remembering is never a quiet act of introspection or
retrospection. It is a power re-membering, a putting together of the
dismembered past to make sense of the trauma of the present”
(Bhabha 1994: 63). Through remembering, LaDuke retrieves the
traumatic indigenous past, retrospects and introspects tribal land
history, and re-presents the disjointed/fragmented homeland as a
unified map in her chronicle of tribal exilic experience. To remember
is to give life to the disjointed past, which not only forms identity but
engenders healing power:
the loss of identity […] only begins to be healed when the forgotten
connections are once more set in place. Such texts restore an
imaginary fullness or plenitude, to set against the broken rubric of our
past. They are resources of resistance and identity. (Hall 1997: 393)
To retrieve the past, by remembrance, is an act of rebellion

against forgetting. It is how we understand tribal exile as tragic, yet
with a potential for salvation. This fits well with the Anishinaabeg, as
well as Cherokee and Pueblo, notions of balance between positive and
negative aspects of spiritual power. Last Standing Woman, in
chronicling tribal loss and resistance, reconstructs a communal/tribal
consciousness oppressed, buried, and threatened with being lost. By
retrieving her tribal past, LaDuke spotlights a legitimate cause to
recover the land long lost to European colonizers, to go back ‘home’,
so to speak.
The significance of home can never be overstated. Home is one
source of identity, a powerful source of continuity in the sense of self.
Referring to the experience of the West Indies, Antonia MacDonald-
Smythe points out that “home is more than a house-physical structure.
Home is more than a bundle of one’s skin. It is an idea, one laden with
associations of belonging, of connectedness, of physical wholeness,
and spiritual growth” (MacDonald-Smythe 2001: 99). This sense of
home is “the goal of the voyages of self-discovery and self-
96 Hsinya Huang
identification” (Gurr 1981: 18); in other words, through the

identification of home, one can find his/her proper location and
cultural being. On the other hand, for those who are deprived of secure
dwelling places, or those who leave their homelands whether
voluntarily or not, home becomes the landscape to be recovered. For
Third World exiles who determine that a return is no longer possible,
home is more readily fixed in a mental landscape. 8 But for tribal
exiles, home is the actual geography.
It is crucial to acknowledge that tribal home is rooted in nature,
in land. Native Americans believe the land has a spirit, it has energy
and power, and humans grow out of it like trees. To be precise, while
tribal generations inhabit the land, the land embodies the ancestral
spirit that protects and continues life to come. As Paula Gunn Allen
emphasizes, “[w]e are the land. To the best of my understanding, that
is the fundamental idea that permeates American Indian life; the land
(Mother) and the people (mothers) are the same [...]. The earth is the
source and the being of the people, and we are equally the being of the
earth” (Allen 1992: 119). The intimate association between land and
tribal people constitutes LaDuke’s thematic concern, as she elaborates
on the ownership of America: “The reality is […] if you do not control
your land, you do not control your destiny” (LaDuke 2002: 143). The
separation of tribal people from their native place thus amounts not
only to native exile but also to genocide, as Western expansionists
continue to steal tribal land in the name of civilisation. The tribal
history (memory) of land loss is retrieved as testimony of tribal
catastrophe after the Discovery. Even more significant than this, in
land/nature as home, Native Americans find strength to go beyond and
above. The Native legacy in the American landscape transcends
Western ideas of historical process, the history of colonisation, joining
the mundane (the present life) with the arcane (the ancestral spirit).
Home deeply rooted in land is both the margin and the centre, a site of
oppression, repression, and expression, which tribal exilic writers
yearn to articulate.
The land recovery episodes in the novel interweave actual tribal
history with fictional accounts. The White Earth Land Recovery
Project founded by LaDuke in the early 1990s has regained one
thousand acres and set its sights on thousands more as over 90 per
cent of the original 837,000 acres, now owned by Whites, were
transferred over the years by theft, fraud, treaties, and federal
legislation. LaDuke represents the White-Red confrontation over land
in a well designed and orchestrated ‘Standoff at White Earth’. The
‘Protect Our Land Coalition’ was formed in 1990, and launched an

occupation to reclaim lost tribal land (LaDuke 1997: 159-220). The
federal government then agreed to negotiate with White Earth about
the halting of logging (LaDuke 1997: 218); finally, in 2000, the
federal government financed the re-acquisition of more than ten
million acres of Indian land across the Nation, enabling White Earth to
purchase fifty thousand acres of land so that, combined with other
acquisitions they had made, the tribe came to own over half of their
reservation (LaDuke 1997: 285).9 In chronicling not merely the loss
but the recovery of land, LaDuke manages to alter the chaotic and
grotesque world of violence and conflict, which was earlier depicted
by the Ojibwe author Gerald Vizenor in his Darkness in Saint Louis
Bearheart and by Louise Erdrich in Tracks. LaDuke, furthermore,
moves beyond the White Earth of the Chippewa, aligning the
Anishinaabeg with other Indian Nations for native coalition: she refers
to uranium mining at Acoma, for instance, which is familiar to readers
of Native American literature from Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.
By drawing upon native solidarity, LaDuke offers a progressive
version of the tribal land history found in the White frontier thesis,
only with the direction reversed.
Progress in tribal terms is never as linear as the progress
prescribed in the White frontier thesis. LaDuke’s tribal narrative
possesses a circular structure, incorporating one individual event
within another, piling meaning upon meaning, until the accretion
finally results in a story which is collective and tribal. LaDuke’s book
is composed in four parts, each of which takes on historical
complexity. She titles the four portions: ‘The Refuge’, ‘The Re-
awakening’, ‘The Occupation’, and ‘Oshki’, to chronicle seven
generations of tribal contestation against White supremacy, from 1862
to 2018. Both seven and four are significant numbers in tribal spiritual
practices. 10 The individual threads are tied together in Part IV as a
revelation of the tribal future. The prevailing idea is summarized in
the Epilogue, in a diary written by the narrator. The diary both begins
and ends the novel, configuring a distinctive tribal voice: “I wrote this
because I am called to write. I have done the best I could, and have
tried to tell some of our story from my mother’s words and from the
words of my relatives” (LaDuke 1997: 299). As she continues to
write, the diarist pins much hope on the “memories and principles”
which are tribal: “There is a great deal I have omitted, but in the least,
I tried to be honest with the memories and the principles” (LaDuke
1997: 299). The third Last Standing Woman takes up the role of tribal
98 Hsinya Huang
historian as well as story-teller that Nanpush performs in Erdrich’s

Tracks.
Consequently, LaDuke’s yearning for home is inscribed not
only through land recovery projects but through a wish to recover “our
story from my mother’s words and from the words of my relatives”
(LaDuke 1997: 299). Uncovering generational continuity in genealogy
is emblematic of a return to the place of origin. John Docker
investigates the meaning of searching for genealogy: “In exploring our
family tree we immerse ourselves in history and in the process we
transform it and make it personal. This is our history. This is part of
our identity. We can never know how our ancestors lived, but we can
imagine and give it life” (Docker 2001: 21). The yearning for home
permeates the narrative of exile. In LaDuke’s case, family history and
tribal landscape, home and memory, intertwine to fabricate Native lost
identity. Through the never-ending stories, transformed with each
retelling, LaDuke relies on the oral ritual of her Anishinaabeg tribe to
reclaim tribal lost heritage.
LaDuke opens the novel with a telling of the migratory history
of the Anishinaabeg tribal people:
There were many migrations that brought the people here. Omaa,
omaa, here. Here to the place where the food grows on the water.
Anishinaabeg Akiing, the people’s land, the land where the manoomin,
the wild rice, grows. It had been perhaps a thousand years since the
time the Anishinaabeg had left the big waters in Waaban aki, the land
of the east. And they now turned Ningaabii’anong, to the west. . .
They traveled by foot on the land and by canoe on the rivers, traveling
farther and farther to the west until they turned home. Giiwedahn. So
it was that the families, the clans, and the head people of the
Anishinaabeg came to the head waters of the Mississippi. Here,
Gaawaawaabiganikaag, White Earth, named after the clay, the white
clay you find here. It’s so beautiful, it is. Here the people would
remain, in the good land that was theirs (LaDuke 1997: 23, italics in
the original).
LaDuke recovers tribal woodlands by tracing the ancestral

migratory past. The passage intermingles English with a rhythmic
tribal language filled with oral story-telling markers. Drawing upon
tribal orality, LaDuke recovers the lost memory of the home-base as
she recounts migration. The italicized tribal words chanted represent
both the ‘route’ of the migration and the ‘root’ of migratory people.
Tribal history/memory is embodied in the land and traced with stories,
with magic, with the presence of ancestors and spirits. This is their
law, to be rooted in land, “the one law for them that is the Creator’s”
(LaDuke 1997: 23). By retrieving tribal memory through storytelling,

LaDuke bypasses the white man’s ‘paper’ law.
Last Standing Woman commences, notably, with a chapter
entitled “The Storyteller”: “The story, though, was all of our story
[…]. But when the story flew into my ears, it made a picture in my
mind I could never forget” (LaDuke 1997: 18). The story is the
testimony. The narrator, the third Last Standing Woman, tells stories,
even when she is still a foetus:
Each month as the child grew, the stories came forth with more force.
And soon, they formed a web that surrounded them both and linked
them from past to future. While before there seemed to be no time,
now there seemed to be nothing but time. (LaDuke 1997: 295)
The baby-girl’s coming “was signalled by the departure of the oldest

person in the village, Mesabe. He was at once the story and the teller.”
Mesabe’s passage “appeared to open the door for her entrance into
life. It was also his life that brought forth the work of hers” (LaDuke
1997: 296).
While Mesabe is the tribal elder who knows the stories of the
previous three generations, and those of the following three
generations, this power line is continued in the name of Last Standing
Woman. There are, in fact, three figures of Last Standing Woman,
who continue to transmit stories and, in so doing, sustain tribal
tradition in a feminine continuum. Each of the tellings becomes not
just a repetition of the tale, but a metamorphosis of a past lost, in a
present lived, and a future foreseen. Each story gives rise to a strategic
disclosure and enhances self-empowerment and self-creation. Tribal
history is synonymous with memory, and story becomes a testimony.
Drawing upon a vital feminine line, LaDuke’s novel, in the form of a
tribal history, is a testimony that embodies significant cultural and
political repercussions. This testimony has involved a potency to
communicate oppression and repression, poverty and subalternity,
imprisonment as well as the struggle for survival. Exile is understood
as tragic yet with a potential for salvation.
Last Standing Woman is, thus, double-faced, addressing both
loss and gain. While the frame story of loss and oppression is
organized according to the time of ‘linear history’ (that is, history as
imposed by the colonists), tribal continuance and survival relies on the
time of ‘ceremonial history’ or rather “monumental time”, to borrow
post-structuralist Julia Kristeva’s terminology. 11 Multiple modalities
of time permeate the novel. Ceremonial/monumental time retains
eternity by repetition. There are cycles, gestations, the eternal
100 Hsinya Huang
recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature

and whose regularity corresponds to what is experienced by tribal
people as cosmic time and vertiginous visions. As the narrator, the
third Last Standing Woman, puts it:
I do not believe that time is linear. Instead, I have come to believe that
time is in cycles, and that the future is part of our past and the past is
part of our future. Always, however, we are in new cycles. The cycles
omit some pieces and collect other pieces of our stories and our lives.
That is why we keep the names, and that is why we keep the words
(LaDuke 1997: 299).
The linear (the chronological structure of the novel) and the cyclical
time of nature, land, and stories intertwine to embody a tribal world
where the material and mundane merge with the spiritual and arcane,
which LaDuke describes thus: “The Anishinaabeg world undulated
between material and spiritual shadows, never clear which was more
prominent at any time” and Native life is “not a life circumscribed by
a clock” (LaDuke 1997: 24).
To explicate further, the ceremonial history is carried on by a
name. The recurrence of the name, Ishkwegaabasiikew, ‘Last
Standing Woman’, informs tribal survival. There are three women
called Last Standing Woman, representing the past, the present, and
the future respectively. The baby-girl, the narrator as she grows up to
be the embodiment of the tribal voice, is related to Lucy, the second
Last Standing Woman “by name and by spirit” (LaDuke 1997: 18),
who is in turn related to the first one who gave and passed down the
name. As the narrator, the third Last Standing Woman, testifies so as
to retain tribal history, “Lucy St. Clair who named me was afraid we
would forget […]. And a picture of how we had these gifts we should
keep” (LaDuke 1997: 18). This tribal consciousness, as articulated by
the narrator, spotlights the danger to tribal identity of losing memory
of their location of origin as they lost their land, their common
territory, to the Whites. Last Standing Woman, in the repetition of the
name, maintains the dynamics of remembrance and commemoration.
There are, indeed, three things that guide tribal direction, as the
narrator claims: “our name, our clan, and our religion” (LaDuke 1997:
299). As there is always a woman called “Last Standing,” the tribe
will never perish and its culture moves on through the keeping of the
“names,” and thus, “the words” (LaDuke 1997: 299). Last Standing
Woman is by no means ‘last’ but rather symbolic of “the continuation
and the rebirth of her people, something that is indigenous to White
Earth” (Matchie 2001: 71).
LaDuke’s collective, tribal story is therefore the cure/medicine

for the tribal traumatic past. As Paula Gunn Allen avers, in her
Grandmothers of the Light, “every medicine path has its attendant
stories, and medicine people, also known as shamans, wise women,
conjurors, adepts, mages, practitioners, or masters, teach apprentices
through story” (Allen 1991: 3). Through stories told, the buried tribal
past is revived and land recovered. In the end, the ancestral bones are
reburied in the White Earth, which not only symbolically reclaims
tribal land but, as McConney says, signals “the lost pieces from the
opening histories [coming] home for the people to be whole”
(McConney 2003: 2).
Last Standing Woman writes in her journal toward the end of
the novel: “For all the pain and heartache we have felt, there has been,
and will be, an equal amount of joy. That is how everything works.
There is always a struggle to maintain the balance” (LaDuke 1997:
299). In the end, stories are retold about the history of migration and
the old ways of hunting; the ancient bones are returned from a
museum showcase to the reservation while a character called Moose
hums an old rhythm to greet them—“Slowly, death chants, lullabies,
love songs, and war songs became a composite of music, chants in his
mind and ears” (271); drums are now returned to White Earth—“the
Midewiwin water drums and the big drums” (1997: 273). Finally,
Moose feels the ancestors are singing in the back of his car. In fact, it
is their spirits that sing (279). Exile becomes an occasion for potential
salvation in that the exiled tribal self continues to resist definition and
categorisation. Returning to the way of life of her people before
colonisation is impossible, so “making do” (as Betty Louise Bell
describes the strategy of another Native American writer) is
important: “a recognition of ordinary lives, the lives of Native
Americans, fragmented and forever affected by extraordinary losses”;
under the pressure of loss, the survival of tribal people depends on the
“adaptations to loss that discover continuity and affirm life” (Bell
1994: 3). These two things are not only ordinary, but also divine, for
Native Americans. The oneness of ordinary and divine, which has
been forfeited by Western thought because of the dominant concept of
dichotomy, becomes the lesson of salvation that Native Americans
teach the whole world, which is, according to Andrew Gurr, “peopled
with exiles” (1981: 27).
102 Hsinya Huang
Notes:
1
The Anishinaabeg are also known as the Chippewa and Ojibwe (English and French
versions of the name given them by Euro-American colonists and other tribes).
2
See, especially: J.R. McNeill and Alfred W. Crosby, 1972, The Columbian
Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood
Press), and Donald Joralemon, 1982, ‘New World Depopulation and the Case of
Disease’ in Journal of Anthropological Research 38.
3
That this denial continues to this day is shockingly illustrated by the fact that the
latest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, employs research from 1939 to support
its assertion that there were hardly more than one million Natives in North America in
pre-Columbian times, thereby ignoring more than 60 years of subsequent research that
makes absolutely clear that the real figure was at least ten times higher. ‘Native
American’, Encyclopædia Britannica. 2004. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
(consulted 17.01.04).
4
They are, according to Paula Gunn Allen, “the way of the daughter, the way of the
householder, the way of the mother, the way of the gatherer, the way of the ritualist,
the way of the teacher, and the way of the wise woman” (1991: 9-15)
5
The seven sacred rites foretold to the Lakota by White Buffalo Calf Woman, a holy
woman who appeared among the people, include: the sweat lodge ceremony, the
vision quest, the ghost keeping ceremony, the sun dance, the hunka ceremony (“the
making of relatives”), the girls’ puberty rite, and the throwing of the ball ceremony
(Hirschfelder 2001: 263-264).
6
LaDuke’s Last Standing Woman is not the sole fictional work that deals with
Anishinaabeg land loss; Louise Erdrich’s Tracks is another prominent example. While
in Tracks, the Chippewa lose their trees in a period when the ancient magic power is
diminishing, LaDuke dramatises the White-Red conflict over land in a confrontation
to prevent lumber men from cutting more trees. Even so, the Anishinaabegs are
indeed forced from their woodland reservation and driven into the ‘civilized’ West
where the Whites threaten to exterminate them. Not all Native American tribes,
however, have been completely exiled from their homelands: the Pueblos and the
Navajo are strong examples. They too have experienced degradation of their land,
though — the story of uranium mining at Acoma, for instance, is familiar to readers of
Native American literature through Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. The Navajo
and the Pueblos have partially lost their sacred land spirits even as they have
maintained control of villages and homesteads.
7
In December 1890, at Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, around three hundred
Lakota (Sioux) were killed by the US army, an incident which became emblematic of
governmental military aggression toward Native Americans. This event is the
historical basis on which LaDuke initiates her narrative of the first-generation
Anishinaabeg Last Standing Woman’s friendship with Lakota woman Situpiwin.
While LaDuke’s novel is a recent literary representation of tribal resistant history, this
incident is the title and the last chapter of Dee Brown’s 1970 popular history of the
defeat of American Indian armed protest against white expansion, Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston) (quoted in Forsyth 2000: 144). LaDuke obviously picked up where Dee
Brown left off and used this symbolic incident to usher in her chronicle of tribal exilic
experience. Coincidentally, the 1970’s saw a resurgence of Native American

resistance, whose high point came in the 1973 siege of Wounded Knee for 71 days in
protest against the white government’s victimisation of Natives. Mary Crow Dog’s
autobiography Lakota Woman (New York: Harper Perennial, 1991) is one of the
famous renditions of this historical incident. For details concerning the siege of
Wounded Knee, refer to Forsyth’s essay, “Writing Other Lives,” which draws on
Lakota Woman exclusively to deploy Native American autobiographical
representation of Euro-American coloniality.
8
Such hallmark figures of post-colonial studies as Edward Said, Salman Rushdie,
Stuart Hall, Homi Bhabha, and V. S. Naipaul seem to have turned themselves into
permanent exiles. Unlike classical wanderers who are exiled from the centre to the
margin, these Third World critics migrate from the periphery to the metropolis to
write back on the empire. For them, the locality of home is problematic; neither the
place they were born in nor the place they leave for is home. Home could be here,
there, everywhere, and nowhere. The dynamics of their cultural positioning assists to
forge a detached stance, on which they acclaim their vision as well as salvation.
9
Nevertheless, in ‘Who Owns America?’, a speech on White Earth Reservation land
recovery, delivered in 2001, LaDuke criticised the function of the ‘Indian Claims
Commission’, through which the federal government acknowledged that they had
taken land and not paid for it, and thus secured 800 million dollars to compensate the
Indian community. LaDuke asks whether this is not an even worse act of theft:
“Which is pretty darn cheap real estate, is what it is. What does it average out to? […]
11 cents an acre? 17 cents an acre? 5 cents an acre?” (LaDuke 2001: 146). That the
American government actually gets to set the price which they will pay in
compensation for something that they stole must have some redress in terms of
justice, as LaDuke insisted in her speech (2001: 146). In the novel, the armed take-
over of White Earth’s tribal offices by the Protect Our Land Coalition is a
dramatisation of the process of the land recovery. The weeks-long occupation serves
as a catalyst for what follows in the novel: two National Guardsmen are taken hostage
and the FBI botches a dawn raid and ends up crawling to the negotiating table. The
tribe wins its land back through the government’s financing. It becomes clear then
that Last Standing Woman is also LaDuke’s roman à clef—a chronicle of the
turbulent times on White Earth and her own direct-action role in counteracting the
imperial abuse of land and power.
10
In addition to the four parts, there are also a prologue and an epilogue to Last
Standing Woman, both of which employ the word ‘storyteller’ in their title.
Storytelling is a familiar Native American tradition, as one can see from Silko’s
Ceremony and Storyteller. Jamie Marks thus calls Last Standing Woman “a
storyteller’s tale of White Earth” (1998: 1A). While storytelling is an important aspect
of the novel, that warrants a lengthy discussion later in the paper, the significance of
the numbers, four and seven, should be stressed. In tribal numerology, four is perhaps
the most sacred number, with its power stemming from four cardinal directions and
four seasons. Four therefore symbolises full circles or wholeness. Two early Native
Renaissance representative works, Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and James
Welch’s Winter in the Blood, both consist of four parts, echoing spatial and seasonal
circles. Edith Swan’s interpretation of symbolic geography in Silko’s Ceremony also
pivots around the number four.
104 Hsinya Huang
11
The concept of ‘monumental history’ is originally used by Friedrich Nietzsche in
‘On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life’: “That the great moments
in the struggle of individuals form a chain, that in them the high points of humanity
are linked through millennia, that what is highest in such a moment of the distant past
be for me still alive, bright and great—that is […] monumental history” (Nietzsche
1997: 68).
Bibliography
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Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press.
- - - . 1992. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian
Tradition. Boston: Beacon Press.
Arnold, David. 1996. The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European
Expansion. Oxford: Blackwell.
Barsamian, David. 2003. ‘Being Left: Activism on and off Reservation: David
Barsamian Interviews Winona LaDuke’ in Z Magazine 19 May. On line at:
www.zena.secureforum.com/Znet/zmag/articles/being_leftja98.htm (consulted
03.04.2004)
Bell, Betty Louise. 1994. ‘Introduction: Linda Hogan’s Lessons in Making Do’ in
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13
American Literary Exiles: The Escape from Anguish1

Peter Karsten
Peter Karsten was born in Connecticut, earned a BA from Yale in

1960 and served for three years on a cruiser with the US 6th Fleet in
the Mediterranean. He earned his PhD in history at Wisconsin, and
teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. He has spent several semesters
conducting research or teaching in Cambridge, England, the Algarve,
Dublin, Sydney, Wellington, and Augsburg. He has published books
and articles on a wide range of subjects. He is serving as Academic
Dean of the Fall 2004 round-the-world voyage of the “Semester-at-
Sea’s” SS Universe Explorer, a floating college for some 600
undergraduates and 30 faculty. He is currently editor-in-chief of a
three-volume Encyclopedia of War and American Society. He
describes himself as a ‘comparativist’.
In this paper, he studies several generations of American self-styled
‘literary exiles’, most of whom went to Europe, and finds that very
few could legitimately claim that title in the sense that writers who
have been banished by oppressive political regimes, or have fled from
religious persecution in other countries, can. (In this strong sense, the
US has, of course, been more often a goal for exiles than a source of
exiles). The possible exceptions are some victims of McCarthyism,
homophobia, and racism, such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin.
Most could not even be referred to as economic migrants, in that they
were almost never fleeing poverty. American literary exiles generally
fall into three or four main categories: ‘exiles at home’, such as Edgar
Allen Poe and Emily Dickinson; the many ‘sojourners’ and
‘expatriates’, such as James Russell Lowell and Gertrude Stein, who
spent a period away from their native land, but without any conscious
high purpose; ‘self-exiles’ from James Fenimore Cooper to T.S. Eliot,
who went to live in Europe to imbibe what they saw as the culture of
their ancestors, or those, such as Ezra Pound and Djuna Barnes, who
sought to distance themselves from the puritanical and/or materialistic
features of American life. While some clearly flourished in exile,
others (such as John Dos Passos) found either that they were less in
tune with European culture than they had expected, or that the great
works they had planned to write did not materialise. In the meantime,
some of the most powerful portraits of American life in the 1930s
were composed, not by the Lost Generation, but by those who had
stayed behind, such as John Steinbeck, Carl Sandburg, Erskine
Caldwell, and documentary filmmaker Pare Lorenz.
108 Peter Karsten
The title ‘literary exile’ has been claimed by, or accorded to, a number
of American-born writers who have worked outside their country of
origin. These include members of the so-called ‘Lost Generation’,
many of whom chose to relocate (at least for a number of years) to
European settings (particularly Parisian ones).2 Yet very few have the
characteristics of the exiled writers whose work is presented and
described in the other parts of this volume. With the exception, as we
are reminded in the two immediately preceding contributions, of
Native Americans displaced in very large numbers from their tribal
lands,3 no American creative artists can truly be said to have been
‘banished’ from their homeland. Only a few have fled political or
cultural persecution as victims of McCarthyism and homophobia, or
victims/critics of racism (such as Richard Wright and James Baldwin).
Where are the refugees from persecution, comparable to an Émile
Zola, an Isabel Allende, or a Yilma Tafere Tasew?4 Where are the
religious refugees?5 Moreover, very few have been driven by
impoverishment to become refugees. Indeed, some of our self-
proclaimed exiles chose to settle into cheap digs abroad partly because
of what the then-almighty dollar could buy. While the United States
has played host to creative people in exile from many other countries
over the last two hundred years, it has hardly been a breeding-ground
for exiled writers in the strong sense of that term.6 Perhaps all of this
is only to say that the United States has never been as tyrannical (or
economically destitute) a place as the homelands of many true literary
exiles, but it is still worth saying.
Since the terms ‘banishment’ and ‘flight from persecution’ can
hardly be used of American literary exiles, it becomes necessary to
sort our American literary exiles using the simple prepositions within,
from, and to.
The first category I shall refer to are those who have been
described as ‘exiles within’ (or ‘exiles at home’ in Daniel Marder’s
words, a group that includes Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson,
perhaps Robert Penn Warren (Hendricks 2000), and possibly even
Herman Melville, for, despite his early nautical experiences in the
South Seas, Melville spent most of his days within the United States,
and, late in life, after suffering personal losses, retreated into solitude
and has the hero of John Marr and Other Sailors tell us that “lone in a
loft I must languish/ Far from closet and parlour and strife/ Content in
escape from the anguish/ of the real and the seeming in life” (Melville
1888: 10).
American Literary Exiles: The Escape from Anguish 109
Another category consists of those who did spend several years

abroad, but cannot be said to have had any particular spiritual purpose
that would constitute ‘self-exile’. They might more appropriately be
called either sojourners, or expatriates, or even re-patriates. Here I
have in mind James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith
Wharton, Eugene O’Neill, Sinclair Lewis, Archibald MacLeish, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, and perhaps Gertrude Stein and Henry Miller.
Lowell spent fifteen months in Italy with his family in the early
1850s, an experience “to which he had been looking forward for more
than a decade”, as one Lowell scholar put it. He “studied Italian
manners and customs, the language and the art of the country”, and
“attempted to keep a journal”, but “the expatriate company in Rome,
which included a number of old friends and at least seven other
Lowells” was too tempting, and his journal was of little future literary
value to him (Howard 1950: 312-313). Hawthorne’s European sojourn
began in 1853, at the age of 49, when he was rewarded by the in-
coming Pierce Administration with the consulship at Liverpool; after
four years in that post, during which time he produced no literary
work, he moved his family to Florence for two years before returning
to the United States for good.
Wharton’s childhood had been spent in Europe; her expatriation
was, consequently, more in the nature of a return to roots; and, in any
event, she never abandoned her dedication to American society.
Sinclair Lewis spent time in Berlin in 1928, but this was prompted by
his desire to be with his lover, the journalist, Dorothy Thompson.
O’Neill sailed for Europe ‘quietly’ in 1928, hoping to keep his
departure (with his lover, Carlotta Monterey) from his wife. He then
moved secretly from London to the Pyrenees, thence to Shanghai,
trying to keep the two from scandal-hunting reporters, before his
divorce became final and he married Ms Monterey and settled into a
chateau in the Loire Valley for two years. Hiding from the literary and
social scene in Britain and France, O’Neill did allow to George Jean
Nathan that the seclusion he enjoyed was providing him with “more
strength to put into one’s job” than he had found “in the U.S.A” and
he did manage to write the trilogy Mourning Becomes Electra while
there, but Europe’s primary appeal for O’Neill appeared to be the
chance at privacy, coupled with “the obvious financial reasons”: “You
can live so much better here on so much less money,” he told his son,
Eugene Jr., in September 1928. In any event, he cut his trip to the Far
East short principally because “I couldn’t write a line there”, and by
April 1931, he and Carlotta were on their way back to the U.S.
110 Peter Karsten
“Europe is fine,” he wrote to Agnes Brennan, “but I don’t see how any
American can ever settle here for good” (Gelb 1960: 663, 668, 680;
Bogard and Bryer 1988: 288, 296, 311, 313, 337, 343, 381).
Gertrude Stein was essentially a bored medical-school student
when she moved to Paris on a whim (though she certainly ‘found’
herself there). Henry Miller moved there, not so much as a self-exile
seeking new direction, as one fleeing personal and occupational
failure. His first attempts to pull himself away from his Brooklyn roots
(moves to Florida and California) had left him floundering. The
steamship ticket for France appears to have been presented to him by
his philandering wife as a means of getting him out of the picture
(Kennedy 1993: 143-114).
But others do appear to have consciously exiled themselves to
foreign shores (at least for substantial periods of time) with a spiritual
purpose. Lloyd Kramer’s insightful observation comes to mind: “The
experience of living among alien people, languages and institutions
can [significantly] alter the individual’s sense of self. […] Intellectual
exiles frequently respond to their deracination by describing home
(idealistically) or rejecting home (angrily) or creating a new definition
of home (defiantly)” (Kramer 1988: 9-10). This passage serves well as
a description of the experience of a number of American literary
‘exiles’.
Writers like James Fenimore Cooper, Henry Adams, Henry
James, and T.S. Eliot, none of them exiles-by-compulsion, appear to
have ‘returned’ to the Mother Country with a kind of imagined
nostalgia. Cooper, for example, complained of a “poverty of original
writers” in his antebellum United States, as well as a poverty “of
materials [...] no annals for the historian; no follies for the satirist; no
manners for the dramatist; no obscure fiction for the writer of
romance” (Cooper 1960: I, 287; II, 107). Hawthorne, in The Marble
Faun, offered a similar verdict: “Romance and poetry, like ivy,
lichens, and wallflowers, need ruins to make them grow” (noted in
Marden, ch. 8). An unsuccessful artist in Henry James’s The Madonna
of the Future bemoans what he regards as the fact that “we are the
disinherited of Art [...] excluded from the magic circle! The soil of
American perception is [...] as void of all that nourishes and prompts
and inspires the artist as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying
so! We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile” (James 1962, 3:
14-15). Thus, many of James’s American heroes and heroines were
constantly “looking to see something original and beautiful” (Levin
1966: 75-76) in England, France, or Italy. But it is only fair to note a
certain ambivalence on James’s part towards these characters; after

all, the narrator of The Madonna of the Future responds
unsympathetically to the artist’s plaint: “You seem fairly at home in
exile... Florence seems to me a very easy Siberia... Nothing is so idle
as to talk about our want of a nutritive soil, of opportunity, of
inspiration, of the things that help. The only thing that helps is to do
something fine!” (James 1962, 3: 15)7
Others, like Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, John Dos Passos,
Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Djuna Barnes, and James
Baldwin, appear to have sought to escape from their familiar
American roots, not in order to imbibe the culture of their ancestors so
much as to distance themselves from either the puritanical or
materialistic aspects of the US (or both) in the hopes of acquiring
greater levels of literary awareness and creativity in unfamiliar
surroundings.8 In this regard, they echo the experiences of their
English predecessors, Keats, Shelley, Byron and Robert and Elizabeth
Barrett Browning. (Barnes and Baldwin were also escaping
homophobia.)
For some, it was the Great War that had “dislodged them from
their homes and the old restraints, given them an unexpected and
disillusioning education, and left them entirely rootless,” in Alfred
Kazin’s formulation (Kazin 1956: 240). The proceedings of the
ensuing Peace Conference at Versailles was noted as well, as in Dos
Passos’s account of the “three men shuffling the pack, dealing the
cards: the Rhineland, Danzig, the Polish Corridor, the Ruhr, self-
determination of small nations, the Saar, League of Nations,
mandates, the Mespot, Freedom of the Seas, Transjordania, Shantung,
Fiume, and the Island of Yap; / machinegun fire and arson / starvation,
lice, cholera, typhus; / oil was trumps” (Dos Passos 1930: 248).
Similarly, the heroine of Dorothy Canfield’s The Deepening Stream,
becoming aware of the behind-the-scenes wheeling and dealing at
Versailles, “began to cry. She felt her way to a bench and sat on it,
burying her face in her hands and sobbing....She felt a hand on her
shoulder....A gaunt old man, shabbily dressed, a refugee.... ‘Pardon...I
see that Madame is in trouble. Madame is a refugee?’ ‘No,’ said
Matey, and then, ‘Yes!’” (Canfield 1930: 336).
At home there were, on the one hand, flappers, bobbed hair,
bootleg gin, and speakeasies; jazz, blues, and the movies; the Model
T, Freud, Havelock Ellis, and the Sexual Revolution; and news of a
strange new European artistic movement, Dada; on the other hand,
there were Prohibition, the deportation of alien radicals, a widespread
112 Peter Karsten
crack-down on Unions, Sacco & Vanzetti, the Immigration Restriction

Act, racism, the eugenics movement, the Ku Klux Klan, and a
resurgence of religious fundamentalism. Malcolm Cowley tells us (in
Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s) of a symbolically
significant moment: In 1921 Harold Stearns proclaimed that the U.S.
was a “maladjusted” mess and that “the futility of a rationalist attack”
on the mess was “obvious”. He decided to abandon the United States,
and when he left for Paris, with some fanfare, in July 1921, “he was
seen,” says Cowley, as “Byron shaking the dust of England from his
feet.” Reporters “came to the gangplank to jot down his last words.
Everywhere young men were prepared to follow his example [...].
‘I’m going to Paris’ they said at first, and then, ‘I’m going to the
South of France [...]. I’m sailing Wednesday – next month – as soon
as I can scrape together money enough to buy a ticket... I’m sick of
this country. I’m going abroad to write one good novel’” (Cowley
1951: 78-79, 175).
Ezra Pound called to them from abroad as well. In ‘The Rest’
(1917) he writes:
O Helpless few in my country,
O remnant enslaved,
Artists broken against her,

Astray, lost in our villages,
Mistrusted, spoken-against,
[...]
You of the finer sense,
[...]
Hated, shut in, mistrusted;
Take thought:
I have weathered the storm,
I have beaten out my exile.
(Pound 2003: 272)
Of course their new European homes had social, economic, and

political shortcomings as well. Moreover, others of those who had
exiled themselves in the 1920’s (“myself included,” Cowley adds)
disregarded “the Ruhr, fascismo, reparations, the New Economic
Policy, the birth of prosperity, as they bedazzled themselves with the
future of their art” (Cowley 1934: 78-79, 175, 214).
But for Afro-American literati, these shortcomings seemed less
significant than the racism they confronted constantly at home.
Richard Wright, who left the States permanently in 1947, has the hero
of The Long Dream reflect on a conversation he has just had with an

Italian-American on a flight the hero is taking to exile in Europe,
having been released from prison after over two years for a crime he
had not committed: “That man’s father had come to America and had
found a dream; he [Fish Tucker] had been born in America and had
found it a nightmare” (Wright 1958: 380).
Some clearly flourished during their ‘exile’. One thinks
especially of Hemingway, Pound, Eliot, Stein, and Miller. Italo
Calvino describes a paradox in Invisible Cities: “Arriving at each new
city, the traveller finds again a past of his that he did not know he had;
the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in
wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places” (quoted in Kennedy
1993: 27). “One of the things that I have liked all these years”,
Gertrude Stein writes in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, “is to
be surrounded by people who know no English. It has left me
intensely alone with my eyes and my English. I do not know if it
would have been possible to have English be so all in all to me
otherwise” (Stein 1990: 70). Similarly, Hemingway suggests in A
Moveable Feast that writers like himself and his fellow exiles may
benefit from their ‘transplanting’ like other life forms. But things can,
at times, be ‘relative’: while European critics were impressed by
Richard Wright’s ‘transplantation’ in French existentialism (evident in
The Outsiders and Savage Holiday) his countrymen were not.
In any event, they became, in Alfred Kazin’s words, “specialists
in anguish” (1956: 241). Dos Passos’s anguish over the way things
were is evident throughout his U.S.A. trilogy, as when he sighs in his
‘Camera’s Eye’ account of the struggle over Sacco and Vanzetti: “all
right we are two nations” (Dos Passos 1930: 462). Consider also
Thomas Wolfe’s angst: “Naked and alone we came into exile [...]
What doors are open to this wanderer? And which of us finds his
father, knows his face, and in what place, and in what time, and in
what land?” (quoted in Kazin 1956: 368-9). Henry Miller willingly
grants, in Tropic of Cancer that “we are doomed”, but he recommends
an “agonizing, blood-curdling howl, a screech of defiance, a war-
whoop!”, a “last expiring dance” around “the rim of the crater […] but
a dance!” (Miller: 1, 98-99, 257). (And, for all its chauvinism, Tropic
of Cancer is one-hell-of-a-successful literary dance.)
If some flourished, many others (perhaps most) of these self-
styled exiles were disappointed; either their sojourns abroad did not
stimulate their creative selves, or they concluded that their vision of a
superior European culture had been just that – a vision, with little
114 Peter Karsten
basis. Mark Twain’s A Tramp Abroad is a screed assailing European

(especially German) culture. His Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s
Court displays little mercy for English social structure and customs.
James Fenimore Cooper’s sojourn abroad dissuaded him from any
further “truckling” to “European opinions” (Cooper 1960: 1: 287). It
is true that Cooper returned “out of step with his country,” in the
words of his biographer. Europe had “unfitted him for life in
America” in that he would continue to identify with a culture of
“gentility” (albeit an American one) (quoted in Marder 1984: 35).
Nevertheless, his most enduring hero, one to whom he returned again
and again, Natty Bumpo (“Leatherstocking”), is a homespun
democrat, and one who is constantly retreating to the moving frontier,
exiling himself from an encroaching American society. Just so,
Cooper wrote to a friend that “now my longing is for a Wilderness –
Cooperstown is far too populous and artificial for me and it is my
intention to plunge somewhere into the forest [...]” (1960: II, 89).
Moreover, Cooper then created the first literary ‘Ishmael’ in
nineteenth-century American literature, Ishmael Bush, Leather-
stocking’s counterpart in The Prairie. This “semi-barbarous squatter”
(Cooper: 1960 364) thought little of ‘exiling’ countless native
Americans, but Cooper was not completely unsympathetic towards
Ishmael Bush, whom he characterizes as basically honest - if stubborn
- an impoverished child of democracy, a self-exile on the vast prairie,
seeking little more than a new chance for his ever-growing family (see
Marder 1984: 45, for such an interpretation, with which I agree).
Many of those who had exiled themselves in the 1920s may
have “escaped from all the things they hated”; they may have made it
to a “café looking out across” a “sun-hallucinated square” in France or
“the Tripolitanian coast,” or Dalmatia; to a place “where one could lie
abed all day and work through the night,” where one could “write
without thought of editorial deadlines or critics asking what it meant;
[where] one could write exactly as one pleased,” but the “days passed
by and the great novel or poems was not even started. The refugees
were undergoing a peculiar experience,” Malcolm Cowley observed:
“Here [...] there were no distractions whatever, nothing to keep them
from working except the terrifying discovery that they had nothing
now to say” (Cowley 1951: 242-43). Cowley, to be sure, distinguishes
between what could generally be accomplished in Paris, where most
were able to write something, and this emptiness that came upon those
who retreated to more isolated sites.
So many of these ‘exiles’ returned to the United States. Harold

Stearns wasted eleven years in Paris, borrowing from friends in the
Montparnasse colony, and selling tourists racetrack tips as ‘Peter
Pickem’ for the Paris Tribune, before returning to the States in 1932
to reverse his earlier general condemnation of American culture with
The Street I Knew and America: A Reappraisal. John Dos Passos,
furious at the Communist purges within some of the battalions of the
International Brigade in Spain, during that country’s Civil War,
plunged back into the American mainstream, as did Archibald
MacLeish, who championed Franklin Roosevelt and turned from Ars
Poetica to a Poetry of Commitment. Similarly, James Baldwin,
returning in 1956, would engage himself productively in the Civil
Rights movement over the next decade (although he retreated for
‘Relief and Recovery’ to his favourite abode, Istanbul).
In the meantime, those who had not declared themselves to be
exiles – talents like John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Carl Sandburg,
Stephen Vincent Benet, Robert Sherwood, James Agee, Erskine
Caldwell, and the documentary film-maker, Pare Lorenz – would, in
the thirties, produce powerful portraits of American culture and life,
some of which may endure at least as long as those of the ‘Lost
Generation’.
America’s literary ‘exiles’ were not archetypical. No American
literati could truly be said to have been ‘banished’; few were truly
victims of political or cultural persecution, despite Ezra Pound’s
claim. Few were driven by impoverishment to become refugees – in
fact, some may have become impoverished because of their self-exile.
Some writers who never left the States, like Emily Dickinson, and
perhaps William Faulkner, could be said to have been true ‘spiritual’
exiles, while others who did leave, including some of those who
virtually emigrated to France, were actually mere sojourners,
inasmuch as their fealty to the United States, its culture and its
literature, remained fixed. Among those who do appear to have exiled
themselves, some acted out of a sense of veneration for the Old
World, others were simply escaping the New in order to find new
voices. Some of the latter found those voices in exile; many others did
not, and had to return to their roots in the States in that quest.
Is there a message in any of this? Would it be that, for most of
those writers who have a real choice, physical self-exile is neither a
necessary nor a sufficient step to discover one’s talents or stimulate
one’s creative juices? But one must allow that it is impossible to
116 Peter Karsten
know, at the outset, whether one is likely to be the exception to this

generalization, or the rule.
Notes
1
This paper draws, in part, on Peter Karsten, ‘“Escape from the Anguish”: A
Historical Typology of Exiles with Particular Attention to American Literary Exiles’
in Helmut Koopmann and Klaus Dieter Post (eds) (2001) Exil: Transhistorische und
Transnationale Perspektiven. Paderborn: Mentis: 147-158.
2
Among the several studies of American writers in Paris, see George Wickes, 1969,
Americans in Paris; Shari Benstock, 1986, Women of the Left Bank, Paris: 1900-
1940; J. Gerald Kennedy, 1993, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing and American
Identity; and Jean Méral, 1989, Paris in American Literature.
3
For a recent account of the treatment of Native Americans that incorporates the
notion of exile, see Oren Lyons, et al., 1992, Exiled in the Land of the Free:
Democracy, Indian Nations and the U.S. Constitution (Clear Light Pub., Santa Fe).
See also: James Merrill, 1989, The Indian’s New World: Catawbas and Their
Neighbours from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel Hill:
Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Va.,
by the University of North Carolina Press) 185; Colin G. Calloway, 1995, The
American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native-American
Communities (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge Univ. Press).
4
The ‘Loyalists’ of the 1770s and ’80s, who would flee the ‘Patriot’ governments of
the thirteen rebellious North American colonies to new homes in the British Canadian
provinces, the West Indies, or the British Isles themselves; certain defeated supporters
of the ‘Confederacy’, who emigrated to Mexico and elsewhere after 1865; Radicals
expatriated (that is, deported) during the ‘Red Scare’ of 1919 and 1920; some home-
grown U.S. Reds who elected to exile themselves in the 1920s and ’30s by emigrating
to the Soviet Union; as well as draft-resisters during the Vietnam War who chose to
move to Canada, Britain, or Sweden. One source for the views of certain of these self-
exiles is the newsletter of the Union of American Exiles, American Exile in Canada,
published in Toronto for at least two years (1968 and 1969). See also Marcia
Freedman, 1990, Exile in the Promised Land: A Memoir (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press), a feminist’s account of self-exile to Israel.
5
In this connection, mention should perhaps be made of the followers of Joseph
Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons), who
abandoned homes in Illinois and Missouri (when local opposition to their religious
and social ways reached fever pitches), for their God-given ‘State of Deseret’, where
they promptly made exiles of some of that place’s aboriginal inhabitants.
6
Emma Lazarus’ famous poem about the Statue of Liberty styles her “the Mother of
Exiles,” and Lazarus did not have only political or religious refugees in mind (Poems
of Emma Lazarus. 2 vols., Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1899, “The New Colossus”
Vol. 1: 202-03).
7
Compare Marder 1984: 14 with a somewhat more insightful analysis of The
Madonna by Harry Levin in his ‘Literature and Exile’ chapter in Refractions: Essays
in Comparative Literature (1966: 75-76).
8
Andrew Gurr believes that the condition of expatriation by writers in the twentieth
century became so commonplace that exile seemed “the essential characteristic of the
modern writer” (1981: 14). While true, this actually describes a number of American
authors of the nineteenth century, as well as most of those of the twentieth century.
Bibliography
Benstock, Shari. 1986. Women of the Left Bank, Paris: 1900-1940. Austin: University
of Texas Press.
Canfield, Dorothy. 1930. The Deepening Stream. New York: Harcourt Brace.
Cooper, James Fenimore. 1960. Letters and Journals of J.F. Cooper (ed. James
Franklin Beard). Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University.
Cowley, Malcolm. 1951. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the Nineteen Twenties
New York: Viking.
Dos Passos, John. 1937. USA: Trilogy, including The Forty-Second Parallel, 1919,
and The Big Money. New York: Modern Library.
Gelb, Arthur and Barbara Gelb. 1962. O’Neill. New York: Harper.
Grossman, James. 1949. James Fenimore Cooper. New York: W. Sloan.
Gurr, Andrew. 1981. Writers in Exile. Sussex: Harvester.
Hendricks, Randy. 2000. Lonelier than God: Robert Penn Warren and the Southern
Exile. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Howard, Leon. 1952. Victorian Knight-Errant: The Early Literary Career of James
Russell Lowell. Berkeley: University of California Press.
James, Henry. 1962. Complete Tales of Henry James (ed. Leon Edel). 3 vols.,
Philadelphia: J B Lippincott.
Karsten, Peter. 2001. ‘“Escape from the Anguish”: A Historical Typology of Exiles
with Particular Attention to American Literary Exiles’ in Koopmann, Helmut
and Klaus Dieter Post (eds) Exil: Transhistorische und Transnationale
Perspektiven. Paderborn: Mentis: 147-158.
Kazin, Alfred. 1956. On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American
Prose Literature. Abr. ed. with a new postscript. Garden City, N.Y.:
Doubleday.
Kennedy, J. Gerald. 1993. Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing and American Identity.
New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kramer, Lloyd S. 1988. Threshold of a New World: Intellectuals and the Exile
Experience in Paris, 1830-1848. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Levin, Harry. 1966. Refractions: Essays in Comparative Literature. New York:
Oxford University Press.
Marder, Daniel. 1984. Exiles at Home: A Story of Literature in Nineteenth-Century
America. Lanham: University Press of America.
Méral, Jean. 1989. Paris in American Literature (tr. Laurette Long). Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press.
Melville, Herman. 1888. John Marr and Other Sailors. Boston, private printing of 25
copies.
Miller, Henry. 1961, Tropic of Cancer. New York, Grove Press.
O'Neill, Eugene. 1988. Selected Letters of Eugene O'Neill (ed. Travis Bogard and
Jackson Bryer). New Haven: Yale University Press.
118 Peter Karsten
Pound, Ezra. 2003. Ezra Pound: Poems and Translation (ed. Richard Sieburth). New
York: Library of America.
Stein, Gertrude. 1990. The Autobiography of Alice Toklas. New York: Vintage.
Wickes, George. 1969. Americans in Paris. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.
Wright, Richard. 1958. The Long Dream. New York: Doubleday.
14
Interview, Poems, and a Short Story: ‘Fingers’,

‘Kyrenia’, ‘Don’t Forget’, and ‘Ledra Street’
Nora Nadjarian
Nora Nadjarian is an Armenian Cypriot. Her grandparents arrived in

Cyprus as refugees from Asia Minor in the early part of the twentieth
century. She grew up in a Greek-speaking community in Limassol and
was just seven years old when, in 1974, the partition of the island
nation into a Turkish north and a Greek southern portion took place.
She and her family experienced, in effect, a second exile, as Greek
Cypriots living in the north were forced to move south and Turkish
Cypriots living in the south had to move north. Since 1974, Cypriots
of both communities have been unable to move freely within their
own country. In April 2003, the first moves towards relaxation of the
partition occurred. Nora undertook most of her formal education in the
UK and writes in English. She has won several international awards
for her writing, including prizes in the Scottish International Open
Poetry Competition in 2000, and again in 2003. Her story ‘Ledra
Street’ was a runner-up in the Commonwealth Short Story
Competition in 2001. Her work has appeared in magazines in the UK
and US, and a volume of her poetry, The Voice at the Top of the
Stairs, was published in Cyprus in 2001.
In an interview for the accompanying DVD, she talks of her personal
experience of partition and reads and comments on poems and a short
story deriving from that experience. The poem ‘Fingers’ recalls her
sense of childhood confusion on the day in 1974 when partition took
place. In ‘Kyrenia’ (written in 2001) she can only imagine herself in
the beautiful northern port town, about which she heard so much but,
like all other Greek Cypriots, could not visit – until 2003. The poem
‘Don’t Forget’ (2003) takes up the mantra which Greek Cypriots have
been repeating for almost thirty years, as if fearful that they might
surrender their memories of locations, including their former homes,
which they have not seen for all that time. For the short story ‘Ledra
Street’, Nadjarian created a fictional fatal accident whose absurdity
mirrors the tragic lack of logic with which a street in Nicosia has been
cut in half by the partition of the capital city. In the interview she talks
of the occasion, very recently, when she first came face-to-face with
Turkish Cypriot writers.
See DVD
120 Nora Nadjarian
Fingers
(Cyprus, 1974)
You clasp and cling onto that hour,

like a baby; that one hour in summer when
everything happened. And changed.
There was music on the radio.

In the kitchen Mum and her mum
tailed ladies’ fingers, on the hour
(about an hour to cook); and you cycled
or read about Alice whose fingers shrank
in the Land of Wonder. Fifty minutes.
The hour in July grew hotter.

Ants climbed your toes while you blew
gum bubbles onto the bark of the fig tree
with its leaves like big, green hands.
Grass underneath your sandals crunched
just like fire crackling. Thirty-five.
Ten minutes and your ice cream

melted vanilla onto a stray cat’s ears and
something droned out of the blue in the sky
and the music stopped. Mum came
and took you, pushed you till your fingers
gave and the ice cream dropped.
Dad was back with shouting eyes;

it was too early to see him. Mum was not setting
the table with forks but tears. The saucepan
had boiled over but nobody cared. And you cried
because of the vanilla which you loved
and the whole kitchen wailed. Five.
And you were in the car, leaving. Five.

The cat was licking its vanilla paws. Four.
Ladies’ fingers were sobbing in the kitchen. Three.
Interview, Poems, and a Short Story 121
The fig tree’s leaves were waving goodbye. Two.

You were letting go, finger by finger. One.
You never knew the island was dividing.
You never knew an hour could be so cruel.
Kyrenia
Imagine it, says my mother. Kyrenia.

Standing at the edge of ripples,
an orange sun on my hair,
zest on my skin.
Boats dancing in water, floating

like smiles at a wedding, on white light.
Mermaid voices gliding in and out
of nets, shimmers of songs.
Like my youth, she says, out of reach.

At times, she weeps; till sun meets moon,
till mermaids scream and boats turn
to rocks about to sink.
Don’t Forget
The past came to visit again last night,

wrapped her arms round my neck
and whispered: It’s me. Don’t forget.
I knocked at a door which a woman opened.

She said in Turkish: Come in. Welcome.
Hoşgeldiniz. Hoşgeldiniz.
She handed an album of photos of me,

my husband, our children, this house,
pre-1974. The blue album. My living room.
I kept these for you, she said.

I thanked her in Greek. Efcharisto poli.
122 Nora Nadjarian
A tiny space the size of a pinhead
between each word, stung the air, the moment,

the dream. She offered coffee and sweets.
One of us was guest, the other hostess – but which?
Oh, there are some dreams which make no sense.

Turn over the cup, she said. I will tell you
your fortune, and we will learn the future.
Yes, I said, yes. We leant like two friends over a secret,

and the patterns of the future on the walls of the cup
made us weep on each other’s shoulders –
all those thirty-year old tears, finally, belatedly;

two sisters who were mothers, wives, daughters,
so long ago. Then the past came and sat between us
and woke me with a whisper:

It’s me. Don’t forget.
Ledra Street
I would like to tell you about the kafenion1, about the cat that lived
there, and the cheese rinds I fed it. About the coffee-shop owner who
was hit by a car, and the tray and the glasses and the coffee which
flew. These are the less important things.
More importantly, there was a time Ledra Street was a whole,
non-pedestrianised, and we still called Turkish coffee, Turkish. But
that was a long time ago.
I can find the spot even now where the coffee-shop owner tried
to cross, and the car hit him and the glass and the cups and the coffee
flew. He died in hospital later. The tyres screeched, the men gathered
round and my father ran out of his shop with a pic-measure in his hand
to see if it was me, panic written in his eyes and a pic-measure in his
hands, as if to measure the life or death left in the body on the tarmac.
I read panic again in my father’s eyes one hot July day, the day I grew
1
kafenion – a traditional Cyprus coffee-shop
Interview, Poems, and a Short Story 123
up. The day my memory was divided into important and less
important things.
Today I walked on Ledra Street and counted the steps from
where the kafenion stood, all the way to the checkpoint. It was fifty-
two steps. Fifty-two steps to freedom, fifty-two steps to captivity. I
can only imagine the other side. My father’s shop hidden in a souk.
Labyrinths of spices, hands dripping gold, a tree of idleness,
Bellapaix, la belle paix. When the hodja’s2 voice clings to the clammy
summer evenings, I try to imagine his face and weigh the importance
of his syllables. What is he asking God, and how carefully is God
listening?
I secretly mourned the coffee-shop owner’s death for years. It
was my fault he died. “Don’t feed it on the table,” he would say. “Not
on the table. A cat has nine, I have only one. If anyone comes in and
finds a cat on the table in my kitchen, I will not have any custom. I
will not have a life.” And the day he lost his life, he made three
coffees on the pale blue flame. The bubbles of the coffee rose and
subsided, rose and subsided in the brikki.3 He lined up the little cups,
filled them, picked up the aluminium tray, that special swaying
pyramid of a tray, and left his shop, the cat, and me.
It was my fault. I would like to say this to the sky in the
evening, like the hodja: it was my fault. But somehow it doesn’t seem
important any more. It sounds silly, even. I had been feeding the cat
on the table, when I thought I heard a noise. I took the cat and threw it
on the floor. Frightened, it ran into the street and got tangled in his
feet. The brakes screeched, too late. So he died, because of me and a
stupid cat.
It was in the paper the next day. My father made his lips small
enough to pull in the coffee from the little cup, and read – possibly to
himself, possibly to my mother: “Andreas Demetriou, 41, killed by
driver on Ledra Street.” My mother said: “And his wife? And his
children? Don’t they ever write about those that are left behind?”
I am now the one left behind. Behind a wall, behind a
checkpoint, looking for my father’s shop, looking for my childhood,
dismissing a man’s death, mourning the division of a city. Counting
the steps to the other side. Wondering where unimportance ends and
importance begins.
2
hodja – a muezzin, who calls Muslims to prayer from a mosque
3
brikki – a small pot used for making traditional Cyprus coffee
15
The Poetics of Exile in the Inter-war Novels of

Irina Odoevtseva
Xenia Srebrianski Harwell
Xenia Srebrianski Harwell was born in a displaced persons’ camp in

West Germany into a Russian and Lithuanian/German family. After
emigrating to the United States she and her parents settled first in
Harlem, and eventually in the Bronx, and became part of New York’s
large and dynamic Russian émigré community, attending Russian
school on Saturdays for twelve years. She studied at Barnard College,
the University of Vienna, Vanderbilt University and University of
Tennessee-Knoxville. She later worked at the US Consulate in St.
Petersburg, Russia. Srebrianski Harwell has taught Russian and
German language, literature, and culture at colleges in the South and
Midwest of the US. She is the author of The Female Adolescent in
Exile in Works by Irina Odoevtseva, Nina Berberova, Irmgard Keun,
and Ilse Tielsch, Peter Lang, 2000). As an inveterate wanderer, she has
travelled throughout the US, Canada, and Mexico, as well as in the
Caribbean, Eastern and Western Europe, Russia, Africa, Mongolia,
China, and New Zealand.
In this paper she examines the writings of Irina Odoevtseva, a member
of the first wave of Russian émigrés after the revolution, who settled in
Paris and, over the next sixty years, wrote novels and poetry in
Russian, few of which have been translated. She returned to Russia
with celebrity status in 1987 and died in 1990. The three novels
discussed here centre on the lives of young Russian women, living in
Paris, who negotiate in different ways the gaining of erotic experience
and the loss of connection with their Russian cultural origins. The first
novel, Angel Smerti (1927, Angel of Death), depicts the inner life of
Ljuka, a young girl, whose memories of the violent events surrounding
her emigration from Russia come to taint her newly awakening
sexuality. The second novel, Izol’da (1929, Isolde), is a psychological
thriller involving three young Russians involved in a robbery and
murder, which Srebrianski Harwell sees, on a metaphorical level, as a
study of the instability of émigré identity. The third novel, Zerkalo
(1939, The Mirror), returns to the central character of Angel Smerti, as
she abandons her husband to penetrate the brilliance and glamour of
the French film-making world. Herself later abandoned, she attaches
herself to a Soviet traveller and briefly contemplates the possibility of
a return to the Soviet Union, soon realising that such a plan is
unrealistic. Odoevtseva prided herself on not living in the past and on
adapting to the community she found herself in. The melodramatic
126 Xenia Srebrianski Harwell
depiction, in these three novels, of the psychic agonies of exiles who

fail both to adapt and to maintain a full sense of their Russian identity,
suggest unacknowledged exilic anxieties in the author herself.
Irina Odoevtseva was a member of the ‘first wave’ of Russian

émigrés, those who left Russia following the revolution and civil war.
Born in Riga in 1895 and raised in St Petersburg, she became a
student of the poet Nikolaj Gumilev and a member of the acmeist
Guild of Poets. In 1922 she published her first collection of poetry,
and the following year she settled in Paris, where she was an active
member of Russian cultural circles. She published four novels and six
collections of poetry, but became best known for her memoirs, Na
beregakh Nevy (On the Banks of the Neva, 1967) and Na beregakh
Seny (On the Banks of the Seine, 1983). In 1987 she returned to St
Petersburg at the invitation of the Writers’ Union and enjoyed
celebrity status there until her death in 1990.
The three novels Odoevtseva completed during the interwar
period – Angel smerti (Angel of Death, 1927), Izol’da (Isolde, 1929)
and Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1939) – are the subject of this paper. At the
time of their publication these novels were quite popular, and Angel
smerti was translated into English as Out of Childhood (1930) and into
German as Ljuka der Backfisch, Roman (1930). However, they have
never been republished, and are available in few libraries.
Consequently, today they are little known and have been the subject of
scant scholarly attention.
Odoevtseva dismissed her novels as “chisto zhenskikh”
(Kedrova 1988: 4; ‘purely women’s writing’), that is, dealing with
love. It is true that, with young women as central characters, love is an
integral part of each plot. However, each work also participates in the
discourse about exile, touching on some of the issues facing Russian
émigrés in Odoevtseva’s time. Taken together, the novels appear to
follow a progression that reflects different stages in the emigration and
assimilation process. Mutating family relationships, and the changing
mix of the heroines’ love interests, mark the stages of transition. In
Angel smerti, published just a few years after Odoevtseva’s departure
from Russia, we have a present mother (there are no fathers in these
works—they perished in Russia) and a cohesive family. Evening
conversation focuses on Russia, and both love interests are Russian. In
Izol’da, which was written two years later, we find a vanishing mother
who abandons her children. Family life is on the verge of a complete
breakdown, and discussions of Russia are avoided. There are two love
The Poetics of Exile in the Inter-war Novels of Irina Odoevtseva 127
interests – one Russian and one French. In the last novel, written a
decade later, both mother and family have disappeared. A Russian
husband has been abandoned in favour of the major love interest, who
is French. It should be noted that the heroine’s movement away from
Russia, family, and Russian boyfriends does not constitute progress –
at each stage there is failure in terms of personal fulfilment and
integration into the new society.
One of the issues Odoevtseva is able to touch upon, by
featuring adolescents as protagonists, is that of the retention of
Russian culture in the younger generation. Members of the Russian
émigré community in Paris made extensive efforts to create the social
structures that would enable Russian children to continue their
Russian education and knowledge of native culture, with the
expectation of an eventual return to the homeland (Harwell 2000:
103). None of Odoevtseva’s protagonists are integrated into such
structures, and the loss of Russian culture among them is evident.
Although they speak Russian, they are not completely familiar with
Russian literature, nor do they have a firm religious foundation. In
Angel smerti, an aunt appears to criticize the mother for not raising the
girls to be more culturally Russian, to which the mother replies that
her primary concerns are economic (Odoevtseva 1928: 77-8). In fact,
the mothers pragmatically encourage their daughters to do well at
French, rather than Russian, schools. Additionally, each novel
individually foregrounds and poetizes other aspects of the exile
condition, and it is these that I will focus on now.
In Angel smerti, Ljuka, a lively fourteen-year old, eager to grow
up, falls in love with Arsenij, the boyfriend of her older sister, Vera.
Vera marries a rich Russian for reasons of economic survival, but
continues her affair with Arsenij and is carrying his child. Through a
misunderstanding, Ljuka believes that Arsenij loves her. In order to
keep her from learning of the affair with Vera, Arsenij feigns love for
Ljuka and kisses her. Vera sees them, and in her shock falls down
some stairs, and is fatally injured. Not understanding that Ljuka is
innocent, Vera curses her before she dies.
Much of the novel is devoted to describing Ljuka’s inner life,
and in particular her preoccupation with death, a state of mind that
appears to have had its inception during the period of the revolution
and emigration. Thinking back to that time, Ljuka remembers the dark
empty mirrors in her house that gave her a sense of foreboding, and
reflects that the idea of a happy childhood is just a myth (Odoevtseva
1928: 10). She dwells on thoughts of her dead father, who was
murdered by the Bolsheviks.
Ljuka’s memory of Russia is part of a private and separate
world that is not to be shared with outsiders. When a French
acquaintance asks Ljuka to tell her about Russia (Odoevtseva 1928:
17), Ljuka pretends not to remember anything about it, although later
she thinks to herself: “Pomnit li ona? Razve mozhno zabyt’? Tak
bol’no. Tak grustno….No ob etom nel’zja razskazyvat’ glupoj,
chuzhoj zhenshchine” (1928: 17; “Does she remember? How can she
forget? So painful. So sad…But one should not talk about this to a
stupid, foreign woman”; this, and all other translations, with no source
indicated, are my own).
Ljuka’s departure from Russia is tainted with violence. When
she is forbidden to take her cat, which she loves above all else, she
places its neck in a noose and hangs it. As she watches its death
twitches, she sees Azrail, the Angel of Death, with huge black wings,
swoop in to take the cat’s soul (Odoevtseva 1928: 49). In Paris, Ljuka
continues to struggle with the deaths of her father and her cat, through
surrealistic visions that blend reality and the projections of her mind.
To Ljuka, Azrail, and therefore death, continues to be equated
with departure. Ljuka finds herself on the shore of the Black Sea (the
location of the mass evacuation of Russians following the failure of
the White Army), waiting to be evacuated. As she looks across the
water, the ominous image of Azrail floats before her eyes. Later in
Paris she makes the same connection between death and departure in a
poem she recites on her way home from school: “Est’ Angel Smerti v
groznyj chas/ Poslednikh muk i razstavan’ja/ On krepko obnimaet
nas,/ No kholodny ego lobzan’ja” ” (Odoevtseva 1928: 55; “There is
an angel of death at the terrible hour of last suffering and separation.
He embraces us tightly, but cold are his kisses”). These lines refer to
the journey into physical death, but to Ljuka they also represent the
journey into exile. Not without significance also is the fact that the
Angel of Death is among the fallen angels banished from heaven, and
therefore is in exile himself (Bethea 1994: 38).
In the poem quoted above, a connection is also made between
death and sexual images – the embrace and the kiss. This too is related
to Ljuka’s experience. The image of the Angel of Death is so firmly
embedded in Ljuka’s subconscious that her awakening sexuality is
also expressed through his image. In a dream, Ljuka lies nude on a
couch, feeling both shame and pleasure. She sees black wings, feels
cold and death, and recognizes Azrail. He caresses her breasts and
kisses her. As before, we see Ljuka between the realms of reality and
vision: when she awakens from the dream, she ‘sees’ Azrail sitting on
her bed, and asks him to return every night (Odoevtseva 1928: 51-52).
Furthermore, she conflates the images of Arsenij and Azrail
(Odoevtseva 1928: 135) into the surrealistic erotic/death-bringing
figure that she sees at the church door at Vera’s funeral. Thus it is the
process of emigration and exile that has permeated Ljuka’s
consciousness with a pathological hyperawareness of, and obsession
with, death.
Odoevtseva was criticized by some members of the Russian
community for portraying Russian youth negatively in her second
novel, Izol’da (Bobrow 1996: 43; Harwell 2000: 23), which recounts
the experience of three Russian adolescents living in Paris – Liza, her
brother Nikolaj, and her boyfriend Andrej.
An English student, Cromwell, falls in love with Liza, and
indulges the Russian threesome in the night life of Paris. Greedy for
more, Nikolaj and Andrej devise a plan to steal Cromwell’s mother’s
jewels. They murder Cromwell, dispose of his body, and run off with
the jewels. Liza, an unwitting accomplice to the plot, seeks refuge in a
hunting lodge belonging to Cromwell’s cousin, Leslie. She returns to
Paris in time to commit suicide with Andrej.
The title of the novel, Izol’da, alludes to the heroine of the
medieval story of Tristan and Isolde, and suggests the theme of tragic
love. But Odoevtseva does more than invoke the medieval work. A
copy of the book becomes an actual prop in the novel in that this is
what Cromwell happens to be reading when he looks up and sees
Liza. With her long dress and blonde hair, Liza appears like a vision
to him, and he is induced to call her ‘Isolde’. Moreover, he hands Liza
the book itself, which she then passes on to Andrej, calling him “her
Tristan”. This gesture accomplishes two things. First, on the symbolic
level, it represents the intrusion of a ‘western text’ into the lives of the
Russians. By accepting it and her new name, Liza symbolically agrees
to become part of this western narrative. Secondly, what the text
contains, the story of the Mark-Isolde-Tristan triangle, is now
replicated in the newly established triangle of Cromwell-Liza-Andrej
(Harwell 2000: 33). There are some other relevant similarities
between the Russians and Tristan and Isolde – both groups are living
as foreigners (Harwell 2000: 33). Tristan is 14, Liza’s age, when he is
kidnapped and brought to England. Cromwell, like Mark, is English,
and although he has no kingdom, he does have possessions – a car and
money – for which he is admired (Harwell 2000: 33). Finally, Isolde’s
suggestion that her friend Brangane be killed, even though she saves
Isolde’s life (Hatto 1960: 22), finds its parallel in the Russians’
murder of a person who has been nothing but a good friend.
Nikolaj, who orchestrates the murder, violates morality on
several other levels as well. Neither friendship nor family are sacred to
him. He sets up an exchange: he offers Cromwell Liza’s virginity if he
promises to bring his mother’s jewels to their house, and then he
coerces Liza into spending the night with Cromwell. He lies to Liza
about the purpose of the jewels, telling her that they will finance a trip
to Russia (Harwell 2000: 34-5). Both he and Andrej, sixteen-year old
males without prospects, illustrate the negative extreme of life in
exile. They are victims of what Robert J. Lifton calls
“psychohistorical dislocation” (Lifton 1979: 296), which involves the
“breakdown of symbolizations around family, religion, authority in
general, and the rites of passage of the life cycle” (Melton 1998: 82).
Whereas Nikolaj is completely alienated from his mother, and
from both his past and present lives, Liza is not. She attempts to
maintain normality in family relationships and is integrated into her
school life at the French lycée. Most importantly, she continues to
love Russia, even though this love is based on vague, nostalgic,
childhood memories and a romantic imagination (Harwell 2000: 28).
Liza’s effort to reformulate Russia in her mind by assimilating the
memories of older people, and by reading Russian literature and fairy
tales, and her idealization of the Russian childhood, common to the
Russian émigré sensibility, represents the “trope of the lost paradise”
(Melton 1998: 86). Another characteristic that Liza shares with some
émigrés is that of messianism. Her childhood fantasy of single-
handedly rescuing her homeland through sacrifice and suffering
parallels the adolescent Liza’s fascination with the suffering figures of
Joan of Arc and the Christian martyrs, and is projected into a dream,
in which an angel confirms to Liza that she has been charged with a
holy mission (Harwell 2000: 29). Her willingness to sacrifice her
virginity for ‘the cause’, while an extension of her messianic thinking,
is also, on another level, a distortion of the saintly ideal – a distortion
arising, perhaps, from the irregular state of exile itself. Even so, if we
wish to find in this novel the equivalent of the medieval work’s love
potion, which stands for something “that threatens to overwhelm […],
something that infects [the] whole being” (Hatto 1960: 7), then Liza’s
passion for Russia is that equivalent.
Liza’s reaction to the crime, to the treachery of her brother and
her boyfriend, to her abandonment by her mother and other adults, all
of which occur simultaneously, is to retreat physically – to the remote

country setting of the hunting lodge – as well as psychologically – into
a state of amnesia and catatonia. The new, but alien, name – ‘Betsy’ –
she is given by Leslie, another Westerner, reflects Liza’s alienation
from herself and the world, as do the robot-like repetitive speech
patterns and the precise, unwavering daily routine of the lodge. Lifton
terms this phenomenon, often a characteristic among exiles, as
“psychic numbing” – a response to excessive psychic disruptions, in
which “the mind […] stops creating symbols and becomes deadened
to external stimuli” (Melton 1998: 18).
On a metaphoric level, Izol’da explores the émigré’s struggle
between two cultures. Liza willingly accepts the manipulation of her
identity by others (specifically, by Westerners) because, as a young
émigré, she has difficulty in establishing her own. She is torn between
her old love – Andrej/Russia, and her new love – Cromwell/the West,
until she comes to understand that her attraction to the West is just a
flirtation and that her place is at the side of the former. At the same
time, she realizes that the choice of Andrej/Russia means continued
hopelessness and the knowledge that no real choices remain.
Odoevtseva’s third novel, Zerkalo (The Mirror), appearing
about a decade after the first two, returns to the character Ljuka, who
is now twenty-one and has left her Russian husband to live with the
French filmmaker, Thierry Rivoire, who has promised to make her a
film star. The couple lead a glamorous life and, in time, Thierry falls
in love with her. He decides she should have his child, but when he
learns of Vera’s deathbed curse, he abandons Ljuka. She commits
suicide, then he does the same.
The novel paints a psychological portrait of Ljuka as she gains
and then loses love. The mirror imagery that is referred to in the title
of the work is a device that reflects Ljuka’s psychological state and
plays on the novel’s theme of image versus reality. Ljuka at 21 is
more detached and hopeless than her fifteen year-old self in Angel
smerti. One scholar has noted a discontinuity in the depiction of the
character between the two books (Bobrow 1996: 65). While this
discontinuity may be a literary flaw, it is also possible that Odoevtseva
is updating the protagonist’s character based on the girl’s continued
struggle with life in exile. Ljuka is less assimilated into French society
as an adult than she was as a schoolgirl, for example, and her
economic situation has not improved. She believes that the fact that
she is Russian, and therefore poor (Odoevtseva 1939: 9), makes her an
outsider: at the theatre she feels like an “oаzis[om] bednosti ” (1939:
6; ‘island of poverty’) among the well-off French moviegoers. When

she seizes upon Thierry’s promise of fame, she immediately thinks not
only of penetrating the ‘insider’ society, but also of becoming
distinctive within it: “Eto Parizh, kotoryj skoro budet poklonjat’sja ej”
(1939: 24; This is Paris, which will soon be bowing before me), she
says. Like Liza, Ljuka is unsure of herself and her identity.
Throughout the novel, at emotional and important moments in her life,
Ljuka repeatedly glances into mirrors, unreal surface reflections, as if
searching for or confirming her own emotional response in the unreal
surface that is the mirror, instead of from within.
The ‘insider’ Thierry is glittering, machine-like (he drops off to
sleep and awakens instantly, as if at the flip of a switch), and
unemotional, and wears a huge ever-present artificial smile. He
suggests illusion, impermanence, and superficiality. On the symbolic
level, there is an implicit criticism of the West in his portrayal.
This criticism becomes explicit in the scene in which Ljuka
meets the Soviet Russian on a train as she returns to Paris. She is
distraught after having been turned away by Thierry, even though she
is pregnant with his child. The Soviet traveller, as a true son of the
revolution, rejects outright the notion of love (Odoevtseva 1939: 158),
and deems extreme Ljuka’s emotional reaction to the loss of Thierry.
To the traveller, Ljuka’s made-up appearance and emotionally-
charged singing style, which he calls ‘European’, are excessive and
artificial (1939: 160, 161). He compares Paris to an operetta, an
inauthentic place, and draws a parallel between it and Ljuka’s grief,
which to him seems theatrical (1939: 167). The traveller offers a
solution to Ljuka’s problems – a return to the Soviet Union.
Talking about Russia calms Ljuka’s hysteria and dissipates her
grief (1939: 162). The day she spends in Paris with the Soviet traveller
is filled with a sense of harmony (1939: 165). On the symbolic level
Odoevtseva is speaking of the desired union of the émigré with native
land, and it is true that the idea of returning to the Soviet Union was
one that occupied the minds of many émigrés during the interwar
period (Raeff 1990: 43). Yet, after the traveller goes home, Ljuka
realizes that a return to Soviet Russia would not solve her problems.
As in Izol’da, the discourse concerns the difficulty of the choices
given to the émigré – old Russia (the former husband) has
disappeared, the Soviet Union (the traveller) is an unrealistic option,
and the West (Thierry) is unreliable, lacking in real values, and has
rejected her even with the knowledge of the pregnancy, that is, of the
fact that a union has been created between them.
Joseph Brodsky said of the exiled writer: “his head is forever

turned backward and his tears, or saliva, are running down between
his shoulder blades” (Brodsky 1995: 27). Odoevtseva, however,
prided herself on not living in the past (Kolonitsaja 2001: 146) and on
being a part of whatever community she found herself in. She stated
that she “never considered herself an émigré, but a Russian” (Kedrova
1988: 3), and that she always adapted easily to new surroundings
(Kedrova 1998: 5). She was also known to be of a generally optimistic
disposition (Bobrow 1996: xvii). All the more striking, then, are the
melodramatic aspects of her works, as well as the psychic agonies of
her protagonists – their fears, anxieties, and loneliness, their lack of
choices, and the ease with which they are seduced into new identities.
Whether her work reveals unconscious exilic anxieties can only be a
matter of conjecture. According to Bethea, Kristeva postulates the
possibility of such subconscious exilic trauma:
A secret wound, often unknown to himself, drives the foreigner […]
however, he does not acknowledge it: with him, the challenge silences
the complaint […]. He is dauntless: “You have caused me no harm”,
he disclaims. (Bethea 1994: 41)
Regardless of what Odoevtseva herself proclaims, it appears that the

poetics of her three interwar novels proclaims otherwise.
Bibliography
Andrew, Joe. 1993. Narrative and Desire in Russian Literature, 1822-49. New York:
St. Martin’s Press.
Bethea, David M. 1994. Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile. Princeton:
Princeton University Press.
Bobrow, Ella. 1996. Irina Odoevsteva: Poet, Novelist, Memoirist. Oakville, ON.:
Mosaic Press.
Brodsky, Joseph. 1995. On Grief and Reason: Essays. New York: Farrar Straus
Giroux.
Harwell, Xenia Srebrianski. 2000. The Female Adolescent in Exile in Works by Irina
Odoevtseva, Nina Berberova, Irmgard Keun, and Ilse Tielsch. New York:
Peter Lang.
Hatto, Arthur. Thomas. 1960. ‘Introduction’ in von Strassburg, Gottfried Tristan.
Harmondsworth, England: Penguin: 7-35.
Johnston, Robert H. 1988. “New Mecca, New Babylon”: Paris and the Russian
Exiles, 1920-1945. Kingston, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Kedrova, K. 1988. ‘Vozvrashchenie Iriny Odoevtsevoj’ in Odoevtseva, Irina Na
beregakh Nevy. Moskva: Khudozhestvennaja literatura: 3-8.
Kolonitskaja, Anna. 2001. ‘Vse chisto dlja chistogo vzora…’: (Besedy s Irinoj
Odoevstsevoj). Moskva: Voskresen’e.
Lifton, Robert Jay. 1979. The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of
Life. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Melton, Judith M. 1998. The Face of Exile: Autobiographical Journeys. Iowa City:
University of Iowa Press.
Odoevtseva, Irina. 1928. Angel smerti. Paris: Izdatel’stvo “Montparnasse”
(translated as Out of Childhood, tr. Donia Nachshen, London: Constable,
1930).
- - -. 1929. Izol’da. Paris-Berlin: Izdatel’stvo knizhnago magazina “Moskva”.
- - -. 1930. Ljuka der Backfisch, Roman (tr. Wolfgang E. Groeger). Berlin:
Rembrandt.
- - - . 1967. Na beregakh Nevy. Washington: Victor Kamkin.
- - - . 1983. Na beregakh Seny. Paris: La Presse Libre.
- - - . 1939. Zerkalo. Bruxelles: Les Editions Petropolis.
Raeff, Marc. 1990. Russia Abroad: A Cultural History of the Russian Emigration,
1919-1939. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sabov, Aleksandr. 1988. ‘Snova na beregakh Nevy’ in Odoevtseva, Irina Na beregakh
Nevy. Moskva: “Khudozhestvennaja literatura”: 314-322.
Struve, Gleb. 1996. Russkaja literatura v izgnanii. Paris-Moscow: YMCA
Press/Russkij put’.
16
Interview and Poems: ‘Refugees’, ‘Coming to Paradise’,

‘Immigrant Architectures’, ‘My Life in Two Parts’,
‘In the Shadow of the Bridge’
Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova was born and spent her childhood and adolescence
in Bulgaria. Declining the title of exile, she refers to her family as
economic migrants, who left their homeland in 1989 first for Britain,
where she attended high school for a year, then for New Zealand,
where she undertook her university studies and has established herself
as a leading poet, novelist and essayist in English. Her debut novel
Reconaissance won the 2000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for best
first novel in the South-East Asia and Pacific region. Her first book of
poetry won the 1999 Montana Best First Book of Poetry award. Her
second novel is Love in the Land of Midas and she was the 2002 and
2004 New Zealand Cathay Pacific travel writer of the year. In 2003
she published her latest book of poetry, Someone Else’s Life, and held
the Creative New Zealand Berlin residency. In addition to Bulgarian
and English, she speaks fluent French and some German and Spanish.
In an interview for the accompanying DVD, Kapka recalls her feelings
of alienation as a young teenager living in Bulgaria, and the
challenges associated with writing in a new language (English) and
new countries (England and New Zealand). She explains that she first
properly found her voice as a poet in English as she sought to capture
the experience of migrants, displaced persons, and other people who
feel themselves to be in exile. We see her reading two poems of that
kind, ‘Refugees’ (a recent poem) and ‘Coming to Paradise’ (from a
group ‘The Immigrant Cycle’, 1998) at a live public performance. She
then meditates on the question of where she now belongs, where home
is, concluding that, unlike many migrants, she takes a strange kind of
comfort from not being tied to a single location. Being displaced, she
says, serves as a motivating factor in her creativity. She explains that
she uses Bulgarian and English for different purposes and in different
aspects of her life. She ends by reading three poems: ‘Immigrant
Architectures’, ‘My Life in Two Parts’, and ‘In the Shadow of the
Bridge’. All of these poems can be found in Kapka’s latest volume of
poetry, Someone Else’s Life, Auckland: Auckland University Press,
2003.
See DVD
136 Kapka Kassabova
Refugees
Look: the poverty of rain

Let’s gather it in thimbles of patience
then pour it out in the mud
Meanwhile
we’ll count all the worlds
to which we’ll never go
We must remember – memory is hope.

But quietly, for words can cut out gaps in us
so wide we’d find
too many bodies lying there
Forget, we must forget

the memories – they open up and blossom
like switch-blades in the guts
Look: this is the world we have

Too poor to hide in
Too dark to cross, too single to forget
Coming to Paradise
We came and found paradise but something

was missing in the water, in the sky,
in the movement of hands
that couldn’t embrace or punish
Our children have the large

moist eyes of wounded deer
but must betray no sign of weakness
they must be winners or nothing
Our children know all the songs

all the shows all the jokes
they try to learn the memories too
our children are like the rest
It’s a sign of fluency to dream in a language

but we dream wide-awake
we think about our dreams
in broken silences
We stand alone and stubborn

we spend years looking for a crack
in the neighbours’ wall
but only find a key
We came looking for paradise and paradise

we found, but it wasn’t enough
so we wept and talked about leaving
and never left.
Immigrant Architectures
These days, you feel uneasy

about closing your eyes.
You are afraid of finding
your native city so familiar

and so aloof
you’ll wonder if you’ve really
been there.
You’ll find the restored

front of a palace
and behind it
the ruins of your neighbourhood.
Boulevards paved
with familiar faces
watch you and cry out
in a chorus of displeasure.
All-embracing loves
close in on nothing,
like dancing with yourself.
138 Kapka Kassabova
And the sea, the sepia sea

inside your glass head
that everybody sees
and no one understands.
And what you’ve known mutates.

And what you’ve known
is something else,
something like the shadow
of a predatory bird gliding
into the great stillness
before a great storm
which is only the storm

of your blood
in the cracked cup of memory.
My Life in Two Parts
1
Outside my window is a row of poplars
growing from the turf of childhood.
Poplars grow in rows, never on their own.
It is Christmas. The sky is full of stars,
the branches are bare,
the wolves distant and menacing.
Now is the only time for oranges.
Their brisk fragrance fills the nails
as we lie in cold rooms high in the Balkans
dreaming of palm trees and the world.
2
Outside my window is a palm tree.
It is winter. The sky is enormous
and the ocean follows the moon.
Oranges are on the window-sill with other
tropical fruit no longer of interest.
Bright-plumed parakeets sway in the palm tree
and that’s the only time I look up.
I lie in the low, stuffy rooms of adulthood

dreaming of poplars and the world.
Always they come in rows.
In the Shadow of the Bridge
Wherever we went, something else

was on our minds.
It was too hot, it was too cold.
We were tired, we were not in the mood.
We had been there. It wasn’t what we wanted.
We were the constant witness of ourselves.
One evening, the moon rose from the horizon

like we’d never seen it:
enormous and yellow.
We drove towards it in the falling night.
We knew it was a rare chance.
We stopped at the roots of a bridge.

We stood in the giant shadow,
pierced by the headlights of passing cars above.
Across the black, wind-combed water was a city
and all its alien lights. We had come from that city.
Your camera on a tripod by the edge of the water.
I sat inside the vintage car.
The moon bulged right above us.
We had everything that night.

So we took a picture and drove away.
17
The Myth of the Great Return: Memory, Longing and

Forgetting in Milan Kundera’s Ignorance
Fiona J. Doloughan
Fiona Doloughan was born in Northern Ireland where she spent her
childhood and adolescence before moving first to England and then to
the USA to pursue her education. After completing her PhD in
Comparative Literature at Chapel Hill, she returned to the UK where
she has held appointments in both French and English at a number of
universities. She is currently a Lecturer in English in the Department
of Linguistic, Cultural and International Studies at the University of
Surrey. Her publications reflect her interdisciplinary and cross-cultural
background. Recent publications have focused on texts produced by
writers who have access to more than one set of linguistic and cultural
resources, such as Ariel Dorfman, Milan Kundera and Ben Okri.
In this paper, she argues that Milan Kundera, in his recent novel
Ignorance (2002), explores the condition of exile in ways which go
against readerly expectation. On the literal level, he portrays two
characters for whom the longed-for return to their Czech homeland
offers little fulfilment, as they discover that life in their adopted
countries (Denmark and France) has more reality for them than what
they have returned to find. Moreover, they realise that other people’s
perceptions of them as displaced or in exile run counter to their own
sense of being at home in their new countries. Doloughan suggests,
however, that Kundera is equally interested in the themes of exile and
return on a metaphorical level. Through repeated allusions to the
Odyssey he poses the question of whether, especially in the modern
world, not only any notion of return to an unaltered homeland, but the
possibility of recovering memories of the past with any accuracy and
completeness, are always illusory. Both on the actual and the
metaphorical level, the exilic condition is one where past and present,
old and new, co-exist and intermingle. Structurally, too, in this novel
Kundera interweaves the lives of the characters and narrative threads
in such a way that none of them can be followed without reference to
another.
142 Fiona J. Doloughan
“For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place

to live” (Adorno 1951, cited in Said 1994: 43).
In Representations of the Intellectual, Edward Said treats exile as both

an actual and a metaphorical condition. He conceives of the exile as
someone who exists “in a median state, neither completely at one with
the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-
involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one
level, an adept mimic or a secret outcast on another” (Said 1994: 36).
Translated into the metaphoric domain, exile is, for Said, characterised
by “restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling
others. You cannot go back to some earlier or perhaps more stable
condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at
one with your new home or situation” (Said 1994: 39).
In discussing Milan Kundera’s treatment of exile in his recent
novel Ignorance (2002), I wish to view it, following Said, as a
metaphorical as well as an actual condition. Insofar as the novel is
concerned with the plight of the émigré(e) and what s/he encounters
on a return visit to his/her native land, it may be considered to be a
material and thematic representation of the exilic condition. At the
same time, the manner in which the themes of exile and return are
structured – i.e., in relation to and against the grain of references to
Odysseus and his (eventual) return to Ithaca – can be seen to
interrogate notions of exile which are culturally and historically
available. In addition, Kundera’s own status as a Czech exile who has
lived in France, his second homeland, since 1975 and whose recent
novels, including Ignorance, have been written in French, serves to
underscore the fact that for this novelist exile and loss of homeland are
live issues of which he has experience rather than being merely
imagined or represented conditions.
At the level of material representation, therefore, I shall argue
that Kundera is questioning the myth of the Great Return both in
relation to his characters’ experiences and by means of the narrator’s
interrogative, and often ironic, comments. With respect to its
metaphorical dimension, I shall view exile as what Michael Seidel
calls “an enabling fiction … a fiction enabling me to address the larger
strategies of narrative representation” (Seidel 1986: xii). For, insofar
as Kundera’s novel reflects “a double perspective that never sees
things in isolation” (Said 1994: 44) but always in relation to “what has
been left behind and what is actual here and now” (Said 1994: 44), it
may be seen as, in effect, the product of an exilic imagination. Living
and working in France, but representing changes, real or imagined, in
The Myth of the Great Return 143
his homeland, Kundera possesses what Hana Píchová refers to as “the

contrapuntal vision in which countries, shores, and languages are held
in dual focus” (Píchová 2002: 9).
The counterpoint and dual focus in Ignorance stem partly from
the fact that the novel is concerned with whether or not it is still
possible to speak of exile and return in the same terms as in the past or
whether, in fact, the modern world is one where such notions assume
different, and perhaps contradictory, meanings. In the fourteenth
section of the novel (there are fifty-three in total), the narrator
speculates about whether in today’s post-Communist, post-Cold War
world, with its rapid transformations, the writing of an Odyssey is still
possible. He conjectures that given our contemporary experience of
time, notions such as exile and return, which depend for their impact
on constancy and lack of change, may well be inconceivable:
The gigantic invisible broom that transforms, disfigures, erases
landscapes has been at the job for millennia now, but its movements,
which used to be slow, just barely perceptible, have sped up so much
that I wonder: Would an Odyssey even be conceivable today? Is the
epic of the return still pertinent to our time? When Odysseus woke on
Ithaca’s shore that morning, could he have listened in ecstasy to the
music of the Great Return if the old olive tree had been felled and he
recognized nothing around him? (Kundera 2002: 54)
Throughout the novel, references to Odysseus and his plight act

as a kind of touchstone against which Irena’s and Josef’s experience
of exile and return are set. As early as section 2, Homer’s account of
Odysseus’s adventures is cited. For the narrator, the Odyssey is “the
founding epic of nostalgia” (Kundera 2002: 7) which glorifies a return
to the known and the finite rather than the infinitude of adventure and
the unknown. According to the narrator, it sets up “a moral hierarchy
of emotions” with Penelope “at its summit, very high above Calypso”
(Kundera 2002: 9). In a way, the Odyssey sets a cultural standard
against which other stories of exile can be measured. In Kundera’s
novel, it serves as a kind of grand narrative which emplots a powerful
set of cultural myths, which, however attractive they may be, seem
ultimately to be at odds with the modern condition.
Thus, for Irena and Josef, the return to Prague and Bohemia
after their ‘adventures’ abroad fails to constitute the joyous and
longed-for return but places them both, in different ways, in situations
where the life they have been leading in France and in Denmark seems
more ‘real’ to them than what they have returned to find. Neither
character conforms to the expectations which others have for them; in
their case, the return to the homeland is not willed but a product of the
wishes of others. In the case of Irena, for example, it is her French
friend, Sylvie, who pushes her to return; in addition, Gustaf, her
Swedish lover, is keen to open a new office in Prague so that Irena
will have a connection once again with her native land.
For Irena, however, the view that other people have of her as “a
young woman in pain, banished from her country” (Kundera 2002:
24) is far from her vision of self. As she chats with Milada in Prague,
she realizes that her life in France after her husband Martin’s death
was, in fact, a happy time, a time when she was in control of her own
destiny. Her life in Prague had been under her mother’s watchful eye;
to escape, she had married Martin, an old friend of her mother’s. Even
her emigration had been prompted not by herself but by the need for
Martin to escape the secret police. Only in Paris, in the years
following Martin’s death, did she enjoy a sense of independence,
despite the difficulties of bringing up children alone.
Josef, too, has returned to Bohemia at the behest of his wife
(now dead) rather than at his own instigation. During his few days
revisiting landscapes and family members from the past, what intrudes
on his consciousness from time to time, like a beacon, is an image of
home – the home he and his Danish wife had set up together in
Denmark:
… he sees two easy chairs turned to face each other, the lamp and the
flower bowl on the window ledge, and the slender fir tree his wife
planted in front of the house, a fir tree that looks like an arm she’d
raised from afar to show him the way back. (Kundera 2002: 143)
For Josef, then, the home-fires that continue to burn are not those of
his native land but rather those of his adopted land where he has spent
his adulthood. In fact, reading through a high school diary which
outlines his adolescent relationships, he finds it difficult to identify
with the exploits and emotions of the young boy he finds represented
there. His past life does not seem to have substance for him, since he
fails to recognize his former self. Only when he copies out a sentence
from his adolescent diary in his adult handwriting is he forced to
confront the fact that they are one and the same.
The resemblance is upsetting, it irritates him, it shocks him. How can
two such alien, such opposite beings have the same handwriting?
What common essence is it that makes a single person of him and this
little snot? (Kundera 2002: 83)
What seems to be at issue here, and in the novel as a whole, is the

nature of memory and the passage of time. Josef wrestles with
representations of the past – in his diary, in the minds of his brother
and sister-in-law, in his own head – which would appear to be at odds
with the ‘facts’ around him. He has no truck with the adolescent that
he appears, from his diary, to have been; indeed, he is distinctly
antagonistic towards his former self and has either forgotten episodes
from his past or remembers things differently.
He goes on reading and remembers nothing. So what has this stranger
come to tell him? To remind him that he used to live here under
Josef’s name? (Kundera 2002: 72)
His chance encounter with Irena at Paris airport is illustrative of the

gap between memory and experience. For Irena, this encounter is
charged with meaning; she remembers Josef as someone with whom
she almost had an affair before leaving Prague and she is keen to
renew his acquaintance:
From the moment she ran into Josef at the Paris airport, she’s been
thinking of nothing but him. She constantly replays their brief
encounter long ago in Paris. (Kundera 2002: 98)
Josef, on the other hand, has no memory of this pleasant and

interesting woman, though he covers up his ignorance in order to
prolong their conversation.
He enjoyed the encounter, too; she was friendly, charming, and
agreeable; forty something and pretty; and he hadn’t the faintest idea
who she was. (Kundera 2002: 48)
Indeed, when, back in Prague, they finally make love in Josef’s hotel
room, Irena becomes aware that Josef has no idea who she is and, in
her drunken state, accuses him of being a bad man.
You don’t know who I am! You picked up a strange woman! You
made love with a stranger who offered herself to you! You took
advantage of a misunderstanding! You used me like a whore! I was a
whore to you, some unknown whore! (Kundera 2002: 187)
For the narrator, it is in the very nature of human beings to forget and
to try and reconstruct the past from the paltry fragments retained in the
annals of memory. But why one fragment and not another? No one
knows, he replies,
since in each one of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our
will or our interests. We don’t understand a thing about human life, if
we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is

what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed. (Kundera 2002:
124)
Yet we continue to try and make sense of the past by inserting our
memories into causal chains which help to make them intelligible for
us – and, indeed, for others – but these causal chains are, in fact,
necessary fictions, since we cannot actually remember the events
leading up to and following a fragment from the past. According to
the narrator, our narratives of the past are approximations, intended to
provide a plausible explanation of events which we no longer fully
remember. “Josef”, he writes, “could not claim that his anecdote was
identical with what he had actually experienced; he knew that it was
only the plausible plastered over the forgotten” (Kundera 2002: 126).
In addition, the narrator points to the perspectival nature of our
memories; we (necessarily) see things from our subjective viewpoints,
which may or may not correspond to the viewpoint of other people. So
for Irena and Josef, who spent time together in the past, their
recollections of events are not at all the same.
The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts:
they don’t have the same recollections; each of them retains two or
three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their
recollections are not similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of
quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other
more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies
among individuals […] but also […] because they don’t hold the same
importance for each other. When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she
remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef
remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was
based on an unjust and revolting inequality. (Kundera 2002: 126)
This injustice and inequality continue until their frenzied love-making

in Josef’s hotel room. Even in the midst of passion, Josef is already
thinking about his return flight to Denmark. If he is able to enjoy, to
the full, this erotic encounter, it is because he sees it as his last:
As he is making love, from time to time Josef looks discreetly at his
watch: two hours left, an hour and a half left; this afternoon of love is
fascinating, he doesn’t want to miss any part of it, not a move, not a
word, but the end is drawing near, ineluctable, and he must watch the
time running out. (Kundera 2002: 184)
So he leaves the by now drunk and still sleeping Irena in his hotel
room, which he secures on her behalf until noon the following day.
Alone, he heads for the airport and boards his plane, the image of
home still etched on his brain: “Through the porthole he saw, far off in
the sky, a low wooden fence and a brick house with a slender fir tree
like a lifted arm before it” (Kundera 2002: 195). This image of home
has run through the novel like a leitmotiv; Josef’s few days in
Bohemia have confirmed him in the view that Denmark, rather than
Bohemia, is where he recognizes himself and his life. The price of
returning to Bohemia would be the loss of his life in Denmark. It
becomes clear to him, while visiting his brother, that were he to stay
in Bohemia, all trace of his wife would soon be gone. For his brother
and sister-in-law know nothing of her, neither her age, nor her
profession; their initial caution, for security reasons, has given way to
a complete lack of interest. By contrast, Josef’s life in Denmark is full
of reminders of his (dead) wife’s presence; his memory of her remains
intact.
Both of Kundera’s main characters, then, serve to undermine
the notion of the Great Return. In Josef’s case, his expectations of
people and places are not met and he fails to identify with his former
self and his former life. His duty done, he cannot wait to leave
Bohemia and return to Denmark.
For Irena, things are slightly more complicated. The evening
she organizes for friends in the restaurant in Prague is fraught with
tensions and misunderstandings – she orders wine on behalf of her
friends, for example; they express their preference for beer. Initially,
her friends seem uninterested in her new life; their interest lies, rather,
in Irena’s memories of their past life together. Yet, by the end of the
evening they are showering her with questions about her present,
thereby, she feels, depriving her of her recent past, “[a]s if they were
amputating her forearm and attaching the hand directly to the elbow;
as if they were amputating her calves and joining her feet to her
knees” (Kundera 2002: 43).
Later, in bed, reviewing the evening in her mind, she realizes
how much she misses her French friend, Sylvie, and how she would
like to be able to take her out and explain to her the price to be paid
for the Great Return:
And you know something, Sylvie – now I understand: I could go back
and live with them, but there’d be a condition: I’d have to lay my
whole life with you, with all of you, with the French, solemnly on the
altar of the homeland and set fire to it. Twenty years of my life would
go up in smoke, in a sacrificial ceremony. And the women would sing
and dance with me around the fire, with their beer mugs raised high in
their hands. That’s the price I’d have to pay to be pardoned. To be
accepted. To become one of them again. (Kundera 2002: 45)
Nevertheless, there are moments when Irena feels at home in Prague.

While waiting for her rendezvous with Josef, she goes walking
through a part of Prague she loves, a quiet, leafy neighbourhood far
from the downtown area. At that moment, comparisons with Paris are
in Prague’s favour: she contrasts the intimacy of Prague with the
“chilly geometry” (Kundera 2002: 133) of Paris. In fact, the Prague
she revisits on her walk is emblematic of her lost country: “Little
houses in gardens stretching away out of sight over rolling land”
(Kundera 2002: 134). She feels happy and recognizes how difficult it
must have been to have left the city. Her stroll through Prague
becomes a kind of farewell, since at the time she emigrated she didn’t
have time to take her leave properly. Walking and reflecting on her
life, she becomes certain that she will leave this city and the life it is
weaving for her:
She moves on, and she reflects that today she is finally carrying out
the farewell walk she failed to take last time; she is finally saying her
Great Farewells to the city that she loves more than any other and that
she is prepared to lose once again, without regret, to be worthy of a
life of her own. (Kundera 2002: 138)
Through his characters and through the narrator’s comments on

their thoughts and actions, Kundera represents the exilic condition as
one where past and present, old and new, co-exist and intermingle;
France and Denmark are viewed through the lens of Prague and
Bohemia and Irena’s and Josef’s lives as émigrés are given value in
relation to their present experience of return to the homeland. Indeed,
the experience of return, where the characters live in a kind of no-
man’s-land with “half involvements and half detachments” (Said
1994: 36), helps to cement their attachments to the lives they have
been living in their adopted homelands. The return that Josef desires is
to an image of home which has attached itself to the house he shared
with his wife in Denmark, thus confirming Seidel’s view that “[t]he
memory of home becomes paramount in narratives where home itself
is but a memory” (Seidel 1986: 11).
For Irena, what is clear is that she wishes finally to enjoy a life
of her own choosing; such a life requires that she leave Prague and all
that it represents. Whether she returns to Paris or moves elsewhere is
left in abeyance. For while talking to Josef over lunch, she offers him
her future, a future which he is keen to avoid: “Not here. In France.
Better yet, somewhere else. Anywhere” (Kundera 2002: 170).
At one level, then, Kundera’s novel is structured around the
themes of exile and return; references to the Odyssey which underpin
the work serve to highlight the myth of the Great Return. At the same
time, Kundera’s focus on memory, longing, and forgetting reflect
more general concerns about (self-) knowledge and the nature of time.
The émigré is emblematic of those who move, usually for political
reasons, from one land – and language and culture – to another. The
journey they have undertaken is literal as well as metaphoric. Yet, as
Said suggests, exile in the sense of existing in a median state is not the
prerogative of the émigré. The intellectual, he claims, needs to be able
to adopt the standpoint of the exile insofar as s/he represents what he
calls “a spirit in opposition rather than in accommodation” (Said 1994:
xv). For Said, this means that “an idea or experience is always
counterposed with another, therefore making them both appear in a
sometimes new and unpredictable light” (Said 1994: 44).
It is precisely this dual focus and juxtaposition of ideas and
experiences that Kundera achieves in Ignorance. The novel is
structured in such a way that characters are seen not in isolation but in
relation to one another; their individual perspectives are always
compared and contrasted with the perspective of others. Josef’s
memories, for example, are set against those of Irena and of Milada;
Irena’s life is situated in relation to that of her husband, Martin, and
that of her lover, Gustaf. Moreover, the novel’s division into fifty-
three sections, with overlapping and interwoven storylines, reflects the
contingent and perspectival nature of perception and experience. One
narrative is interrupted by, and set against, another such that the reader
is aware of the limitations and self-delusions of each of the characters.
In addition, commentary from the narrator and the extended
‘philosophical’ passages serve as counterpoint to, and explanatory
framework for, the experiences of individual characters, thereby
raising them to a more abstract and generalisable level. In other
words, ‘theory’ is seen to inform ‘practice’ and the particular is shown
in relation to broader and more universal concerns. For, as Peter Kussi
points out, Kundera is concerned that literature transcend national and
parochial boundaries (Kussi 1978: 30).
Indeed, it is at this more abstract level that we may view writing
as an exilic condition and representation as the product of an exilic
imagination. Given that, for Said, intellectual representations (and
here he includes talking, writing, teaching, appearing on television)
“are the activity itself” (Said 1994: 15), and that for Kundera the novel
is “a living, evolving source of form and inspiration as well as a
repository of accumulated knowledge” (Kussi 1978: 20), it becomes
possible to view Kundera’s work as a meditation on loss and return

which ultimately constitutes his true homeland.
As long ago as 1971, Kundera bemoaned the fact that “[i]n our
society it is counted a greater virtue to guard the frontiers than to cross
them” (quoted in Kussi 1978:16). Throughout his life, Kundera has
crossed countless frontiers and, in his fiction, interrogated “the
stereotypes that are so limiting to human thought and communication”
(Said 1994: x). He has used his double vision as an exile, or what
Kussi calls “the effects of ‘extraterritoriality’” (Kussi 1978: 29), to
question accepted truths both at home and abroad. I shall give the last
word to Píchová who sums up Kundera’s view of the novel as an
interrogative mode embodying a spirit of questioning and of
opposition:
Kundera calls upon a broader history of the novel, defining it as a
genre of questioning, placing his own work into a broad sweep of the
history of the novel as a kind of bridge, as a way of preserving a spirit
of questioning that resists accepting any one truth as the only truth.
(Píchová 2002: 13)
Bibliography
Kundera, Milan. 2002. Ignorance. London: Faber and Faber.

Kussi, Peter. 1978. Essays on the Fiction of Milan Kundera. PhD thesis. Columbia
University: University Microfilms International.
Píchová, Hana. 2002. The Art of Memory in Exile: Vladimir Nabokov and Milan
Kundera. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press.
Said, Edward. 1994. Representations of the Intellectual. London: Vintage.
Seidel, Michael. 1986. Exile and the Narrative Imagination. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
18
Exile in Redemption: S.Y. Agnon’s Only Yesterday

Arnold J. Band
Arnold Band was born in Boston, Massachusetts and was educated at

Harvard University, with study years abroad in both Jerusalem and
Paris. He has taught at UCLA since 1959, but has been a visiting
lecturer at Yale University, the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv
University, and Brandeis University. While living in Los Angeles on
the Pacific Rim, he has travelled much to Europe, Israel, Mexico, and
East Asia. He is best known for his pioneering research on Agnon
and other Jewish authors. A collection of his leading essays was
recently published as Studies in Modern Jewish Literature.
In this paper, he discusses a novel by S.Y. Agnon, the leading
Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, who won the Nobel Prize in
1966. In many of his novels, but specifically in Only Yesterday,
Agnon deals with the aspirations for redemption from exile generated
by the Zionist movement. In this novel, Band suggests, Agnon insists
that the secular redemption from exile embodied in the re-creation of
the ancestral home of the Jews as a modern national state does not
solve the religious problem of exile, which, following both Biblical
and Kabbalistic notions, treats exile as a metaphysical condition
remedied only by some sort of messianic event. Only Yesterday, set
in Jerusalem and Jaffa in the first decade of the twentieth century,
explores this theme through the tragic experiences of the hero. The
Biblical echoes add to the historical depth of the plot. The novel,
written between 1936 and 1945, against the bloody background of
the times, is a sober reflection on the failings of secular, nationalistic
aspirations.
In the Western literary tradition, exile as an event and a recurring

theme has its foundational origins in the books of the Hebrew Bible
(the Old Testament). The historical experience of Ancient Israel left a
record of two major historical exiles, that of 722 BCE and that of 586
BCE. These, in turn, shaped both contemporary historiography and
prophecy, on the one hand, and major mythic structures, on the other
hand. The cardinal paradigms of sin and punishment through exile
that we encounter in the first eleven chapters of Genesis reflect this
experience. Adam and Eve expelled from Eden, Cain driven from his
home, and the builders of the Tower of Babel dispersed over the face
152 Arnold J. Band
of the earth are examples that have educated many peoples for
centuries. It was not inevitable that exile would be regarded as
punishment for sin rather than the result of drought or, conversely,
that sin would be punished by exile rather than by pestilence, but the
joining of exile and sin was what the Hebrew prophets and historians
deduced from their experience – and bequeathed to us.
Furthermore, the exile-sin nexus, well established by the
seventh century BCE, was accompanied by a concomitant promise or
hope for redemption as a reward for repentance, for the mending of
one’s ways. Again, this was not inevitable. One can conceive of a
variety of different reactions to an exilic situation: a type of quietism,
or a rejection of this world, or a violent militancy. But the pre-exilic
prophets and the Deuteronomic historians formulated a theology of
redemption that includes concepts of repentance and messianism.
Redemption implied two types of return: return to the ways of the
Lord and return to the ancestral homeland. This powerful cluster of
ideas which generations have taken for granted was well formed even
before the exile of 586 BCE, and has come down in a rich variety of
possibilities throughout history. While this cluster of concepts has
been the heritage of all the western monotheistic religions, Judaism,
because of its historical circumstances, has emphasized the exile
component to a degree unknown in other religions. Reconstructed
during the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE (see the book of
Ezekiel), Judaism entered the Hellenistic period with its dispersion of
populations, called ‘the Diaspora’, that found meaning – if not
pleasure – in exile.
This notion of exile informed all of Jewish writing until the
modern period and, even in the twentieth century, continued as a
powerful theme in the works of many writers, specifically those with
training in traditional texts. Among these, the leading figure is the
Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon (1887-1970) who was awarded the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1967. Agnon’s life spanned the great events in
the Jewish world during the twentieth century. Born in 1887 in
Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he settled in
Palestine in 1908 and, apart from a sojourn in Germany between
1912 and 1924, lived in Jerusalem until his death in 1970. He was
thus a witness to major events such as: the acculturation of European
Jewry, the Zionist-inspired return of Jews to their ancestral homeland,
and the violent destruction of the European Jewish Diaspora in World
War II. Well read in both traditional Jewish and modern European
Exile in Redemption: Agnon’s Only Yesterday 153
literature, he was superbly equipped to render these experiences in

compelling literary form.
Among his many works of fiction, the novel Temol Shilshom
(Only Yesterday) is particularly well-suited for discussion in the
context of a volume on the poetics of exile. Published in its full scope
in 1945, it deals with the adventures of a young Jewish halutz
(‘pioneer’) from Galicia who tries to settle in Jaffa and Jerusalem
during what is known as the Second Aliya, the second wave of Jewish
immigration to Palestine between 1904 and World War I. Though this
time is often treated, in literature, as the heroic period of the Zionist
return from exile to homeland, Agnon’s portrayal of it is radically
dissonant with this literary paradigm. His hero, Yitzhak Kummer,
never settles on the land as a farmer (the Zionist ideal), but works as a
house-painter in both Jaffa and Jerusalem and finally dies a violent
death after having been bitten by a rabid dog in Jerusalem. The
journey from exile to homeland ends in death, the ultimate exile from
a life of self-fulfilment -- and this is not the only exile that we find.
This plot or fabula, even in its bald form, should suffice to
intimate the potential vectors of exile-homeland implications, which
are far more complex when we study the sujet. But before I do, I
want to return to my basic formulation of the original, biblical cluster
of exile-redemption notions outlined above. When one speaks of
redemption in traditional Jewish texts, one refers either to a spiritual
redemption, the return to the life under God’s law and the
concomitant state of peace on earth, or to the territorial return. Within
the world of traditional Jewish messianic aspirations, the two forms
of redemption, the spiritual and the territorial, are usually combined,
and the normative term for either redemption was the same, ge’ulah.
What makes this term so powerful in Hebrew is that phonetically it
resonates with its opposite, the term golah or galut - the standard
term for exile. The movement from galut to geulah was one of the
clichés of the period, inviting rampant over-determination.
The term ge’ulah, in fact, was so ubiquitous that by the time of
the Second Aliya (1904-1914), of Israel (the Jewish people) from
exile to their ancestral homeland (Zion), it was used in a secular sense
for a gamut of activities relating to the Zionist activities in resettling
the Land of Israel (Palestine) during the Ottoman Turkish occupation:
buying land, draining swamps, irrigating deserts, and building
institutions of all sorts. These secular ge’ulah activities were
promoted in essays, speeches, songs, and slogans all designed to
mobilize the potential halutzim (‘pioneers’) who would hopefully
154 Arnold J. Band
come to execute the Zionist program. The entire project, fuelled by

the harsh realities of exilic life in Czarist Russia with its pogroms and
discriminatory laws, assumed such mythic proportions in Zionist
circles, that it far outstripped the realities on the ground. While some
writers of the Second Aliya did write glowing accounts of the lives of
fulfilment the pioneering youth were supposed to be living, there
were contemporary writers like Yosef Hayyim Brenner who wrote
more sober, often devastatingly pessimistic, accounts of real events of
the time. Without understanding the dissonance between the myth
and the harsh reality, one cannot possibly understand what Agnon,
writing his novel Temol Shilshom (Only Yesterday) a generation later
in the late 1930s and early 1940s, was striving to express in this
major novel. To say that the return from exile to homeland was a
failure is a simplification, since the terms were so endlessly over-
determined. The dissonance between avowed constructed myths and
lived realities is, of course, one of the great themes in the modern
novel and Agnon examines the exile-to-homeland theme within this
rubric.
To do so he created a protagonist, Yitzhak Kummer, a naïve,
idealistic, young man from a pious family in Galicia, a young man
with no experience in life, the type one would expect to grow through
his experiences if he were placed in the traditional Bildungsroman.
But this novel is not the traditional Bildungsroman. Given the
irreconcilable gap between constructed myth and reality which no
experience can bridge, the novel becomes not a Bildungsroman, but
its negation, an anti-Bildungsroman, in which the hero does not grow,
but floats aimlessly and actually regresses to the point where he dies
a violent, meaningless death. In the homeland he cherishes and
dreams about, he is never free of exile. This death is a logical
consequence of his exile from all possible meaningful communal
associations: he does not belong to the new world of Zionist pioneers;
he imagines he might belong to the traditional pious life of the Old
Yishuv (the pre-Zionist settlement) in Jerusalem, but he is considered
an outsider, an exile there.
This fusion of central theme and character construction is
evident in the very first, signature sentence of the novel. Often
discussed, it cannot be understood without our prefatory explanation
of the exile-homeland nexus, and the dissonance between constructed
myth and lived reality.
Like all our brethren of the Second Aliya, the bearers of our salvation
(redemption), Isaac Kummer left his country and his homeland and
his city and ascended to the land of Israel to build it from its
destruction and to be rebuilt by it. From the day our comrade Isaac
knew his mind, not a day went by that he didn’t think about it. A
blessed dwelling place was his image of the whole Land of Israel and
its inhabitants blessed by God. (Agnon 2000: 3)
A close reading of this short passage will demonstrate all the points
made above. First, when the ostensibly omniscient narrator begins to
tell us about his hero Isaac (Yitzhak) Kummer, who was “like our
brethren of the Second Aliya” (Agnon 2000: 3), he situates both his
hero and himself as part of a specific historical movement of
“brethren” with all that implies. He also establishes the close bond
between himself and his hero, so close, in fact, that in certain
passages which use ‘combined speech’ they merge. Secondly, these
brethren are referred to as “the bearers of (the men of) our Salvation
(redemption)” in what at first sounds like a traditional, pious flourish,
but is actually ironic. They, and those who wrote about them, might
have believed they were ‘redeemers’, i.e. bringing redemption to the
Jewish people through their settlement of the Land of Israel, but they
never achieved this goal.
Thirdly, the page is studded with terms taken from pious texts:
“beney ge-ulah” (“bearers of redemption”); “heni’ah et artzo ve’et
moladeto” (“he left his land and homeland”, taken from Genesis 12);
“alah le’eretz yisrael’ (“he went up [on pilgrimage] to Eretz
Yisrael”) etc. The density of this religious terminology must alert
Agnon’s reader to the fact that he or she is reading a deliberate
parody, not a pious declaration. (It is also possible that one finds here
an echo of the opening line of H. N. Bialik’s famous poem, ‘Be’ir
haharega’ (‘In the City of Slaughter’), an angry lament over the
Kishinev pogrom of 1903.
Fourthly, “Livnot ota mehurbana” (“to build it from its
destruction”), starts as a parody of a biblical phrase, but goes on to
mouth, and mock, the Zionist cliché found in songs and posters:
“livnot ulehibanot” (“to build and be built”), that encapsulates the
entire Zionist ethos. By going to the Land of Israel to build it, the
exilic Jew would rebuild or rehabilitate his disintegrated exilic (galut)
personality. In Zionist ideology, the exilic personality was considered
decadent, and needed to be cured or redeemed by leaving exile for the
Land of Israel, to go from galut to ge’ulah.
The phrase “from the day our comrade Isaac knew his mind”
(“amad al da’ato”) is satirical since Isaac never really reaches the
maturity of one who knows his mind, i.e. has independence of
thought. Throughout the novel he has no independent thought and
156 Arnold J. Band
this is adumbrated in the rest of this passage in which we see that

Isaac’s mind is simply an extended pastiche of other people’s clichés
- recalling Flaubert’s description of Charles Bovary’s mind, “the
sidewalk on which everyone else’s thoughts walked”.
Apparently sensing that Yitzhak Kummer, basically a
simpleton, might not be able to carry the complex tangle of ironic
messages he would want to convey, Agnon joined to him a second
character which acts as a sort of alter ego: the dog Balak. While
Balak is not a name in common use since he was the hostile king of
Moab in Numbers 22:2, the name is actually Agnon’s whimsical
creation: when one reads backwards the word for dog in Hebrew,
KeLeV, one gets BaLaK. Reading the Hebrew letters from left to right
rather than right to left is a powerful marker of alienation and of exile
since that is the way a gentile would ordinarily read Hebrew letters.
In the novel, it is the director of a diasporan organization in the Land
of Israel who first reads the name that way. The letters in Hebrew
were whimsically painted on the dog by Yitzhak himself; as he
wanted to clean his paint-brush one day he wrote on the dog: Kelev
Meshuga, ‘Mad Dog', in Hebrew. The dog, actually considered mad
by the Jewish residents of Jerusalem who read this message, is driven
away with sticks and stones and wanders the city, an exile in his own
home. In his exilic wandering, he contracts rabies, the disease of the
exilic dog, and, returning to his original neighbourhood, bites Yitzhak
during the latter’s wedding week. Yitzhak contracts rabies, goes mad,
and dies bound to his bed – in a modern Binding of Isaac. Unlike the
biblical Binding of Isaac which ends in a glorious redemption in that
Isaac is saved and a ram is substituted for him, this modern Isaac dies
a meaningless death, alone on a foul bed.
We, the readers, are treated to a prolonged journey through
Jaffa and Jerusalem of the Second Aliyah, seen either through the
eyes of Yitzhak or the dog, Balak - his alter ego. The travelogue, well
integrated with the plot, renders such a detailed series of scenes of
these two centres of Jewish habitation during the Second Aliyah that
many readers read the novel as a historical novel about the Second
Aliyah when it is actually the opposite. It is a novel written a
generation later. In it Agnon employs the deadly tensions between the
ideals of the Second Aliyah and the impossibility of their realization
as a paradigm of the human tragedy involved in believing in powerful
myths that one cannot realize in life situations. Yitzhak fails to
become a productive pioneer working the soil, and becomes instead a
mediocre housepainter superficially painting over old houses. He tries
to become a secular member of the new pioneering society, but ends

up returning to the traditional life among pious Jews in Jerusalem
who reject him as an outsider – an exile from the secular world in the
pious world in Jerusalem. He dies, bitten by the dog which becomes
rabid when exiled because he has on his back the words ‘Mad Dog’,
painted, on pure whim, by Yitzhak. Yitzhak is, thus, an exile from
meaning, from a redeemed world which might endow meaning to
human life.
While the novel is graphically situated in Jaffa and Jerusalem
of 1908-12, it reflects the thinking of its author at the time of its
composition. We have abundant documentation of Agnon’s concerns
at this time since this was the peak of his creative life. Without
running through his entire bibliography of the period, item by item,
we can point to three salient works.
From 1930 on, Agnon published a series of surrealistic stories
– often dubbed Kafkaesque – reflecting a profound spiritual crisis.
Though situated in traditional religious settings, they manifest an
agonized struggle with doubt and a sense of inner exile from religious
equanimity.
In 1938-39, he published serially his novel A Guest for the
Night (Oreah nata lalun), in which a narrator, with many of the
distinctive features of the writer Agnon, tells of a year-long visit to
the town of his childhood, Shibush (a fictive equivalent of Buczacz),
that had been devastated during the hostilities on the Eastern front in
World War I. This home, abandoned during many centuries of exile
in Galicia, had been destroyed with no possible hope for
reconstruction or redemption. Though the novel describes the
devastation of World War I, it reflects the anxieties of the late
thirties, fuelled by the rise of Nazism and the murderous riots in
Mandatory Palestine between 1936 and 1939.
During the months of the final composition of Only Yesterday,
news of the murder of Polish Jewry by the Germans began to reach
Jerusalem. During this period Agnon wrote and published such
Holocaust stories as ‘The Lady and the Peddler’ (HaAdonit
veharokhel) and ‘The Sign’ (HaSiman).
While I would not call Only Yesterday a Holocaust novel, the
historical context of the time of its composition is that of the late
1930s and early 1940s, not the Second Aliyah of 1904-14, when the
novel’s action takes place. To call it a novel of the Second Aliyah is
naïve. The realization that territorial redemption from exile does not
necessarily entail spiritual redemption is something Agnon certainly
158 Arnold J. Band
knew early in his career, perhaps as early as 1908, but it is in the

complex prose of Only Yesterday that we really find the obsessive
vision that the Exile he was brought up with in Galicia was destroyed
and the Land of Israel, the goal of the Zionist dream, was far from a
satisfying redemption, if anything, an exile within redemption.
Finally, he is telling us that exile is never over, that it is perhaps the
lot of all mankind.
Bibliography
Agnon, Shmuel Yosef. 2000. Only Yesterday (tr. Barbara Harshav). Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press.
Band, Arnold J. 1968. Nostalgia and Nightmare: a Study in the Fiction of S.Y.Agnon.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
19
Exile and Revolt: Arab and Afro-American Poets in

Dialogue
Saddik Gohar
Saddik Gohar was born in Egypt and holds MA and PhD degrees from
Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He has taught English language
and literature at universities in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and has
several times been a visiting professor at the Indo-American Centre
for Studies and Research at the Hyderabad campus of Osmania
University, India. He is currently an associate professor in the
Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of
Humanities and Social Sciences, United Arab Emirates University.
Five collections of his poetry in Arabic have been published, and he is
currently translating two of them into English. He is a human rights
activist, calling for the rights of minorities and oppressed groups in the
Arab world, and a peace activist working for peaceful coexistence
between all Arab countries and the Israeli people. He has published
extensively in the fields of English/American literature, comparative
literature, and translation theory. Among his many publications is A
Singer in the Ghetto: A Study of Le Roi Jones/Amiri Barak’s
Revolutionary Poetry (1998).
In this paper, he explores the motifs of exile and revolt in the poetry of
contemporary Palestinian writers. Exile, both physical and spiritual, is
a traditional theme of poetry in Arabic, but the subject of exile has
become more acute since 1948 with the forced exodus of Palestinians
from their homeland and the emergence of dictatorial regimes in many
Arab countries. He explores work by some of the outstanding poets
who have remained in their homeland (such as Mahmud Darwish), as
well as those who have left the country (such as Kamal Nasir). This
poetry communicates powerfully the pain of exile, anger at the
injustice of their situation, and the hunger for return, while subverting
the widespread image in the West of the Palestinian as terrorist. Gohar
makes the parallel between these poets and radical black American
poets of the 1960s, who wrote of the enslavement and transportation
of their African ancestors and the ongoing discrimination against
Afro-Americans, and highlights the support offered to Palestinians by
later generations of Afro-American poets, such as June Jordan, who
have delved into their own experience of exile and alienation to
develop a dialogue with the writers in Arabic. Nevertheless, whereas
for most Afro-American poets the idea of a permanent return to Africa
is no more than a dream, for Palestinians the hunger to return to their
rightful homeland does not diminish.
160 Saddik Gohar
In an article entitled, ‘Real Wounds, Unreal Wounds: The Romance of

Exile’, Ian Buruma argues:
Exile as a metaphor did not begin with the Jewish Diaspora. The first
story of exile in our tradition is the story of Adam and Eve. No matter
how we interpret the story of their expulsion from the Garden of Eden
— original sin or not — we may be certain of one thing: There is no
way back to paradise. After that fatal bite of the apple, the return to
pure innocence was cut off forever. The exile of Adam and Eve is the
mark of maturity, the consequence of growing up. An adult can only
recall the state of childlike innocence in his imagination; and from this
kind of exile a great deal of literature has emerged. (Buruma 2001: 3)
Whether associated with the Jewish Diaspora or the fall from Eden,
exile may be viewed as the forced or self-imposed moving away from
one’s homeland. Thus, exile becomes a signifier not only of living
outside one’s place of origin but also of the inner condition caused by
such a physical absence. At the same time, exile may also connote the
exclusively spiritual, intellectual or even existential condition of
someone who is alienated from the surrounding community. In
whatever form, exile has always been a source of inspiration for poets
and writers. As Buruma argues, the exilic experience has triggered a
great deal of literature characterised by “the melancholy knowledge
that we can never return to Eden” (Buruma 2001: 3).
Historically, the theme of exile has occurred as a basic motif in
Arabic poetry from the pre-Islamic era up to the modern time. For
example, in the early twentieth century, Egyptian Ahmad Shauqi,
known as ‘the prince of poets’, explored the theme of exile in his
poetry. In ‘An Andalusian Exile’, he says:
O bird crying on the acacia tree, alike are our sorrows
should I grieve for your troubles or lament my own?
what tale have you to tell me? — only that the self-same hand that
laid my heart waste has pinioned your wind
Exile has cast us both, fellow strangers
in a grave not our own, where our kind never meet
parting has struck us — you with a knife, me with a barbed arrow
child of the valley, nature has set us apart
and yet affliction has brought us together.
(Jayyusi 1987: 102)
Shauqi’s romantic image of the Andalusian exile was replaced by new

images in post-Second World War poetry, following major political
and social changes in the Arab world. For instance, the rise of Arab
nationalism as a reaction against European colonialism and Zionism
and the subsequent revolutions which erupted in many Arab countries
Exile and Revolt: Arab and Afro-American Poets in Dialogue 161
were among the radical changes that greatly affected Arab people. The
anti-colonial and anti-Zionist revolutions in countries such as Egypt,
Syria, Iraq, and Algeria were associated with the emergence of
dictatorial regimes which committed many atrocities against their own
peoples, turning these countries into prisons and places of exile. Due
to lack of democracy and freedom, many Arab intellectuals and
representatives of religious and ethnic minorities in the Arab world,
such as the Kurds, the Shi’ites, and the Copts, were forced to leave
their countries and live in diaspora.
Furthermore, the Palestinian tragedy which resulted in the
exodus of Palestinian refugees after the 1948 and 1967 wars between
the Arabs and Israel deepened the wounds of exile in the Arab psyche.
Many Arab regimes were little better than Israel in their treatment of
the Palestinian refugees. The disputes among Arab governments over
the Palestinian refugee problem created a state of anger and prompted
widespread self-examination and questioning in Arab countries. Arabs
were disappointed because the new revolutionary regimes failed to
achieve their dream of unity and prosperity. Instead of fighting the
enemies of the nation, many Arab regimes established enormous
police forces and a repressive apparatus to oppress their own citizens.
The armies of these regimes were shamefully defeated in wars with
Israel, and many Arabs realized that it was time for them to abandon
what the Iraqi poet, Buland al-Haydari calls, “the long sleep of
history” (al-Haydari 1987: 82). The Arab defeats in 1948 and 1967, as
well as the rise of Arab dictatorial governments, left Arab people in a
state of shock and they became sceptical about the validity of their
socio-political systems.
With the new political realities, particularly the partition of
Palestine, the creation of Israel, and the emergence of repressive Arab
regimes, two main categories of Arab poets may be described as
‘writing in exile’. The first category includes poets who were
members of ethnic and religious minorities living in various Arab
countries or representatives of political opposition groups. The second
category constitutes Palestinian poets, both those living under Israeli
occupation and those who have been compelled to leave their country.
Among the former are poets such as Mahmud Darwish, Samih al
Qasim, Tawfiq Zayyad, and Sadiq al-Saigh who have lived under
Israeli occupation and who constitute the core of Palestinian poetry of
exile and revolt. This group of poets has been dedicated to writing
what is called the ‘Palestinian poetry of resistance’ since the 1960s. In
spite of censorship, banning of books, jailing, torture, and
162 Saddik Gohar
assassination, the Palestinian resistance poets succeeded in continuing

their poetic production, and their poems were smuggled into every
Arab house. The Israeli regime inside Palestine, like the Arab regimes
outside, has censored the rights of the Palestinian refugees to express
their feelings about their plight. Even poetry of lamentation and
elegies are considered forms of political and protest poetry.
The latter group includes Palestinian poets such as Kamal
Nasir, Tawfiq Sayigh, Izz-al-Din-al-Manasira, Fadwa Tuqan, and
others who left their country after the second exodus following the
Arab-Israeli war in 1967, the defeat of the Arab armies, the
occupation of Eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Golan Heights,
and the Sinai Desert. Nevertheless, Palestinian poets, whether living
inside or outside their country, are able to participate in the modernist
poetic tradition in the Arab world. They convey the angry voice of
refugees living in exile through their haunting lyrics. The Palestinian
poets in exile have suffered both physically and psychologically, and
their poetry is coloured by feelings of death, tragedy, and defeat.
However, they are not susceptible to despair or disappointment or
frustration. These poets, living either in exile or in prisons, have never
lost hope of having a homeland of their own. This dream recurs in
their poetry as they talk about the pain and anguish of living in exile.
They reflect this sense of anguish and use poetry as a means of facing
their personal and national disasters. These poets, who belong to the
community of the dispossessed, have a firm hope that they will one
day achieve the dream of returning to their villages and cities after the
resurrection of Palestine.
The dream of return which haunts these ‘prisoners of fate’ and
these exiled poets is epitomised by the image of the reunion of
families and lovers. In Palestinian poetry, the poet's own homeland,
village, or city is personified as a fertile woman, a beautiful mistress, a
beloved, a wife, or a mother. The metaphorical device which
manipulates feminine personifications is integral to the Arabic poetic
tradition. Mahmud Darwish, for example, in ‘A Lover from Palestine’,
portrays his homeland, Palestine, as an innocent and beautiful
beloved, and as a mother and a widow who has lost her husband in the
battle for freedom and independence. Moreover, Palestinian poets,
living in internal or external exiles, have struggled to affirm the Arab
identity of their homeland and subvert the hostile image of the
Palestinian as a terrorist. It is noteworthy that one of the most
damaging ways in which Palestinians, living in exile and refugee
camps, are presented in the West is through the image of terrorism, an
image so pervasive that it seems to reflect “an almost platonic essence

inherent in all Palestinians and Muslims” according to Edward Said's
essay, ‘Identity, Negation and Violence’ (Said 1988: 52).
In addition to affirming the Arab identity of Palestine, these
poets attempt to create some meaning out of a disintegrated world
based on nationalistic illusions. They articulate their feelings of exile
in poems which criticise Israeli policy and attack the passive attitudes
of some Arab regimes toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Like the
radical black American poets of the 1960s, who replaced their points
of reference in the American avant-garde with those of black
revolution, Arab poets, such as Nizar Qabbani (a poet of sex and
erotica) and others, turned into militant political poets due to the
failure of the Arab dream. For example, Qabbani in “Marginal Notes
on the Book of Defeat” criticizes a nation whose warfare consists of
the “oriental cults of rhetoric and false heroism which never killed a
black fly” (Qabbani 1987: 96). Like Qabbani, all the revolutionary
Palestinian poets living in internal or external exile expressed their
feelings of disappointment after they lost their country. As a result of
the 1948 war, more than 1.5 million Palestinian citizens were scattered
throughout the Arab world to live in permanent refugee camps. More
than that number were forced to leave their cities and villages in
Northern Palestine and live in refugee camps in Gaza and the West
Bank. The remaining Palestinians were destined to live in exile
outside the Arab world or as a minority inside the state of Israel. In
their Israeli exile, Palestinians were cut off from their cultural roots
and were dealt with as second-class citizens. In spite of having Israeli
nationality, Palestinians, inside Israel, were poorly educated and were
denied any right to have an identity or a culture of their own.
For Palestinians, exile has become a permanent condition in
which they have attempted to express the wounds of a lost homeland
and of a people transformed into a nation of refugees. In ‘The View
from No-Man’s Land’, Kamal Boullata recalls how Palestinians were
forced to live in internal exile in their own land:
I was less than ten years old when the meaning of no-man’s land first
found its way into my life. At the time, Jerusalem, the city in which I
was born, had just been divided into two separate worlds. On one side,
the city’s Jews began to live in a state all their own. On the other side,
Arabs, regardless of their religion, staggered together under the
burdens of their newly-broken lives. Barbed wire marked the borders
beyond which we were now forbidden to cross. Sites which grown-
ups started referring to as no-man's land became the only terrain
linking two segregated sides. Through the coils of barbed wire, we
began to see what looked for a time like an irremediable wasteland
164 Saddik Gohar
haunting our neighbourhoods. Trespassing through wild shrubs to

recover a ball that strayed into what only yesterday was a relative's
courtyard now meant risking stepping on a mine or being shot by a
sniper. (Boullata 1992: 579)
Boullata adds that, with the passage of time, Palestinians had to accept
exile as a basic reality in their lives:
Within a decade, the rest of Jerusalem fell to Israeli annexation. The
declaration that crowned the city ‘the eternal capital of the Jewish
State’ condemned all Palestinians like myself as outsiders in the city
of our birth. No-man's land was now hurriedly eradicated by Israeli
bulldozers. That former commons that had been turned into a bit of
nowhere had finally become the permanent site and symbol for the
state of exile in which I found myself. It is not in figurative terms,
however, that I primarily see the fusion of those two formative
experiences in my life. The sense of foreboding created by Jerusalem's
division and the daily predicaments of that experience confirmed the
inevitability of my actual exile. In time, the interrelatedness between
the two conditions became fused when on the very day that
Jerusalem's no-man's land was eradicated, exile became a central
reality in my life. (Boullata 1992: 580)
The Palestinian concept of living in exile (no-man's land) under

Israeli occupation recalls Le Roi Jones's comment on blacks living
under white racism in America. In Home: Social Essays, Jones points
out that black people live in “a no-man's land, a black country,
completely invisible to white America, but so essentially a part of it as
to stain its whole being into an ominous grey” (Jones 1966: 114).
Moreover, the Palestinian resistance against the Israeli occupation
during the 1960s was similar, in many ways, to the black revolution
against American racism in the same decade.
In his introduction to Modern Black Poets, Donald B. Gibson
argues that “the great social stress of the sixties has brought about the
creation for the first time of a significantly definable black poetry. It is
a poetry clearly distinguishable from that written by poets of the
majority culture and different, too, from poetry written by previous
generations of black writers” (Gibson 1973: 9). In fact, the 1960s was
a crucial time not only for blacks living in the American Diaspora but
for Palestinians living in exile, whether inside their occupied land or
outside their country. Both blacks and Palestinians not only voiced
protest on the streets but also screamed it in their poems. The
black/Palestinian exile poetry in the post-war era was a reflection of
what was happening in the socio-political arena. Poetry was used as an
agent, a weapon in the battle for freedom and independence. All the
frustrations and bitterness which had been suggested by earlier black
and Palestinian poets have erupted into an angry outspoken protest

since the 1960s. Some poets, on both sides, were criticised for
militancy and didacticism but the majority of black and Palestinian
poets were not merely angry militants but creators of new techniques
and forms. Proud of their identities, both black American and
Palestinian poets wrote for their own people in their own language and
in their own way, portraying the experience of nations that are forced
to live in exile.
There has, indeed, grown up a dialogue between Palestinian and
Afro-American poets. For example, the black American poet, Don L.
Lee, in ‘A Poem for a Poet’, dedicated to the Palestinian poet
Mahmud Darwish, establishes an analogy between the Palestinian
tragedy and its black counterpart:
Read yr exile
I had a mother too & her death
Will not be
Talked of around the world.
Then, Lee compares the fate of Palestinians under Israeli occupation

with the plight of blacks in America:
Like you
I live
Walk a strange land
My smiles are real but seldom.
Lee adds that both Palestinians and Afro-Americans are victims of the
same colonising, hostile forces:
Our enemies eat the same bread
and the waste from their greed
will darken your sun and hide your moon
will dirty your grass and mis-use your water
your people will talk with unchanging eyes
and their speech will be slow & unsure & overquick
Finally, the Afro-American poet advises his Palestinian counterpart to

avoid the crippling impact of the colonizer's culture:
You must eat yr/own food
Keep your realmen; yr/sculptors
Yr/poets, yr/fathers, yr/musicians
Yr/sons yr/warriors
If you must send them, send them
The way of the sun
As to make them
Blacker
(Lee 1971: 167-168)
166 Saddik Gohar
June Jordan is another Afro-American poet who sympathizes

with the Palestinian people living in exile. In her poem ‘Apologies to
All People in Lebanon’, dedicated to the Palestinian refugees who
have been living in exile in Lebanon since 1948, she expresses her
sympathy with exiled Palestinians. The poem, which was written after
the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps’ massacres, is a reflection of the
pain and suffering of a nation of exiled refugees. Recalling the
atrocities of the massacre which took place during the Israeli
occupation of Lebanon, Jordan says with regret: “I didn't know and
nobody told me and what / could I do or say anyway?” Lamenting the
brutal mass murder of exiled Palestinians, Jordan dismisses the
American and Israeli media reports about the Palestinian refugees in
Lebanon. According to her, these false reports were used as a pretext
to justify the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which resulted in the
death of thousands of Palestinian refugees living in exile:
They said you shot the London Ambassador
And when that wasn't true
They said so
What
They said you shelled their northern villages
And when U.N. forces reported that was not true
Because your side of the cease-fire was holding
Since more than a year before
They said so / what
(Jordan 1985: 104)
In her rage against the brutality of the Israeli war machine, June
Jordan describes how the Palestinian refugee camps were subjected to
devastation and ruin:
They ravaged your
Water supplies, your electricity, your
Hospitals, your schools –
They blew up your homes and demolished
The grocery stores and blocked the
Red Cross and took away doctors
To jail and they cluster-bombed
Girls and boys
Whose bodies
Swelled purple and black into twice
The original size
(Jordan 1985: 104)
The poet openly declares that the Israeli military machine is

responsible for the massacre of innocent Palestinian citizens living in
exile in Lebanon: “They tore the buttocks from a four month old baby
and then / they said this was a brilliant / military accomplishment”.
Afterwards, the poet rejects the allegation that the Israeli attack
against the refugee camps was a part of a military self-defence
operation: “They said this was done in the name of self-defence, they
said / that is the noblest concept / of mankind. Isn’t that obvious?”
According to Jordan, the Israeli military operation against the
Palestinian refugee camps “made close to one million human beings /
homeless / in less than three weeks and they killed or maimed / 40,000
of your men and your women and your children” . The poet also refers
to the Zionist propaganda apparatus which seeks to beautify the face
of the Israeli military machine and tarnish the Palestinian image:
They said they were victims.
They said you were Arabs.
They called your apartments and gardens guerrilla
strongholds.
They called the screaming devastation
That they created the rubble
Then they told you to leave, didn’t they?
(Jordan 1985: 105)
By the end of the poem, Jordan visualizes an image of

Palestinian refugees living in exile in Lebanon as they are being
forced to leave their camps and move from one exile to another:
Didn’t you read the leaflets that they dropped
from their hotshot fighter jets?
they told you to go
one hundred and thirty-five thousand
Palestinian in Beirut and why
didn’t you take the hint?
Go!
There was the Mediterranean: you
could walk into the water and stay
there.
What was the problem?
(Jordan 1985: 105)
The black poet concludes her poem with an apology which reflects the
collective attitude of honest American and Israeli citizens toward the
Palestinian tragedy:
168 Saddik Gohar
Yes I did know it was the money I earned as a poet that paid
for the bombs and the planes and the tanks
that they used to massacre your family
But I am not an evil person
The people of my country aren’t so bad
you cannot expect but so much
from those of us who have to pay taxes and watch
American TV.
You see my point
I am sorry
I really am sorry
(Jordan 1985: 106)
Like Jordan, Palestinian poet Mahmud Darwish explores the

massacres of Palestinian refugees. In his poetry, Darwish narrates the
whole story of Palestinian suffering in Lebanon. The refugee camps of
Palestinians living in Lebanon were brutally attacked by the Israeli
army and its Lebanese allies — the right wing Christian militias. After
the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization troops from
Lebanon, during the Israeli invasion of the country in 1982, the
vulnerable refugee camps were attacked and thousands of unarmed
women and children were slaughtered by Lebanese Christian militias
supported by Israel. The same militias were responsible for the mass
murder of Palestinian refugees during the Tel-Al-Zaatar massacre
which took place during the Lebanese Civil War. The Palestinian
refugee camps were also besieged for more than six months by the
Shi’ite Muslim militias, supported by the Syrian army, during which
hundreds of exiled refugees died of starvation. In ‘Brief Reflections
on an Ancient and Beautiful City on the Coast of the Mediterranean
Sea’, Darwish used the sea image as a symbol of the Palestinian exile.
Displaced from their homeland, the Palestinian refuges have lived in
exile in Lebanon since 1948. During the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in
1982, Palestinian refugees were forced to leave their camps in
Lebanon and move to a new place of exile: “We have to sing for the
sea’s defeat within us / or for our dead lying by the sea / and wear salt
and revolt to every port / before oblivion sucks us dry”, writes
Darwish (al-Udhari 1986:130). In this long poem, the poet describes
the Palestinian refugees, who were evacuated by sea, as follows:
We are the leaves of tree

the words of a shattered time
we are the moon light sonata
we are the other river bank that lies between the voice and the
stone
we are what we produced in the land that was ours

we are the plants of broken vase
we are what we are but who are we?
(Al-Udhari 1986: 130)
Using the sea as an image of Palestinian exile, Darwish says:

Greetings oh ancient sea
you, sea that have saved us from the loneliness of the forests
you, sea of all beginnings (the sea disappears) our blue body, our
happiness, our soul tired of stretching from Jaffa to Carthage
our broken pitcher, tablets of lost stories, we looked for the legends of
civilizations but only could find the skull of man by the sea
(Al-Udhari 1986: 134)
In the same poem, Darwish highlights the duration of Palestinian

suffering. Palestinians were forced to leave their country twice, in
1948 and in 1967, after the occupation of all the Palestinian territories.
In their third exodus in 1982, the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon
were subjected to more suffering: “The sea cannot take another
immigration / oh, the sea has no room for us”. The remaining
Palestinian refugees who survived the genocide of the camps and
whom Darwish calls “the generation of the massacre” are doomed to
move from one exile to another just to be killed: “Every land I long
for as a bed / dangles as a gallows”. Even in the Arab countries where
Palestinians live in exile “a knight stabs his brother in the chest” and
there “my dream leaves me only to make me laugh / or make people
laugh at someone leading a dream like a camel in a market of
whores”. In their Arab places of exile, the Palestinian refugees have
been slaughtered by Arabs such as the Lebanese, the Syrians and the
Jordanians, just as they have been massacred by the Zionists in Israel:
“We walk from one massacre to another massacre” (Al-Udhari
1986:138). Thus Darwish expresses his sympathy with the Palestinian
people and he apologises to what he calls “the land / victim”, for all
the atrocities inflicted upon the Palestinians and their homeland:
Whenever a prophet rises from our victims we slaughter him with
our own hands
I have the right to speak
and the priest has the right to kill
I have the right to dream
and the executioner must listen to me or open the door to let my
dream escape
(Al-Udhari 1986: 138)
170 Saddik Gohar
In ‘Victim No. 48’, Mahmud Darwish describes the experience

of a Palestinian refugee living in exile in Lebanon who becomes a
symbol of all Palestinian refugees in the Arab world. These refugees
are not only subjected to the pains of exile and alienation but also to
the danger of war and genocide: “He was lying dead on a stone / they
found in his chest the moon and a rose lantern / They found in his
pocket a few coins / A box of matches and a travel permit”. As a
Palestinian refugee, the victim, in the poem, is deprived of a national
passport and is instead given a travel document by the host country.
After his death, “his mother kissed him / and cried for a year”. The
poor mother, in the poem, like all Palestinian mothers, is destined to
witness the death and agony of her sons and daughters, either at the
hands of the Israeli soldiers or in Arab countries where Palestinian
refugees are dealt with as aliens: “His brother grew up / And went to
town looking for work / He was put in prison / Because he had no
travel permit / He was carrying a dustbin / And boxes down the street”
(al-Udhari 1986: 125). The victim’s brother is arrested and sent to a
Lebanese jail because his status as a refugee does not enable him to
obtain a job outside the refugee camp. Even if the Palestinian refugee
attempts to earn his living by working as a dustman, the laws of the
host countries prevent him from practising this simple human right.
The plight of the Palestinian refugees, in the poem, reflects the
miserable and inhuman conditions of those who live in exile,
particularly if this exile is a refugee camp, a ghetto where they are
forced to stay for years. The title of the poem, ‘Victim No. 48’, refers
to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war which resulted in the occupation of most
of the Palestinian towns and villages and the dramatic exodus of half
of the Palestinian people who were scattered in refugee camps in
neighbouring Arab countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Iraq.
Darwish reminds us that the Palestinian refugee problem started in
1948 and, since that time, Palestinians have been subjected to
massacres, suffering, alienation, exile and death: “Children of my
country / that’s how the moon died” (al-Udhari 1986: 125).
In addition to the pains of exile, Palestinians, in diaspora, and in
the occupied territories, suffer from a loss of identity. The victim’s
brother, in the above-mentioned poem, is sent to prison because he has
no Lebanese identity card which would enable him to find a suitable
job. As a refugee and an exile, he is only allowed to look for work
inside the boundaries of the poor refugee camps. When he was
arrested by the police, in Beirut, he was “carrying a dustbin and boxes
down the street”. This indicates that the refugee is either a dustman or
someone who looks for remains of food and clothes in the rich
people’s garbage. Being deprived of an independent homeland and a
national passport, Palestinian people suffer not only from a deep
identity crisis but also from humiliation and ridicule, particularly
when they are forced to move from one place of exile to another.
Darwish depicts this painful experience in ‘The Passport’: “They
didn’t recognize me / the passport’s darkness / Erased the tones of my
photographs / They put my wound on show / For tourists who love
collecting pictures”. Obviously, “the darkness of the passport” is due
to the fact that it is not a genuine Palestinian passport but a travel
document given to Palestinian refugees by the host countries. To be
fair, it must be acknowledged that Israel is the only country in the
region that gave Palestinians living inside Israel since 1948 passports
and nationalities. Darwish himself has Israeli nationality and an Israeli
passport, despite being an Arab. However, the poet indicates that his
Israeli passport has eliminated his Palestinian identity and has become
a reminder of a homeland which he has lost. This negation of identity
leads to pain and trauma because the poet does not want strangers to
identify him either as a refugee or an Israeli. Darwish takes pride in
his Palestinian identity and it is sufficient for him that the Palestinian
“boxthorn” and the Palestinian “rain songs recognize me” (al-Udhari
1986: 125). Further, in his journey of exile, the poet still remembers
“all the dark eyes” of his own people, “all the wheat fields”, “all the
waving handkerchiefs”, and all “the birds that followed my hand to
the barriers of a distant airport”. Being “deprived of a name, of an
identity / in a land I tended with both hands”, the Palestinian poet has
to live in exile after the colonizers turned his homeland into “prisons”
and “graves”. In his exile, the Palestinian refugee/poet has become a
symbol of suffering: “Today Job’s voice rang throughout heaven”.
The Biblical/Quranic allusion to Job provides an insight into
Palestinian suffering, linking the Palestinian ordeal to the human
history of pain and to other persecuted people such as the Jews and the
Afro-Americans. In these intense moments of misery, the speaker in
the poem finds no need for his refugee passport or the nationality of a
host country because “the hearts of people are my nationality / Take
away my passport” (al-Udhari 1986: 126).
Thus, in ‘Psalm 2’, Darwish reveals his nostalgia for his
homeland, Palestine, a “country, turning up in songs and massacres”.
He addresses his homeland: “Why do I smuggle you from airport to
airport / like opium / invisible ink / a radio transmitter?”. In his
diaspora, the poet also takes great pains to recall the memories of a
172 Saddik Gohar
country “trapped between the dagger and the wind”. He reflects his
painful experience of exile as he addresses his homeland:
I want to draw your shape
you, scattered in files and surprises
you, flying on shrapnel and birds’ wings
to find my shape in yours
there isn’t a name in Arab history
I haven’t borrowed
to help me slip through your secret windows
all the code-names are kept
in air-conditioned recruiting offices
will you accept my name — my only code name — Mahmud
Darwish
(Al-Udhari 1986: 127)
Speaking about life in the diaspora, the poet in “Horses

Neighing at the Foot of the Mountain” refers to an exilic experience
which turns into a “journey in which a martyr kills a martyr” (al-
Udhari 1986: 140). In this journey, the Palestinian refugees “travel
like other people but we return to nowhere / we travel in the carriages
of the psalms, sleep in the tents of the prophets and come out of
speech of the gypsies” (142). The reference to “the tents” and the
analogy between the Palestinians and the gypsies in Darwish’s poem
“We Travel Like Other People” signify the state of homelessness and
alienation which characterizes the life of the Palestinian refugees:
“We have a country of words speak, speak so I can put my road on the
stone of a stone / speak so we may know the end of this travel” (al-
Udhari 1986: 142). Moreover, in a poem entitled “Speech of the Red
Indian”, collected in his anthology The Adam of Two Edens (2000),
Darwish draws an analogy between Palestinians and Native
Americans, nations that were forced to live in diaspora in their own
land. Darwish speaks to the colonizers of his land using some Quranic
verses as an intertext: “you have your God / and we have ours / you
have your religion and we have ours / Don’t bury our God / in books
that back up your claim of land over land”. He continues: “you have
come from beyond the seas, bent on war, / Don’t cut down the tree of
our names, / Don’t gallop your flaming horses across/ the open plains”
(al-Udhari 1986: 132). In the same historical context, the poet
associates the loss of Palestine with the fall of Granada after the defeat
of the Muslim/Arab invaders who stayed in Spain for more than seven
centuries. Both catastrophes, according to the poet, led to suffering
and Diaspora on the part of the Arab people. In spite of the Arab
history of pain in ancient Spain, Darwish, who compares Palestine
with Spain, identifies himself with the famous Spanish poet Federico
Garcia Lorca: “the keys belong to me, / as well as the minarets and
lamps. / I even belong to myself / I’m the Adam of Two Edens lost to
me twice. / Expel me slowly. Kill me slowly / with Garcia Lorca /
under my olive tree” (154).
The theme of exile is also explored in the works of Samih Al-
Qasim, another prominent Palestinian poet. In ‘The Will of Man
Dying in Exile’, he says: “light the fire so I can see my tears / on the
night of the massacre / so I can see your sister’s corpse / whose heart
is a bird ripped up by foreign tongues / by foreign winds” (al-Udhari
1986: 108). In this poem, which was written after the 1967 Arab-
Israeli war and the Israeli occupation of the rest of the Palestinian
territories, Al-Qasim refers to the plight of exiled Palestinians who
almost lost hope of returning to their homeland particularly after the
appalling defeat of the Arab armies in war with Israel. The
Palestinian, in the poem, who is both a refugee and an exile, is
depicted as a ‘scarecrow’ without a name. Al-Qasim’s refugee image
is not only a reflection of Yeats’ scarecrow in the ‘Byzantium’ poem,
but it carries more pathetic overtones because the Palestinian refugee
is a victim of both Israeli aggression and Arab indifference: “At the
end of the road he stood / like a scarecrow in a vineyard / at the end of
the road he stood / wearing an old coat / his name was the unknown
man” (al-Udhari 1986: 108). The Palestinian refugee has no name and
no identity because the Palestinian dream of having an independent
homeland and returning to their own country has been frustrated. Even
in exile, Palestinian refugees are brutally attacked by the Israeli army
and hostile militias in host countries. In ‘To Ariel Sharon’, Al-Qasim
speaks about the massacres of Palestinians by the Israeli army, not
only inside Palestine but also in the refugee camps in Lebanon:
The general’s tank has five mouths
under the tank a boy of five, a rose
a boy and five stars adorn the general’s shoulders
under his tank five roses and five boys
the tank has countless mouths
(Al-Udhari 1986: 109)
The poet who is both black and American is similar, in many

ways, to the Palestinian writer living in exile under Israeli occupation.
Both of them create poetry in the context of a complex of factors
which subtly affect the nature of their work. For example, the position
174 Saddik Gohar
of the black poet, living in the American diaspora, offers him/her a

special insight into his/her social and political milieu. S/he views
objectively what are called the antithetical black and white cultures of
America. The result is a portrait of an ambiguous grey world in which
irrational horrors and contradictory tensions are in operation. This
poetry graphically describes the individual's place in an American
social and cultural context which Le Roi Jones calls “the hopelessly
interwoven fabric of American life” (Jones 1963: 111). Because black
American or Palestinian poets are members of an oppressed group,
defined by the majority culture to the latter's own advantage, the thrust
of their creativity runs counter to the majority definition. That is to
say, their work, if faithful to life, must challenge the superiority
assumptions advocated by their oppressors (white Americans/Israelis).
Black and Palestinian poetry will also reflect a cultural background
that is fundamentally different, in many ways, from the dominant
culture. It reflects the identity of oppressed and exiled nations that
struggle for their dignity and honour. Further, black/Palestinian poets,
in challenging the definitions of their oppressors and in choosing to
correct these definitions/images, reclaim the historical right to self-
determination and thus, their work is perceived, on some level, by the
dominant group, as either revolutionary or propagandist.
In Black Skins, White Masks, Frantz Fanon points out that there
is a moment at which “the colonialist reaches the point of no longer
being able to imagine a time occurring without him. His eruption into
the history of the colonized people is deified, transformed into
absolute necessity” (Fanon 1969: 159). The attempt of the colonizers
(white Americans/Israelis) to erase the history and culture of
colonized peoples (blacks/Palestinians – not to mention Native
Americans) by dismissing their poetry of exile as propagandist, is a
part of what Edward Said calls “the moral epistemology of
imperialism” (Said 1979: 18). In The Question of Palestine, Said
argues that the approved history of colonialist nations such as
America, Australia, South Africa, and Israel started with what he calls
“a blotting out of knowledge” of the native people or the making of
them into “people without history” (Said 1979: 23). In other words,
the colonizer seeks to turn the colonized (blacks) or the native
(Palestinians) into a non-entity, in order to erase their identity.
Therefore, in both black and Palestinian poetry of exile, there is a
focus on the issue of identity. In a poem entitled ‘Palestinian’, Harun
Hashim Rashid affirms his own identity as a Palestinian, proud of his
people, of his struggle, and of his just cause: “Palestinian / is my name
/ On all battlefields / I have inscribed my name / Palestinian / Such is

my name, I know / It torments and grieves me / Their eyes hurt me /
Pursue me, wound me / For my name is Palestinian” (Khouri 1975:
231). The Palestinian poet is not ashamed of his identity, regardless of
all the prejudices against him: “Jails with their gates flung wide /
summon me / And in all the airports of the world / Are found my
names and titles” (233). He insists on showing the world the real
identity of the Palestinian people who have been suffering in the
attempt to gain their independence even after most of the Arab
governments have abandoned them: “Palestinian I am / Though they
betray me and my cause / Though they sell me in the market / Though
to the flames they cast me” (233).
In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon discusses the native
writer's identity crisis as follows:
In order to ensure his salvation and to escape from the supremacy of
the white man's culture, the native intellectual feels the need to turn
backwards towards his unknown roots. Because he feels he is
becoming estranged, he decides to take all for granted and confirms
everything even though he may lose body and soul. (Fanon 1967: 37)
Black American poets such as Le Roi Jones, Don Lee, Nikki

Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez, in search for their identity in the
American diaspora in the 1960s, turned backward toward their roots in
Africa. Don Lee, in ‘The Primitive’, acknowledges his African roots:
“Taken from the / shores of Mother Africa / the savages they thought,
we were - / they being real savages / to save us. (from what?) Our
happiness, our love, each other?” (Lee 1971: 63). In ‘Change is Not
Always Progress’, Lee cries: “Africa / don't let them steal / your face /
Take your circles / and make them squares / don't let them / steal /
your body" (Lee 1971: 169).
Likewise, the black poet Nikki Giovanni in ‘Ego Tripping –
There May Be a Reason Why’, sticks to her racial roots in Africa: ‘I
was born in the Congo / I walked to the fertile crescent and built / the
sphinx / I designed a pyramid / I sat on the throne / My oldest
daughter is Nefertiti” (Giovanni 1970: 37). Furthermore, Sonia
Sanchez, in her poetry, links blacks with their roots in Africa,
recalling the sad memory of the journey of the African slaves to the
new world:
Come into black geography
you seated like Manzu's cardinal
Come up through tongues
multiplying memories
176 Saddik Gohar
and to avoid descent

among wounds
cruising like ships
climb into these sockets
golden with brine.
(Sanchez: 1974: 21)
Instead of going toward the west, the poet asks the ship carrying
slaves to travel back through time and move toward the east, toward
Africa.
Being displaced from their original homeland, the black people
remain dispossessed, living in the American Diaspora. The feeling of
being exiled in a white country coupled with the growing of black
social and ethnic consciousness in the 1960s led to an identity crisis
on the part of the black people in America. The black poet in America,
like the Palestinian poet living in Israel, realizes that s/he is locked in
a limbo between contradictory cultures: "I am inside someone / who
hates me", says Le Roi Jones in The Dead Lecturer (Jones 1964: 15).
In spite of being an American by birth, the black poet feels that he is
lured into the tradition of an alien culture that cuts him off from his
origin in Africa. But, the image of the homeland Africa to the black
poet is different from the image of Palestine in the eyes of the
Palestinian poets, in that, for the former, a permanent return to the
land of his origins is not usually feasible.
Yusuf al-Khatib observes that
by the end of the catastrophic year [1948] which brought about the
most obnoxious defeat that could befall a nation, the concept of the
land took two forms in the eyes of the Palestinian people: ‘exile’ and
‘prison’. While ‘exile’ includes all lands where Palestinian refugees
live whether inside Palestine or outside it, ‘prison’ involves the
Palestinian land that came under the Israeli flag (cited in Sulaiman
1984: 118)
Some people wonder why Palestinians living in rich Arab countries

have failed to be assimilated into these countries. In fact, Palestinians,
whether living in refugee camps or in rich Arab countries or
elsewhere, have deep and strong spiritual links with a country they
believe is their rightful homeland. They long to return to their
homeland simply because their relationship with Palestine is not based
on material or political assumptions. This attitude toward their
homeland is peculiar to the Palestinian people in exile.
Comparing contemporary Afro-American and Palestinian
poetry, it becomes obvious that Africa, to the black American poet, is
a fantasy, a dream world, a kind of Utopia. However, Palestine, to the
Palestinian poet, is a reality that exists; it is a land which has been

usurped by a ruthless enemy, a mother, a sister, a wife raped by the
colonizer, a refugee camp ravaged by Israeli tanks and American
Apaches and F-16 bombers. To the black poet, “African blues / does
not know me / does not feel what I am” (Jones 1964: 47). The black
American poet is caught in a limbo between cultures and trapped in
the language, fantasies and traditions of a people from whom s/he is
alien by birth, thereby s/he feels that s/he is severed from his/her
roots: “Africa is a foreign place / you are as any other sad man here —
American” (Jones 1964: 47). Mahmud Darwish personifies Palestine
as a refugee woman forced to live in exile. In “A Lover from
Palestine” Darwish says: “yesterday I saw you at the harbour /
travelling without relations or provisions” (Sulaiman 1984: 160).
Palestine is also a mother:
I ran to you like an orphan
questioning the wisdom of our forefathers:
“How can the green fruit grove
after being dragged to a prison
an exile and a harbour, remain green
in spite of its travels
and in spite of the scent of salt and longing?”
In the same poem, Darwish portrays Palestine as a Christ figure: “I

saw you on the mountains covered / with thorny plants / a shepherdess
without sheep / harried amidst the ruins”. After the loss of Palestine
Darwish’s homeland and which is depicted as “the lungs in my chest/
the voice of my lips / the water and the fire for me”, the poet is forced
to live as an exile in alien countries: “I, who have been turned into a
stranger”. Thus, he weeps tears and blood after the loss of his
homeland: “I saw you in rays of tears and wounds” (Sulaiman 1984:
160).
In Darwish’s poem, Palestine also takes the shape of a widow
who has lost her husband in the never-ending battle for freedom and
independence: “I saw you at the mouth of the cave / hanging the rags
of your orphans on a line”. Darwish further portrays Palestine as an
orphan who lost his/her father in the war with the colonizer: “I saw
you in the songs of orphanhood and / misery”. By the end of the
poem, Palestine takes the identity of the poet's beautiful beloved: “I
saw you in every drop of the sea / and in every grain of sand /
beautiful as the earth / beautiful as children / beautiful as jasmine”. In
the final lines of the poem, Darwish promises his innocent and
beautiful beloved to sacrifice himself for the sake of her eyes:
178 Saddik Gohar
I swear to you: I shall weave a scarf from my eyelashes

embroidered with verses for your eyes
and with your name on it
A name when watered
with the praises of my chanting heart
will make the trees spread their branches again
I shall write few words on the scarf
more precious
than kisses and the blood of the martyrs
(Sulaiman 1984: 160).
Darwish's magic words are a reminder that Palestine is an Arab

country and will remain so: “Palestinian she was / and Palestinian she
remains” (160).
Like Darwish, who insists on his identity as a Palestinian living
in exile in the state of Israel, Le Roi Jones, in ‘Kaba’ affirms his
black/African identity: “We have been captured brothers / and we
labour to make our gateway into / the ancient image, into a new /
correspondence with ourselves / and our black family” (Jones 1987:
146). Like Jones, Langston Hughes in ‘Refugee in America’ affirms
his identity as a black poet, underlining the notion that blacks in
America were deprived of human rights, particularly their freedom,
which intensified their sense of alienation:
There are words like freedom
sweet and wonderful to say
on my heart-strings freedom sings
all day everyday
There are words like liberty
that almost make me cry
If you had known what I knew
you would know why
(Hughes 1974: 290)
Like Palestinians under Israeli occupation, blacks in America

up to the 1960s were haunted with the dream of equality, but their
dream was frustrated. However, Langston Hughes was confident that
his dream would be realized: “In some lands / Dark night and cold
steel / prevail / But the dream will come back / and the song breaks its
jail” (Hughes 1967: 63). He insists on achieving his dream: “To fling
my arms wide / In some place of the sun / to whirl and to dance / till
the white day is done / Then rest at cool evening / Beneath a tall tree /
while night comes on gently / dark like me" (14). Due to white racism
and oppression, the black man's dream was delayed, thus he turned to
Africa for a full realization of his dream. In Africa, the black poet
seeks solace, consolation, and emotional support but, unlike the

Palestinian poet, s/he discovers that Africa is so far away and s/he
does not even have many African memories. The black American
poets are infused with African blood, but the words that flow out of
them are not in an African language but in a “strange un-Negro
tongue” (Du Bois 1961: 16). Black American poets do not see Africa
the same way the Palestinian poets sees their homeland, Palestine,
because the Negro poet suffers from what W.E.B. DuBois calls,
“double consciousness” (Du Bois 1961: 16).
DuBois, in his discussion of the notion of double consciousness
points to
this peculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this sense of always
looking at one's soul by the type of the world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity. In this merging, he [the black American] wishes
neither of the older selves to be lost. The Negro would not Africanize
America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He
(the black American) would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of
white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for
the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a
Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his
fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his
face. (DuBois 1961: 16-17)
Palestinians are more directly bound to their homeland than

black Americans. Blacks living in the American exile have almost lost
their connection with their African homeland; however, they cannot
liberate their collective psyche from the feeling of being dispossessed.
Sterling Plump argues that “the transporting of millions of Africans
into the West was an environmental switch, but there was not a
simultaneous cosmological or world view adjustment” (Plump 1972:
32). On the other hand, the transporting of millions of Zionists, and
other immigrants whose connection to Judaism is tenuous, into the
Promised Land has created many problems for both Israelis and
Palestinians. Nevertheless, it can be argued that, regardless of the
pains of exile that have characterized the lives of Palestinians, Afro-
Americans and the Jewish nation, there is always a strong sense of
hope for a better future of these oppressed peoples. The well-known
Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai expresses this hope for a new era of
peace and love:
An Arab shepherd searches for a lamb on Mount Zion,
And on the hill across I search for my little son,
An Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
In their temporary failure.
180 Saddik Gohar
Our voices meet above

the Sultan's pool in the middle of the valley.
We both want the son and the lamb
to never enter the process
of the terrible machine of ‘Chad Gadya’.
Later we found them in the bushes,
and our voices returned to us crying and laughing inside.
The search for a lamb and for a son
was always
the beginning of a new religion in these hills.
(Coffin 1982: 341)
Bibliography
Al-Haydari, Buland. 1987. ‘The Journey of the Yellow Letters’ in Asfour, John
Mikhail (tr. and ed.) When the Words Burn: An Anthology of Modern Arabic
Poetry (1945-1987). Ontario: Cormorant Books: 81-82.
Al-Udhari, Abdullah (tr. and ed.). 1986. Modern Poetry of the Arab World. New
York: Penguin Books.
Boullata, Kamal. 1992. ‘The View From No-Man's Land’ in Michigan Quarterly
Review 31: 580-590.
Buruma, Ian. 2001. ‘Real Wounds, Unreal Wounds: The Romance of Exile’ in New
Republic 224: 1-10.
Darwish, Mahmud. 2000. The Adam of Two Edens: Poems. Syracuse, New York:
Syracuse University Press and Jusoor.
Coffin, Edna Amir. 1982. ‘The Image of the Arab in Modern Hebrew Literature’ in
Michigan Quarterly Review 21: 319- 341.
Du Bois, W.E.B. 1961. The Souls of Black Folk. Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett
Publications.
Fanon, Frantz. 1969. Black Skins, White Masks (tr. Charles Lam Markman). New
York: Grove Press.
- - - . 1967. The Wretched of the Earth (tr. Constance Farrington). New York:
Grove Press.
Gibson, Donald B (ed.). 1973. Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Gohar, Saddik. 1998. A Singer in the Ghetto: A Study of Le Roi Jones/Amiri Barak’s
Revolutionary Poetry. Cairo: Anglo-Egyptian Book.
Giovanni, Nikki. 1970. Re-Creation. Detroit, Michigan: Broadside Press.
Hughes, Langston. 1974. Selected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage.
- - - . 1967. The Panther and the Lash. New York: Knopf.
Jayyusi, Salma Khadra (ed.). 1987. Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Jones, Le Roi. 1969. Black Magic: Collected Poetry (1961-1967). Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill.
- - - . 1963. Blues People. New York: William Morrow.
- - - . 1966. Home: Social Essays. New York: William Morrow.
- - - . 1964. The Dead Lecturer. New York: Grove Press.
Jordan, June. 1985. Living Room. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press.
Khouri, Mounah and Hamid Algar (trs and eds). 1975. An Anthology of Modern
Arabic Poetry. California: California University Press.
Lee, Don. 1971. Directionscore: Selected and New Poems. Michigan: Broadside
Press.
Plump, Sterling. 1972. Black Rituals. Chicago: Third World Press.
Qabbani, Nizar, 1987. ‘Marginal Notes on the Book of Defeat’ in Asfour, John
Mikhail (tr. and ed.) When the Words Burn: An Anthology of Modern Arabic
Poetry (1945-1987). Ontario: Cormorant Books: 95-99.
Said, Edward. 1988. ‘Identity, Negation and Violence’ in New Left Review 171: 46-
60.
- - - . 1979. The Question of Palestine. New York: Times Books.
Sanchez, Sonia. 1974. Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women. Detroit: Broadside
Press.
Sulaiman, Khalid A. 1984. Palestine and Modern Arab Poetry. London: Zed Books.
20
Annexing the Land of Exile: Language and History in

the Work of Assia Djebar
Trudy Agar
Trudy Agar received her MA from the University of Waikato, New

Zealand, and her PhD conjointly from the University of Auckland and
the University of Paris 13. She has taught at the Université de la
Sorbonne, Paris, and then at the University of Auckland, before
joining the French department at the University of Canterbury, New
Zealand, as a lecturer in French. She has travelled in Europe and
North Africa. Her research interests are in the areas of Francophone
women’s writing, violence in literature and postcolonial auto-
biography.
In this paper, she examines the many dimensions of exile in the
partially autobiographical novel L’amour, la fantasia (1985) of
Algerian writer Assia Djebar. One of very few indigenous Algerian
women to gain a formal education in the pre-Independence period,
including study at one of the most prestigious universities in France,
Djebar sees this experience as having, in one sense, cut her off from
the community of women she grew up with. While she does speak an
Arabic dialect and understands her maternal Berber, she has come to
use French, the language of ‘yesterday’s enemy’, as the language of
her published writing. At the same time, she acknowledges that
speaking and writing French represents a liberation from some of the
most fundamental features of Algerian patriarchy. In L’amour, la
fantasia she recounts elements of both the French war of invasion in
the 1830s and the struggle for Independence in the 1960s,
interweaving official history, autobiographical material, and oral
accounts by illiterate Algerian women, who have themselves been cut
off from conventional written history. Her written French is enriched
with structures and expressions which derive from their speech. She
aims to recover her links with her Algerian sisters by giving voice to
their previously unrecorded stories. Sadly, with the targeting of
Algerian intellectuals by Islamic militants over the last decade, her
choice of residence in France and the United States has become
formal exile.
Assia Djebar is an Algerian woman writer whose work forms part of a

new literature that has its origins at the violent intersection of two
geographical spaces, two languages, religions, and cultures. Algerian
184 Trudy Agar
writing in French first appeared in the 1920s, but really came into its
own in the 1950s just prior to Independence. Instead of declining with
the French withdrawal from Algeria in 1962, this literature has
continued to flourish, despite many writers’ trepidation about
expressing themselves in the French language, which Abdelkébir
Khatibi called “la belle et maléfique étrangère” (Khatibi 1971: 12-13;
‘the beautiful and maleficent stranger’1). Shortly after his country
gained independence, Moroccan Abdellatif Laâbi warned that
Maghribi writers should remain on their guard, aware of the danger of
letting French become not simply an instrument of communication but
an instrument of culture (Laâbi 1970: 36). Some, like the Algerian
writers Kateb Yacine and Malek Haddad, ceased writing in French,
preferring Arabic or even silence to the language of the former
coloniser. Haddad referred to the French language as his “exile” and
refused to live in this exile once independence was obtained (Déjeux
1975: 74-5). Yacine abandoned French-language fiction for theatre
written in his native Arabic dialect. Yet other writers consider the
French language to be “le seul acquis positif de la colonisation” (‘the
only positive legacy of colonisation’),2 a position that is slowly
beginning to find favour with the Algerian ruling class. Reversing a
40-year policy of official political hostility to the notion of
francophonie, the incumbent president, Abdellaziz Bouteflika, has
recently changed tack, pursuing a rapprochement with the
international French-speaking community, a repositioning exemplified
by his presence at the Francophonie Summit in 2002. Djebar’s
relationship to the language of her written expression is problematic
and fraught with risk, tensions and conflicting desires. Her
autobiographical novel, L’amour, la fantasia (1985; translated as
Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade, 1993), reveals the ambiguous
relationship this Algerian exile has with the languages of her
homeland and with French, the language of yesterday’s enemy.
Born in Cherchel, Algeria, in 1936, the daughter of a liberal-
minded teacher and a housewife who taught herself French, Assia
Djebar has led an extraordinary life. She was one of the few Algerian
girls of the pre-independence period to receive a formal education.
She wrote three novels prior to Independence, making her the first
recognised Algerian woman novelist. In 1955, Djebar became the first
Algerian woman to be admitted to the prestigious École normale
supérieure in France. She then published novels, poetry, and drama
before becoming the first Algerian woman to direct a film, La nouba
des femmes du mont Chenoua. After Independence, and particularly
Annexing the Land of Exile: Language and History in the Work of Assia Djebar 185
since the assassination of writer and journalist Tahar Djaout in 1993,

and the subsequent targeting of intellectuals by Islamic militants,
Djebar, like many Algerian writers, chose to live in exile from her
native country. Since leaving Algeria in the early 1980s, to live first in
France then in the United States, she has continued writing to wide
acclaim, returning occasionally to Algeria at great personal risk.3 In
2002, she was awarded the German Peace Prize for her contribution to
self-confidence among women in the Arab world and for bringing
hope for peace to Algeria.
In L’amour, la fantasia, Djebar undertakes a vast project of
rewriting the two wars between Algeria and France: from the first
battle of the French invasion in 1830 to the end of the war of
Independence, combining historical fact, autobiographical scenes,
eye-witness accounts of events from the 1960s that she had recorded
for the filming of La nouba, and the plural autobiography of her
female compatriots, whom she calls her “sisters”. Throughout the text,
Djebar interrogates her own uneasy position as an exiled postcolonial
writer telling the story of her illiterate countrywomen in the language
of the former oppressor. The French language, which is, in Djebar’s
terms, the main character of L’amour, la fantasia, has become her
“idiome de l’exil” (Djebar 2000: 1; “language of exile”). Through her
rewriting of the linguistic war that was fought in the wake of the
colonial invasion, Djebar tries to negotiate a new territory between the
warring languages, one that will lead her back from exile.
The first two parts of L’amour, la fantasia consist of a rewriting
of the colonial war of invasion, which Djebar imagines in terms of a
troubling meeting of desire and violence, a coupling of terms
announced in the title of the book - a fantasia being a demonstration
performed by Arab horsemen, often as training for battle, which is
accompanied by women’s youyous, or ululations. The first battle is
codified as a scene of seduction, where the French troops gaze upon
the city of Algiers, which is stretched out before them like a veiled
woman dressed in the traditional white haik. She unveils herself for
the flotilla and allows herself to be seen by her future invaders. It is
unclear, however, whether she allows herself to be gazed upon in
order to be seen, or so that she might see. The desire is double: the
female city, troubling to the soldiers as she is immobilised in her
ghostly whiteness, dreams perhaps of a love affair. The first meeting
of the two peoples takes place in silence, “comme si les envahisseurs
allaient être les amants!” (Djebar 1995: 16; “as if the invaders were
coming as lovers!”, 1993: 8). The silence of the first encounter soon
186 Trudy Agar
gives way to cries of pain and suffering from the Algerians, as the
initial desire and reciprocal interest is transformed, for the French
invaders, into rapine and a desire to subjugate the Oriental other.
The ambiguous enterprise of colonial conquest, according to
Djebar’s retelling of it, relies heavily on the power of language.
Words are given a magical, mortal quality in Djebar’s writing. Initial
attempts between the two parties to communicate end, inevitably, in
death. Any exchange of words is fatal. The elderly Algerian sent to
receive Field Marshal de Bourmont’s pseudo-pacific declarations is
then murdered by his own when he returns with the written message.
In a similar scene, the terms of dey Hussein’s surrender are collected
by a French interpreter. The dey abdicates, but the interpreter dies a
few days later from a nervous illness. According to Djebar, all
communication between the two sides, just like the initial mutual
desire, is doomed to failure since the desire is tainted by violence.
For Djebar, language, with its mystical power, is the weapon
par excellence. The imposition of French was used to stifle the voice
of the colonised and to impose the cultural values of the coloniser.
Djebar points to the unequal battle of words: of the thirty-seven
published accounts of the July 1830 invasion, only three were written
by Algerians. Algerian women were especially incapable of fighting
the war of words on an equal footing because they were illiterate and
their spoken languages, Berber and the Algerian Arabic dialect, had
no written form. Most military accounts of the period attempted to
silence Algerian suffering in order to sustain French support for the
colonial enterprise. Djebar attempts to fill the gaps in the colonial
accounts of this war through her own rewriting of it, and by sourcing
her material not just from military accounts written by Frenchmen but
also from oral stories told by illiterate Algerian women. Her account is
at once deliberately historical and imaginative. Djebar, a former
university lecturer in history, allows her imagination to fill in those
aspects of history that have been silenced beyond recovery. This is a
feminisation of history, a deliberate downplaying of the scientific,
with an emphasis on the role of women as guardians and transmitters
of history and an embracing of history as writing.4
To have one’s suffering silenced or suppressed is, in the words
of the text, to suffer “true death” (Djebar 1993: 92). This is why
Djebar thanks Colonel Pélissier for having made an official report on
his act of genocide, when he caused the death through asphyxiation of
the Ouled Riah tribe, who were hiding in underground caves, without
attempting to veil the suffering he had inflicted. Pélissier had the
courage to order the bodies to be exhumed from the caves and laid out
for counting. It is for this reason that Djebar calls him “le premier
écrivain de la première guerre d’Algérie!” (Djebar 1995: 92; “the
foremost chronicler of the first Algerian War!”, 1993: 78). Pélissier’s
report, which caused a scandal in Paris for evoking Algerian suffering
in too ‘eloquent’ and ‘realistic’ a way, exhumes the memory of the
deaths by giving voice to them and prevents them from “sécher au
soleil” (Djebar 1995: 89; “drying in the sun”, 1993: 75).
The suppression of the voice of the colonised, in the past, has
led to an exile from language, a condition Djebar terms “aphasia”.
Whereas French soldiers were gripped by “scribblomania” (1993: 44),
the natives voiced only cries – both ululation and shouts of suffering.
The aphasic Algerian woman, however, transformed her silence into a
tool of resistance used to deny the vanquisher his victory; a victory
unnamed, and therefore unrecognised, is no victory at all. Djebar
attempts to counter the silence of female combatants in the war of
Independence by basing her relation of this war on oral accounts given
to her by women of her own tribe. She hands the autobiographical
pronoun ‘I’ over to these women, transcribing and translating their
stories into French while retaining some of the particularities of what
she terms “subterranean” female language: understatement, religious
formulae, enigma, and idiomatic expressions modelled on the
Algerian Arabic dialect, such as ‘to denude’, meaning ‘to remove
one’s veil’. The modelling of French on dialectal Arabic produces
unsound sentences, such as “Tout ce qui est passé sur moi ! Mon Dieu,
tout ce qui est passé !” (Djebar 1995: 171; “Everything that has
happened to me! Oh Lord, everything that has happened”, 1993:
150).5 This mixing of the two languages, the only miscegenation
Djebar’s maternal culture will allow, is an instance of what Chantal
Zabus has termed “relexification” (1991) and struggles against the
standard, authoritative French language while at the same time making
this language dynamic and heterogeneous. For the Moroccan writer
Tahar Ben Jelloun, this mixing of two ‘expressions’ within
Francophone texts serves to enrich and transform the French language,
creating a French that is “aimée, transfigurée, enrichie, remplie de
nouvelles images, baignée dans des fleuves chauds et marinée dans
des épices nouvelles, parfois piquantes, d’autres douces” (Ben
Jelloun, 2002; “loved, transfigured, enriched, charged with fresh
images, bathed in warm rivers and marinated in new spices,
sometimes piquant, sometimes mild”).
188 Trudy Agar
Djebar’s personal story is depicted as indissociable from the

violent history of her country; a fact she insists on when she claims to
have been born in 1842, the year French soldiers destroyed her
family’s zaouia, or religious monument. Her own development, both
as a woman and as a writer, is presented in L’amour, la fantasia as the
story of the meeting in violence and desire of these two cultures and
languages.6 Her entry into this encounter was a gift of love from her
father, who wanted to give his daughter a formal education. Her
ambiguous linguistic inheritance is illustrated in the first scene of
L’amour, la fantasia: her father holds her hand as he takes her to
school on her first day. He embodies the contradictions of the family’s
situation in colonial Algeria: he is dressed in a European suit, carries a
satchel and wears a fez on his head. It is thus Djebar’s father, the
teacher, who introduces her to the French language, making it
henceforth her father or stepmother tongue, as opposed to her mother
tongue, the Algerian Arabic dialect with its strong Berber influences.
Her schooling in French is presented in Djebar’s autobiography as
though it were an act of treason, a pact with the enemy. Like Kateb
Yacine, she was sent into “la gueule du loup” (Yacine 1966: 181; “the
jaws of the wolf”). The narrator imagines herself a prepubescent girl,
offered by her father to the ‘enemy camp’, like girls in her town who
are promised to other families at a young age. The narrator accuses
her father of sacrificing his daughter but not in order to benefit from
the union with the enemy camp. Rather, he sent her into the French
camp out of love, out of a desire to protect her from confinement to
the harem. Her audacious father, who wants to educate his daughter, is
the object of neighbours’ pity since, in their eyes, an educated girl
represents a grave danger for her family in that her education may
allow her to act outside the bounds of masculine control. In the text,
the potential for emancipation lies largely in the power of words.
Young girls who know how to write have a voice that may circulate
beyond the confines of the harem, and the danger is that what they
write will be words of female desire. Love written, says Djebar, is
more dangerous than love sequestered.
Acculturation through her colonial French education first gives
a voice to the Algerian girl; this voice will in turn liberate her body,
allowing her to leave the harem and circulate unveiled, outside in the
world of men. The French language, she says, blinds men who can no
longer be her voyeurs. The words of the girl and her unveiled body
separate her from other females in her milieu who must remain ‘mute’
and confined to the harem. The dominant language, that of Djebar’s
education, becomes for her the language of love, since it does not
carry the weight of Algerian traditions in restraint and prudishness,
and allows love to be spoken. Djebar’s parents are the only Algerian
couple she knows who address each other by name: to name one
another is to love each other openly, a dramatic break with tradition.
The narrator is quick to signal the contradictions inherent in this
situation: the French language initiates her into love, while it was her
father who gifted this language to her, the man who wants to protect
her from desire. “Cette langue”, she writes, “que m’a donnée le père
me devient entremetteuse et mon initiation, dès lors, se place sous un
signe double, contradictoire…” (Djebar 1995: 12; “the language that
my father had been at pains for me to learn, serves as a go-between,
and from now on a double, contradictory sign reigns over my
initiation…”, 1993: 4).
Although French introduces Djebar to the language of desire, she is
unable to speak these words due to the inherited prudishness of
cultural traditions. She also wishes to avoid causing envy in her
Algerian sisters to whom words of love will never be spoken. The
impossibility of speaking love in her bilingual situation is a legacy of
the violent past. No exchange of love is possible between the two
enemy camps, states Djebar, because there has been violence –
pillage, rape, and murder – in the French desire for Algeria. Djebar’s
amorous aphasia is a link to her feminine inheritance. Like her sisters,
her stifled voice is bottled up inside her until released in a savage cry.
Yet, exiled from the language of love, Djebar finds herself exiled too
from the Algerian female community and the legacy of her maternal
culture. Her body has been westernised by her French education. She
finds it difficult to ululate; instead of bursting forth from her, the
sound tears her throat. She acquires a taste for basketball and athletics,
preferring these activities to trances at female meetings. Djebar says
she has been exiled from her childhood by a war between the French
and Arabic languages, fought within her. French, the stepmother
tongue, necessitates the loss of the dominated culture in favour of the
dominant French culture. Her bilingualism is a series of tactical,
warlike, manoeuvres between the two camps; the foreign tongue, the
language of exile, establishes a “proud presidio” within her, while the
mother tongue “resists and attacks” (1993: 215). The gift of love from
her father – education in the French system – has liberated Djebar into
the world of men and of desire, just as it gave her parents the words to
speak their love; but the violence of the colonial legacy means that
this gift is also a taking-away. It robs the girl of the legacy left to her
190 Trudy Agar
by her mother: her mother tongue and her place in the subterranean
community of women. This double nature of her father’s gift is
presented in L’amour, la fantasia as a tunic of Nessus in which she
must envelop herself when she writes, and whose equivocal nature
means that the war between the two people can be heard in every
sentence, as can the formulation of contradictory desire.
The ambiguities inherent in Djebar’s linguistic exile undercut
her project to rewrite the history of the Franco-Algerian conflicts. The
project is a violent one: Djebar compares writing her autobiography to
performing a live autopsy on herself. It is also a delicate undertaking;
to translate the story of suffering into the ‘adversary’ language is to
run the risk of unveiling too much, of robbing her sisters of the
indomitability that lies in their refusal to name the vanquisher.
Djebar’s tactic, as we have seen, is to translate her sisters’
subterranean language into her text, to speak from their point of view,
modelling her French on their Arabic words.
Her autobiographical project is also a communal project, a
plural autobiography. Djebar wonders why she, of all the women of
her tribe, was the only one lucky enough to receive her freedom
though a Western education. Though now cut off from her sisterly
community, she still hears her sisters’ voices, which have “besieged”
her mind to force her to give them a voice in her writing (Djebar 1999:
29), thereby annexing for them the freedom she has acquired, the
territory that lies between the two warring languages. The story of the
Frenchwoman Pauline, recounted in L’amour, la fantasia, is a sign of
hope that this autobiographical project of sisterly love might enact a
rapprochement between the enemy camps. Pauline was a militant
whose opposition to the French conquest of Algeria landed her in an
Algerian prison, after which she lived out the rest of her life in poverty
and exile. Drawn to the Algerian culture and people, Pauline wrote
about Algerian women with tenderness, a desire for friendship to
which violence was not a corollary. Djebar, in digging up the past of
her sisters, with tenderness for them as well as for the French military
officers, whose written accounts failed to disguise both their desire for
the colonized and the latter’s suffering, she suggests that love between
these two peoples, cultures, and languages will not always be
expressed through violence. By reviving her sisters, Djebar has
awakened within herself the words of love of her mother tongue,
paving a way for a return to the homeland of her Algerian sisterhood.
Heeding Laâbi’s warning, rather than using French as an instrument of
culture, Djebar uses it as an instrument of “transformation” (Djebar
1999: 42), providing Algerian women with a public voice, as well as

modifying the French language. In her acceptance speech for the
German Peace Prize, Djebar stated that her role as a writer was to
seize the French language that had entered her country with the 1830
invaders and shake from it “toute sa poussière compromettante”
(Djebar 2000: 9; “all its compromising dust”).
An image in the closing lines of the text, parallel to the first
scene in which Djebar’s father takes her by the hand to her French
school, symbolizes the violent legacy of the French language in
Algeria and Djebar’s appropriation of it. Her father is replaced in this
last scene by the writer and war painter Eugène Fromentin, and the
image has become macabre. Djebar does not now receive a hand
stretched out to her in love, and hope for emancipation, but the
amputated hand of an Algerian woman that Fromentin had found and
then thrown away. Djebar imagines that he passes to her this “main
inattendue, celle d'une inconnue qu'il n'a jamais pu dessiner” (Djebar
1995: 255; “unexpected hand – the hand of an unknown woman he
was never able to draw”, 1993: 226). She then seizes this “main
vivante, main de la mutilation et du souvenir” (Djebar 1995: 255;
“living hand, hand of mutilation and of memory”, 1993: 226), and
tries to make it hold a qalam so that she may use it to write the story
of her sisters, whose memory has been mutilated, exiled from history
and into silence.
Notes
1
This and all other translations with no source indicated are my own.
2
Declaration by Mouloud Kassim Naït Belkacem, member of the Haut Conseil de la
langue nationale, at the Algerian Cultural Centre in Paris, 10 October 1986 (Déjeux
1992: 4).
3
Djebar evokes the risks of writing as an Algerian in Le blanc de l’Algérie, a
narrative in which she relates the assassination of two close friends and her brother-in-
law, the playwright Abdelkader Alloula, and of other Algerian intellectuals killed by
Islamic fundamentalists.
4
Djebar sees this approach to history as a legacy left by Polybius, for whom
“l’écriture de l’histoire est écriture d’abord : il instille dans la réalité mortifère dont
il s’obstine à saisir trace un obscur germe de vie” (Djebar 1995: 159; “the writing of
history is writing first of all. Into the deadly reality that he describes he instils some
obscure germ of life”, 2002: 164).
5
Blair’s English translation fails to convey the grammatical unsoundness of the
original French, which could be translated as ‘Everything that happened on me!’.
192 Trudy Agar
6
The linking of these two terms, violence and desire, is common in French-language
literature of the Maghrib. The following line from Abdelkébir Khatibi’s La mémoire
tatouée is a well-known example: “Quand je danse devant toi, Occident, sans me
dessaisir de mon peuple, sache que cette danse est de désir mortel” (Khatibi 1971:
188; ‘When I dance before you, West, without renouncing my people, know that my
dance is of mortal desire’).
Bibliography
Ben Jelloun, Tahar. 2002. ‘Éloge des langues françaises’. Editorial. L'Orient Le Jour
Beirut (14 October 2002). On line at: www.lorient-lejour.com.lb/ aujourdhui/
tribune/tribunesujetw2.htm (consulted 14.10.2002).
Déjeux, Jean. 1975. La littérature algérienne contemporaine. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
- - - . 1992. La littérature maghrébine d’expression française. Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France.
Djebar, Assia. 1999. Ces voix qui m’assiègent… en marge de ma francophonie. Paris:
Albin Michel.
- - - . 1995. L’amour, la fantasia. Paris: Jean-Claude Lattès, 1985. Paris: Albin
Michel. 1993, translated as Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade (tr. Dorothy S.
Blair). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.
- - - . 1995. Vaste est la prison. Paris: Albin Michel. 2002, translated as So Vast the
Prison (tr. Betsy Wing). Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove.
- - - . 1995. Le blanc de l’Algérie. Paris: Albin Michel. 2000, translated as Algerian
White: A Narrative (tr. David Kelley and Marjolijn de Jager). New York:
Seven Stories Press.
- - - . 2000. ‘Idiome de l’exil et langue de l’irréductibilité’. Acceptance speech for
the German Peace Prize. 23 October 2000. On line at: www.remue.net/cont/
Djebar01.html (consulted 12.07.2003).
Khatibi, Abdelkébir. 1971. La mémoire tatouée. Paris: Denoël.
Laâbi, Abdellatif. 1970. ‘Littérature maghrébine actuelle et francophonie’ in Souffles
18 (March-April): 35-37.
Yacine, Kateb. 1966. Le polygone étoilé. Paris: Seuil.
Zabus, Chantal. 1991. The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the
West African Europhone Novel. Cross Cultures 4. Amsterdam and Atlanta,
GA: Rodopi.
21
Creating a Poetics in Exile: The Development of an

Ethnic Palestinian-American Culture
Nir Yehudai
Nir Yehudai was born in Israel in 1947. After many years of working
in agriculture, education, business & community management, and
Arab-Jewish co-existence projects, he turned to academic study in the
Department of Middle Eastern History at Haifa University, where he
now teaches part-time. He gained his Master’s degree with a thesis
entitled ‘Economic Cooperation Between Palestinian Arabs and Jews
as a Possible Pattern For Relations Between Two National
Communities in a State of Conflict, 1920-1930’. His PhD thesis is
entitled ‘The Palestinian Diaspora in the United States: Cultural,
Political and Social Aspects, 1948-1995’.
In this paper, he explores the phenomenon of Palestinian-American
culture. He argues that Palestinians in the United States, while they
form part of the larger Arab-American community, possess a distinct
consciousness and culture. Artistic creativity has been important in
maintaining that consciousness and in expressing a range of emotions,
including yearning, rage, frustration, and loss. He surveys artistic
activities and centres that include: an exhibition of traditional
Palestinian dresses and embroidery in New Jersey; poetry and prose
alluding to such features of Palestinian everyday life as fig-trees,
traditions of weaving and embroidery, and cooking; a Palestinian film
project associated with Columbia University; an embroidered tent
installation in an artist’s studio in New York; and an internet site
which brings together a wealth of Palestinian-related items. He
emphasizes that these works serve not only to bring Palestinians in the
US together, to reflect on their country and culture, but to
communicate with a wider American audience. It lends support to the
claim that immigration may lead not to the loss of ethnic cultural
identity, but rather to its reappearance under a new guise and
conditions. He employs a theoretical-methodological framework for
immigration research which focuses on questions of ethnicity and
culture, as well as social structures and institutions among immigrant
groups, ethnic groups and communities, and the characterization of a
diaspora. It deals with developments which have occurred in the
immigrant’s new country after s/he has made the geographical
relocation (or was born as second or third generation), rather than
analysing the circumstances and motivations for the immigration
(although it is clear that, especially in the case of Palestinians, these
motivations and circumstances are particularly important).
194 Nir Yehudai
Let me begin with poems (or extracts from poems) by three

contemporary Palestinian-American poets: Fawaz Turki, Naomi
Shihab Nye, and Lisa Suhair Majaj:
Moments of Ridicule and Love
In moments of desperation
Palestinian poets wish
they had a government to assail,
politicians,
bureaucrats,
elected bodies
to ridicule.
We never realized
dragging such comic trivia
into a poem
could be,
like first love,
an exquisite thought […]
(Turki 1975: 4)
Kindness
Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
(Shihab Nye 1980: 42-43)
Departure
Some things
you take when
you go: light
no one can capture,
voices that sing
alone, the touch
of snow on air.
The Development of an Ethnic Palestinian-American Culture 195
Some things are lost

in the leaving. Some
remain. Some seeds
planted in brine
still grow.
(Majaj 1999: 79-80)
The Palestinians who live in the United States are an

inseparable part of the Arab-American community, and there are
authors such as Elias Tuma, who do not even consider them as a
unique and separate community in a sociological sense (Tuma 1981).
However, the accumulated experience resulting from their history in
the Middle East and their lives in a Diaspora, with its lack of a civil
and political centre that can be identified as a homeland, as well as
their being labelled suspect as a consequence of the stereotyping
tendency of significant sectors of American society, has led to the
formation of a unique shared consciousness as Palestinian-Americans.
This consciousness has found interesting, and even poignant,
expression in artistic creativity.
The turn to artistic activity is based on the perception that artists
may often better express processes, sensations and conflicts, which the
average person requires a “longer reaction time” to express
(Rynearson 1996, 20). Using a few out of many possible examples,
this paper seeks to demonstrate the emotional force which artistic
creativity can give to simple objects from the homeland, including
clothing, trees, foods. Feelings of yearning, rage, frustration, and loss
– as well as empathy and identification with the fate of others – are
expressed in these artistic works. The examples are presented with
little analysis or elaboration, since I believe that the works speak for
themselves. The poems were all written originally in English, even
though they are clearly Middle Eastern and Palestinian in nature. This
kind of creativity operates parallel to, and as a part of, everyday life,
and as a component of the political agenda of Arabs and Palestinians
in the United States. Although clear political and nationalist
statements can be identified in the works of art, this does not detract
from either the purely artistic value of the works or the emotional
pleasure which they accord even to people who are not Palestinian.
Hanan Karaman Munayyer and Farah Munayyer, who have
been living in West Caldwell, New Jersey since their immigration to
the United States in the early 1970s, have developed an active
exhibition of traditional Palestinian dresses and embroidery. In order
to further this enterprise, they have set up an institute, located in their
196 Nir Yehudai
home, called the ‘Palestinian Heritage Foundation’ which organizes

exhibitions and events throughout the United States and publishes on
its website (http://www.palestineheritage.org/index.asp) a newsletter
by the same name in English and Arabic.
In a recent article, Jane Friedman describes their collection and
their enterprise with the words: “New Jersey Stops at the Munayyer
Door”. She writes:
Their collection of embroidery and costumes, their sets of coffee
utensils, the pillows and slipcovers, in fact, their entire living rooms
leave you with the impression that you have entered an original
Palestinian home. The collection and the fund which they have set up
are dedicated to a mission: to preserve and revive a heritage which is
being lost, and to inform and educate both Palestinians and Americans
about a unique aspect of Palestinian culture. (Friedman 1997: 2)
In her own article about her family collection, Hanan Karaman

Munayyer explains and analyzes the sources, roots, and historical
contexts of textile art in the Middle East (1997: 5-8).
The Palestinian-American poet Lorene Zarou-Zouzounis has
written a poem called ‘Embroidered Memory’ which includes
reference to Palestinian dress. It reads, in part:
Arabic tapestry embroidered
Into my soul
Is my memory
Of home
Red on black pyramids
Octagons, lines and vines
Each village distinct
Bedouin purple and fuchsia
Red poppies and tulips
My mother, sixteen - creating
Vibrant peacocks on linen
Circle around
Down, up
Up, down
A fine needle in and out
An artist’s tool piercing
Fabric, weaving culture
Women of this art
Fill my heart with hues of
Red and orange fruit orchards
Filling the air with aroma
Of a culture of olive,
Almond and fig groves […]
(Handal 2001: 317-8)
Fig trees are also invoked in the work of Naomi Shihab Nye,
one of the best-known Palestinian creative figures in the United
States, especially as a result of the wide-ranging variety of her poetry
and prose which find readers in diverse audiences, and which deal
with issues that go beyond the Palestinian experience. In the following
story poem she examines the web of longing which links her father to
the fig tree that once stood in the yard of his house, and stands for all
those things which he could not take with him when he was exiled
from his homeland:
My Father and the Figtree
For other fruits my father was indifferent.

He’d point at the cherry trees and say,
See those? I wish they were figs […]
The last time he moved, I had a phone call,

my father, in Arabic, chanting a song I’d never heard.
“What’s that?”—“Wait till you see!”
He took me out to the new yard.
There, in the middle of Dallas, Texas,
a tree with the largest, fattest, sweetest figs in the world.
“It’s a figtree song!” he said,
plucking his fruits like ripe tokens,
emblems, assurance
of a world that was always his own.
(Shihab Nye 1993: xiv-xvi)
Shihab Nye’s father, ‘Aziz Shihab, has published a small book of

reminiscences which combines, for the most part, stories of his
childhood in Jerusalem with recipes for traditional Palestinian dishes.
The style and content of the book are primarily folkloric and, except
for two chapters, does not include the political material which
characterizes similar works written by Palestinians in the Diaspora.
One of the ‘political’ chapters tells of ‘Aziz Shihab’s uncle who lived
in the area of Beersheba and who became rich during the 1930s and
1940s by buying land cheaply from neighbouring Arabs and selling it
secretly to a Jewish organization centred in London. Shihab describes
a visit to this relative, ‘the Sheik,’ with his father when he was a boy.
His father reprimanded the relative as a traitor who was becoming rich
by betraying his nation and his homeland (Shihab 1993: 87-90). The
second chapter, touching on politics, describes the burning insults,
both personal and general, suffered by the author and the people
around him from British soldiers and officers before 1948 (Shihab
1993: 32-34).
198 Nir Yehudai
Sharif Elmusa, the co-editor of the anthology Grape Leaves,

was born in 1947, in Abassia (today, Yahud, in the Jaffa district), to a
family who earned their living by growing fruit trees. During the 1948
war, the family was uprooted to Nu‘aima, near Jericho, where they
began to grow vegetables. In a poem inspired by a visit to Nablus,
Elmusa writes:
Summer. The figs are bruise pink,

tomatoes luscious enough
to stop a hurried man.
Ignore the flies.
At 9 a.m. peasants savour shish-kebab
in puny, vaulted eateries.
Ah, the roasting coffee’s aroma,
the folk-lore of each of the senses.
This is a place for commerce.
Everything here is for sale:
children’s toys, kitchen utensils,
bananas, peanuts, pine nuts, posters,
cassettes, straw mats, sponge mats, watches,
Elvis’ T-shirts, turkey breasts, shoes […].
(Elmusa 1996: 361)
Annemarie Jacir is active in movie production, working in the

Film Department of Columbia University in New York. Her parents
were born in Bethlehem, where they still have family. In her work,
Jacir deals extensively with the way in which the status and image of
Arabs are presented in the American film industry. She states that she
is caught in a cycle of discrimination and stereotypes against which
she must struggle. In the past few years, she and a number of
associates have set up a project called Palestine Films, under the
auspices of Columbia University, which has produced a film called
Satellite Shooters. The film is a kind of Western, centring on a
Palestinian family in Texas. The hero is the teenage son of the family,
played by an Arab American actor. The film deals with stereotypes,
with the clash between ‘Orientalism’ and ‘Occidentalism’, with
American foreign policy, and with criticism of traditional Arab society
(Frayer 2000 and Annemarie Jacir website). Jacir has also produced a
number of documentary films about the health system under the
Palestinian Authority and about aspects of Israeli-Palestinian relations
during the Oslo process. Jacir is also a published poet. ‘Untitled Exile
Poem’ is a cry embodying the sense of loss of homeland and home,
and the envy experienced by Palestinians towards their neighbours
who were colonised by countries which ultimately gave up and left
their colonies, while Palestine received the ‘worst possible deal’. The
following is a part of the poem:
in america
the coffee table arabs
sip
sip
sip
inventing words because there is
no english translation
demanding justice and freedom
demanding to go home
reading about turks in germany
and wondering if they hear about us too
the prophets of palestine
now gather in cairo cafes
stargazing
dreaming
old men inhale life from bubbling nargillas
they talk and talk;
who stole the past
from our wrinkled palms?
homeless, will we learn
to carry out houses on our
backs for our land is gone
and we still carry it in our heads…
(Jacir 2001)
Emily Jacir is an artist involved with painting and the plastic

arts. She has worked and exhibited in various places both within and
outside the United States and, as I learned from a conversation with
her on 8 February 2000, at a meeting at Columbia University, she is
intensively active in Palestinian issues. She defines herself as a
Palestinian artist and, in many cases, she answers questions about
where she is from with the reply “from Bethlehem”. Emily Jacir has
been engaged in an additional undertaking, which is clearly
Palestinian and artistic in nature: she has set up a large tent in her
studio in New York to symbolize transience and the reality of being a
refugee. On the walls of the tent she, along with friends and other
volunteers, has embroidered in black thread the names of the
Palestinian villages which were abandoned and destroyed in 1948.
The list of villages is based on the book written by Walid Khalidi, All
That Remains.
Artist Samia Halaby, who was born in Jerusalem in 1936, relates that
she has always held pictures in her mind’s eye of the beautiful
200 Nir Yehudai
Jerusalem of her memories, of her family home, and of her

grandmother. In addition to her art, Samia has, in recent years, set up
an internet site where she presents her work, along with articles and
essays, references to Palestinian artists, exhibitions of their work, and
of views of the Palestinian homeland (http://www.art.net/~samia/
pal/olives/olives.html). As she explains: “In 1996 I wandered through
the hills around Ramallah and did several little paintings. As I painted
this little olive tree, it began to seem like a child. I began to pay
attention to the different characters of olive trees as infants, toddlers,
adolescents, powerful prime-of-life ones, elderly, and so on”.
The artist writes of another painting:
This is a fig tree with two little infant olives peeking in from the right
side of the frame. Olive trunks have powerful shapes which grow as
they resist the wind. The two infant olive trees are already bracing
themselves diagonally against the attack of the wind. That is what
makes them seem as though they are peeking in at me. Oh if it were
possible for olive trees to know how to brace themselves against the
Israeli settlers' bulldozers.
Suheir Hammad was born in Jordan, in 1973, to Palestinian

refugee parents, who moved first to Beirut and later to Brooklyn, New
York. Her poems and her prose speak of exile, of Palestinian
suffering, and of urban America, as a Black woman in a racist society.
She is one of a number of writers who have expressed penetrating
criticism of the traditional role of the Palestinian woman. Her work is
featured on the website of the The Poetry Center at Smith College,
http://www.smith.edu/poetrycenter/bios.php?name= shammad, which
says of her: “In addition to her work as a creative artist, Hammad has
written and spoken out about issues such as the defence of Mumia
Abu-Jamal, domestic violence, sexual abuse, racism, and
homophobia.” In an interview some years ago with Nathalie Handal,
she said:
In relation to Palestine, I am not sure. But I need to change so one day
I may be writing so that people recognize Palestine, the next day I
may be writing specifically for Palestinians, recognizing ourselves,
treating ourselves better, especially our women... (Handal 1997)
In the poem ‘There Are Many Usages for the Word Black’
she identifies with those who are discriminated against and pursued in
various places (Hammad 1996: 10). Hammad declares that her life has
been transformed by the influence of the African-American poet and
essayist June Jordan, and especially her work Moving Towards Home,
a collection of political articles and poetry which appeared in 1989. In
one of her poems, Hammad refers to her mother as “Mama Sweet
Baklava”:
Everyone got a favourite

sweet every woman got
a recipe
she is baklava
back bone strong foundation
layers thousand layers
upon each other like
refugees fleeing or cold
children warming each other […]
(www.cafearabica.com/culture/cultureold/articles/culsuh10x1.html)
Lisa Suhair Majaj, an important Palestinian-American

researcher, poet, and author, has described the process of exposing
Arab-American creative talents to a variety of readers as a process of
negotiation between cultures which has placed many of these creators
in a position of ‘split-vision’, as one eye looks at the American
context while the other eye is always directed towards the Middle
East. Her poem, ‘Recognized Futures’, is a good example for the
poetic expression of that issue, and a suitable piece for concluding this
paper:
Turning to you, my name -

this necklace of gold, these letters
in script I cannot read
this part of myself I long
to recognize—falls forward
into my mouth.
You call my daily name, Lisa,

the name I've finally declared
my own, claiming a heritage
half mine: corn fields silver
in ripening haze, green music
of crickets, summer light sloping
to dusk on the Iowa farm.
This other name fills my mouth,

a taste faintly metallic,
blunt edges around which my tongue
moves tentatively: Suhair,
an old-fashioned name,
202 Nir Yehudai
little star in the night. The second girl,

small light on a distanced horizon.
Throughout childhood this rending split:

continents moving slowly apart,
rift widening beneath taut limbs.
(www.fas.harvard.edu/~gstudies/mideast/lessons/backgd.htm)
Bibliography
Elmusa, Sharif S. 1996. ‘One Day in the Life of Nablus’ in El-Zein, Amira and Munir
Akash (eds) Culture Creativity and Exile special issue of Jusoor: The Arab
American Journal of Culture Exchange and Thought for the Future 7/8: 361-
364.
Frayer, Lauren. 2000. ‘Annemarie Kattan Jacir: A Palestinian-American Filmmaker
Trying to Make a Difference’. eStart.com, July 26, 2000, Washington, D.C.
www3.estart.com/arab/women/annemarie.html (updated: 2001) (consulted
30.06.2004).
Friedman, Jane. 1997. ‘These Stitches Speak’ in Aramco World 48(2): 2-4.
Gonzalez, Nancie L, and Carolyn S. McCommon (eds). 1989. Conflict, Migration,
and the Expression of Ethnicity. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Halaby, Samia. ‘Olives of Palestine’. On line at: www.art.net/~samia/pal/olives/
olives.html (consulted 20.07.2002).
Hammad, Suheir. 1996. Born Palestinian, Born Black. New York: Harlem River
Press.
- - - . Cafearabica: The Arab-American Online Community Center, Culture ‘Suheir
Hammad: 2 poems excerpted from her upcoming book of Poetry, Pariah’. On
line at: www.cafearabica.com/culture/cultureold/articles/culsuh10x1.html
(consulted 14.04.2004)
Handal, Nathalie. 1997. ‘Drops of Suheir Hammad: A Talk with a Palestinian Poet
Born Black’ in Al Jadid 3(20): s.pag.
- - - . (ed.). 2001. The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology. New
York: Interlink Books.
Jacir, Annemarie. 2001. ‘Untitled Exile Poem’ in Mizna 3(2): s.pag.
- - - . ‘Funding Update’ (for the Satellite Shooters). On line at:
www.columbia.edu/~kdr7/funding.html (consulted 14.04.2004)
Khalidi, Walid (ed.). 1992. All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and
Depopulated by Israel in 1948. Washington D.C.: Institute for Palestine
Studies.
Majaj, Lisa Suhair. 1999. ‘New Directions: Arab-American Writing at Century’s End’
in Akash, Munir and Khalad Mattawa (eds) Post-Gibran: Anthology of New
Arab American Writing. Jusoor: Syracuse University Press: 67-81.
- - - . www.fas.harvard.edu/~gstudies/mideast/lessons/backgd.htm (consulted
14.04.2004)
Munayyer, Hanan Karaman. 1997. ‘New Images, Old Patterns: A Historical Glimpse’
in Aramco World 48(2): 5-11.
Rynearson, Ann M. 1996. ‘Living Within the Looking Glass: Refugee Artists and the
Creation of Group Identity’ in Rynearson, Ann M. and James Philips (eds)
Selected Papers on Refugee Issues. IV. Arlington, Virginia: American

Anthropological Association: 20-44.
Shihab, ‘Aziz. 1993. A Taste of Palestine. Introduction by Naomi Shihab Nye. San
Antonio: Corona Publishing.
Shihab Nye, Naomi. 1995. Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. 1980. Portland,
Oregon: A Far Corner Book.
Tuma, Elias. 1981. ‘The Palestinians in America’ in The Link 14(3): 1-14.
Turki, Fawaz. 1975. Poems From Exile. Washington D.C.: Free Palestine Press.
22
Poems: ‘Do not live a day in a homeland’s memory’ and

‘O fire be peaceful’
Emad Jabbar
Emad Jabbar was born in 1968 in Maysan, Southern Iraq. He has

published two books of poetry in Arabic – There Were Songs There
(1996) and Tears On the Eyelids of Distant Windows (1998) – and
won a number of awards, including the Iraq Prize for Creativity,
presented by the Ministry of Culture and Information in 2000. In
March 2000 Emad travelled to the United Arab Emirates to receive a
prize from the Al-Sada House for Journalism. He has not yet returned
to Iraq. While he was living in Jordan as a political refugee with the
UNHCR in 2001 his long poem ‘O You Prayer Rug of Al-Aqsa’ won
the (American) Holy Land Institute for Relief and Development's
Cultural Contest on the theme of ‘The Suffering of the Palestinian
Refugees’. In 2002, he won the Al-Sharjah Award for Arabic
Creativity, presented by the Ministry of Information and Culture of
the UAE, for the poetry collection A Feather from Sorrow. The
material prize of the Al-Sharjah Award is the upcoming publication of
A Feather of Sorrow (in Arabic) by the UAE government. Also in
2002, A Feather of Sorrow was translated into English by the Iraqi
scholar Yaqoub Abouna. Emad has not yet sought publication of this
work in translation. He migrated to New Zealand in 2002, and is
currently living in Wellington where he is studying Religion at
Victoria University, writing new pieces in both English and Arabic,
and working with the International Writers’ group (established 2002).
In a live performance recorded for the accompanying DVD, he reads
two poems in Arabic which reflect his personal experience of exile.
We are most grateful to Tarik Bary for providing the English subtitles.
See DVD
206 Emad Jabbar
Do not live a day in a homeland's memory
Each time you pack up

your things to travel
All the little stars flutter
in you
All the bridge's lamps return
you
All the house's eyes
The stubborn date palms
return you
Their nascent clusters have landed
And the last squadrons are
startled in your heart
And they shout: don't leave
You are a poet
You are he
Who gathers people's tears
In the dawn of registers
You are a witness
Live here between the
twin rivers and persist
Live here and strew the
years of sufferance
In the embers of the braziers
You weep every time a bullet
hurts Baghdad
Every time the river's water
returns a drowned babe
The voice of death's colour
in its eyes wounds you
Leaves from the bushes' top

falling
On the migrant's crown
And the green boughs almost
Grasping the garments
And the bitter orange
Throwing fragrance and questions
in the way
Why do you pack the bags
Poems 207
today
If you leave, the door
will weep
And the virgin footbridge
And your tired eyes mother
will weep
And the wind shall fling her
weeping lock
Upon the neighbours
Live here forever
And reproach whoever you wish
to reproach
Who do you think will house

you, who?
Who do you think will bring
you close?
If the bird of songs
cries in your ribs
Who will give you a hand's width
of sympathy?
Do not live a day in a homeland's
memory
You are this wind
This cloud
This water
You this remaining mountain
across the ages
Do not live a day in a homeland's
memory.
O fire be peaceful
O fire
O fire
O fire be peaceful
upon the river
and love
and the lovers
208 Emad Jabbar
who are tired

and broken
they tell their secrets
to the water
and push their dreams
like clouds in the evening
O fire be peaceful
clouds pass by my family's home

and forget a wisp
and pass on
and I still farewell clouds
in this cool
and wait for clouds
O my family's cloud
I pray every day
to come
summoning night's tales
O fire be peaceful
there, mornings' greetings are a poem

there, children's quarrels are a poem
there, tears are a poem
and the abaya's1 night musk
is a poem of dew
so fire be peaceful
upon Al-Sayyaab's2 face in the gloom
upon his hand wet with wavings
Benedictions of shrapnel from the Arab Gulf
in his coat pocket
he kisses the children of his city
the children of Basra
every morning
and casts greetings towards the poor
peace on people who fade
before their time
peace on people who set like suns
1
Abaya – a traditional woman's robe worn over clothes, it is almost always black in
colour.
2
Al-Sayyaab was a great Iraqi poet.
Poems 209
peace on people who are bleeding

on the Zakurah's3 clay in
time's conscience
glory to you – the guardian of the poor
you will withstand horror
withstand warplanes
by what is in your words
and in your heart
you will bleed in death much
more than life
and so lavender greens near to
the verandas
salamun4 when you scream
then songs come like boats
flapping with a wounded sail
and a lover's oath hits the waves
we smelt over the distance Iraq's breeze

and his boys’ voices in the alley
we smelt over this distance, master…
and the tears poured on earth remain
salamun upon Iraq's mountains
How many exhausted among these stations
How many regretful beyond these oceans
with no bosom friends under
this darkness
so fire be peaceful
upon the rose and goodness
and memories
upon the friends still noble
upon Youssif’s5 wound
when the wind leaves her children
in the reeds
upon his chest in the nights of exhaustion
3
Zakurah (Ziggurat) – the sacred steps of ancient Sumarian temples.
4
Salamun, Salamaa – are ways of saying the Islamic greeting Salamun Alaikum
depending on the context.
5
Youssif (Joseph) Al-Saiyigh is a great Iraqi poet who is dying of lung disease at the
time of writing.
210 Emad Jabbar
and say salaamaa
cough will go… and the poem remains

and the mountain grass will
wither… but the poem remains
and the singer's voice will
tire… but songs remain
and poets will be broken
when their children starve
the poets will be broken when they
enter empty markets… but
the poem remains
the poem remains
23
Poem for Basim Furat, Emad Jabbar and Yilma Tafere

Tasew: ‘Exiles’
Nora Nadjarian
Cypriot writer Nora Nadjarian wrote this poem for three refugee
writers who have settled in New Zealand, Iraqis Basim Furat and
Emad Jabbar, and Ethiopian Yilma Tafere Tasew, after meeting them
at the Poetics of Exile conference in Auckland in 2003. For her
biographical details see the introduction to the DVD interview with
her at number 14 above.
Exiles
We crossed the desert, leaving our hearts behind;

travelled through explosions of days and nights
to step onto the cold, wild shore of a new life.
We crossed the desert, blinding our memories,

pouring handfuls of sand to burn the sockets;
to fill the hole where a heart should beat.
On this cold, wild shore, a new life.
We sleep by the ocean, and listen

for voices from the past in the waves.
We sleep by the ocean, and wait

for salt surf to wash over the wounds.
We sleep by the ocean, and let

seagulls tear at the healing scars.
We sleep by the ocean, and dream

of the warmth of sweat and blood.
24
Exile and Memory: Re-membering Home After the

Partition of Bengal
Urbashi Barat
Urbashi Barat was born and educated in Calcutta, India. She has
experienced several kinds and modes of displacement: geographical,
cultural, emotional. Since her marriage she has lived in Jabalpur, in
the centre of India, where cultural and social traditions are
distinctively different from what she knew in her birthplace in Bengal.
If her own family belongs to East Bengal – now another country,
Bangladesh, from which they have been effectively exiled as a result
both of relocation and Partition – her husband’s family migrated from
their original home in West Bengal to Central India more than a
century ago. She has been teaching English in Jabalpur for more than
twenty years and is currently head of the Department of Postgraduate
Studies & Research in English, at Rani Durgavati University,
Jabalpur. She has published a book on Graham Greene and fifty
research articles, mainly on women’s writing, postcolonial fiction, and
English language teaching. One of her areas of interest at present is
the South Asian diaspora.
In this paper, she examines writing that derives from the partition of
India and the brutality and degradation associated with the violent
displacement of thousands of people following the imposition of
invented borders. She focuses on two very different works, one in
Bengali, the other in English, the first a factual recounting of the exilic
experience, the other a fictionalised study of liminal lives, to discover
the ways in which exiles from a partitioned Bengal attempted to make
sense of what had happened to them by looking back at the past. The
first work is an anthology of essays by sixty seven anonymous
refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) now living in
India, Chhere Asha Gram (The Abandoned Village), written not only
to enable them to recover for themselves, in memory, their lost village
homes, but also to enable people living in Indian Bengal who had not
personally experienced exile to understand something of their
sufferings. This collection of (male) voices centres on the refugee’s
nostalgia, his inability to understand what has happened, and his
yearning to re-establish himself without ever forgetting what he has
left behind. The second text, Amitav Ghosh’s novel in English, The
Shadow Lines, builds on the traditional Bengali opposition of house
and home to explore the different ways in which home is remembered,
imagined, and re-created by those whose experiences of continuous
dislocation, their own and their ancestors’, have rendered them
214 Urbashi Barat
permanent exiles. As home and loss are narrativised, both fact and
fiction suggest that the exilic memory, which Rushdie compares to
shards of broken mirrors, does not simply recapture the past but
creates a new reality which may have little in common with historical
accounts. In both works, the remembered home ensures that the past
continues into the present and loss is turned to gain, even as it also
suggests that the condition of exile is permanent, irrevocable, and
universal.
A Bengali nursery rhyme written just after India’s Independence soon

became a classic expression of the popular feeling about a newly
achieved political freedom: not joy or relief, but, rather, an
incomprehension and an anguish that this freedom was gained at the
expense of home and homeland, which were now so broken up that
they could never be put together again. The mocking question that the
poem asks, using a domestic parallel, points out that those who should
have known better were as complicit in this act of reckless and
irresponsible violence as those whose careless scribbles across a map
had erased the plural identity of Bengal: “Teler shishi bhanglo bole
khukur pore rag koro, / tomra je shob buro khoka, bangla bhenge
bhag koro, / bharat bhenge bhag koro, / tar bela?” (‘when a little girl
[accidentally] breaks a bottle of oil you’re so angry, what about the
way you adult little-boys [deliberately] broke up and divided Bengal,
and India?’, my translation). For Bengalis, Independence was also
Partition, the invention of borders which permanently and irrevocably
exiled entire communities. Even today, more than half a century after
the event, the victims of Partition continue to explore the dimensions
of their loss of home, to attempt to understand what it has done to
their sense of identity and their social relationships.
Remembering, as Homi Bhabha points out in The Location of
Culture, is “never a quiet act of introspection. It is a painful re-
membering, a putting together of the dismembered past to make sense
of the trauma of the present” (Bhabha 1994: 63). In this paper I use
two very different works, one in Bengali, the other in English, as
examples of some of the ways in which Hindu exiles from East
Bengal attempted to make sense of what had happened to them
through re-membering their lost home: like Derek Walcott’s famous
broken vase (Walcott 1992), the recovery through memory becomes a
(re)discovery of love and longing. Leaving home is not, of course, a
new experience for Bengalis, who have traditionally loved travelling:
the popular stereotype of the indefatigably peripatetic Bengali is part
of contemporary folklore in India. Since the mid-nineteenth century,
Exile and Memory: Re-membering Home After the Partition of Bengal 215
moreover, the educated middle-class Bengali, especially from the

East, has frequently left his village home in search of a livelihood;
there are old-established communities of probashi Bengalis, Bengalis
who live outside the homeland (Bengal), in most North Indian cities,
and adhibashi, or diasporic, Bengalis, all over the world, particularly
in the West.1 But the exile of the probashi and the adhibashi is
voluntary, self-imposed, and above all temporary; they have always
been able to go back home, no matter how briefly or temporarily. The
exiles who had to leave home after Partition, however, knew they
could never return. Yearning for a past that can never be recovered,
and desperately seeking for a present in which they can discover new
roots, they continually attempt to remake their lost homes, albeit only
in, and through, memory. This is what both these books reveal.
One of these volumes is a collection of Bengali periodical
essays. The 67 anonymous essays it contains were originally written
for a now defunct newspaper, Jugantar, around 1950, that is, almost
immediately after Partition. These were later anthologized by
Dakshinaranjan Basu into a single volume, Chhere Asha Gram (The
Abandoned Village).2 As the writers of these essays, apparently almost
all male, describe the villages they had been forced to leave behind
them, they (re)create their lost homes, to voice their own anguish and
their incomprehension of what had happened; as they do so they also
try to explain to their readers, their fellow-Bengalis in Indian Bengal
who had never experienced exile, what this loss of home meant to
them. The village home, especially in the fertile rural landscape of
East Bengal, was, for the urban Bengali Hindu, their emotional centre
and spiritual home, as well as a powerful pastoral image in Bengali
literature and the Bengali imagination. Writers and readers alike
always acknowledged the economic deprivations, social
backwardness, and the meanness of spirit of rural society; but they
also celebrated it as the source of all familial and social values, the
place where the Bengali returned to celebrate his Hindu festivals. Cut
off forever from this wellspring of the spirit, the essayists are
devastated; striving to discover some kind of meaning in the
fragmented and alienated lives they are now condemned to lead, they
derive their resilience and their social identity through their memories
of home.
The second text is Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines,
published on 1995. This is a novel that can be interpreted in several
different ways, but, like the essays, its basis is the way (or ways) in
which memory (re)constructs the past and the home/homeland. At the
216 Urbashi Barat
core of both, obviously, is the break-up of Bengal, and the consequent

loss of home: a loss that in the novel represents and symbolizes all the
dislocations in the lives of its characters as well as epitomising the
contemporary human situation. Home here, however, is the city
(Dhaka), not the village of the earlier volume. Perhaps that is one
reason why, by contrast with the essays, the novel’s focus is not so
much on the exile’s yearning but on the exilic memory; as the narrator
explains, “for people like my grandmother, who have no home but in
memory, learn to be very skilled in the art of recollection” (Ghosh
1995: 194). Its urban, middle-class characters are twice exiled: from
their roots in the village, the ‘real’ home of all Bengalis (indeed, of all
South Asians) – in Bengali the term desh is applied to both nation and
village home – and the house in the city. Everyone in the novel travels
all the time, over space and time and in the imagination, as though this
will enable them to discover the lost home. Ila’s paternal grandfather
does go back once in a while to his Raibajar house, deep in the (West)
Bengal countryside, but the family’s ties to the ancestral village home
are only tenuous; consequently, they never find or make a home
anywhere else, try as hard as they may. The sense of unbelonging that
the narrator’s Tha’mma (Tha’mma is a popular diminutive of the
Bengali word for grandmother) feels after the loss of her Dhaka home
leads her to locate ‘home’ in the idea of a nation created from blood;
her values and principles, her dreams and her actions, all derive from a
driving need to compensate for her loss in one way or the other. The
redoubtable grandmother’s strident nationalism is thus a sublimation
of her longing for home: a nation for her is a “a family born of the
same pool of blood” sharing a home(land), no matter what religious
community or region its members belong to, for which they can
sacrifice everything (Ghosh 1995: 78). Her idea of the nation is like
her family home in Dhaka, “a very old house” that had “evolved
slowly, growing like a honeycomb, with every generation of Boses
adding layers and extensions, until it was like a huge, lop-sided step-
pyramid, inhabited by so many branches of the family that even the
most knowledgeable amongst them had become a little confused about
their relationships” (1995: 121). Ila’s experience of constant
dislocation, on the other hand, has uprooted her from ‘home’.
Rejecting as stifling the bourgeois world of Calcutta, where she
observes her stay-at-home relatives leading their petty humdrum lives,
she chooses to live in London, where she has spent a part of her
childhood, believing that it will give her the personal freedom she
longs for. In the end, however, she realizes that she can never really be
free of the past, for “the squalor of the genteel little lives she had so
much despised” is very much a part of “the free world she had tried to
build for herself” (1995: 188). Ila’s failure to reconstruct home is due
to her inability to use her imagination, as the narrator points out early
in the novel (1995: 21). Indeed, Tha’mma declares that Ila had no
right to a home in Britain; her ancestors had not given their blood for
it, and so it could never be her nation/desh (1995: 78). By trying to
grab something that could never be hers by right, and thereby refusing
to acknowledge the burden of responsibilities towards ‘home’ that real
freedom means (1995: 89), her great-niece has become “a greedy little
slut” (1995: 79). It is only Tridib, Ila’s uncle and the narrator’s
mentor, and the narrator himself who recognize that ‘home’ exists
outside a specific geographical space; it is an emotional and
imaginative construct that, as Tridib puts it, is born out of “a pure,
painful and primitive desire, a longing for everything that was not in
oneself, a torment of the flesh, that carried one beyond the limits of
one’s mind” (1995: 29).
The novel thus explores the different ways in which home is
remembered, imagined, and re-created by those whose experiences of
continuous displacement, their own and their ancestors’, have
rendered them permanent exiles. The exilic voice here is a female one,
by contrast with the male voice of the essays; it is the voice of
Tha’mma, echoed, eerily distorted, in Ila’s. But both these voices are
heard in and through the memory of the anonymous narrator, who is
male, like the novelist himself (who, it might be interesting to recall,
is the son of a migrant, probashi, Bengali family and who has become
an adhibashi in the U.S. He is thus as much a dislocated person as his
characters.) The contesting notions of what ‘home’ means grow out of
the different responses of individuals, of males and females, to the
physical act of exile from home/homeland, and identify with differing
notions of nationhood. Not surprisingly, the recurrent, and perhaps
central, trope of the novel is the house, just as that of the essays is the
village as idyll/ideal.
There is, then, a continuous tension between male and female
notions of home and nation in the novel. The matter of gender is of
some significance: home/homeland for the Bengali is traditionally
seen in feminine terms, as a maternal figure, with janani, mother, she
who gives birth, and janmabhoomi, birthplace, usually conflated and
described as being even loftier than heaven. Home, then, is a sacral
site, the one space that the colonized male could preserve from the
depredations of the colonial influence: in a patriarchal society,
218 Urbashi Barat
therefore, it is inevitably the location of femininity/femaleness. In

Bengali writing, the woman is frequently seen as the (sole or primary)
upholder of the community’s history and identity; her body is the sign
through which are conducted the interactions and contests between
rival patriarchal concepts and groups.3 In conventional Bengali
literature, therefore, the male might be seen abandoning the female;
never, however, does a mother reject her son. Hence the unnaturalness
of Partition: the mother and the son have been forcibly parted. If the
first essay in The Abandoned Village refers to the soil of the writer’s
village home as his mother (Basu 1975: 1), a later one has the
despairing cry, “Won’t it ever be possible to go back to the lap of the
mother we have left behind? Mother - my motherland - does she really
belong to somebody else now?” (Basu 1975: 257). In Ghosh’s novel,
the violence of Tha’mma’s beliefs about the sanctity of the nation and
the bleakness of Ila’s domestic arrangements in London alike
underscore the reversal of social values that the loss of home involves;
both are women, the perversity of whose ideas, hopes and convictions
mark them out as unfeminine and unnatural. The men, however, from
the narrator, or Tridib, to Shaheb, Tridib’s father, the narrator’s father,
or even Nick, the Englishman Ila marries and in whose house in
London she lived as a little girl, are more passive figures, for whom
what has been lost can be regained only through imaginative
reconstruction, through narrativisation of memory. Any other way will
lead ultimately to death and disaster, as becomes obvious when
Tha’mma tries to bring her uncle ‘home’ from his ‘home’ in Dhaka
and both he and Tridib are killed.
‘Home’ is always an emotive word, but in Bengal it has certain
special associations. Constantly exposed to travel and migration, the
Bengali traditionally distinguishes between where one lives, one’s
house, basha, and where one belongs to, one’s home, bari. Bari, then,
is one’s permanent home, where one’s patrilineal (ironical, perhaps, in
the context of the convention of the maternalisation of home!)
ancestors belonged, the source of one’s identity and family. As
someone from Dhaka remarked in his essay in The Abandoned
Village, “The sacred memory of my ancestors is mixed with [the] soil
[from the village bari]” (Basu 1975: 1). One might live in a basha of
one’s own choosing anywhere, but to be forcibly cut off from one’s
bari, one’s family home, is a much more devastating experience than
to lose one’s basha: it is to lose one’s ties to the past and to the basis
of one’s being. A lamp must be lit every evening in the
family/ancestral village bari (almost invariably by the women of the
family) to signify continuity of family line and of self; not to do so is

to invite the extinction of both. This is why it is so important to the
Bengali that home must constantly be recalled and re-membered; this
is why Partition, destroying as it did one’s ties to the land to which
one belongs, became an act of violation and defilement.
In both The Abandoned Village and The Shadow Lines, memory
is much more than simply a function by which information stored in
the brain is later recalled to consciousness. The experience of exile
brings about in its victims a kind of paramnesia, a conjoining of what
Lacan called Verdrängung, repression, and Verwerfung, repudiation, a
distortion of recall that Salman Rushdie was famously to compare
with the shards of a mirror. This frequently means a retrospective
falsification (when the memory becomes unintentionally or
unconsciously distorted by being filtered through the narrator’s
present emotional, cognitive, and experiential state), a confabulation
(the unconscious filling of gaps in the memory by imagined or untrue
experiences that the narrator believes in), and a recovered memory,
when a repressed experience is brought back to consciousness.
Memory and paramnesia in both The Abandoned Village and The
Shadow Lines work together to empower the exiles to (re)create their
lost spaces, the heterotopias (as Foucault might have called them) of
and from the past that help them to deal with their present. These
‘other spaces’ are at once real places and locations that exist beyond
them; exile engenders a shift in perspective that, as it registers change,
also renders the familiar unfamiliar, the real unreal. Home is the site
of nostalgia as well as of a terror of the unknown; the borders between
the spaces are ‘shadow’ ones, achieving presence only when they are
crossed.
The narrative structure of the exilic memory is very different,
then, from that of history. History recovers events by chronological
narration, by explaining why certain things happened and why they
did so at that particular moment in time. But for both these exilic
narratives, Partition and the loss of home are things that can never be
explained. They can only be experienced as monstrous, and embody
the breakdown of all social values. In essay after essay these refugees
from East Bengal agonize over the loss of innocence and the collapse
of certainties that their forcible departure from home has brought
about. They ask themselves and their readers why it is that they were
forced to leave their villages, why neighbour turned against neighbour
after so many centuries of living harmoniously, even lovingly,
together: “Was our feeling of kinship based on quicksand?” (Basu
220 Urbashi Barat
1975: 156). “Why did the structure of the human mind change so
suddenly?” (1975: 101). “What happened is something ordinary
human beings can never comprehend” (1975: 91). Above all, “[j]ust
one line drawn on a map, and my own home becomes a foreign
country?” (1975: 66).
This is the question that haunts Tha’mma, too, in The Shadow
Lines. She is determined to bring her old uncle, her Jethamoshai,
‘home’ to India when she hears he is still alive in Dhaka: “Imagine
what it must be to die in another country, abandoned and alone in
your old age” (Ghosh 1995: 136; emphasis added). Yet Jethamoshai
knows very well he is in his own home, his own homeland: “As for
me, I was born here, and I’ll die here” (1995: 215). As Tha’mma
applies for an Indian passport, the anomalousness of her own situation
strikes her. She finds it hard to mention Dhaka as her place of birth in
her application, for what was once home to her is now the capital of
East Pakistan, a foreign country. Separated from her home by the
forces of history, Tha’mma finds it difficult to explain “how her place
of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality”
(Ghosh 1995: 152). Before flying to Dhaka she even wonders whether
she will be able to see the border between the two Bengals from the
aircraft, and this apparent ignorance causes much amusement in the
family. Yet Tha’mma is no fool; she is an educated woman, a former
schoolteacher and school principal, who has always been very much
aware of social and political events in the world outside the house.
Her bewilderment, then, sums up the confusion that the conflicting
notions of home and homeland cause: “But if there aren’t any trenches
or anything, how are people to know? I mean, what’s the difference
then? And if there’s no difference, both sides will be the same; it will
be just like it used to be before […]. What was it all for then -
Partition and all the killing and everything - if there isn’t something in
between?” (1995: 151).
Eschewing the straightforward narrative mode of the essays, the
novel loops back and forth in time, linking past to the present, the
partition of Bengal in 1947 to the exilic lives of the present. Like all
Bengali women Tha’mma lost her first home, her paternal home or
baaper bari, when she left it after marriage. Nor did she have the
support of her shoshur bari, father-in-law’s home, which was
expected to fulfil that role for married women and widows. Her
husband worked far away from their native Bengal, in Burma, and he
died too early to provide her with the security of a home of her own.
Partition meant that she could never revisit her baaper bari, and
would have to make do in a one-room tenement in Bhowanipore (a

middle-class Calcutta neighbourhood) until her son grew up and
married, at which time they found other places to live which were
more suitable to her son’s growing professional success. But for all
their apparent comforts these houses are simply bashas that her son
rents; they are very different from her memories of her Dhaka house
and her notions of home. That is why, as she grows older, she
progressively loses interest in her Calcutta locations. She comes back
to her old self only when her obsessive desire to bring her uncle away
from the Dhaka home to India, and the Calcutta house that was still
not home, seems about to be fulfilled. Now she is caught between
memory and belonging, on the one hand, and reality and nationality,
on the other, and loses her sense of place and time: instead of saying
that she would ‘go’ to Dhaka, she says that she would ‘come home’ to
Dhaka. Her young grandson finds her slip very funny, but the adult
narrator realizes that the confusion in his grandmother’s mind between
coming and going, which he had laughed at as a young boy, was not
really her fault: “Every language assumes a centrality, and fixed and
settled point to go away from and come back to, and what my
grandmother was looking for was a word for a journey which was not
a coming or going at all: a journey that was a search for precisely that
fixed point which permits the proper use of verbs of movement”
(1995: 153) – the centrality and fixed point of home.
This is why Jethamoshai refuses to leave his Dhaka home. All
his family, his children and their families have left for India, his house
has been turned into a makeshift motor-cycle-repair shop, and he is
looked after by Muslim squatters who have taken possession of the
house; but, as he has told his sons, he will never leave his home for an
imaginary one in an imaginary India: “I don’t believe in this India-
Shindia. Once you start moving you never stop, he said. It’s all very
well, you’re going away now, but suppose when you get there they
decide to draw another line somewhere? What will you do then?
Where will you move to? No one will have you anywhere” (Ghosh
1995: 215). When Tha’mma tries to remove him from home by force,
he dies on the way from one ‘home’ to another. For the essayists of
The Abandoned Village home was the last and ultimate refuge of all
that they have held sacred: “The village, mingled with the memories
of my forefathers, was a place of pilgrimage for me” (Basu 1975:
241). But now that they have lost it, they have also lost, like the
characters in Shadow Lines, the sense of fixity and certainty that
‘home’, ‘birthplace’ and ‘country/nation’ traditionally have. No
222 Urbashi Barat
wonder, then, that they are bewildered. A writer originally from a

village in Chittagong asks sadly, “The village where my ancestors had
lived for seven generations [a conventional Bengali expression], a
village which is more precious than gold to me, where is it today?”
(Basu 1975: 197). Another person, from Mymensingh, points out the
irony of his situation: “My home is in a country I have no connection
with any more. The house is there, the village is there, the property is
there, but I am homeless” (Basu 1975: 88). A refugee from Kushtia
relates his present condition to that of the goat he had loved as a child
but which he had quite cheerfully given up to be slaughtered as a
sacrifice to the goddess Kali; it sums up for him what has happened to
human relationships in the carnage of Partition (Basu 1975: 239).
Indeed, writer after writer in The Abandoned Village recalls
with nostalgia their emotional bonds with their lost homes. A man
from Barisal recalls how whenever he used to return home for his
holidays it was like going back to his mother’s embrace, which had
helped him to “forget all the insults, suffering and the weariness I had
suffered” in the stifling and depressing atmosphere of his city house
(Basu 1975: 111-2). The essays in The Abandoned Village rewrite, in
fact, the basha/bari opposition into the more conventional one
between town and country: “We are educated; we have tasted the
intoxication of the city. We have lost our caste”. Perhaps that is why
they have been punished today: they can never return home; “The
doors of our return to the village have been shut for ever” (Basu 1975:
68-9). For Tha’mma, too, Ila is a gold-digging whore because she has
consciously rejected home in the margins, for self-exile in the
metropolis, abandoned a world of belonging for one of cultural
dislocation and deracination. Certainly the home that Ila tries to create
for herself with Nick in London gives her only unhappiness and
uncertainty. Because the narrator, like Tridib, does not look for home
outside the imagination he is freer than all the other characters; he
knows that homelessness and dislocation are an integral part of human
experience everywhere.
What is especially interesting is how the Hindu essayists and
the Hindu characters in the novel reconstruct the role of Muslims in
their memories of home; for East Bengal has always been
predominantly Muslim. There is, perhaps surprisingly, less anger than
incomprehension. Tha’mma, for one, knows how much Muslims were
a part of the freedom movement; she remembers with admiration the
silent young Muslim classmate in college who was later discovered to
be actively involved in the violent activities of militant freedom-
fighters. She does not, as she could well have, object to the narrator’s
close friendship with a Muslim boy. But when she thinks of her uncle
and her Dhaka home being looked after by Muslims she cannot accept
it. The underlying distrust between the two communities surfaces in
Dhaka itself, especially when Tridib is killed by a mob there. When
the essayists in The Abandoned Village look back at their Muslim
neighbours, with whom they, too, shared so much through the
generations, there is much affection, but more bewilderment. “We
have lived together for generations, sharing each other’s joys and
sorrows, but did they [their Muslim friends] feel the least regret when
we left? Did it take only one blow of the scimitar of politics to cut off
the ties that had existed from the beginning of time?” (Basu 1975:
235). The writers remember Muslims in their villages as very much a
part of the daily lives of the Bengali Hindu community: “For so long
we Hindus and Muslims have lived together like brothers – we have
always felt a close relationship with everybody [….]. But today?”
(Basu 1975: 258). Living together as brothers, however, means, for
the Hindu, the way in which their Muslim friends and neighbours
participated in Hindu festivals; no-one ever mentions Hindus doing
the same with Muslim celebrations. It is as though the Muslim way of
life had never existed in the Bengali Hindu consciousness. In their
constructions of the lost homeland, the harmony between the two
communities is a given, but the home is fundamentally a Hindu one, in
which the Bengali Muslim might be a respected guest while his
Islamic way of life is treated as irrelevant. Not surprisingly, therefore,
the Bengali Hindu in the essays tends to see the Muslims’ hatred of
them at the time of Partition as inexplicable, fundamentally alien to
the Bengali temperament, and engendered by forces outside Bengal.
Where factual memory is baffled by changes that the essayists
failed to notice were inevitable, Ghosh’s fiction juxtaposes them
against the stories people create about their own lives and by stories
from the individual memory that do not necessarily coincide with
received history. By doing so, he interrogates the meaning of home,
nation and history themselves. For Tha’mma, who lived in Burma and
Calcutta for longer than she lived in Dhaka, it is not Calcutta, but
Dhaka, that was ‘home’. But when she goes home to a city and a
house that is no longer home, she discovers that Partition changed
everything, and asks in anguish, “Where’s Dhaka? I can’t see Dhaka”
(Ghosh 1995: 193). She is more of a foreigner at home than May, the
English girl who did not need a visa to visit Dhaka as she did (1995:
195). When she and Mayadebi, her sister, finally visit their old house
224 Urbashi Barat
they realize that it is no longer home, their home, but an automobile

workshop and a home for numerous Muslim refugees from India.
Indeed, the story of the Partition is a retelling of the story of the
partition of her family home many years ago: just as the traditional
joint family in Bengal was disintegrating under the force of growing
urbanization and individualism, and brother rose against brother in
bitter family strife, so did the two communities who had lived together
so long as brothers, the sons of the same Mother(land). Like warring
brothers in notoriously litigious Bengal, they decided to divide their
parental/family property, the home and the homeland. When
Tha’mma’s ancestral house was partitioned, the two brothers,
Tha’mma’s father and Jethamoshai, insisted on an exact division of
the property, even if it meant that the dividing line went through doors
and an old bathroom commode, just as during the Partition of the
homeland the newly-drawn lines on the map of Bengal literally ran
through homes, dividing them between the two nations, and houses on
the border frequently had their bedroom in one country and their
kitchen in another. As a child Tha’mma saw both the bitterness of the
separation and its strangeness, especially the way the old loyalties to
the family continued when it came to matters of family honour and
pride, such as arranging marriages. She made up stories then for her
little sister about the other side of the house, stories of an upside-down
world, which provided a source of endless fascination and amusement
for the two little girls, even as she knew she belonged there just as it
continued to belong to her part of the house in spite of the division.
The recurring metaphor of the mirror in the novel, reflecting and
distorting experience of past and present, of people and places,
underscores the skewed relationship between memory and fact.
Thus, during the 1964 Hindu-Muslim riots in Calcutta,
following the theft of the Prophet’s hair from the Hazratbal Mosque in
Srinagar, the schoolboy narrator suddenly finds his best friend Mantu
(Mansur) transformed into an enemy, the Governments of India and
Pakistan trading symmetrical accusations, and the people on both
sides of the border reacting with an identical sense of horror and
outrage. Many Muslims in East Pakistan gave shelter to Hindus, just
as many Hindus in India helped their Muslim neighbours. As a college
student, however, the narrator finds the day’s violence in Calcutta
forgotten in histories and archives. When, at last, he discovers a
mention of the riots in Bengal in the old newspapers, it is of one in
Khulna (erstwhile East Pakistan), not in Calcutta; he finds out then
how Tridib, whose mirror-image he was supposed to be, was killed by
a mob in Dhaka in the same riots that engulfed Calcutta, and realizes
that there is always something that will connect Calcutta to Dhaka,
Bengali to Bengali. Even in their self-destructive violence the people
of East and West Bengal exhibit their common inheritance and
kinship, just as the families of Tha’mma’s father and Jethamoshai had
always done. As Foucault remarks of the heterotopia, which he
describes as a mirror: “The space in which we live, which draws us
out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our
history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a
heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void,
inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live
inside a void that could be coloured with diverse shades of light, we
live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible
to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another”
(Foucault 1986: 23).
These remarks are equally applicable to the stories about home
by the anonymous essayists of the earlier volume: ‘home’ is in the
imagination as a constant symbol of loss. The heterotopic mirror,
moreover, enables both the essayists and Ghosh’s narrator to see
themselves where they are absent, in the memory and the imagination,
even as it removes them from where they are and puts them inside
their reflections. In Ghosh’s novel, of course, it is not only the narrator
or his mentor who do so: the characters image each other through their
imaginations and their shared pasts: the narrator and Ila, Tridib and
Nick, the families of the Basus, the Datta-Chaudhuris, the Tresawsens
and the Prices, Tha’mma and Mayadebi, Tha’mma and Ila, Tha’mma
and the narrator’s mother, and so on. As they construct stories and
histories about each other they constantly go back to their conceptions
of ‘home’ and to Tha’mma’s memories of the upside-down house in
Dhaka, for that is where it all starts: the removal from place. The
ferocity with which the grandmother defends her home and its values
is clearly a part of the alienation and the disorientation that are
themselves the products of exile; the fluidity of borders that Tridib
and the narrator experience are also born of their dislocation from
home. For the essayists, too, what remains of their ‘home’ is nostalgia
and yearning, a sense of loss that can be overcome only through
narration. As in The Shadow Lines, the narrative of the exilic memory
helps to rebuild what has been temporally and spatially destroyed, not
simply by recapturing the past but also by creating a new one, whether
or not that has anything in common with historical accounts. After all,
as the narrator himself points out, “a place does not merely exist, [but]
226 Urbashi Barat
has to be invented in one’s imagination” (Ghosh 1995: 21). In both

The Abandoned Village and The Shadow Lines the re-membered home
ensures that the past continues into the present, making the condition
of exile permanent, irrevocable, and universal.
Notes
1
The original term for the Bengali migrant was probashi, one who lives outside his
home(land); as ‘homeland’ now encompasses more than Bengal, and includes the
whole of India (or Bangladesh for Bengalis from East Bengal), Bengalis settled
‘outside’ India/Bangladesh are called adhibashis.
2
All quotations from the text are my own translations. I am indebted to Dipesh
Chakrabarty’s article, ‘Remembered Villages: Representations of Hindu-Bengali
Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition’ in Mushirul Hasan (ed.) Inventing
Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of India (N. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2002), for an introduction to this book, which now appears to be out of print.
3
See Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), and Veena Das, Critical
Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1995).
Bibliography
Basu, Dakshinaranjan (ed.). 1975. Chhere Asha Gram. Calcutta: Ananda Publishers.
Bhabha, Homi J. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.
Foucault, Michel. 1986. ‘Text/Context of Other Space’ in Diacritics 16(1): 22-27.
Ghosh, Amitav. 1995. The Shadow Lines. New. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Walcott, Derek. 1992. ‘The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory’. Nobel Prize
Lecture. December 7, 1992. On line at: www.nobel.se/literature/ laureates/
1992/walcott-lecture.html (consulted 05.05.2002).
25
Film Excerpts: A Taste of Place: Stories of Food and

Longing
Shuchi Kothari and Sarina Pearson
Shuchi Kothari was born in Ahmedabad, India. She studied and lived
in Austin, Texas for seven years, before moving to New Zealand in
1997. She writes film scripts for the film industries in India, New
Zealand, and the United States. She is a lecturer in the Department of
Film, Television & Media Studies at the University of Auckland.
Sarina Pearson was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and has lived in
Canada, the United States, and New Zealand. She has produced films
and currently lectures in the Department of Film, Television & Media
Studies at the University of Auckland. Sarina and Shuchi run Nomadz
Unlimited, a small production company committed to fostering new
talent and producing provocative work.
The brief excerpts presented on the accompanying DVD are taken
from the film A Taste of Place: Stories of Food and Longing (2001),
directed by Susan Pointon, written and presented by Shuchi Kothari
and produced by Sarina Pearson. In this film, Kothari talks to
immigrants to New Zealand from the Pacific nation of Niue, from
former Yugoslavia, from India, from China, and from Ethiopia about
what it means to them to prepare the food typical of their mother
countries in their adopted country, using ingredients which often only
approximate the original materials. As she watches (and helps) them
cook, she reflects on the complex psychological and social processes
at work. Preparing traditional foods is one of the most powerful means
for migrants to maintain their collective identity and links with the
homeland, especially when the food is consumed in a communal
setting. Primal emotions of longing, and sorrow over what has been
lost, are tempered by a range of other feelings, including pride at
having adapted to a new environment. While, in most cases, the
people Kothari meets prefer not to discuss the trials they have
experienced on camera, their stories reveal instances of discrimination
or exclusion related specifically to their food. In particular, they meet
official prohibitions on the importing of certain ingredients and on
methods of outdoor cooking, as well as dislike among neighbours for
alien cooking smells. Nevertheless, as Kothari comments, many locals
enjoy eating at ‘ethnic’ restaurants, even if they show little interest in
the welfare or culture of the migrants whose dishes are served there.
The excerpts presented on the DVD show Eyerusalem Atalay, a recent
Ethiopian immigrant, roasting coffee in the traditional way over a
228 Shuchi Kothari and Sarina Pearson
small coal brazier and preparing meat and pancake dishes for an
Ethiopian community celebration. A war-widow, who speaks little
English, she came to New Zealand with her two small daughters via
exile in Sudan, where she ran a successful restaurant, while her sons
remain in Ethiopia.
See DVD
26
Food and the Exile

Hilary Funnell
Hilary Funnell was born in New Zealand and lives in Auckland

where she is completing her Masters in English Literature. A life-
long passion for food and cooking, coupled with her foreign travel
experiences, and the fact that she lives in a particularly migrant-rich
area, have resulted in a fascination with the cultural function of food
as a marker of identity.
In this paper she examines the ways in which food bridges the old
and new lives of exiles, enabling them to remain connected to their
past while also constituting a language with which to negotiate their
presence in the host country, and ultimately choose to what degree
they become a part of their new culture.
From the moment of arriving in a new country, exiles are forced to

think of themselves in a different light. In a new land one suddenly
becomes ‘Other’ and things previously taken for granted assume a
fresh significance. As the exiled Iranian writer Mahnaz Afkhami
observes: “through the disruption of the given and the accepted, the
exile experience brings into focus the sources on which the self is
composed and structured” (Afkhami 2003). Everyday practices such
as dress, language, manners, and food become points of difference
and visibility and, sometimes, sites of discrimination; they may
become redundant or unacceptable or merely, in the case of food,
unavailable. What was once simply ‘home’ is now ‘Home’; rituals
take on more significance, meals become an expression and
affirmation of culture and a celebration of group ties rather than just
an opportunity for sustenance.
Whether exiled voluntarily or by force, exiles share a common
sense of loss which is often reiterated most acutely through food.
Margaret Morse writes that “food is often considered ‘a lived
metaphor of culture itself’” (quoted in Khoo 2002: 204); in exile it
also becomes a symbol of the exilic struggle to adapt to a new life. It
is impossible to overestimate the importance of food, both physically
and culturally – in the words of anthropologists Counihan and Van
230 Hilary Funnell
Esterik: “food touches everything” (1997: 1). Through it we

experience and express hardship, estrangement, loss, comfort, love,
creativity, power, nostalgia, and, of course, exile. This paper focuses
on the ways in which food, for exiles, functions as a bridge between
their old culture and their new life; allowing exiles to remain
connected – as much as possible – to their old life, through the
relationships sustained by shared meals and the memories invoked by
smells and tastes. It also examines the way food constitutes a
language with which to negotiate one’s presence in the host culture,
allowing exiles to choose between identifying solely with their
original culture, and reinventing themselves in the new one.
*
[T]he sense of ourselves has always been located […] in the idea of
roots, the idea of coming from a place, the idea of inhabiting a kind
of language which you have in common and the kind of social
convention within which you live. And then what happens to the
migrant is that they lose all three […] and they find themselves in a
new place, a new language. And so they have to reinvent a sense of
self […]. (Rushdie 1987: 63)
Rushdie’s words refer to language as it is conventionally understood,

however, the ‘language’ he refers to could equally be that of food.
Not only does food have its own language of preparation but, as we
have seen, it can articulate a multitude of meanings. Roland Barthes
terms food an “alimentary language” which he describes, after
Saussure, as subject to the rules regulating any signifying system, and
which he breaks down into the abstract, non-specific “food” and its
performative aspect (Barthes 1964: s.p.).
The abstract ‘food’ is the langue in Saussurean terms, “the
system or totality of language shared by the ‘collective
consciousness’” (Cuddon 1999: 449); it comprises the rules (or
‘grammar’) governing its use. This grammar consists of “rules of
exclusion”, operated by taboos such as kosher or halal laws,
“signifying oppositions”, such as savoury and sweet or raw and
cooked , “rules of association”, which operate at dish level or at menu
level, and “rituals of use” which function as “alimentary rhetoric”
(Barthes 1964: s.p.). All of these function at a social level, “the
individual cannot by himself either create or modify [the langue]; it is
essentially a collective contract which one must accept in its entirety
if one wishes to communicate” (Barthes 1964: s.p.).
Food and the Exile 231
Where food is concerned, this means exiles must choose

between living within their customary langue and reinventing
themselves within the new. As Andrew Buckser writes, “while
culturally constructed, food must be consumed physically by
individuals; thus eating always involves an individual choice about
connection with a group” (1999: 192). On the one hand exiles can
maintain their connection to the langue of their cultural community,
thus emphasising their otherness in the host culture and resisting
assimilation; on the other hand they can adopt the langue of the host
culture in order to communicate within that society and reduce their
otherness. Obviously, there are degrees of integration, the two
langues are not completely exclusive although one will naturally
dominate; however, where diet is concerned it is not always possible
to be ‘bilingual’. Put very simply, exiles whose food preferences are
very different from those of their host country, or those who observe
strict dietary laws, for example orthodox Jews, cannot easily be
invited to dinner where these laws or tastes are not followed, thereby
excluding them from a great deal of social interaction within the host
culture.
Buckser describes the Jewish community of Denmark which is
so fully integrated that, despite seeing dietary laws as “one of the few
symbolic systems […] through which [they] can express their Jewish
identity” (1999: 195), many Jews choose not to keep kosher outside
their homes, recognizing that “being simply a Dane among other
Danes, cannot coexist with a forthright observance of Jewish dietary
rules” (1999: 197). Clearly this is no longer a community in exile;
however, the dilemma confronting Danish Jews is similar to that
faced by other exiles intent on merging with their host culture; the
question it poses is “which comes first, the imperatives of
conviviality implicit in one's Danishness, or the food taboos implicit
in one's Jewishness? How far is one willing to transgress one identity
in order to keep step with the other?” (1999: 197). The solution for
many of these Jews is to regard kosher laws as non-applicable outside
their home, minimizing their difference in the wider community and
making their “Jewishness a private identity” (1999: 197).
The compromise devised by the Danish Jews is motivated by
the desire to avoid disrupting the dual identities they enjoy. Other
exiles who are more visible and less accepted by the host culture are
compelled to deny their own foodways in an effort to communicate
their desire to belong. For this reason, children of exiles will very
often demand the food that their peers eat as a way of blending in. As
232 Hilary Funnell
Bell and Valentine point out, consuming western food, particularly

for young people, is “a way of exhibiting some control over their own
bodies and of articulating their hybrid identities” (1997: 43).
André Aciman asks “how do you – indeed can you ever –
rebuild a home? What kinds of shifts must take place for a person to
acquire, let alone accept, a new identity, a new language?” (1999:
14). By choosing to make the fundamental shift in their dietary habits
that eating the host food often requires, exiles are attempting to
anchor themselves to their new home and regain the sense of place
and identity which is lost in the process of exile. The sense of
‘rootedness’ that they seek is what Simone Weil described as
“perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human
soul” (quoted in Said 1994: 146); by inhabiting a new language of
food the exile can recover a sense of home.
However, diet is not always a matter of choice for exiles, and
has often been inflicted on societies by colonising powers, or on
people exiled as slaves. When Goa, in India, was colonised by the
Portuguese in the sixteenth century, the Goans were forcibly
converted to Christianity; consequently their diet changed from
Hindu vegetarianism to a meat-based diet which permitted alcohol.
Slaves in the Southern American states and in the Caribbean were
given the foods which their oppressors rejected; in the American
South these were pig parts such as intestines, tripe, trotters, and so on,
which are described by African-American writer Donnell Alexander
as “massa’s garbage” (2003). In each situation, the only recourse
available to the exiles, apart from starving, was to embrace the food
forced upon them and make it distinctly their own. As a result,
descendants of these exiles inherit an alimentary language which
speaks of their ancestors’ oppression, whilst also expressing home
and comfort. However, like any colonised population forced to speak
their coloniser’s language, this language becomes part of who they
are and how they express themselves; to reject it is to lose part of
themselves. This dilemma is expressed by Jennifer Iré, writing of her
Trinidadian origins:
I found out that some of the favourite foods of my people came from
the creation of the ‘slave diet’ by Europeans and are therefore an
artifice of slavery. […]. My ancestors were fed denatured food, salted
meat and fish and condensed milk, and we came to treasure these
foods as our heritage. On first learning this history of the foods I
loved […] I had a dilemma. I could not stomach the food and yet I
craved the food. (1997: 255-256)
Iré goes on to explain how, unable to bear losing part of her heritage,
she instead learned to celebrate the food of her ancestors as a symbol
of her foremothers’ creativity and wisdom and of their ability to
create an identity, through food, that endures.
The essential, sustaining nature of food is repeatedly invoked
in the imagery used to describe the exilic experience. Amy Kaminsky
describes Cortázar as an “expatriate who was always nourished by
the language and presence of his Argentina” (1999: 10); Mary
McCarthy writes of exiles “wasting away” and being “deprived of
sustenance” without news from home, “hungry for scraps of rumour”
or “thirsting for news” (1994: 50). Other exiles write of overcoming
exile as a process of being “melted down in the common pot”
(Avakian 1997: 229). The fact that these metaphors are universally
recognisable ensures their effectiveness. References to a food
commonly associated with their culture are often employed as
pejorative labels for the exile, reducing them to a universally
understood concept (food) and presumably reducing their perceived
threat; Indians become ‘curry-munchers’, Pacific Islanders become
‘coconuts’, Hispanics are referred to with variations on ‘burrito-
brain/head’. Exiles themselves have food-related labels for their
assimilated compatriots, such as ‘banana – yellow on the outside,
white on the inside’.
*
Many migrant groups maintain their previous cultures and lifestyles
in their countries of adoption, often insisting that their children do the
same. But this is by way of acclimatising to their new situation,
creating a bridge between the past and the present they had opted for
[…]. My parents did not choose to leave Palestine and they never
willingly acquiesced in its loss. They […] [saw] England as […] a
staging post on a route that only pointed back […]. My father’s finest
achievements […] were in fact the bridges he built to connect him to
the past, to Palestine’. (Karmi 1999: 60)
Some exiles, such as Ghada Karmi’s family, maintain their traditions

in an attempt to repair this rupture and resist the new culture, living
as if nothing has changed and as if their presence there is temporary.
Other exiles use food as a bridge between their old culture and their
new life – looking both ways, as it were. Some use food as a means
of survival in the host culture and a bridge beyond exile.
Ghada Karmi’s family were exiled from Palestine to London in
1949. Karmi’s article describes how her mother maintained her
family’s cultural identity at all costs, interacting only with other
234 Hilary Funnell
Arabs, speaking no English and, despite the difficulty and expense of

obtaining ingredients, cooking only traditional food. Her
determination not to become part of British society extended to her
refusal to have heating or a fridge, as Karmi writes, “succumbing to
the refrigerator would for her have symbolized her acceptance of the
European way of life” (1999: 56). In the film A Taste of Place (see
number 25 above) the Ethiopian woman Eyerusalem exhibits a
similar resistance to her new life in New Zealand, due in part, no
doubt, to having left children behind in Africa. Eyerusalem speaks no
English and keeps the link to her old life alive by cooking traditional
foods and by making her (Ethiopian) coffee the traditional way, on a
small charcoal burner in her living room. The round-bottomed, metal
coffee pot that she uses is an evocative symbol of her attitude to her
new life – by not using her treasured earthenware pot, which is from
Ethiopia, and which she fears will get broken, she ensures that the
coffee she makes here is never quite the same or as good as the coffee
made at ‘home’.
The most poignant instances of food being used as a bridge to
the past occur in extreme circumstances during which food becomes
a means to resist oppression. David Sutton writes of exiles in brutal
situations such as concentration camps, using memories of food to
“defy dehumanisation and to dream of the past and of the future”
(2001: 167). During the Second World War, Jewish women in the
Terezin Concentration Camp surreptitiously compiled a book of their
favourite recipes in an attempt to resist the despair of being in the
camps and to keep alive the memory of what they had to live for.
Cara De Silva, editor of the now-published book (In Memory’s
Kitchen, 1996), explains: “food is such a powerful identity marker
[…], a central part of who we are” (De Silva 1996); by remembering
special meals and the celebrations they are associated with, she says,
“you are reinforcing who you are in the face of those who want to
annihilate you and your culture and your traditions, and everything
about you […]” (1996). Sutton also writes of concentration camp
internees who elected to fast for religious reasons, or who formed
bread into chess pieces rather than eating it, and in so doing preserved
their dignity and, ironically, unwittingly gave themselves a better
chance of survival than those who were totally subjugated by their
need for food (Sutton 2001: 167).
*
[…] in der heym at home
where she does everything to keep
yidishkayt alive
yidishkayt a way of being

Jewish always arguable
in mark where she buys
di kartofl un khalah
(yes, potatoes and challah)
di kartofl the physical counter-

part of yidishkayt
mit tsibeles with onions

that bring trern tsu di oygn
tears to her eyes when she sees
how little it all is
veyniker un veyniker
less and less […]
(Irena Klepfisz in Keenan and Lloyd 1990: 29 -30)
The food writer Claudia Roden, herself a one-time exile, writes in her
Book of Jewish Food that “dishes are important because they are a
link with the past, a celebration of roots, a symbol of continuity. They
are a part of immigrant culture which survives the longest” (1996:
11). The dishes that Roden refers to represent the Jewish way of life;
they have been maintained in many Jewish communities as a link to
the past. As the extract from Irena Klepfisz’s poem suggests, even in
times of hardship, food has been the physical manifestation of the
Jewish way of life. Many Jewish recipes symbolise events in Jewish
history or reflect the mobility of Jewish populations. Even in
integrated communities, like that of the Danish Jews, they constitute
an important acknowledgement of history and group bonds and are a
feature of celebrations. Eva Hoffman writes that “for Jews, in their
long Diaspora, the need to preserve the symbolic centre in an
indifferent world…often led them to insulate themselves from their
surroundings, to retreat to their community as a place of refuge and
spiritual fortress” (Hoffman 1999: 53). In communities which are
more vulnerable and which do not enjoy the same long and peaceful
residence as the Danes,1 holding on to the past through food and
dietary laws represents “culinary conservatism” (Gabaccia 1998: 9),
which offers a way of maintaining control over one’s life as an exile
236 Hilary Funnell
and of strengthening group bonds and, as Sneja Gunew writes,

resisting being “overwhelmed and assimilated” (Gunew 2000: 228).
*
[…] when you mourn a loved one, you wish more than anything to be
[…] with others who share your sense of loss. I sought mostly the
company of other exiled Iranians […].We remembered tastes, smells,
sounds. We knew that no fruit would ever have the pungent aroma
and the luscious sweetness of the fruit in Iran that the sun would
never shine so bright […]. (Afkhami 1994: 6)
Meals were elaborate affairs to which much care and attention were
given […]. Long white cloths were spread on the lush carpets. Huge
round trays were carried from the kitchen […]. Numerous dishes of
saffron rice, meat and vegetable stews, fresh herbs and cheese and
bread were placed in the middle of the sofreh […]. (Azar Salamat in
Afkhami 1994: 80)
I wish for the night

Dark as a pith of date;
Ripe as a pith of date;
Sweet as a pith of date.
(Mishra 2002: 15)
Reading the work of exiled writers (particularly that of women), one

is struck by the presence of food, either in nostalgic memories of
lavish meals, as in the extract from Azar Salamat, or used as
metaphors for the motherland, as in Sudesh Mishra’s description of
Palestine. The hyperbole that thrives in these works, as the extract
from Mahnaz Afkhami demonstrates, is a feature of nostalgia’s
reconstruction of the past as an ideal place. As Suzanne Vromen
describes it, nostalgia recalls “a world from which pain has been
removed” (qtd. in Spitzer 1998: 378); food nostalgia typically recalls
meals associated with the freedom and innocence of childhood or the
abundance of celebration; it also recreates a time of unity before the
community or family bonds were ruptured by exile, and before
identity was blurred by hybridity.
*
[…] inside that moment
which comes to be, when we remember,
at the only centre where it has always been,
an aproned figure stands kneading, ripe
with yeast, her children at her skirts.

(Pattiann Rogers in Keenan and Lloyd 1990: 75)
What is clear from exilic writing is that food, whether actual or

remembered, represents home and safety for the exile. Hamid Naficy
writes that “a smell, a sound, or a taste suddenly and directly sutures
one to a former house or home and to cherished memories of
childhood” (1999: 6); Amy Kaminsky describes “all the familiar
landmarks of home – food smells, […] the sounds of a familiar
language […] the kinetic knowledge of a place that is your home,
where you can feel safe[…]” (Kaminsky 1999: 11), that are the first
casualties of exile. This safe place is often associated with the hearth,
the centre of the house, symbolising the mother who is the traditional
source of food and comfort; this is illustrated by Pattiann Roger’s
poem, and Diana Der Hovanessian’s poem ‘Without You I Am’, the
middle lines of which read: “home without hearth/ hearth without
fire/ fire without fuel” (Keenan and Lloyd 1990: 47). This imagery is
amplified by the use of metaphors of nurturing to refer to the exile’s
native land such as ‘motherland’, and ‘provider of plenty’, the
construction of the motherland “as a warm, cornucopian breast from
which people selectively seek nourishment” (De Souza 2004) and the
figuring of language as ‘the mother-tongue’. Kaminsky points out
that ‘mother’ in Lacanian theory is “figured as place”, and
“rootedness” constitutes the “integration of self and place” (1999:
59). “This”, says Kaminsky, “echoes the position of the child before
separation from the mother and before entry into language” (1999:
59). Therefore, the attempt to reconnect with the motherland by
cooking or remembering the food from one’s past, has at its heart a
desire to mend our first ‘exile’ from the body of the mother.
The exile, as Edward Said has written, is someone who exists

in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor
fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half involvements, half
detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, an adept mimic
or a secret outcast on another. (Said 1994: 36)
As a bridge between cultures, food becomes a blend of the old and

the new, a reflection of the exile’s evolving identity in what Said
terms the ‘median state’ of exile. In this state the ‘speech’ or parole
of the exile’s alimentary language becomes a tool for adaptation to
238 Hilary Funnell
the new culture. While langue is the ‘grammar’ of language, parole is

its performative aspect; it encompasses recipes and cooking methods
which are subject to endless variation by both groups and individuals.
Menus represent the coincidence of langue and performance. It is the
parole of food that allows exiles ‘play’ in the production of meals –
and it is their presence in a foreign culture that demands it.
One of the first hurdles the exile faces on arrival in a new
country is obtaining familiar ingredients. They may be difficult or
impossible to find or they may be over-priced, forcing the exile to use
substitutes where available, or to go without. Eyerusalem, the
Ethiopian woman in the film A Taste of Place, is shown making
traditional pancakes for which she has had to use a replacement flour,
with the result that they are ‘not as good’ as the ‘real’ ones. Every
time Eyerusalem makes these pancakes she is reminded of where she
is – ‘not home’ – and of where she is from – ‘not here’. However, as
Panikos Panayi points out, it is not just the lack of familiar foods, but
the presence of unfamiliar and unpalatable foods that symbolise
absence from the exile’s homeland (Panayi 2002: 47). The Niuean
family in the same film sometimes use canned peaches instead of
papaya in their special celebratory taro dish; they also have to cook
the dish in an electric oven rather than an umu, or earth oven, as is
traditional.2 Despite this, these substitutions serve to make the
resultant dish more significant – it is both a symbol of their readiness
to adapt and of the difficulties they have had to overcome. It is worth
noting that changes to the diet of exiles in their host country are not
always negative. Exiles who have come from refugee camps or
impoverished or war torn areas very often find the selection and
availability of food in the host culture a huge improvement. Foods
that were previously out of reach can now be consumed regularly;
David Simpson writes of migrants in this situation developing meat-
heavy diets based on their social aspirations in their home country
(1999: 161).
The expatriate Bulgarian writer Kapka Kassabova states that
she “writes English with an accent”.3 This comment is an apposite
analogy for the cooking of exiles as, once they have adapted their
recipes to local conditions, they are, indeed, cooking with an accent
of their new culture. Exiles who eat local food frequently use the
condiments of their own cooking to make the food more palatable, in
this case, cooking with their own accent. The presence of exiled
populations will very often make itself felt, eventually, through its
influence on the local food: through restaurants, imported ingredients
and so on. This may be as simple as a brief fashion for using the spice
sumac or as pervasive as the adoption of stir-frying techniques;
whichever it is, the exile’s food could be said to have ‘contaminated’
the local cuisine. In much the same way that (in the words of Trudy
Agar, this volume: 187) a language can be ‘contaminated’ by another
and be made “dynamic and heterogeneous”, so the local cuisine
becomes “enriched, charged with fresh images, bathed in warm rivers
and marinated in new spices, sometimes piquant, sometimes mild”
(Agar, this volume: 187). This influence on local food can ease
acceptance of the exile in the host culture; as Sneja Gunew writes:
“the notion of multiculturalism as food” is usually the most readily
acceptable form of cultural difference (Gunew 2000: 227).
Interestingly, while the host language and food eventually replace or
alter the language and food of the exile, it is generally only the host
food that is similarly affected.
*
“I wish they liked us as much as they like our curries” “[actually],
they like their version of our curry” (words of a Pakistani taxi-driver
in the film A Taste of Place, an excerpt of which is included in the
accompanying DVD – see number 25, this volume)
As a bridge beyond exile, food represents a means of survival and the

opportunity for many exiles to prosper and become part of the
community. However, I question whether the exile and the exile’s
food don’t lose both something vital in the process, becoming a
hybrid of their two cultures which is never free of a sense of
otherness.
To return to the analogy of food as a language, the
performance, or ‘text’ of food, like any other language, can be
deconstructed, after Derrida, in order to demonstrate that it says
“something quite different from what it appears to be saying and
…may be read as carrying a plurality of significance… at variance
with… a single stable meaning” (Cuddon 1999: 210). Exiles who
operate restaurants in their host country (as very many do) produce
food which speaks of authenticity and exoticism to their customers
but which, in reality, tells a tale of hardship and adaptation and, very
likely, inauthenticity.
Some critics describe this inauthenticity as a deliberate holding
back which allows ethnic restaurateurs some agency in the marketing
of their national cuisine, while preserving at least some part of it for
themselves. Others describe it as a bastardisation forced on the
240 Hilary Funnell
producer by the demands of the host culture for cheap, fast meals that
come in a choice of ‘mild, medium or hot’. Bell and Valentine write
of the process of “acculturation and hybridisation” (1997: 116) by
which ethnic food is “water[ed] down” through its exposure to the
host cuisine, until the food available in ethnic restaurants is very
often “removed from its original form and meaning”(1997: 116).
According to Kaminsky, some see this hybridisation as
“reprehensible and transgressive” (1999: 96); others, such as Gunew,
see it as a “form of internalized subjugation which characterizes
power relations in diaspora” (2000: 228). Sau-ling Wong writes of
“food pornographers” who make “a living by exploiting the ‘exotic’
aspects of [their] ethnic foodways” (quoted in Khoo 2000: 204), a
process which Samir Gandesha describes as reducing “the Other to
the status of the ‘other’, as what is simply the antithesis of Western
identity” (quoted in Gunew 2000: 228). The result of this is a blurring
of cuisines and ethnic identities to meet the misconceptions of the
host consumer; Anne Kershen writes of Pakistani-run restaurants
purporting to be Indian because that is the assumed origin of ‘curry’,
and of non-traditional dishes, like Chicken Tikka Masala, which have
become a feature of Indian menus around the Western world (2002:
5); in addition, traditionally regional cuisines like those of China and
India are presented as homogenous entities. A Taste of Place
highlighted the prevalence of ‘fusion cuisine’ in Auckland restaurants
– an often meaningless and fashion-driven amalgamation of different
cuisines which Gabaccia aptly labels “ciao mein” (1998: 216).
The sale and consumption of ethnic food has its own set of
power relations. Not only does it provide an opportunity for the
western diner to symbolically ‘consume the other’, on a societal level
as well as individually, but it allows the provider of the food to
subvert the host/guest relationship to which he/she is subject as an
exile. This is particularly true of restaurants which cater chiefly for
their own cultural group where a westerner might be confronted with
unfamiliar food and a language barrier and briefly experience what it
is to be foreign. However, Kershen suggests that, in some ethnic
restaurants, the newly configured host/guest opposition becomes one
of master/servant and asks if western diners “experience any empathy
with those who are cooking and serving their food or are their
xenophobic sentiments heightened by being served by members of an
ethnic minority?” (2002: 6).
*
'An accent marks the lag between two cultures, two languages, the
space where you let go of one identity, invent another, and end up
being more than one person though never quite two'. (Aciman 1999:
10)
I have examined food as a language that bridges the different stages

of the exile’s adaptation (or resistance) to a new culture and to the
state of exile. Food serves as both a route back to the old culture and
a means of reinventing oneself in the new. Although it offers the
promise of a bridge beyond the state of exile, I question whether
exiles can ever really liberate themselves from this state, or whether
they simply swap one form of exile for another. Eventually exiles and
their food assume a hybrid identity that is both more exotic than the
host culture and less ‘authentic’ than the original: witness the
ubiquitous spring roll for sale in non-Asian cafés. Aciman claims that
the exile can never be completely one thing or another; each aspect of
the exile's identity is accented by the other, as with his/her cooking.
Exiles may lose their sense of loss for their homeland, but they never
completely lose their otherness in the host culture. As Rina
Ferrarelli’s poem below suggests, exiles are always outside the
‘interior’, forever exiled to the ‘border town’ of their aspiration to
belong.
Emigrant/Immigrant II
A slight accent.
Forming
each phrase before
delivery
and never a slur.
Checking
every move,
prepared
for all contingencies.
Close,
yet not quite.
Insisting
on a knife and fork
when your fingers
would do as well.
Almost there.
The place sighted,
But out of reach.
Destined never to cross
242 Hilary Funnell
Into the interior.

A bridge, a border town.
(Keenan and Lloyd 1990: 62)
Notes
1
According to Buckser, practically the entire Jewish population of Denmark was
saved from the Nazis by a spontaneous effort on the part of the Danes.
2
They do have an umu, but it is big enough to cook for 250-300 people, clearly too
large for their family Sunday lunch.
3
Kapka Kassabova, e-mail to the author, 02 February 2004.
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27
The Other Side of Exile: Malaysian Writers Who

Stayed Behind
Zawiah Yahya
Zawiah Yahya was, until her retirement in 2004, a professor of

postcolonial studies and critical theory at the School of Language
Studies and Linguistics, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia where she
also served as Head of Department and Dean. Her early education at
home in Malaysia was largely based on the British system, a tradition
which continued through her BA and MA in English literature at
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her sense of
academic displacement began on her return home to a changing
postcolonial landscape in which English was marginalized by the
education policies of the day. Later, it was her doctoral research in
postcolonial studies at the University of Nottingham that provided her
with an academic mission which finally gave her professional
relevance in her own country. Since then, she has published books and
papers that reflect this struggle. Her Resisting Colonialist Discourse
(1994) signals an important intellectual departure from the English
tradition of her early formative years.
In this paper she examines the contribution of Malaysian writers in
English who stayed behind at a time when others went into self-exile.
Post-independence conditions in Malaysia after 1957 and, in
particular, government policies on language and education drove
many writers in English to migrate to English-speaking countries such
as Canada, Australia, and the USA. But those who chose to stay
behind continued to practise their craft in English, in an environment
that was far from ideal, and yet were able to produce powerful
narratives and poetry out of their engagement with the tensions of
their time. This paper assesses their contributions to a postcolonial
nation in the process of becoming, as well as the role they can play
today, 45 years on, at a time when a change in policy is bringing about
the re-entry of literature in English into the national curriculum.
This paper is concerned with the poetics of survival, for writers who
chose to stay when others went into self-exile. Malaysia’s post-
Independence policies on language and education drove a few writers
in English to English-speaking countries. Other writers such as Lloyd
Fernando, K.S. Maniam, Wong Phui Nam, and Lee Kok Liang chose
246 Zawiah Yahya
to stay to continue to practise their craft under circumstances that were

far from ideal; yet they were able to produce powerful narratives and
poetry out of their engagement with the tensions of their time. In the
process, they gave literature in English a local habitation and a name.
Much that happened in Malaysia after Independence in 1957
made English-language writers feel alienated and marginalised. The
language policy that made Malay the national language, the concept of
national literature as literature written in the national language, and
the state patronage it enjoyed by virtue of this status, gave some
English-language writers life-long grievances. Some left the country
and became extra-territorial and diasporic. Some stayed behind to
work out their angst. Some aligned themselves with the state agenda
for nation-building while others remained, “unaccommodated,
discontented, internal exiles” (Quayum and Wicks 2001: 155).
What happened in Malaysia also happened elsewhere in the
postcolonial countries of Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian
subcontinent. Since Independence in 1957, language policies in
Malaysia have become nationalist in orientation. The Malaysian
government began the process of displacing English from its pedestal
and replacing it with the Malay language as the national medium. The
process had actually been initiated earlier, in the twilight of British
rule in 1951, with the Barnes Committee Report which recommended
the institution of a national school system, with Malay as the main
medium of instruction.
This was followed in 1956 by the Abdul Razak Report and the
National Language Act of 1967 requiring the full conversion of all
English primary and secondary schools to the national medium by
1978, and tertiary education by 1983. The establishment in 1970 of
Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) as Malaysia’s first fully
Malay-medium university was the climax of the nationalist dream.
English was relegated to the position of second language, although all
public universities have always provided English proficiency courses
and made a pass in English compulsory for getting a degree.
The development of language policy is a significant dimension
of the postcolonial condition, which is characterized by a desire to
chart a common destiny and define a common identity. This has
become necessary because, somewhere in our colonial past, when
Great Britain launched her civilizing mission, her empire-builders
created the image of their own language, culture, and literature as
features of a superior civilization. Now, after Independence, ex-
The Other Side of Exile: Malaysian Writers Who Stayed Behind 247
colonised people like us have to begin the process of reclaiming and

reconstructing their own linguistic, cultural and literary identities.
The about-turn in language policy, however, upset the
westernised English-educated middle-class that was created in the first
instance by the colonial administration. It is easy to understand why
English-language writers viewed this linguistic and literary
development with resentment. What was so objectionable about the
state ideology as they perceived it, was that it had chosen the
language, literature, and culture of the Malays as the basis for national
identity and unity. Writers in English and other languages thus felt
that they were denied “an active engagement in nation building and
the formation of national culture” (Quayum and Wicks 2001: x). They
also felt they had been denied official recognition and sponsorship
because of their use of a language that had fallen out of favour. The
issue is complicated by competing linguistic and ethnic identities, the
warring existence of two literary traditions in Malay and English, and
the clash between national and communal ideologies.
To understand the complexity of this issue we need to go back
to where it started, with the British education policy that implemented
a dual system of Malay vernacular and English education. Malay-
medium education was for the Malay rural masses, English was for
the immigrant non-Malay community in the urban centres. Unlike the
English-medium and Christian missionary schools, Malay vernacular
education suffered extreme government neglect, characterized by an
intellectually deprived content, virtually non-existent instructional
material, poorly paid and badly trained staff, and dilapidated,
makeshift premises. Later, faced with growing Malay demands, the
British established a teacher-training college – the Sultan Idris
Training College (SITC), in 1922 – to train sons of fishermen and
padi-planters so that they could return to their villages to educate their
own people. Among the subjects for the three-year course was Malay
literature. It was these non-elite, mostly Malay-educated teachers-
turned-writers and journalists who were said to have initiated the birth
of modern Malay literature and preserved its umbilical links to the
tradition of the peasantry from which it sprang.
Through the medium of newspapers and magazines they played
their dual role as champion and critic of their society, making it aware
of, and shaping its responses to, the threatening changes taking place
in its environment. Because their social and political consciousness
was then raised, they first became aware, and then resentful of, their
disadvantaged position in their own country, ruled and drained of its
248 Zawiah Yahya
resources by a foreign power, invaded by an endless influx of

immigrants, run by a money-based economy they had no access to,
and infiltrated by western values alien to them. Rather than ‘high’
western literature, journalism, with its interest in current affairs and its
tendency towards social criticism, gave the indigenous literature of
this period its social orientation. In fact, Malay writers have always
seen themselves as playing a role in national development. “Art for
society” was the slogan for ASAS 50 (Generation 50 Writers), a
literary organization in the 1950s whose central agenda was the
promotion of Malay language and literature and resistance to colonial
rule and to English as the official language.
We need to know these historical details in order to understand
the thinking of Malay nationalists and their antagonistic relationship
with their English-medium counterparts, who they thought did not
share their social commitment and ideals. These details also give an
insight into the deep rift that writers on either side of ‘The Great
Divide’ have not been able to cross to this day.
Unlike Malay literature, early English-language writings by
Malaysians did not have their roots in Malaysian soil. The small group
that began writing in the 1950s consisted of budding writers from the
ivory tower who were taught to bend westwards in search of light. The
literature syllabus, like that in other colonies, was centred on the study
of the English literary tradition from Shakespeare to Milton, from
Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, and the great humanist tradition of
European culture, taught as if its only concern was with the universal
themes of love, fear, birth, and death. Literary criticism revolved
around Matthew Arnold’s quest for the enlightenment of a Hellenised
English middle class, T.S. Eliot’s high culture of an Anglo-Catholic
feudal tradition, F.R. Leavis’s sermons on the moral significance of
the Great Tradition and I.A. Richards’s impractical criticism on the
Equator. Although there was then in existence a Malay literary
tradition, which had a history that went back some five hundred years,
the colonial perception was that it was inferior, and had not risen
above its peasant beginnings.
It is ironical that, at the time when the English-language writers,
who belonged to the non-Malay University educated elite, were busy
internalizing the codes, diction, images, and rhythm of the English
masters, Malay-educated writers of the newly formed ASAS 50 were
busy promoting the use of Malay language and literature for the
attainment of nationalism, independence, and social equity, and
resisting the domination of colonial rule and of English as the official

language (Zawiah 1994: 55).
English-medium writers who stayed while others left had to
come to terms with this politics of emergent nationalism. They have
often been accused of being the carriers of colonialist attitudes, of
obstructing the full expression of national sentiments, and of not being
as committed to the literary and political activism as indigenous
writers. They have been made to feel a sense of alienation from the
mainstream national agenda, a sense of estrangement that comes with
writing against the grain of the national language and the national
canon. Their westernised education was thought to have drawn them
into an unthinking, self-centred individualism. Some of those who
stayed dealt with their alienation by withdrawing from the domain of
the State to the exclusive domain of their art, to the “more immediate
and personal problems of craftsmanship […]. To concentrate on the
business of writing and so produce poems, not manifestoes or
commemorative stamps” because “[p]oet and nation do not always
speak the same language” and because “the poet […] is responsible
only for his art and to himself” (Ee 1979: 72-73).
Apart from this English-Malay dichotomy, English-language
writers have a real problem of not having their own tradition to fall
back on. Although their immigrant forefathers had come from other
countries that had long histories and literary traditions, they had been
uprooted by the British as indentured labour from under-privileged
socio-economic margins where only hard labour, not philosophy or
poetry or the ancient classics, could fill up their rice-bowls. As a
result, there was very little that they could pass down to the next
generation in the new land. This is what Wong Phui Nam, one of the
stayers, refers to when he says a Malaysian writer in English will
bring to his work “a naked and orphaned psyche” (Wong 1991: 169),
by which he means an absence of cultural and spiritual resources
carried over from a ‘mother’ culture. The vacuum was to be filled by
Anglo-European cultural constructs, by the best that had been thought
and said in works published in Oxford, Cambridge, London, New
York. Many poets who suffered from ‘orphaned psyches’ modelled
their works on T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland; Edwin Thumboo claimed W.B.
Yeats as a major influence and Arthur Yap, Larkin.
Writers in Malay do not have the problem of double exile that
constantly plagues writers in English. The language the English-
language writers use to describe their world is culturally rooted in the
Anglo-European tradition and locates them as outsiders looking in. At
250 Zawiah Yahya
the same time, there is always the pressure to prove their worth
against an external, cosmopolitan standard, yet their self-conscious
use of the language does not quite produce the kind of authenticity
that makes them heirs to the tradition of Shakespeare and Milton.
These are some of the problems that English-language writers
in Malaysia face, from both within and without. Yet, it is precisely in
the process of negotiating the problematics of linguistic exile, literary
isolation, and political marginalisation that their real contribution to
the nation is to be found. What has resulted is a corpus of writings that
reflects, in essence and in details, the postcolonial realities of the
country.
To start with, it helps a great deal that Malaysian writers,
especially fiction writers, choose to focus on the specific socio-
political issues that beset the society of their time. K.S. Maniam, in
The Return, writes about the problems experienced by an Indian
immigrant family in their attempts to adapt to the new country. In
another novel, In a Far Country, he explores the question of identity
for succeeding generations of Indians faced with the problem of
displacement and loss of home. Lloyd Fernando, in Scorpion Orchid,
explores the superficiality and fragility of race relations, as
exemplified by four multiracial university graduates, beneath the
tensions of the race riots of the 60s. His second novel, Green Is the
Colour, set in the period following the riots between Malays and
Chinese on 13 May 1969, unravels the uneasy, disturbing phase of
national history that ensued and asks the pertinent question: Is unity in
diversity possible?
K.S. Maniam and Lloyd Fernando are examples of writers who
have successfully interfaced forms, techniques, and style with specific
realities of national and political events, social changes, state policies,
and cultural ideologies. Their novels are really about a nation in the
process of becoming.
The most daunting task for English-language writers is of
finding their real ethnocentric voices in a colonial language with
‘built-in’ historical, cultural, and aesthetic assumptions, and
associations with the imperial centre, and of transforming this
language “to bear the burden of their experience” (Achebe 1975: 62).
Some have to find recourse in their own cultural and spiritual heritage
which is often, ironically, older than the European tradition. Many
create their own imagery, symbols, and myths.
This process of transformation is called ‘domesticating’ or
‘Malaysianising’ the English language to “convey in a language that is
not one’s own, the spirit that is one’s own” (Rao 1938: vii). It is, as
Wong Phui Nam puts it, “the wiping away of ‘the sweet incense that
hangs upon the boughs’ on a summer night or the colour and
movement of daffodils from the word ‘flower’ and putting in their
place the rude, odourless, and pendulous beauty of the hibiscus”
(Wong 1991: 175). The act of emptying a sign of its cultural content
is, in itself, an awesome but commendable task; although, to have
“full many a hibiscus born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness in
the desert air” can be quite tiresome if not handled with care.
To overcome an over-dependence on the English tradition,
writers like K.S. Maniam, Lloyd Fernando, and Lee Kok Liang either
return to the spirituality of their own pre-colonial cultures or create
and develop their own symbols and myths. In The Return, for
example, K.S. Maniam draws his imagery and symbolism from Indian
philosophy and Hinduism. The Indian immigrant’s struggle to adapt to
a new life is cumulatively expressed in the symbolism of a grafted
culture and rituals, as the following passage demonstrates:
He fashioned his own urns, lamps, jars, and statues with many arms
and faces, out of the clay he brought from the river. Sitting on the map
he had woven from lallang and wild reeds that grew near the river, he
began to chant in a garbled language. It embarrassed me to hear him
recite a rhythm mounted on Tamil, Malay and even Chinese words
[…]. (Maniam 1981: 100)
By contrast, Lloyd Fernando, in Scorpion Orchid, develops his

own religious symbolism. He creates the enigmatic figure of Tok Said
who appears differently to different people: as Indian/Hindu priest,
Malay/Muslim medicine man, Chinese/Buddhist medium, and as
Christian/Eurasian. Tok Said, as a racial fusion, is used to project a
need for multiracial Malaysian society to be united at a deeper
spiritual level than the fragile and shallow camaraderie of the four
multi-racial protagonists in the novel. As a symbol or a myth of
common Malaysian identity, Tok Said is Fernando’s argument against
racial loyalties that seem to obstruct integration.
What is also interesting about Scorpion Orchid is Fernando’s
attempt to integrate local Malay folklore into his fiction. This can be
seen in the meaningful juxtaposition of a passage from Sejarah
Melayu (Malay Annals), written in the sixteenth century, with
contemporary discourse, to show parallel incidents that both demand
an answer to the question “Do you want to join the new society or
not?”
252 Zawiah Yahya
If mythic power is lacking in Malaysian literature in English, it

is not because a local indigenous tradition or history does not exist.
Fernando asked, in a paper delivered in 1969, why local writers of
literature in English shouldn’t re-examine this deep and varied past
and put it to fresh purposes. Part of Scorpion Orchid’s freshness is the
use of indigenous history to remind us that there was, and could be, a
history independent of, and outside, European history, whether or not
the telling of it follows the conventions of Western historiography. It
is writers like Fernando and Maniam who, both despite and because of
their misgivings and problems, have developed, enriched, and charted
the direction of Malaysian Literature in English. It is an act of
commitment to the new society that is multiracial and multilingual,
and “to one’s cultural roots and the past without also or necessarily,
committing oneself to the ancestral homelands of one’s origin”
(Quayum and Wicks 2001:164).
Some problems, especially on a national scale, take a long time
to work themselves out. On Malaysia’s long-distance run as a nation,
circumstances and priorities change and we must brace ourselves to
confront each reality and absorb its effect as it comes, with faith and
commitment. Perhaps what will redefine our society is not the
destination, but the journey. We have experienced ambushes in the
past, such as that of 13 May 1969, that changed the course of our
history. We will no doubt experience other surprises along the way.
Right now, we are grappling with the imperatives of globalization that
are fast making English-proficiency a matter of necessity. Public
statements about it are made by policy-makers every other day, in the
same breath as they claim the ills of globalization. The winds of
change are a-blowing and official language policies are shifting, yet
again, to take the blows. For example, the Private Higher Educational
Institutions Act 1996 now allows for courses to be taught in the
English language in the private institutions, to the consternation of
nationalists who see it as a betrayal of the spirit of the National
Language Act of 1967. They say that the 1996 Act has created a dual
system of tertiary education, one in the national language, the other in
English, as represented by eleven Malay-medium public universities
on the one hand and, on the other, the more than six hundred English-
medium private university colleges. In a way, the English language
has come full circle. It looks as if history has repeated itself, only this
time the British can no longer be blamed.
Other indicators from the Ministry of Education, of the ‘second
coming’, include the introduction of the Malaysian University English
Test (MUET) as a prerequisite for entering local universities; the

inclusion of literature in English as a compulsory component in the
English language papers for the secondary school curriculum, the
inclusion of literary passages in English in the SPM English paper
1119 and, more recently, the change of medium of instruction from
Malay to English for mathematics and science in schools.
What this means to literature written in English is that a
potential pool of English-speaking readers is now in the making. This
is in addition to the large number of young Malaysians who, since the
early 1990s, have been returning home from universities in English-
speaking countries like Australia, New Zealand, Britain, Canada, and
the USA. Some of them, including the beneficiaries of the post-May
13th New Economic Policy, are now actively engaged in the writing
and publication of creative writings in English. This multi-ethnic mix
of writers is now taking over where the older generation left off,
replacing earlier issues of immigrant consciousness with a wider
spread of contemporary problems associated with modernity. English-
language theatre is now, for instance, the in-thing in cosmopolitan
areas like Kuala Lumpur and Penang, for the yuppies of middle and
upper-middle class background. The old elitism is, of course, still
there although contemporary Malaysian writing in English is certainly
more cross-cultural and inter-communal than that of the preceding
generation.
As a result of all these changes, English-language writings are
now finding their legitimate places in the school and university
curricula. Both Maniam and Fernando are now part of the staple diet
for students at ‘O’ and ‘A’ Levels. Malaysian literature in English as a
course or even as a programme has been running in public universities
for some years now.
For the contribution of English-language writers who have
walked the mile with us, we are indeed very grateful that they did not
leave us.
Bibliography
Achebe, Chinua. 1975. Morning Yet On Creation Day. New York: Doubleday.
Ee, Tiang Hong. 1979. ‘Malaysian Poetry In English: Influence and “Independence”’
in Pacific Quarterly 1(4): 69-73.
Fernando, Lloyd. 1976. Scorpion Orchid. Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann.
- - - . 1993. Green is the Colour. Singapore: Landmark Books.
Maniam, K.S. 1981. The Return. Kuala Lumpur: Heinemann.
- - - . 1993. In a Far Country. Kuala Lumpur: Skoob Books.
254 Zawiah Yahya
Quayum, Mohammad A. and Peter C Wicks. 2001. Malaysian Literature in English:

A Critical Reader. Malaysia: Longman/Pearson Education.
Rao, Raja. 1938. Kanthapura. New York: New Directions.
Wong Phui Nam. 1991. ‘Out of the Stony …. A Personal Perspective of the Writing
of Verse in English in Malaysia’ in Edwin Thumboo (ed.), Perceiving Other
Worlds. Singapore: Times Academic Press: 169-178.
Zawiah Yahya. 1994. Resisting Colonialist Discourse. Bangi: Penerbitan UKM.
28
The Cultivation of Exile: Qi Biaojia and his Allegory

Mountain
Duncan Campbell
Duncan Campbell was born in New Zealand but spent his childhood
in West Africa and the West Indies before being sent ‘home’ to
boarding school. He began his study of Chinese in Malaysia in the
1970s and spent the years 1976-78 in China. Since that time he has
taught Chinese language and literature at both the University of
Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington, but returns to China
as often as he can.
His paper examines the remarkable exile of Qi Biaojia, a senior
Chinese official of the mid-seventeenth century. During the late Ming
dynasty (1368-1644), as at earlier times in the history of China, exile
for members of the literati was often more a matter of self-imposed
return to their native place than enforced removal from it, in the hope
that estrangement from the power and privileges of office-holding
could be compensated for by the opportunity exile provided to read
and write. In 1635, with the imperial bureaucracy paralysed by
factionalism and the empire itself threatened by internal rebellion and
foreign invasion, Qi Biaojia (1602-45) took leave from court and
returned to his birthplace of Shanyin in Zhejiang Province. For the
next few years he devoted his time and energy to the creation of a
garden wherein he housed his immense book collection. A decade
later, the Ming dynasty having collapsed and been replaced by the
Qing, he chose to commit suicide in the lake within his garden rather
than face pressure to take up office again under the new and ‘foreign’
political order. Making use of both Qi Biaojia’s celebrated account of
the construction of his garden (‘Footnotes to Allegory Mountain’) and
his diaries covering this period of his life, this paper discusses the uses
to which he put his self-imposed exile and the twinned joy and pain
that it afforded him.
256 Duncan Campbell
「子曰：『君子之道或出或處或默或語』」《易．繫辭》1
Allegory Garden
A scene of desolation now this garden of old,

My sense of loss redoubled as I visit it again.
Throughout the garden, prunus buds burst into whiteness,
Along both banks the willows unfurl their greenness.
In clumps the fragrant grasses grow anew,
And here and there gushing springs begin to sing.
When the nightjar’s call hastens on the fall of day,
I linger still beside the bright moon’s rays.
Shang Jinglan 商景蘭 (1604-ca. 1680) (Qi Biaojia 1960: 268)
Exile and its representation, in China’s literary and artistic traditions,

are freighted, both traditionally and still to this day, with a special
resonance. In keeping with both the longevity and the sophistication
of China’s political culture, the possibility of exile has spanned a
broad but well-defined spectrum ranging from reclusion (both major
and minor) 2 to enforced or self-imposed exile to permanent
banishment beyond the pale of the civilised Chinese world but,
traditionally, always within the borders of the Chinese political order.3
Each choice – if choice there were – obviously had its own terrible
price to pay, its own particular burden to bear. At the same time,
removal, whether from the court or from one’s native place, whether
by volition or by imperial sanction, often presented China’s literary
elite with a range of possibilities and alternative paths towards
immortality.
“The things of this world sing out only when in a state of
disequilibrium”, claimed the great Tang dynasty intellectual Han Yu
韓愈(768-824), a man who knew a thing or two about exile (Han Yu
1986: 233). Indeed, if, in the words of David Hawkes, Qu Yuan’s 屈原
(c. 340-278 BCE) “despairing cry” from exile signals “the birth of
literature” in China (Hawkes 1985: 68), then the received poetic
traditions of ancient China, in particular, would be all but
inconceivable without reference to the exilic conditions which
occasioned much of its bulk.
It was not just the Chinese poetic voice that flowed from such
terrible circumstances; in an example that is more directly germane to
The Cultivation of Exile: Qi Biaojia and His Allegory Mountain 257
the protagonist of my paper, that protean figure Su Shi 蘇軾 (1037-

1101) claims that it was during his two periods of exile (to Huangzhou
between 1080-84 and to Lingnan between 1094 and 1100) that he
completed his commentaries on the Book of Changes, the Book of
Documents, and the Analects of Confucius. In a letter written during
the last year of his life, Su Shi states that only when he thinks of these
three commentaries, the last of which, sadly, is no longer extant, does
he “feel this life has not been lived in vain. Nothing else is worth
mentioning” (Bol 1992: 282).
If it was to the classics that Chinese men of letters such as Su
Shi turned for guidance in times of personal or political crisis, it is not
always in written texts alone that we find evidence of their solutions to
the dilemmas they faced. Such meditations on disequilibrium could
also be embodied in particular designed landscapes, inscribed with
mountains and rivers, rocks and trees.
In the confused and often dangerous late-Ming dynasty political
order, if the choices before the fall of the dynasty in 1644, described
as the most cataclysmic dynastic transition in Chinese history, 4
seemed complex, then the choices afterwards, depending on those
made earlier, were often stark: suicide or lasting infamy.
Qi Biaojia 祁彪佳 (1602-45)5 was one such man born into this
disordered age, in his case to one of the wealthiest and most socially
prestigious families of one of the wealthiest and most prestigious
regions of Southern China. For a while, during the late despairing
years of the Ming dynasty, he held some of the most important posts
at the Court in Peking. In 1634, tiring of the factionalism that had
crippled the bureaucracy, he retired to his hometown of Shanyin 山陰
(present day Shaoxing 紹興) in Zhejiang Province, to care for his aged
mother, he claimed, and to study under the philosopher Liu Zongzhou
6
劉宗周 (1578-1645), one of the most thoroughgoing Confucian
moralists of the age. Whilst thus in self-imposed exile, however, Qi
Biaojia also indulged his self-confessed obsession for the mountains
and the rivers (shanshuipi 山水癖 ) 7 by building himself a large and
most elaborate garden wherein to house his family’s enormous book
collection,8 expending much of his family's fortunes in the process.
This garden was named Allegory Mountain, and Qi wrote a wonderful
account, entitled ‘Footnotes to Allegory Mountain’ (hereafter,
‘Footnotes’), of both the design of the garden and the process of its
construction (Qi Biaojia 1960: 150-70). 9 Just as his garden was a
complex one, so is his representation of it multi-layered and
susceptible to a variety of readings. With reference to the theme of
258 Duncan Campbell
this volume, and on the basis of a translation of this text that I

produced some years ago (Campbell 1999: 243-71), I want to suggest
one particular understanding of both Qi Biaojia’s garden and his
representation of it.
On a certain level, I suppose, all gardens, especially once they
become more than simply economic units perhaps, acquire levels of
metaphoric meaning. Most frequently, these meanings relate to a
desired and perfected world; the etymology of the English word
‘paradise’, after all, is an Old Persian word (pairidaeza) meaning an
enclosed park or orchard. For Qi Biaojia, Allegory Mountain
provided, in part at least, a simulacrum of the perfect order that he had
sought so long and hard, albeit unsuccessfully, to bring about through
his efforts at Court. As such, his representation of it, if not entirely the
garden itself, makes explicit reference to the text that had been so
crucial to Su Shi during his first period of exile, the Book of
Changes.10 For one thing, although we know from his diaries that the
garden contained more vistas than those Qi Biaojia chose to take us to
in his ‘Footnotes’, he includes accounts of only forty-nine such vistas.
As the Book of Changes states, in reference to the number of yarrow
stalks employed in the process of divination: “The number of the total
is fifty. Of these, forty-nine are used. They are divided into two
portions, to represent the three powers” (Wilhelm 1968: 310).11 The
garden, in Qi Biaojia’s representation of it, is to this extent best
understood therefore as an embodiment in miniature of the entirety of
the cosmos and its normative moral order. 12 Secondly, it is to his
Abode for the Study of the Book of Changes that Qi Biaojia conducts
us first on our tour of the garden, once we have passed through the
main gate and made our way along Water Bright Gallery. Here is his
account of this site:
Abode for the Study of the Book of Changes
Of the many fine features of Allegory Garden it is the rocks that prove
most excellent, but it is not the rocks alone that embody the excellence
of the garden. Once a rock is placed in the midst of water, even the
most recalcitrant of them seems to acquire a divine intelligence.13 And
it is only from my Abode for the Study of the Book of Changes that
this perfect marriage between rock and water can be observed to full
advantage.14 The abode overlooks the eastern corner of Asymmetrical
Pond and stands across the water from the Hall of My Four
Unfulfilled Obligations. As one raises one’s eyes upwards or stares
downwards, the sky and the pond present a seamless flow of purity
and one feels a profound affinity for the birds and fishes. 15 When
along the bank the lamps are lit, their inverted reflections dance
enticingly upon the surface of the water, and when the strings and
flutes strike up their tunes seem driven across the surface of the pond
like waves of snow. It is at times such as this that I feel the scene
before me to have been Heaven sent. And when the Master of the
garden becomes wearied of the sights of his garden he spends his days
with a copy of the Book of Changes in hand; painstakingly he works
his way through the text, achieving in the process a sense of release
from the vexations of life. Although my family has specialised in the
exegesis of this classic for generations, I am as yet incapable of fully
understanding its principles of change. I have managed to develop an
inkling of the Way of waxing and waning, however, of the ebb and
flow of the cosmos. This mountain has existed for as long as Heaven
and Earth themselves. Before the present moment, it was no more than
a tiny mound of earth. How can one guarantee that, sometime in the
future, these arrayed pavilions and storied studios will stand tall yet
upon these sheer cliffs and here within this secluded valley? Nothing
is spared Heaven and Earth’s determination of its fate. How silly of Li
Deyu of the Tang dynasty who, when demoted and in exile at Red
Cliff in Canton, wrote to his sons so assiduously, instructing them to
seek to preserve every stone and every leaf of his Peaceful Springs
Garden. Had he forgotten the fate of the Golden Valley and Flowery
Grove gardens?16 Where are they today? And thus does the Master
have an inkling of the truth, taking joy in those pleasures afforded us
in this present life and caring not a jot for what might become of this
garden in the future. (Campbell 1999: 248; Qi Biaojia 1960: 152 )
This level of philosophic distance from the world around him

proved a short-lived consolation for Qi Biaojia, however, and just
across Asymmetrical Pond stood a structure that perhaps better
embodies the anxieties that characterise Qi’s attempt to exile himself
from that world; the Hall of My Four Unfulfilled Obligations, the
forty-eighth site that he leads us to:
Hall of My Four Unfulfilled Obligations:
Within my Farm of Abundance stands a three-columned hall,

overlooking the flowing water, as if its wings outspread. Here the
Master of the Garden raises his silkworms and stores his grain. Here,
occasionally, too he entertains his guests with wine served in finest
rhinoceros-shaped goblets. I happened at the time to have taken as my
teacher Master Wang Chaoshi. 17 He took grave issue with my
obsession with the construction of my garden and upbraided me in a
letter, in the following manner:
Recently I took a look at your garden and found that it

embodied four unfulfilled obligations, three of which are
failings on your part, and one on mine.
Great has been the favour bestowed upon you by the
state. You ought to be considering how you can show yourself
260 Duncan Campbell
worthy of such favour. Even though you have retired to the

countryside, you ought nonetheless to be discussing the Way
and thinking about the great profession, each day deliberating
how you may restore to their glory the gods of the grains and
the soil, and confer benefits to the common folk. But for the
past two years that you have been here, far from concerning
yourself with such matters, you have simply devoted yourself
to the construction of your garden, with carving and
engraving, with flowers and rocks. In order to display your
mastery of such petty skills, you have neglected the Grand
Scheme of things as far as your state goes. If everyone were
to be like you, what then could the state rely upon? This then
can be said to be the manner in which you have failed to fulfil
your obligation to the sovereign.
Your revered father long cleaved true to the Way, and
was also conversant with the Buddhist scriptures. He
purchased more than 10,000 books and entrusted them to the
care of his sons and grandsons. To bring glory to the
illustrious example of one’s parents is a matter for the
progeny of such parents. You are today approaching your
fortieth year, the age at which you should be without doubt,18
and you have served in the past in the post of censor. The
requirement to establish yourself and implement the Way
does not change with the circumstances of the times. But of
such a determination I can observe no evidence and all you
seem capable of is following the precedent set by your
forebears, but with even greater flourish than they. How can
such behaviour be regarded as an expression of the filial piety
expected of you? In this way, you can be said to have failed to
fulfil your obligation to your father.
You are blessed with heaven given talents and a quick
intelligence, by nature you are loyal and upright. Your
attributes are such that you could have become a mentor who
benefits the age, an effective vessel of the Way. At the same
time, your fortunate destiny is such that you enjoy the
pleasures of friends and teachers and without having to quit
your home you could have followed in the footsteps of the
sages of old, if only you had devoted yourself to such an
effort. On the contrary, however, far from cherishing your
considerable abilities, you have associated with vulgar types
and have pursued this particular task. Word of your efforts
has spread to all four quarters, earning you the awe of mere
boys and girls everywhere. You pay no heed to the frowns of
those intent upon the Way, casting your pearls amongst the
worthless potsherds and allowing your fine fields to become
overgrown with weeds. In this respect you can be said to have
failed to fulfil your obligation to yourself.
If you are guilty of having not fulfilled these three
obligations, then I for my part should have repaid the
affection you have shown me with some straight talking in
order to nip your enterprise off in its bud. This I have failed to
do, vainly hoping now to remedy the situation with my

present remonstrance, once the deed has already been done. I
regret that I have been remiss in my effort to rectify myself,
and I am ashamed that nor have I been able to provide you
with an appropriate role model. In this way I may be said to
have failed to fulfil my obligation of friendship.19
Alas! What excellent counsel this is! How very fortunate I am to have
been the recipient of such excellent counsel. Of all the criticism of the
error of my ways I have received since I embarked upon the
construction of my garden, only these words have served to cut to the
quick. Having been counselled in this manner, I have nonetheless been
unable to act like Wang Jian who destroyed his Studio of the Long
Beams as soon as his uncle criticised it for its lavishness, and this
exacerbates my failing. The Master has accused me of failing to fulfil
three obligations. This accusation I readily accept. Having heard his
counsel and having proven incapable of changing my ways, this may
be said to be a failure to fulfil the obligation of friendship on my part,
not his. I have named this place the Hall of My Four Unfulfilled
Obligations in order to record my remorse and my intention to reform
myself. (Campbell 1999: 262-63; Qi Biaojia 1960: 168-69)
For a brief moment, then, Qi Biaojia’s garden served both to

embody the dilemma he faced and to offer him, through a process of
self-cultivation and contemplation – the traditional alternative to
taking office – a resolution of the crisis he faced. But of course, just as
the walls of his garden had failed to keep out the stream of unwanted
guests that distracted him from his books, so too did they prove
ineffectual in the face of events elsewhere. As the “halfway house on
[his] pilgrimage […] [as] the setting for [his] dreams […] [the garden
became] also the site of ruin and desolation” (Minford 1998: 260).20
Regular reports of the collapse of the Ming political order continued
to reach him, seeping through the porous walls of his enclosed garden
and breaching its symbolic order.21 When the death of his mother in
1644 finally released him from his filial obligations, Qi Biaojia took
up office again, and after the fall of Beijing and the suicide of the
Chongzhen Emperor, news of which reached Qi as he made his way to
the Southern Capital, he was appointed Governor of Suzhou. 22
Factional infighting in the court of the Prince of Lu soon enforced his
retirement once more, however, and he returned to Shanyin. Facing
increasing pressure to accept office under the new dynasty, Qi Biaojia
appears to have believed that he had little alternative but to end his life
a martyr. The official history of the period records his demise in the
following manner:
262 Duncan Campbell
In the 5th month of the next year [1645] the Southern Capital was lost,
and by the 6th month, Hangzhou too, in turn, had fallen. [Qi] Biaojia
thereupon began his fast. On the 4th day of the succeeding intercalary
month, having told his family that he was going to repair early to his
bedchamber, he proceeded to his lake wherein he sat bolt upright and
awaited his death. He was 44 years old. (Zhang Tingyu et al. 1974:
7054)
There is a record of his last conversation with one of his sons. A

relaxed smile on his lips, he turned to him and said: “Although your
father did not fail in his family duties, I was however somewhat too
addicted to the springs and the rocks. I was lavish in constructing my
garden and this was my failing” (Qi Biaojia 1960: 252). He was
buried within his garden, in a coffin that he had already prepared for
himself. In his will, written shortly before he made his way from Jar
Hideaway toward Asymmetrical Lake, he asked that Allegory
Mountain be made over to the care of the local temple to provide, he
says, the living for a number of Chanist monks. A final annotation to
his diary reads: “My grandfather’s diary ends on this day. During the
5th watch of the 6th day, he died a martyr” (Qi Biaojia 1991: 1447).
Notes
1
A literal translation of this, the “Attached Verbalisation” to Hexagram # 13
(“Tongren” 同人 [Fellowship with Men]), might read: “The Master said: ‘Such is the
Way of the Superior Man that he either goes out [and takes office] or he remains at
home [and does not], that he remains silent or that he speaks up’”. The I Ching or
Book of Changes, tr. Richard Wilhelm, rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968) 305-06, provides this suggestive reading:
“The Master said:/ Life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings./ Now
the course is checked, now it runs straight again./ Here winged thoughts may pour
freely forth in words,/ There the heavy burden of knowledge must be shut away in
silence”.
2
The secondary literature on reclusion is extensive; for recent studies, see Aat
Vervoon, 1990. Men of the Cliffs and Caves: The Development of the Chinese
Eremitic Traditions to the End of the Han Dynasty (Hong Kong: The Chinese
University of Hong Kong); and both Alan Berkowitz, ‘Topos and Entelechy in the
Ethos of Reclusion in China’, Journal of the American Oriental Society (1994),
114(4): 632-38 and his The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval
China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). On that most iconic of poetic
recluses, Tao Qian (365-427), see A.R. Davis, ‘The Narrow Lane: Some Observations
on the Recluse in Traditional Chinese Society’, East Asian History (1996), 11: 33-44.
3
Interestingly, the modern Chinese poet and historian Wen Yiduo 聞一多 (1899-1946),
a man steeped in China’s classical poetic traditions, highlights what can be understood
as a disjunctive moment in China’s exilic traditions in a letter addressed to his friend
Liang Shiqiu written shortly before returning to China from his studies in Chicago:
“Living abroad is like being exiled to a frontier region”, for which see Wang-chi
Wong, ‘“I am a Prisoner in Exile”: Wen Yiduo in the United States’, in Gregory B.
Lee, (ed.), Chinese Writing and Exile, Select Papers Vol. 7, The Centre for East Asian
Studies (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993) 19, 34. Here, Wen Yiduo
seems to be picking up on a connection made by late Qing dynasty officials
dispatched on embassies abroad between exile and travel beyond the borders of the
Chinese political order, for which see Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書, ‘Han yi diyishou yingyu
shi “Renshengsong” ji youguan er san shi’ 漢譯第一首英語詩《人生頌》及有關二三事
[Longfellow’s ‘A Psalm of Life’ – The First English Poem Translated into Chinese –
and Several Other Related Matters], Qizhui ji 七綴集 (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1985)
130-31. The post-1989 growth of mainland diasporic Chinese communities
throughout the world, with the consequent expansion of the Chinese linguistic world
and the partial resinification of the historic overseas Chinese communities, represents
perhaps another disjunctive moment in this tradition of reclusion and exile.
4
Ho Koon-piu, for example, argues that the Ming-Qing transition, which he dates as
between 1628-1722, “was marked by the greatest number of scholar-officials dying as
martyrs for their dynasty”, for which see his ‘Should We Die as Martyrs to the Ming
Cause? Scholar-Officials’ Views on Martyrdom During the Ming-Qing Transition’,
Oriens Extremus (1994), 37(2): 123.
5
For short English-language biographies of Qi Biaojia, see the note on him appended
to the biography of his father Qi Chenghan (1568-1628) in L. Carrington Goodrich &
Chaoying Fang, (eds) (1970), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368-1644 (New York
& London: Columbia University Press) 1: 216-20; and A.W. Hummel, (ed.) (1943),
Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, 1644-1912 (Washington: Government Printing
Office) 126. More recently, on Qi Biaojia’s philanthropic activities, see Joanna F.
Handlin Smith, ‘Opening and Closing a Dispensary in Shan-yin County: Some
Thoughts about Charitable Associations, Organizations, and Institutions in Late Ming
China’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (1995), 38(3): 371-
92; on his garden, see Joanna F. Handlin Smith, ‘Gardens in Ch’i Piao-chia’s Social
World: Wealth and Values in Late-Ming Kiangnan’, The Journal of Asian Studies
(1992), 51(2): 55-81; for a translation of his celebrated account of the construction of
this garden, see Duncan Campbell, tr., ‘Footnotes to Allegory Mountain’, Studies in
the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes (1999), 19(3/4): 243-71; Dorothy
Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century
China (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994) 226-32, has a
discussion of Qi Biaojia’s wife Shang Jinglan. This paper is based in part on a reading
of Qi Biaojia’s fourteen diaries covering the period from the 29th day of the 7th month
of the 4th year of the reign of the Chongzhen Emperor (1631) to the 4th day of the 6th
month of the Yiyou year (1645) (listed in the Bibliography), the manuscripts of which
are photomechanically reproduced in Qi Biaojia wengao 祁彪佳文稿 (Beijing: Shumu
wenxian chubanshe, 1991) 2: 921-1447.
6
For a short biography of this man, see A.W. Hummel, ed., Eminent Chinese of the
Ch’ing Period, 1644-1912, 532-33. For discussions of his philosophic contributions,
see Tang Chun-i, ‘Liu Tsung-chou’s Doctrine of Moral Mind and Practice and His
Critique of Wang Yangming’, in Wm. Theodore De Bary, ed. (1975), The Unfolding
of Neo-Confucianism (New York & London: Columbia University Press) 305-31.
7
On the concept of ‘obsession’ in Chinese culture, and its intensification during the
late Ming period, see Judith T. Zeitlin, ‘The Petrified Heart: Obsession in Chinese
264 Duncan Campbell
Literature, Art, and Medicine’, Late Imperial China (1991), 12(1): 1-26; and the
chapter dealing with this topic in her subsequent book Historian of the Strange: Pu
Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 1993). For a more recent treatment, see Wai-yee Li, ‘The Collector, the
Connoisseur, and Late-Ming Sensibility’, T’oung Pao (1995), 81(4-5): 269-302.
8
After Qi Biaojia’s death, the break up of his library and the disposition of the books
that it had once contained was to occasion one of the most notorious disputes of the
early Qing period, that between the two Ming loyalist scholars Huang Zongxi 黃宗羲
(1610-95) and Lü Liuliang 呂留良 (1629-83), for which see Tom Fisher, ‘Loyalist
Alternatives in the Early Ch’ing’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1984), 44 (1):
83-122.
9
Qi Biaojia seems to have begun his account of his garden late in the 9th year of the
reign of the Chongzhen Emperor (1636) (‘Linju shibi’, Qi Biaojia wengao, 2: 1062).
His diaries show that he worked intensively upon it during the 4th and 5th months of
the next year, at the same time that he was reading both Wang Shizhen’s (1526-1590)
‘Record of My Mount Yan Garden’ and Li Daoyuan’s (d. 527) Footnotes to the
Classic of the Waterways, finishing it on the 21st day of the 5th month (‘Shanju
zhuolu’, Qi Biaojia wengao, 2: 1085-87). Having circulated the manuscript among
friends, Qi made some changes before having it copied and sent for printing (‘Shanju
zhuolu’, Qi Biaojia wengao, 2: 1095). By this time the text had acquired its present
title. Construction of the garden continued of course, and in his diaries Qi Biaojia
speaks of having a friend put the finishing touches to a text entitled ‘More Footnotes
to Allegory Mountain’ (‘Zijian lu’, Qi Biaojia wengao, 2: 1127). It appears that this
text is no longer extant.
10
Peter Bol argues that Su Shi’s commentary on the Book of Changes, as well as
providing a means to “correct the mistakes of past and present” and to “bring benefit
to the age”, was also intended as his “account of himself”, a way for others to know
him, for which see his ‘Su Shi and Culture’, in Kidder Smith, Jr., Peter K. Bol, Joseph
A. Adler & Don J. Wyatt, eds., Sung Dynasty Uses of the I Ching (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1990), 56.
11
On this aspect of Qi Biaojia’s garden, see Cao Shujuan 曹淑娟, ‘Meng jue jie yu –
“Yushan zhu” de yuanlin quanshi xitong’ 夢覺皆寓﹣《寓山注》的園林詮釋係統 , Taida
zhongwen xuebao 臺大中文學報 (2001), 15: 193-240. I am indebted to Alison Hardie
for bringing this article to my attention.
12
On this tradition, see Edward H. Schafer, ‘Cosmos in Miniature: The Tradition of
the Chinese Garden’, Landscape (1963), 12 (3): 24-26.
13
For a discussion of these two categories of rock, see Jing Wang, The Story of Stone:
Intertextuality, Ancient Chinese Stone Lore, and the Stone Symbolism of Dream of the
Red Chamber, Water Margin, and The Journey to the West (Durham & London: Duke
University Press, 1992), especially 193-98. More generally, see John Hay, Kernels of
Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art (New York: China House Gallery,
China Institute in America, 1985); and Edward Schafer, Tu Wan's Stone Catalogue of
Cloudy Forest (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961).
14
This alludes to a passage from the Shishuo xinyu 世說新語 which, in Richard
Mather’s translation (Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World
(Minneopolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976), 402; romanisation altered), goes:
“When Sun Chu was young he wanted to become a recluse. Speaking of it once to
Wang Ji, he intended to say, ‘I’ll pillow my head on the rocks and rinse my mouth in
the streams’. Instead, he said by mistake, ‘I’ll rinse my mouth with rocks and pillow
my head on the streams’. Wang asked, ‘Are streams something you can pillow on, and
rocks something you can rinse with?’ Sun replied, ‘My reason for pillowing on
streams is to ‘wash my ears’, and my reason for rinsing with rocks is to ‘sharpen my
teeth’’”..
15
This appears to be a conflation of two allusions; the first to that passage from the
‘The Great Treatise’ attached to the Yi jing that goes: “Looking upward, we
contemplate with its [the Yi jing] help the signs in the heavens; looking down, we
examine the lines of the earth. Thus we come to know the circumstances of the dark
and the light. Going back to the beginnings of things and pursuing them to the end, we
come to know the lessons of birth and of death…”. (The I Ching or Book of Changes,
294); the second from the ‘Autumn Floods’ chapter of the Zhuangzi which goes:
“Zhuangzi and Huizi were strolling along the dam of the Hao River when Zhuangzi
said, ‘See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please! That’s what
fish really enjoy!’ Huizi said, ‘You’re not a fish - how do you know what fish enjoy?’
Zhuangzi said, ‘You’re not I, so how do you know I don’t know what fish enjoy?’
Huizi said, ‘I’m not you, so I certainly don’t know what you know. On the other hand,
you’re certainly not a fish - so that still proves you don’t know what fish enjoy!’
Zhuangzi said, ‘Let’s go back to your original question, please. You asked me how I
know what fish enjoy - so you already knew I knew it when you asked the question. I
know it by standing here beside the Hao’”. (See Burton Watson, tr., Chuang Tzu:
Basic Writings (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1964), 110;
romanisation altered).
16
Two famous gardens of old, the first built by Shi Chong of the Jin dynasty, and the
latter an imperial garden sited in Luoyang and given this name during the Three
Kingdoms period.
17
On Wang Chaoshi 王朝式 (1603-40), another disciple of Liu Zongzhou, see He
Guanbiao (Ho Koon Piu) 何冠彪, ‘Wan Ming lixuejia san kao’ 晚明理學家三考, Ming
Qing renwu yu zhushu 明清人物與著述 [Personages and Writings in Ming-Qing China],
Asian Studies Series # 6 (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Educational Publishing, 1996), 39-
43.
18
A reference to Lunyu, II.iv: “The Master said: ‘At fifteen, I set my mind upon
learning. At thirty, I took my stand. At forty, I had no doubts. At fifty, I knew the will
of Heaven. At sixty, my ear was attuned. At seventy, I follow all the desires of my
heart without breaking any rule’”. (See Simon Leys, tr., The Analects of Confucius
(New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1997, 6).
19
In his diary, Qi Biaojia records receiving this letter on the 20th day of the 2nd month
of the 10th year of the reign of the Chongzhen Emperor (1637), see ‘Shanju zhuolu’,
Qi Biaojia wengao, 2: 1076. “His letter put me in quite a funk for the rest of the day”,
he tells us. On a visit to the garden the next day, Qi Biaojia decides to build a hall
within his Farm of Abundance and to give it this name, in order, he says, “to record
the error of my ways”.
20
Minford is here speaking about Prospect Garden, the focus of so much of the action
of the novel The Story of the Stone.
21
On this most dramatic of dynastic transitions from Ming to Qing, see Lynn A.
Struve, The Southern Ming, 1644-1662 (New Haven & London: Yale University
Press, 1984); and her similarly entitled chapter in Frederick W. Mote & Denis
Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China: Volume 7, The Ming Dynasty,
1368-1644, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 641-725.
266 Duncan Campbell
22
On the important role that Qi Biaojia played in attempting to pacify the countryside
around the Southern Capital, see Jerry Dennerline, ‘Hsü Tu and the Lesson of
Nanking: Political Integration and the Local Defense in Chiang-nan, 1634-1645’, in
Jonathan D. Spence & John E. Wills, Jr., (eds), From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest,
Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China (New Haven & London: Yale
University Press, 1979), 89-132.
Bibliography
Bol, Peter K. 1992. “This Culture of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and
Sung China. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Campbell, Duncan. 1999. ‘Qi Biaojia’s “Footnotes to Allegory Mountain”:
Introduction and Translation’ in Studies in the History of Gardens &
Designed Landscapes. 19 (3/4): 243-71.
Han Yu. 1986. ‘Song Meng Dongye xu’ 送孟東野序 [Preface Sent to Meng Jiao] in
Han Changli wenji jiaozhu 韓昌黎文集校注 (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe).
Hawkes, David, (ed. and tr.).1985. The Songs of the South: An Ancient Chinese
Anthology of Poems by Qu Yuan and Other Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Minford, John. 1998. ‘The Chinese Garden: Death of a Symbol’ in Studies in the
History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 18 (3): 257-68
Qi Biaojia. 1960. Qi Biaojia ji 祁彪佳集. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju.
- - - . 1991. ‘Qi Zhongmin gong riji’ 祁忠敏公日記 in Qi Biaojia wengao 祁彪佳文稿
Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe 2, containing:
1. ‘She bei chengyan’ 涉北程言 [Chronological Report of My Excursion
North] [Chongzhen 4 (1631): 29th day 7th month – 30th day 12th month]:
921-39.
2. ‘Xi bei rongyan (shang)’ 棲北冗言（上） [Miscellaneous Report of My Stay
in the North: Part One]
[Chongzhen 5 (1632): 1st day 1st month – 30th day 6th month]: 940-64.
‘Xi bei rongyan (xia)’ 棲北冗言（下）[Miscellaneous Report of My Stay in
the North: Part Two]
[Chongzhen 5 (1632): 1st day 7th month – 29th day 12th month]: 965-91.
3. ‘Yi nan suoji’ 役南瑣記 [Occasional Record of My Service in the South]
[Chongzhen 6 (1633): 1st day 5th month – 4th day 6th month]: 992-1010.
[Supplement: ‘Xun Wu sheng lu’ 巡吳省錄 [A Brief Record of My Tour of
Wu]
[Chongzhen 7 (1634): 11th day 6th month – 16th day 6th month]: 1010-11.
4. ‘Gui nan kuailu’ 歸南快錄 [A Joyous Account of My Return to the South]
[Chongzhen 8 (1635): 9th day 4th month – 30th day 12th month]: 1012-1038.
5. ‘Linju shibi’ 林居適筆 [Occasional Jottings from My Sojourn in the Woods]
6. ‘Shanju zhuolu’ 山居拙錄 [A Clumsy Account of My Sojourn on the
Mountain]
7. ‘Zijian lu’ 自鑒錄 [An Account of My Self-Admonition]
8. ‘Qi lu’ 棄錄 [An Account of My Dissolution]
9. ‘Ganmu lu’ 感慕錄 [An Account of My Gratitude for Kindness Granted Me]
10. ‘Xiaojiu lu’ 小捄錄 [An Account of My Small Efforts at Famine Relief]
11. ‘Renwu rili’ 壬午日曆 [Diary of the Renwu Year]
12. ‘Guiwei rili’ 癸未日曆 [Diary of the Guiwei Year]
13. ‘Jiashen rili’ 甲申日曆 [Diary of the Jiashen Year]
14. ‘Yiyou rili’ 乙酉日曆 [Diary of the Yiyou Year]
[Yiyou(1645): 1st day 1st month – 4th day 6th month (inter.)]: 1424-1447.
Wilhelm, Richard (ed. and tr.). 1968. The I Ching or Book of Changes, rendered into
English by Cary F. Baynes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
29
A Sense of Place: Colombian Artists on Violence and

Exile
Marta Jimena Cabrera
Marta Jimena Cabrera was born in Bogotá, Colombia. She moved to

Australia to undertake a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of
Wollongong. She has returned to live in Bogotá. Her work deals
mostly with memory and identity in the field of the visual arts.
In this paper, she examines the response of the latest generation of
Colombian artists to the grave socio-political situation of their
country. In the past few years around one million Colombians have
become internal refugees, fleeing violence and poverty. Such
displacement is not entirely new and has, in the past, been addressed
by such notable painters as Alejandro Obregon and Fernando Botero.
Currently, as the situation has worsened, issues surrounding the
disruption of everyday life, brought about by the loss of place, have
come to the attention of a new generation of Colombian artists
working in other media, including performance artists Maria Teresa
Hincapié, sculptor Doris Salcedo, video artist José Alejandro
Restrepo, and installation artist Oscar Muñoz. This paper explores the
strategies by which contemporary Colombian visual artists address
issues of loss, memory, and displacement, bringing these issues into
the public sphere and seeking to inscribe them in collective memory.
The displacement of civilians in Colombia as a consequence of

violence has a long and convoluted history. My father’s family, for
instance, was displaced from its province in the 1950s, a period
known, appropriately, as La Violencia. The family was lucky, not only
because they fled before a potential massacre, but also because they
were able to go back to their land. Today, however, my father, now
retired, is again unable to live on the land he inherited from his father
because to do so is still dangerous.
The dynamics of terror have, in fact, shifted since the time of
the bipartisan violence of my father’s childhood. Besides the army and
the guerrillas, the paramilitary and drug traffickers have come to make
Colombia’s violence an extremely complex phenomenon of decentred
repression (with many forces involved), occurring at the intersection
of territorial and economic interests, neoliberalism, corruption, and
270 Marta Jimena Cabrera
state weakness. The civilian population is forced to flee, not as a mere

by-product of armed confrontations between these factions, but rather
as the result of direct intimidation, terror, and extortion, as parties to
the conflict settle scores by attacking civilians suspected of
sympathising with the adversary. Hence, displacement in Colombia
must now be seen as a strategy of war aimed at different objectives:
the establishment of control over territories, expanded cultivation of
illicit crops, or to the seizure of land and private property. In order to
save their lives, around three million people have undergone
displacement within the country in the last fifteen years, most of them
fleeing to the impoverished shantytowns encircling many cities, where
they are often even more exposed to crime and violence. As a result of
the high level of violence against them, both during and after flight,
displaced people are often reluctant to register with authorities or even
seek humanitarian assistance. Around half of these are women and
children and a disproportionate number of displaced persons are
members of minority groups. Although Afro-Colombians make up
only sixteen percent of the Colombian population and indigenous
people two percent, together they account for more than one-third of
all displaced people.
The anger and aspirations of displaced people have been
expressed in numerous statements and in testimonies appearing in
academic studies on displacement:
After the killing of several relatives we did not want to leave, so we
were threatened again; they returned several times and sprayed the
house with bullets, we had to remain under the bed all day. (Alvarez-
Correa 1998: 37)
I don’t want to return to my land because of violence. I don’t want to

remember what happened. (51)
I’d like to live like I did before, having food, clothes and housing, so
as not to feel displaced. (79)
I’d like to make myself up once in a while, like before, and not remain
like I am now […] without makeup, to put on a good pair of shoes.
Like that [...]. (79)
Within this context of ongoing turmoil, violence seems so

pervasive that it appears as a mythical force that engulfs everything, as
Michael Taussig argues in an essay on Colombia, appropriately
entitled ‘Terror as Usual’:
A Sense of Place: Colombian Artists on Violence and Exile 271
Forces become disembodied from social contexts as one enters a

world in which things become animated paralleling the impossibly
contradictory need to both establish and disestablish a centre, a motive
force, or a reason explaining everything. (Taussig 1992: 19)
According to this widespread view, itself a symptom of cultural

anaesthesia, Colombia is ‘a culture of violence’, fated to an endless,
inescapable cycle of collective guilt and individual impunity. Such
perception has definitely been heightened by the pervasiveness of
violence in the media (particularly on television), eroding public
sensitivity in the face of extreme acts of violence. In consequence, the
visual arts, which actively treated the topic through the 1990s, sought
to address violence in fresh ways, that is, by trying to create a mental
space for violence to register, a strategy which may or may not
involve the use of shocking images.1
The initial idea for the present essay came from perceiving
remarkable resemblances between two sets of images. The first is a
series of photographs of María Teresa Hincapié’s 1990 performance
‘una cosa es una cosa’ (‘a thing is a thing’). In this piece, the artist
brought into a museum several bags containing all her household
items, except for the furniture. Then, she took everything out and
placed every item on the ground, creating a rectangle enclosing her.
Next, the items were feverishly organized and re-organized by colour,
by their function, or any other criterion over eight hours per day, for
two weeks. A short text written by the artist serves to accompany the
piece and reinforces its underlying notions of domesticity, ritual, and
repetition:
movement here. then. in the corner. in the centre. on one side. near
him. very far. further. very far. very, very far. here are the handbags.
here, the pocket. here the bag. here, the box and over it, the pocket. at
one side, the box. in the corner, the pocket and the bag; in the centre
the paper bags and very near, the box. leakage. dispersion. everything
getting empty. everything disappears. everything scatters.
disseminates. blends. stops. organise themselves in a cue in a random
way. they mark a space. they separate in groups, one beside the other.
common groups. where they are similar. because they are white.
because they are made up of fabric […] because they need one another
as the toothbrush and toothpaste, but also because the paste is by itself
and the toothbrush is with other toothbrushes, or by itself. […] I,
alone. she, alone. we, alone. they, alone. a space alone. a place alone.
a line alone […] everything is alone. all of us are alone. a heap of rice.
a heap of sugar. a heap of salt. a heap of wheat. a heap of coffee. a
heap of different things. (Hincapié 2000: 155)
In this piece, the repetitious everyday world of women’s domestic

labour is taken from the private sphere and is inserted into the public
sphere of the museum, making the spectator bear witness to domestic
experience and legitimising its presence within the public sphere.
Another irruption of the private into the public is present in the
other set of images that gave birth to this essay. In this case, however,
repetitious domestic daily life has been disrupted by terror and has,
therefore, to be replicated in other spaces. The people in these images,
having been forcibly displaced from their homes, occupied the
headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross in
Bogotá in 1998 to demand solutions from the national government.
Twelve occupations of government offices or public places (with
durations of between one day and three months) took place in Bogotá
during 1998 (Osorio 2000: 197, note 12). During these occupations,
they recreated the domestic space and the rituals of daily life: cooking,
washing, sleeping.
Photo: Garry Leach

Hincapié’s first performance of ‘una cosa es una cosa’, which took

place eight years before these events, was, incidentally, repeated in
1998, suggesting connections between these images that go well
beyond mere visual resemblance.
Hincapié’s aesthetics of the ordinary, her repetitive action of
organising, of making and unmaking a home, restores the sense of
order of the world, and conveys the idea of daily ritual, of the
sacredness of the everyday, of the sacredness of life, as well as the
impossibility of permanently reclaiming a space.2 Daily ritual
continues even if both daily life and daily space have been disrupted
by violence, as in the case of displaced communities. As Gaston
Bachelard noted in his Poetics of Space: ‘the house is one of the
greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories, and dreams
of humans, thus a being without a house would be a dispersed body’
(Bachelard 1994: 5). For this reason, forceful displacement, along
with massacre and disappearance,3 is an extreme form of violence that
fuses at once the fracture of identity, the destruction of the sense of
place, marginality, and vulnerability:
Living on the boundaries of civil society and along the margins of the
law, the displaced also endure the consequences of the unequal
relations of gender and class to which they are also subject. This is a
world pitched between legality and illegality, visibility and
invisibility, the public and the private. In a sense, the inhabitants of
this world have abandoned their right to difference. They live on the
threshold of dispersal and dissolution. It is difficult to give voice even
to a residual sense of identity here; but if we can find one at all it
might be [the] notion of a ‘community of absence’ or disavowal, one
that is always positioned as an aporia, one that is always already
marginalized. (Merewether 1996: 104)
By contrast with Hincapié, video artist José Alejandro Restrepo

employs strong images of violence in a well-researched work
entwining ethnography, myth, and history in an effort to analyse
continuities and discontinuities between different forms of violence.
His Musa Paradisiaca (‘Heavenly Muse’, 1994-97) looks at accounts
of travel by Europeans in the nineteenth century, at the banana
growing process and the violence associated with it, as well as at
contemporary economic diplomacy (Herkenhoff 2001: 46). In Musa
Paradisiaca (the scientific name of the common banana) bunches of
bananas, which are deliberately left to rot in the exhibition space, have
small television screens attached to the lower end of them playing
fragments of news bulletins from Urabá (a banana growing region
notorious since 1985 for the massacres of banana plantation workers),4
as well as images of a nude couple in a luxuriant natural scene. This

not only suggests links between violence and the idea of an exuberant
and exotic America, both sexually and in nature (Roca 2001: 7), but
also displaces the focus of history to other topics: to desire, to myth, to
war, and, finally, to the senses of the viewer (Gutiérrez 2002).
Indeed, banana plantations have strong connotations, in
Colombian collective memory, of violence and corruption. Gabriel
García Márquez’s A Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), for instance,
retells the story of the 1928 massacre at the hands of the Colombian
army of a group of striking United Fruit Company workers. More
recently, the banana-growing region has been reinscribed in memory
as a site of violence, via television news which highlights the
involvement of large landowners, banana companies, unions and
workers, and guerrillas and paramilitaries, all set against the backdrop
of tensions imposed by globalization (Roca 2001: 7). These coalescing
elements have made this region the setting for a number of more
recent massacres and a location from which many people have been
displaced, a fact Restrepo relates to issues of space:
[V]iolence as an instrument of conflict obeys certain norms of the
senses. Terror, through spectacle […], goes much deeper: to a total
rupturing of the senses […]. We are watching […] a confusing story
which really, above all else, is a problem of geographies, geopolitics,
and the strategic partitioning of territories, of passages and corridors.
The best lands are areas of conflict, and there too are found the
greatest number of large landowners. Thus, displacement in order to
occupy and displacement in order to usurp are the strategies of the
anachronistic feudal lords and their private armies. (Restrepo 2001:
63)
Sculptor Doris Salcedo agrees with Restrepo in pointing to

space as an underlying source of violence: ‘I don’t believe that space
can be neutral. The history of wars, and perhaps history in general, is
but an endless struggle to conquer space. Space is not simply a setting,
it is what makes life possible. It is space that makes encounters
possible. It is the site of proximity, where everything crosses over’
(2000: 12). In fact, Salcedo also makes reference to the banana-
growing region in an untitled piece known as ‘White Shirts’ (1989-
90), in which long metal rods impale neat stacks of white shirts. The
work alludes to the 1988 massacres at La Negra and La Hondura
banana plantations, where male workers were dragged out of their
beds and shot in front of their families.
Doris Salcedo: Installation of Untitled Sculptures: ‘The Spine’, De Appel Foundation,

Amsterdam, January-March 1994. Photo courtesy of Alexander & Bonin, New York.
While this work refers tangentially to forced displacement, in

La Casa Viuda (‘the widowed house’) (1993-95), Salcedo refers to it
more directly by ‘implicitly represent[ing] the house as the place of
refuge, shelter, a sanctuary now exposed, uncovered, and violated’
(Merewether 1998: 20). The destruction of the dwelling place, of
‘home’, brings to mind the words of Elaine Scarry in The Body in
Pain: ‘The unmaking of civilisation inevitably requires a return to and
mutilation of the domestic, the ground of all making’ (Scarry 1985:
45). The pieces in La Casa Viuda, placed in in-between or decentred
spaces in museums and galleries, are a conjunction of materials,
furniture, clothing, bones, and cutlery forced or compressed into the
surface of the furniture and often perceived only after a careful look:
‘Bearing traces of violence, the objects are mute witnesses and

testimony to the past. The house that had been a shelter, that
concealed and protected, is violently altered into the tomb and burial
site of its inhabitants’ (Merewether 1998: 21). As Salcedo asserted,
this piece ‘makes use of [the notion of] non-place, that is a place of
passage, where it is impossible to live’ (Gutiérrez 1996: 49).
Doris Salcedo, ‘La Casa Viuda’, 1992-4. Photo courtesy of Alexander & Bonin, New
York.
While La Casa Viuda evokes parts of a house which literally

cling to the persons who have disappeared from its protection, in
Unland (1995-98) an inanimate object duplicates the organic growth
processes of the deceased as a way of keeping their presence alive
(Cameron 1998, 14). Unland is composed of three pieces (The
Orphan’s Tunic, Audible in the Mouth and Irreversible Witness)
meant to be seen together and each referring to a specific incident of
violence, although the information is not provided to the audience. ‘I
do not illustrate testimonies’, stated the artist in an interview
(Merewether 1999: 82). In the case of The Orphan's Tunic (1996-97),
it is known that the piece was inspired by the artist’s encounter with a
six-year old girl, witness to her mother’s murder, who could not
remember anything before this event but who refused to change the
dress she wore daily because it had been sewn by her mother. The
work consists of two wooden tables clashing into each other. One of
them bears a white shroud of raw silk with an intermediate zone which
the viewer only gradually recognizes is covered with human hair.
Thousands of minuscule holes, as follicles, allow the table to breathe,
to acquire the appearance of a living being (Peña 2003: 18).
Doris Salcedo, ‘Unland: The Orpahan’s Tunic’, 1997. Photo: David Heald.
Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York.
Unland, a poetic neologism inspired by the work of Paul

Celan, suggests that its subject matter is no longer that of an
abandoned site, but rather focuses on the place of homelessness,
for there is no place in officialdom for this repressed archive,
nor adequate social rituals to address the depth of collective
tragedy. As Salcedo comments:
To place the invisible experience of marginal people in space is to find
a place for them in our mind. I think of space in terms of place, a place
to eat or a place to write, a place to develop life. So there’s no way of
isolating living experience from spatial experience: it’s exactly the
same thing. Certain types of contemporary work underscore this
aspect of sculpture as a topography of life. (2000: 17)
Hence, Salcedo’s work expresses an ‘ethical commitment to combat

the anaesthesia present in dominant representations of violence in
Colombia’ (Merewether 1998: 23), by salvaging fragments that, as the
artist asserts, are ‘individual cases that are of little interest to
historians and to the Colombian justice system’ (Salcedo 2003: 29).5
While Salcedo’s work focuses on the recognition of individual
victims of violence, the work of Oscar Muñoz emphasises rather the
transitory and vulnerable condition of individual and collective
identity, as experienced under conditions of violence. His process-
intensive works can be considered to some extent as performances, as
they require the intervention of the viewer in order to be completed.
One such work is Aliento (‘breath’) (1996-97), which features a dozen
polished metal disks, each with a photo-screened image of a victim of
violence. With the use of a greasy medium (grease being a material
evocative of the Holocaust), the images are made imperceptible, while
the metal disk acts as a mirror reflecting the viewer’s face. When the
viewer breathes on them, the faces of the victims briefly come into
view, only to quickly fade away. This work entails a double
movement between historical recovery and its simultaneous vanishing,
as the expired breath gives only an ephemeral glimpse of the subject
matter, leaving the viewers with only their own reflection, implicated
both in bringing these images to light and allowing them to be
forgotten.6 Taken a step further, Aliento can be related to
disappearance and torture, which are also connected to displacement,
as individuals and communities flee from these threats.
The topic of fragility and the ephemeral explored in Aliento is
also present in the Narcisos series (‘narcissuses’) featuring Muñoz’s
face posing in a way reminiscent of obituary photographs.
Oscar Muñoz, ‘Narcisos’. Courtesy of Sicardi Gallery and the artist.
The image is obtained by sifting charcoal powder through a photo-

silkscreen on to a tray of water. The precarious and unstable image
floats on the water's surface and as the days pass, the water evaporates
and viewers have a sense of interacting with the works, becoming
active in the conformation of the image. On other occasions, the artist
has floated pages from newspapers on the water, further complicating
the process of translating his photographic image to the surface of the
water. Despite the variations introduced by the artist, the series has in
common that it not only reacts to the involvement of the viewer, but
actually demands it for the work to be completed, which in turn can be
seen as a comment on passivity and compliance in the face of acts of
violence.
The notion of the dissolution of identity, fuelled by the loss of
place (both spatially and socially) and the fearful desire for
anonymity, is one of the traumas that displaced persons frequently
suffer. This is symbolised in another aspect of the series, also called
Narcisos. Here, a self-portrait printed with charcoal powder, and

floating on the surface of moving water, is contained in a draining
sink. The image undergoes a slow deformation and depends upon a
video camera to record the process of destruction of the image. The
video Narciso (2001) registers the process from the beginning, from
the moment the powder enters into contact with the surface of the
water and creates the image, passing through its gradual deformation
and ending in its imminent destruction by the emptying of the sink.
The dissolution of the self is, in the end, a mirror image of the
dissolution of the community as a whole, which is the ultimate effect
of wars on society, such as the one Colombia experiences
[under repressive violence] the idea of community or collectivity […]
is continually threatened and always at stake. This history reveals a
pervasive vested interest in removing from consciousness the death of
people in order to effect the displacement of popular memory as an
active element of hope and key impulse of collectivity. Terror is
anonymous. Mutilation and disappearance are strategies by which
identification is erased. Human identity and death are desacralized
[…]. In this context, there can be no martyrs, no historical memory, no
family shrines; nothing but anonymity. (Merewether 1996: 114)
Although the situation in Colombia continues to be extremely delicate,

a positive feature is the active cultural and intellectual effort involved
in grasping the issue from different perspectives, in contradiction to
the idea that Colombia is victim to a self-destructive craze, destined to
burn indefinitely in what international analysts consider a ‘low
intensity conflict’. In this sense, displacement is not the consequence
of a senseless fratricidal war, but rather a strategy of war aimed at the
control of territories and the exploitation of natural resources by both
local and international interests.
The visual arts, working through their very powerlessness,7 are
part of this effort, opening spaces for reflection: by aesthetically
undertaking transdisciplinary investigations into the sources of the
ongoing violence, as in the case of Restrepo; or by establishing
connections between the themes of identity and violence and
involving the public in dialogue, as Muñoz does; and even functioning
as witness to tragedies and victims which would otherwise be
forgotten or exploited by the media (itself another way of forgetting),
as does Salcedo.
Notes
1
In Real Pictures, an installation about the massacres in Rwanda, Chilean artist
Alfredo Jaar enclosed 550 photographs in individual black archival photographic
boxes. None of the images were visible, but there was a text on the top of each box
describing the photograph it contained. The work, described by the artist as a
‘graveyard of images’, also featured a phrase from Catalan writer Vincenç Altaió:
‘Images have an advanced religion: they bury history’ (Gallo online).
2
Hincapié’s work has shifted since the 1990s from the notion of the quotidian,
evident in pieces such as Punto de fuga (‘vanishing point’) (1989) and Vitrina
(‘showcase’) (1989) to that of the holy, suggested by works such as Caminar es
sagrado (‘walking is holy’) (1994-1995) (Pini 2000).
3
Disappearance is a strategy that adds symbolic violence, based on making the body
invisible and the process of ignorance that accompanies it, to the physical violence of
imprisonment, torture or death.
4
For a recent history of violence in Urabá, see García (1996).
5
Charlotte Delbo, in discussing the aesthetic rendering of traumatic memory, has
suggested that what makes sense memory valuable is the fact it can resist
historicisation by preserving in memory the affective experience itself (1995).
6
A work comparable to that of Chilean artist Eugenio Dittborn, whose ‘airmail
paintings’ present the faces and bodies of victims in an attempt to force the audience
to bear witness to loss, and to confront the reality of political violence (Bennett 2002,
p. 345).
7
Which Salcedo explicitly acknowledges: ‘I look for individuals as faces, as real
presence, but in most cases unfortunately I encounter just the impossibility of finding
the person because the person is gone and all that is left is a trace and all that is felt is
his silence. All that remains is beyond my possibilities, beyond my reach. There is
nothing or very little I can grasp of that life that is gone long ago. This is what my
work is about: Impotence, a sum of impotence, not being able to solve anything, or to
fix a problem, not knowing, not seeing, not being able to grasp a presence, for me art
is a lack of power’ (2003: 29, my emphasis). This suggests, as Jean-François Lyotard
has argued, that art might function as a space of resistance to metahistories (1999: 73-
74).
Bibliography
Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press.

Bennett, Jill. 2002. ‘Art, Affect, and the "Bad Death": Strategies for Communicating
the Sense Memory of Loss’ in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and
Society 28(1): 333-351.
Cameron, Dan. 1998 ‘Inconsolable’ in Doris Salcedo. New Museum of Contemporary
Art, Santa Fe: SITE.
Delbo, Charlotte. 1995. Auschwitz and After. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Gallo, R. ‘The Limits of Representation’ TRANS No 3/4. On line at: www.echonyc.
com/~trans/Telesymposia3/Jaar/Telesymposia3eJaar.html (consulted
05.05.2004).
García, Clara Inez. 1996. Urabá: región, actores y conflicto, 1960-1990. Medellín:
Universidad de Antioquia.
Gutiérrez, N. 2000. ‘José Alejandro Restrepo TransHistories, Biblioteca Luis Angel
Arango’ in ArtNexus 43, March: Bogotá.
- - - . 1996. ‘Conversación con Doris Salcedo’ in ArtNexus 19, January-March:
Bogotá: 48-50.
Herkenhoff, Paulo. 2001. ‘El hambre polisémica de José Alejandro Restrepo’ in
Transhistorias. Historia y mito en la obra de José Alejandro Restrepo.
Bogotá: Banco de la República.
Hincapié, Maria Teresa. 2000. ‘una cosa en una cosa’, in Fusco, Coco (ed.) Corpus
Delecti. Performance Art of the Americas. New York and London: Routledge.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. 1999. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Merewether, Charles. 1998. ‘To Bear Witness’ in Doris Salcedo. New Museum of
Contemporary Art, Santa Fe: SITE.
- - - . 1996. ‘Zones of Marked Instability: Women and the Space of Emergence’ in
Welchman, John (ed.) Rethinking Borders. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Osorio, F. E. 2000. ‘Territorios, identidades y acción colectiva. Pistas en la
comprensión del desplazamiento’ in Desplazamiento forzado interno en
Colombia: conflicto, paz y desarrollo. ACNUR: CODHES.
Peña, M.E. 2003. ‘Object and Body Recalling Memory’, unpublished paper.
Pini, Ivonne. 2002. ‘María Teresa Hincapié Between the Quotidian and the Holy’ in
ArtNexus 45, September: Bogotá.
Restrepo, Jose Alessandro. 2001. ‘Psicogeografías y transhistorias’ in TransHistorias.
Historia y mito en la obra de José Alejandro Restrepo. Bogotá: Banco de la
República.
Roca, J. (ed.). 2001. TransHistorias. Historia y mito en la obra de José Alejandro
Restrepo. Bogotá: Banco de la República.
Salcedo, Doris. 2003. ‘Traces of Memory. Art and Remembrance in Colombia’ in
Harvard Review of Latin America 2 (3): 28-30.
Scarry, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain. The Making and the Unmaking of the World.
Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Taussig, Michael. 1992. ‘Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin’s Theory of History as a
State of Siege’ in The Nervous System. London and New York: Routledge.
30
Fading into Metaphor: Globalization and the

Disappearance of Exile
Rudolphus Teeuwen
Rudolphus Teeuwen (born 1955) studied Dutch and Comparative

Literature at the University of Utrecht in his native Netherlands. After
studies in the Comparative Literature Department at the University of
Pennsylvania, he moved, in 1995, to Taiwan to become Associate
Professor of English at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung.
He writes, among other things, on eighteenth-century literature,
philosophy, and aesthetics. His own experiences of foreignness and
faded nationality have also come to inform his thought and writing.
This aspect of his work began in 1994 with the publication of an
article on Edward Gibbon and (as Gibbon himself called it) his
‘quality of foreignness’. In the book Teeuwen edited in 2001,
Crossings: Travel, Art, Literature, Politics, he first expressed his
unhappiness with postmodern and postcolonial treatments of exile, a
theme he further develops in the article published here.
In this paper, he comments on how, in the age of globalization, public
attention has been drawn to local differences: the differences between
war zones and havens of peace; between pockets of poverty and
enclaves of wealth; between regimes of repression and regions of
tolerance. These differences generate movements of peoples across
borders on a scale never seen before. So-called asylum-seekers,
refugees, and illegal aliens are treated as crowds to be processed for
admission, to be controlled, to be discouraged from settling, and to be
ready for return at the slightest sign of improvement in the conditions
(economic, political, racial etc) that they fled. They are not generally
referred to as ‘exiles’, a term with a long history, which, in the mid-
twentieth century, came to be used as a mark of prestige when applied
to Europeans fleeing Nazism and the Communist regimes of Eastern
Europe. Nevertheless, the term ‘exile’ has not entirely disappeared,
being in constant use, according to Teeuwen, in the work of
postcolonial scholars such as Edward Said and Homi Bhabha, who use
it of intellectuals like themselves, who have made careers for
themselves away from their personal (or family) homeland by
reflecting on questions of ‘home’ and ‘away’. He asks to what extent
this is a nostalgic and self-serving use of the notion of exile, and
whether ‘exile’ has become a metaphorical name for those who
identify with a plight – that of the refugee and the asylum-seeker –
they do not really share.
284 Rudolphus Teeuwen
“The exile is a universal figure”, writes George Lamming in his The

Pleasures of Exile. He goes on to explain that the exile is someone
who lives, politically, “without the right kind of information to make
argument effective.”
We are made to feel a sense of exile by our inadequacy and our
irrelevance of function in a society whose past we can’t alter, and
whose future is always beyond us. Idleness can easily guide us into
accepting this as a condition. (Lamming 1960: 24)
Lamming writes this in 1960, as a “man of colonial orientation”

(Lamming 1960: 24), and as a thirty-two year old writer. He had
already been in self-imposed exile in England for ten years, in order to
become that writer, and felt “that I have had it (as a writer) where the
British Caribbean is concerned. I have lost my place, or my place has
deserted me” (1960: 50).
It doesn’t take much reading in The Pleasures of Exile to
understand that Lamming, by declaring that “the exile is a universal
figure” (1960: 24), is not claiming that everyone is an exile. Exiles,
rather, are universal because they lack specificity and are inept in
dealing within the precise contexts of their lives, whether Barbados or
England. Or, to put it more positively (George Lamming’s is not a
gloomy personality): “The pleasure and paradox of my own exile is
that I belong wherever I am” (1960: 50). Thus, the exile stands apart
from the multitude of people who have more precise ways of
attributing their happiness and unhappiness to a “geography of
circumstances” (1960: 50). The pleasure of exile that Lamming
describes is that of transcending both one’s original and assumed
environments.
Times have changed since the days of colonialism from which
Lamming speaks. Postcolonialism and postmodernism followed and
are now shading into the age of globalization, and the idea that would
have appeared absurd to Lamming—that everyone is an exile—has
gained currency. I regret this development and would prefer to resist
it. I believe that the word and concept of ‘exile’ have undergone an
unhelpful metaphorical extension, and that postcolonial critics such as
Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have forged that extension.
To see what exile was like before its current metaphysical
extension, and also before Lamming’s mid-twentieth-century
philosophical resignation, a look at the opening pages of Daniel
Defoe’s Roxana (1724) is instructive. Defoe’s heroine doesn’t actually
use the word ‘exile’, but that very new word of the late seventeenth
century designed to denote a specific kind of exile: ‘refugee’. Roxana,
Fading into Metaphor: Globalization and the Disappearance of Exile 285
when still a girl, came over with her parents to England from France.
She is at pains, in the early pages of her story, to distinguish her
family’s coming over from that of other refugees, “[m]y Father and
Mother being People of better Fashion, than ordinarily the People
call’d REFUGEES at that Time were” (Defoe 1996: 5). Those refugees
were the French Protestants or ‘Huguenots’ who fled their country
after 1685 when, with the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, France
no longer tolerated Protestants on its soil. What Roxana vividly
remembers from these early scenes of her English life, a life as a
foreigner still, is how her father complained of being pestered for help
by poorer and later arrivals:
a great-many of those, who, for any Religion they had, might e’en
have stay’d where they were, but who flock’d over hither in Droves,
for what they call in English, a Livelihood [. . .]. My Father, I say, told
me, That he was more pester’d with the Clamours of these People,
than of those who were truly REFUGEES, and fled in Distress, merely
[i.e., purely] for Conscience. (Defoe 1996: 5-6; italics in original)
Everything about Roxana’s very short account of her early English

years bears witness to her horror at being regarded as a refugee.
Roxana’s fear is that she will be permitted neither to transcend her
French origins nor to assume her English destination. So she hurries
into Englishness in barely a page, learning to speak the new language
without keeping “any Remains of the French language tagg’ed to my
Way of Speaking, as most Foreigners do” (Defoe 1996: 6; italics in
original). The term ‘refugee’, John Mullan reminds us in a note in his
edition of Roxana (and the OED backs him up), “seems to have been
coined in 1685 specifically to describe the French Huguenots who fled
to England” (Defoe 1996: 341). The newly-coined word derives from
the French language (a Frenchness probably still palpable in the
word’s English newness) and intends a group of Frenchmen in
England: the Huguenots, as it were, came over with a bridle of their
own linguistic making, a cordon sanitaire. This linguistic containment
is reflected in the small capitals, rare in Defoe’s novel, with which the
word is set off from other words on his page. And because the novel’s
Preface encourages us to understand this novel as Roxana’s own
verbal account of her life only slightly edited by a ‘Relator,’ the
contempt for the French refugees is Roxana’s own. She, taking her
cue from her father, applies the word “refugee” to others to prove her
own Englishness, and it is the word’s offensive newness (rather than
its French familiarity) that she throws in the face of the economic
opportunists and the virtuously poor among her countrymen.
To those of us who, voluntarily or not, live the phenomenon of

globalization, Roxana’s invidious distinctions and anxious glosses will
seem quaint: they have a remembered familiarity buried in deep
irrelevance. The familiarity lies in the terms, the irrelevance in their
application. We still know of refugees, but they are no longer French
Huguenots or any other single and homogenous group. Being French
or being English has become much more a matter of accidental
difference than the essential and permanent divide it was to Roxana.
Globalization doesn’t do away with the notion of essentiality, but it
does with that of permanence. Essentiality becomes the temporary
quality of the flash points, civil wars, economic imbalances, floods,
and famines of the moment (captured on tape for an international
audience), and the havoc they create in people’s lives. The very idea
of globalization as well as its manifestations in economics, politics,
and culture are all very much related to the experience and conviction
that existing categories and distinctions fail to organize the world of
human activities and feelings in a useful, desirable, truthful, or
sensible way. Distinctions become temporary, transitory, or vague,
scaffolding put up to be removed when a service provided by them is
no longer required.
The speed with which bureaucratic categories for displaced
people now spring up and replace each other attests to the relative
powerlessness of those categories in the age of globalization. But
categorical decomposition also has an impact on accounts of exile that
people can give of themselves. These accounts, in any age, are usually
intensely personal autobiographies, but as the notion of exile loses
definition, the possibility of achieving the authority of authenticity for
one’s story of exile also diminishes. There is no questioning the
authenticity of Roxana’s voice fighting the category of ‘refugee’ that
is looming over her beginnings, even though it is the authenticity of
clamouring for an assumed identity. As Roxana begins the story of her
life she knows that her story will be one of adultery, prostitution, child
murder, avarice, vanity, deception, and endless cycles of guilt and
imperfect penitence that will take her for long, un-English stretches to
France and Holland. She therefore begins her account with a
presentation of her credentials as a true Englishwoman so that her
confessions and the lessons that they contain cannot be dismissed as
those of a mere foreign floozy.
Roxana clearly does protest too much. It is different with
Lamming, although there is no questioning his authenticity as a voice
of exile either. Whereas Roxana realizes that any categorical
equivocalness in her national identity would weaken the relevance of

her case, George Lamming embraces that equivocalness. With
Barbados still stuck in the posture of colonial backwater and England
still in that of benevolent civilizer, Lamming has freed himself from
belonging in either camp and wryly pays the exile’s price of double
irrelevance. But Lamming is too prickly-sensitive an author to be
taken at his word. His professed irrelevance is not truly a form of
disengagement but rather of heightened awareness of his incomplete
submersion in the cultures of either his origin or his destination. Not
fully sheltered by the forms of either culture, Lamming exposes
Barbados and England to each other, and it is up to his readers to see
how this mutual aloofness in Lamming gives form to cultural insights.
Roxana’s authenticity was that of a forceful desire to merge with her
context of destination and to erase that of origin. Lamming’s
authenticity is that of insisting on Barbados when in England, and (in
a more veiled manner: there is the matter of colonialism to redress) to
insist on England when still in Barbados. This stance allows him to
unravel some of the workings of racism by telling stories of working
at the BBC Colonial Service, of black poets’ poetry readings to over-
appreciative English audiences, or by explaining black ‘laziness’ in
the eyes of white governors. Most importantly, it allows him to see
Prospero’s island as Caliban’s, and to tell of this insight to Prospero’s
face.
I call Roxana and Lamming ‘authentic’ exiles because they
understand their lives as in active oscillation between two determinate
places. But I realize that the concept of authenticity, for all its
suggested stability, is an unstable one, especially when used in
conjunction with the notion of dispersal that is so definitive of exile.
The very word ‘authenticity’ assumed an aura of suspect
fashionableness at its very heyday, in the existentialism of the 1950s
and 1960s. Theodor Adorno castigates the authenticity craze that
swept intellectual Germany in the wake of Heidegger’s Being and
Time in his caustic 1964 book The Jargon of Authenticity. The concept
of ‘authenticity,’ Adorno feels, smuggles into the severity of
philosophy all sorts of “slack and self-surfeited thought” (Adorno
2003: 49) that tells that nothingness is Being, and that “suffering, evil
and death are to be accepted, not to be changed” (2003: 53).
Heidegger, Adorno argues, is the ultimate philosopher of rootedness
as a form of “petit-bourgeois kitsch” (2003: 45), and thus the one who
turned the notion of authenticity into a jargon. Heidegger depicts the
authentic state in contrast to the dispersed one and celebrates as
authentic “the unending mumble of the liturgy of inwardness” (2003:

57). But the danger of an inwardness that doesn’t want to know of
dispersion is the “thinking oneself superior which marks people who
elect themselves: the claim of people who consider themselves blessed
simply by virtue of being what they are” (2003: 61). In Heidegger,
authenticity is a “mythically imposed fate” of full self-possession, and
not the answer to “the relatively innocent question about what is
authentic in something” (Adorno 2003: 104).
Adorno’s plea to regard authenticity as the simple but precise
question of “what is authentic in something” (2003: 104) has largely
fallen on deaf ears. In postmodernism and postcolonialism, precision
is a form of petit-bourgeois ungenerosity, and in the age of
globalization it hampers the expansion of whatever fate it is that
globalization has in store for us all. Globalization entails the giving up
of some of the linguistic, historical, and moral precision that is the
triumph of earlier and more place-bound thinking and acting.
Historical awareness is probably the biggest impediment for the
various manifestations of globalization, and the replacement of the
historical by temporal globalization’s greatest project. One sees this
attempted replacement of history already in much postcolonialist
thought, and postcolonialism, no matter how justly critical of many of
the manifestation of globalization, certainly is one of its earliest
outposts.
Homi K. Bhabha, in ‘DissemiNation’ (1990), begins the
celebration of temporal, metaphorical, transcendent existence as
opposed to historical and autochthonous being. Bhabha contemplates
the uncomfortable condition of living in between countries,
allegiances, and senses of home, and he begins his essay beautifully.
The first paragraph is a powerful evocation of the fate of the scattered
people who gather at the edge of cultures not their own and are
‘gathered’ in the foreign nation’s statistics banks. He goes on to
explain:
Gatherings of exiles and emigrés and refugees, gathering on the edge
of ‘foreign’ cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the
ghettos or cafés of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of
foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language;
gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses,
disciplines; [. . .]. Also the gathering of [. . .] incriminatory statistics,
educational performance, legal statuses [. . .]. (Bhabha 1990: 291)
To these gathering individuals, ‘nation’ becomes a metaphorical

concept as something they have carried with them across the distances
“that span the imagined community of the nation-people” (Bhabha

1990: 291). Bhabha’s use of the notion of metaphor determines his
emphasis on culture and nationhood as something that is brought
along rather than left behind. The scattering of people, to him, is less a
destruction of a culture abandoned (perhaps through force) than the
constitution of a culture that one enters by bringing along cultural
fragments to a new accumulation of cultural fragments. Culture
becomes a temporal construction of diverse disjunctive fragments and
thus an agent against the pretensions of solid naturalness and
immanence, backed up by a centuries-long history that dictates
inclusions and exclusions. As such an agent against history, culture
becomes ‘performative,’ a counter-creation of a certain weightlessness
and impermanence that scattered people make through the behaviour
and actions of their gathering. There is a sense of triumph in this
achievement, a denial of the exile’s irrelevance that Roxana fought
through narrative sleight of hand and that Lamming embraced.
But there is also a bit of wilful depth in this play with the
etymological roots of the words ‘metaphor’ and, elsewhere,
‘translation’ as applied to rootless people protesting by virtue of their
metaphorical mode of being the nation state’s pretensions of literal
truth. Bhabha, in a voice that, to my ear, exchanges authenticity for
the solemn, self-dramatizing jargon of authenticity, claims personal
experience with this metaphorical way of living (“I have lived that
moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and in other
places [. . .] becomes a time of gathering” [Bhabha 1990: 291]), but
his personal testimony begs the question of how he imagines a
metaphorical experience to register on the sensorium. One wonders if
Bhabha’s notion of metaphorical being isn’t itself a metaphor for the
sort of truce that occurs when gathering cultures, all intending to carry
on, are forced to settle for what can be cobbled together of elements
that are carried over.
Bhabha’s choice of the perspective of the communities that
result from the scattering and gathering over of the communities that
were left and entered is a legitimate one. It is also true that there is no
thought imaginable without recourse to metaphor. Metaphor is
endemic to thought because “[a] metaphor is a compromise struck
between the old and the new, between the overwhelming authority of
language and the irrepressible anarchy of wit” (Weiskel 1976: 4). As
such a compromise, metaphor enables us “to grasp experience in
terms sanctioned by the past” (Weiskel 1976: 4). Thomas Weiskel
writes here of the sublime, and adds: “We cannot conceive of a literal
sublime” (1976: 4). We also cannot conceive of literal exiles, of exiles

who comprehend their condition without reference to earlier beings
who lived a life of exile. But only someone who thinks of travel, of
being scattered and gathered, as a metaphorical transaction of cultural
fragments could imagine the question of the capacity in which one set
out on one’s travel to be unimportant. It matters to the scattered
whether they are exiles, or refugees, or migrants, or expatriates, or
émigrés: these are different states of being, not forms of a single
metaphor. Bhabha’s celebrated erasure of prior presence of the nation-
people comes at the price of a self-erasure: one cannot destroy the
claims of singular culture by insisting on one’s own singularity.
Bhabha takes the notion of metaphor too literally by omitting its
inherent appeal to a sanctioning past. Thus, travellers who are literally
metaphorical by carrying all they amount to with them fade into a
general metaphor and are robbed of the distress, courage, triumph, and
despair of a personal history.
Bhabha indicts national history as a confining-excluding
concept that must be counteracted by the temporal gathering of
metaphorical, translated beings on a nation’s edges. In this process,
the very history of terms such as exile and refugee is threatened with
forgetfulness. But some who reflect on their lives as shaped by
globalization are more linguistically responsible. Pico Iyer, for
instance, in an attempt at defining people like himself, comes up with
terms like “off-shore beings” (Iyer 2001: 22) and “global souls”,
persons who have “grown up in many cultures all at once” and who
live “in the cracks between them” (2001: 18). He writes:
[a] person like myself can’t really call himself an exile (who
traditionally looked back to a home now lost), or an expatriate (who’s
generally posted abroad for a living); I’m not really a nomad (whose
patterns are guided by seasons and traditions); and I’ve never been
subject to the refugee’s violent disruptions: the Global Soul is best
categorized by the fact of falling between all categories [. . .]. (Iyer
2001: 23)
We see Iyer here rejecting metaphors for himself that are readily at
hand. Instead, he gropes for an accurate metaphor. In those of “global
soul” as well as “off-shore beings” there is a spiritual capitalism at
work, with reverberations of transcendence (“soul,” “beings”) joined
with words that conjure cable networks, business ventures, and extra-
territorial waters. The struggle with (self-) definitions of people caught
up, willingly or not, in the swirls of globalization is, to me,
globalization’s rare but most worthwhile enterprise. It is here, in the
search for a particular, precise metaphor, that the images of global

modernity are forged, and this enterprise of giving or withholding
names involves our taste and temperament, our politics and
civilization, our contentment or our discontent with the world and our
figure in it. There is much at stake in the contestation of the words that
whirl around so frequently in discussions of postcolonialism and
globalization: immigrant, refugee, migrant, expatriate, asylum seeker,
exile. Naming truly shapes reality here: all these words refer to having
or lacking a legal status, and legality is the way language enforces
reality. This brings up—as a matter of taste, or purpose, or tact, or
ethical niceness—the question of how reluctant one should be in
applying these words in an extended or metaphorical way to oneself.
The term ‘exile’ is probably the one that has suffered most in
this respect from the historical, linguistic, and moral latitudinarianism
of postcolonialism, and it is the one most in need of new attention.
Once the designation of a horrible fate, ‘exile’ today is a term so
eagerly embraced that a deep forgetting of what it means to be an
exile must be at the root of it.
In his “The Romance of Exile,” Ian Buruma, irritated by the
appropriation of exile as a fashionable image, writes:
Now it is exile [rather than consumption, i.e., tuberculosis] that evokes
the sensitive intellectual, the critical spirit operating alone on the
margins of society, a traveller, rootless and yet at home in every
metropolis, a tireless wanderer from academic conference to academic
conference, a thinker in several languages, an eloquent advocate for
ethnic and sexual minorities—in short, a romantic outsider living on
the edge of the bourgeois world. (Buruma 2001: 33)
“Margins,” “rootless,” “metropolis”: Buruma conjures the lofty

sadness of exile, but then pierces the nobility and grinds his axe: the
mention of academic conferences and the championing of ethnic and
sexual minorities bring the exile into an interested modernity of
posturing and posing. Buruma wants to register his protest against the
eagerness with which quite a few intellectuals – postcolonial
intellectuals who are perfectly at home in their adopted North America
or Western Europe – glory in seeing themselves as exiles. Without
ever having had to experience the sadness of banishment, they aren’t
shy to take the authority that comes with it. Buruma is thinking in
particular of the five contributors to a lecture series at the New York
Public Library whose papers are collected in the book Letters of
Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss. The five
are “Edward Said [who] is introduced as a Palestinian in exile, Eva
Hoffman as Pole in exile, Bharati Mukherjee as Bengali in exile,

Charles Simic as Yugoslav in exile, and Andre Aciman, the editor of
the book, as an exile from Alexandria” (Buruma 2001: 33).
Buruma taunts those who are merely metaphorical exiles with
their simulation of ‘real’ exile. This simulation is deeply nostalgic for
an authentic state of being, one that requires courage and the
overcoming of hardships. Buruma distanced himself from the
simulation, but he shares the nostalgia. It is this nostalgia that
motivates his criticism of metaphorical exiles as cheapeners of that
valued figure of the exile. And there is some scope indeed for
considering these scholars as abusers of category: they can quite
accurately be regarded as émigrés, or residers abroad or, for that
matter, as more or less ordinary immigrant Americans or Canadians.
As Buruma points out, “Of the five witnesses to exile, only two were
forced to leave their country of origin: Aciman, whose family was
kicked out of Egypt, and Simic, whose parents could not live under
communism” (2001: 33). These two, presumably, can legitimately
claim their status as exiles (or, actually, dependents of exiles), but the
other three live in a more metaphorical and literary state of exile. And
whereas actual exile is a prohibition of travelling back rather than an
allowance to travel, metaphorical exile brings no travel restrictions at
all.
Buruma’s nostalgia for absolute authenticity is a form of what
Adorno dismissed as the “jargon of authenticity”. It affords him the
advantage of legislating exile and leads him into the unfairness of
absolute rhetorical power. To be exiled has never conferred a precise
and literally circumscribed residency or legal status on anyone, but
taken such a status away from one. It is this very negativity that makes
exile such a hard fate to countenance for human beings, and that sets
them the task of self-definition. In the essential subjectivity of self-
definition, the term ‘exile’ becomes available for metaphorical,
connotative, and literary uses. New states of actually being of
questionable residency status in our present age – new forms of
negative being – are those of the sans papiers: asylum seekers, illegal
aliens, refugees, and migrants.1
The shift from ‘exile’ to ‘refugee’ to ‘migrant’ represents a shift
in perspective away from individual distress and escape toward
international crowd control and the movement of peoples; from being
pushed out to being processed for admittance; from the importance of
spies and informers to that of customs and immigration officials. The
exile’s envelopment in the jargon of bureaucratic classification is an
assault on his or her authenticity. Exile too has finally entered the age
of mechanical reproduction, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s phrase, and
with this, exile has lost its aura. The loss of individuality and
authenticity marks the exile for consumption and disappearance. The
refugee or asylum seeker now has to contest his status rather than
quietly embrace an exile’s homeless peace upon stepping into a host
country. Interviews with lawyers and counsellors precede interviews
with immigration officials, and refugees are wise to exaggerate their
plight so as to create an impression of authenticity. Part of the current
facelessness of exile is that the problem of identity, as it figures in the
refugee debate, now centres on the identity of receiving nations, that is
to be kept intact, rather than that of displaced persons. Modern
legislation with respect to refugees does not even use or recognize the
term ‘exile,’ for instance for individual intellectuals or academics
fleeing political persecution, but lumps them together with all other
asylum seekers. The United Nations Convention on Refugees, first
drafted in 1951, speaks of refugees and of refugees only, but intends
the term for the individual victims of Communism and “[u]ntil the end
of the 1980s, refugees continued to be propaganda tools in the proxy
Cold Wars across the globe” (O’Toole 2001: 12). ‘Refugee’ is a legal
status, conferring the right of protection, but this status is under
pressure as the term ‘refugee’ is threatened by dissolution into the
term ‘migrant,’ a term without recognized legal status. As O’Toole
shows, since the 1980s the term ‘refugee’ has slipped away from
designating individually persecuted individuals, partly because the
term ‘persecution’ itself has experienced slippage, and come to
include a suffering of hardships that are not directly life-threatening,
such as economic depression or social environments intolerant of, for
instance, non-heterosexual orientations. The word ‘refugee,’
increasingly pressed into the service of designating a logistical,
economic, legal, moral, and identity problem of receiving nations,
starts to refuse to do this hatchet job. ‘Migrant’ (a word that prays that
those who come will go again) is, for now, the current denotative term
in the bureaucracy of immigration policies, although the two terms
haven’t yet clearly divided the field of distress between them. Erika
Feller, director of UNHCR’s International Protection Department,
worries about the waning powers of the word ‘refugee.’ Pam O’Toole
quotes her as saying, “‘[w]hat is required from our perspective is the
disentangling of asylum from the migration debate, the
decriminalization of asylum seekers who are increasingly seen as
backdoor migrants’” (2001: 13).
With exile largely abolished as a legal and literal state of being,

and with terms such as refugee and migrant newly established as
categories of unmediated misery, the interesting question now is
where the attraction of the term lies, and where the desire comes from
to be counted among the metaphorical exiles. Why this desire to be
metaphorically dispossessed on the part of those who possess so much
cultural and, often, material capital?
One part of the answer is that in and of itself the status of exile
confers cultural capital, precisely because of its pedigree in literature
and revolution. Being an exile – calling oneself one – is entering
(metaphorically) the tradition of Heine and Adorno, Marx and Joyce,
all living away from a home that hadn’t always expelled them. This is
a tradition of knowing more, of seeing more acutely because one sees
with foreign eyes, because one knows as a foreigner knows, in
isolation.
Another part of the answer to the attractiveness of exile is that
the painful negativity that the word ‘exile’ connotes truly corresponds
to an experience, a psychological state into which many nowadays can
enter. The word ‘exile’ answers the desire for a label that fits a state of
being. To describe this state, this experience, I’d like to enlist the help
of Susan Stewart and apply, more or less, the way she uses the terms
‘authenticity’ and ‘transcendence’ throughout her book On Longing to
my problem of defining the exile’s experience. The two terms are
opposites for Stewart, rather as ‘authenticity’ and ‘dispersal’ are for
Heidegger but without the mutual exclusiveness of Heidegger’s terms,
and also without the ‘Blubo’ (the Nazi ‘Blut und Boden’) overtones
that Adorno detected in them. The exilic experience, then, is partially
one of a lack of authenticity, of living outside of one’s original context
and feeling nostalgic for a return to an (imaginary) situation of living
in full and immediate experience of a personally known world. But the
experience of exile is for another reason the opposite of this. The
experience is, then, the exhilarating one of transcendence, of knowing
the world many times over through the mediated experiences of
others, of knowing the world as a structure of patterns and repetitions
rather than as a unique and singular event. For transcendence one
needs to turn to outsiders and their experiences. What is specific to
exiles is that they repeat the world in themselves, and become their
own outsiders by living their lives more than once, in more than one
situation. In the trade-off between the felt lack of authenticity and the
pleasure of transcendence, prospers and festers that peculiar mixture
of sadness, self-dramatization, cultural insight, and condescension that

marks the exile.
In ‘Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,’ the third of
his 1993 Reith Lectures (presented for BBC radio, broadcast
worldwide, and collected as Representations of the Intellectual), Said
is aware of the pleasure to be found in the state of exile, as long as the
exile is metaphorical: “the intellectual as exile tends to be happy with
the idea of unhappiness, so that dissatisfaction bordering on dyspepsia
[. . .] can become not only a style of thought, but also a new, if
temporary, habitation” (1994: 39). Said goes on to reflect on the
intellectual career of one of his main heroes, Theodor Adorno, a true
refugee from Nazi Germany. Adorno inspires metaphorical exile Said
with the knowledge that, even in metaphor, the exile is not condemned
to spineless accommodation. The metaphorical exile is held to the task
of carrying over Adorno’s severity: that of not giving in, of not
becoming comfortable in a new life, but of remaining marginal and
alienated to the environment one finds oneself in. The “rewards and,
yes, even privileges” (Said 1994: 44) of such exile are advantages of
perspective: of seeing with the eyes of both insider and outsider.
But Said ends his lecture in spinelessness, even though, in
mitigation, he must be assumed to do so out of politeness to his
audience. The end of the lecture reveals that Said considers an
“intellectual exile” a sort of metaphorical exile stretched beyond even
the need of physical travel. “Even if one is not an actual immigrant or
expatriate,” Said tells his audience, “it is still possible to think as one,
to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move
away from the centralizing authorities toward the margins, where you
see things that are usually lost on minds that have never travelled
beyond the conventional and the comfortable” (1994: 46-47). Mental
travelling can, indeed, be a movement of exile, as evidenced in
situations such as that of the former Soviet Union where mental self-
exile was a means for many intellectuals of moving away “from the
centralizing authorities toward the margins.” But to the extent that
Said’s listeners and readers are inhabitants of relatively free and
democratic countries all over the globe, his sanctioning them to stay
quietly at home while nonetheless enjoying all the privileges of an
exile’s distressed kind of travelling is nothing but a polite extension of
a culturally enviable marker to whoever wants to don it. Said too, no
matter how passionately he identifies with Adorno, speaks in the
jargon of authenticity. As any metaphor, ‘exile’ too strikes a
compromise between the past and the present, a present that is widely
felt as a lack or a loss of authenticity such as an exile experiences this.

The term ‘exile’ dignifies that modern experience by association with
a less modern form of it, in which the distress is not an existential
human condition, but the consequence of an exceptional turn of fate:
to be proscribed residence in one’s place of birth. In the metaphorical
exile, longing – the desire for what is irretrievably lost – is itself
metaphorical: it is the longing of one suffering an existential fate for
an exceptional fate. So what Said confers on his listeners and readers
is an unearned distinction. The proportional dissymmetry between the
existential and the exceptional fate has here given rise to rhetorical
abuse.
But why insist on actual travel for the metaphorical and (even
more metaphorical) intellectual exile? The travel that matters here is,
after all, the metaphorical travel of alienation. The task of the
intellectual exile is to stick to this real, actual alienation, this
unassimilated foreignness, and to use it as a form of transcendence
against the centre. This is the heroism of exile that, in various forms,
both Bhabha and Said celebrate. My answer would be that alienation
and transcendence are not unique to the exile: an interaction between
the two is, indeed, the defining condition of the age of globalization.
But the alienation of a ‘global soul,’ such as Pico Iyer, walking around
in Los Angeles International Airport or at the Atlanta Olympic Games
leads to a radically different stance in life compared to that of the
exile. Iyer sees the airport as “the spiritual centre of the double life:
you get on [a plane] as one person and get off as another” (2001: 42),
and elaborates this by bringing together alienation and transcendence
in his account of spending a few weeks at LAX. Iyer is remarkable for
his mood of abstracted, non-judgmental, unfazed, and kind
comfortableness with the way the world presents itself to him. Always
in transit, he is always at home. In some respects, Iyer’s way of
finding authenticity (rather than alienation) in transcendence and
multiplicity is akin to George Lamming’s. But to Iyer’s ‘global soul’
there is, beyond the nuisances of jetlag, very little agonizing and not a
beginning of bitterness in reflections upon one’s life in transit. There
is blandness in Iyer where there is fierceness in Lamming. The exile’s
pining for a return is a mood simply cancelled for Iyer, but cancelled
in the manner in which a flight may be cancelled: without ultimate
finality.
A final consideration of Said’s rush into metaphorical exile may
show it to be masking a form of actual exile, after all. Not in all
aspects, and not under all conditions, is an actual exile heroic.
Whereas a metaphorical exile may choose his alliance with the heroic
exile, the actual exile is often less than a hero. In his willingness to
please his audience, Said perhaps betrays an exile’s not-quite-being-
at-home. An exile (one who actually lives away from home) is
someone who is in the position of a guest, and one who must try not to
overstay his welcome. Said pays no conscious attention to the exile as
guest, but his polite balancing of the exile’s freedom of not “having
always to proceed with caution, afraid to overturn the applecart”
(1994: 47) with the solicitous and cautious assurance that everyone
can be an exile shows up an unacknowledged tension in an exile’s
mode of being. A good part of the misery of the exile is this prolonged
sense of being around other people’s lives, and depending on those
others, without being one of them. The rebellious independence and
saeve indignatio of the exile must be matched with the suave
politeness of the cultured beggar.2 If we view Said as an actual but
unheroic exile (rather than a metaphorically heroic one), his
authenticity as an exile is enhanced by a very touching weakness that
he is at pains to screen from view.
If I am right in saying that to call oneself, metaphorically, an
exile betrays a desire to be a hero at a discount, and opens one up to
the risk of becoming a guest who is no longer welcome, then I think
we should abandon that tired metaphor with all its pretensions of
transcendence and risks of ridicule. Heroism, it seems to me, is
globalization’s first victim because globalization is this condition in
which affiliations become vague. For the exile, globalization is the
cruel denial of his suffering as it erases the divisions (ideological,
geographical, polemical) that underwrite his exile. If exile indeed
becomes a historical category of distress, we should respect the
history, retire the term, and not dilute the suffering it denotes by
metaphorical continuation. Those of us who are not exiles should
learn to be unassuming, should learn to live without borrowed sorrow,
and, most of all, should rejoice not to have been handed the fate that is
made more bitter by anachronism.
Notes
1
In my discussion here of Buruma, Edward Said and the notion of metaphorical exile,
I borrow from earlier ideas and formulations I developed in ‘The Ends of Travel –
The Argument from Satire,’ my introduction to Crossings: Travel, Art, Literature,
Politics (2001).
2
I develop this point of the exile’s susceptibility to being seen as a sponger (for
instance in Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau) a bit further in ‘The Ends of Travel – The
Argument from Satire’ ( 2001).
Bibliography
Adorno, Theodor. 2003. The Jargon of Authenticity. (tr. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic
Will). First published 1973. London: Routledge Classics. Trans. of Jargon
der Eigentlichkeit: Zur Deutschen Ideologie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1964.
Bhahba, Homi K. 1990. ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the
Modern Nation’ in Bhabha, Homi K. (ed.) Nation and Narration. London:
Routledge: 291-322.
Buruma, Ian. 2001. ‘The Romance of Exile’ in New Republic (12 Feb. 2001) 33-38.
Defoe, Daniel. 1996. Roxana or The Fortunate Mistress. 1724. (ed. and introd. John
Mullan) (World’s Classics). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Iyer, Pico. 2001. The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home.
New York: Vintage Departures-Random.
Lamming, George. 1991. The Pleasures of Exile. 1960. (Foreword Sandra Pouchet
Paquet). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
O’Toole, Pam. 2001. ‘The Road to Refuge’ in BBC On Air (June 2001) 11-14.
Said, Edward W. 1994. ‘Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginal’ in Said, Edward
Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures. London:
Vintage-Random: 35-47.
Stewart, Susan. 1993. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the
Souvenir, the Collection. 1984. Durham: Duke University Press.
Teeuwen, Rudolphus. 2001. ‘Introduction: The Ends of Travel – The Argument from
Satire’ in Teeuwen, Rudolphus (ed.) Crossings: Travel, Art, Literature,
Politics. Taipei: Bookman: 1-28.
Weiskel, Thomas. 1976. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and
Psychology of Transcendence. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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CREATIVITY I N EXILE

Rodopi Perspectives on Modern Literature

Amsterdam- New York, NY 2004

ISBN: 90-420-1833-X (DVD in PAL) (Bound)

1 Creativity and Exile: An Introduction 1

2 Poem: 'Can You Tell Me?' 13

4 Resisting the Anomie: Exile and the Romantic Self 21

5 Interview and Poems: 'Ode to Joy, '1971', 'People Like 31

6 Poem for Chris Abani: 'Parts of Speech' 35

7 Film: Three Riders of the Apocalypse (DVD) 37

8 Exile and the Philosophical Challenge to Citizenship 41

9 Exile, Empire and the Convict Diaspora: The Return of 57

10 Exile at the Edges of Empire: Contemporary Writing in 71

11 Audio Installation with Sculptural Images: 87

13 American Literary Exiles: The Escape from Anguish 107

14 Interview, Poems, and a Short Story: 'Fingers', 119

15 The Poetics of Exile in the Inter-war Novels of Irina 125

16 Interview and Poems: 'Refugees', 'Coming to Paradise', 135

17 The Myth of the Great Return: Memory, Longing and 141

18 Exile in Redemption: S.Y. Agnon's Only Yesterday 151

19 Exile and Revolt: Arab and Afro-American Poets in 159

20 Annexing the Land of Exile: Language and History in 183

21 Creating a Poetics in Exile: The Development of an 193

24 Exile and Memory: Re-membering Home After the 213

25 Film Excerpts: A Taste of Place: Stories of Food and 227

26 Food and the Exile 229

27 The Other Side of Exile: Malaysian Writers Who Stayed 245

28 The Cultivation of Exile: Qi Biaojia and His Allegory 255

29 A Sense of Place: Colombian Artists on Violence and 270

30 Fading into Metaphor: Globalization and the 283

Creativity and Exile: An Introduction

Michael Hanne was born and grew up in Britain. Following studies in

Other writers, said Tabori, found themselves accused of “nostalgia, of

Brooke-Rose has written, “the clanging connotations are of suffering

disembarking somewhere in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia, hungry for

If the designation ‘exile’ has almost disappeared from popular

not just an occasional or incidental effect of colonization, but one of

testimonies of ordinary people separated from their homes by the

we are what’s left of us in exile

Can you tell me?

We must remember – memory is hope.

Several contributors note a tendency among creative people in exile to

Gohar highlights another issue which, however, divides groups

colleagues Hilary Chung and Leonard Bell are planning a separate

Zoomslide Media have done a wonderful job in production of the

Brodsky, Joseph. 1994. ‘The Condition We Call Exile: An Address’ in Robinson,

Poem: ‘Can You Tell Me?’

Yilma Tafere Tasew is from Ethiopia where he was a primary school

He became a community organiser in the transit camp at Walda, and

Can You Tell Me?

The shining moon

The shining moon

Our small cottage

Is my Mum’s hair full of grey?

What’s my Mother’s income?

The green fertile field where I grew up

The attractive rivers of the village

Is Alamirew still there with his ‘Washint’1

Are there social gatherings?