Exile is mostly a linguistic event. (Joseph Brodsky)
Some of my favorite writers, if not all, had come to writing through a particular exilic relationship. Either with their birth place or their citizenship status or their choice of residence. Even with their choice of language.
Albahari, Hemon, Joyce, Nabokov, Kundera, Soyinka, Ugreshic, Milosz, Stein, Pound, Rushdi, Brecht, Harwood, Skvoretcky, Todorov, Auden.
Whether we agree or not, with the claim that the past century, due to its geopolitical stance, afforded a shift in the mythic understanding of exile as ‘man’s fall from God’s Grace’ and thus reduced the punishment of banishment to a mere East to West dislocation, the notion that writing and exile are almost inextricably linked seems to persist and with that continue to question the very nature of writing and creation. Namely, as Albahari aptly put it in his ‘The Exiled Fragments’ (2003), ‘an exile, a wanderer, a writer’ all appear to coexist, as synonymous ‘borderers on the same path’.
Yet, I wonder, and with that open the question to the larger audience – which one of the two necessitates the other: does exile (in its widest form, therefore including all forms of expatriation and displacement) condition the act of writing, as a needed attempt to move oneself towards freedom or is writing such as state of creation, primarily a singular solitary experience (both in motion and execution) which compels each writer’s voluntary exile, at least through the linguistic event of ‘putting his words down on paper’?
Etymologically speaking, exile, from its Latin roots, implies a state of flux, a paradoxically dangerous motion of ‘being on the outside of things’, forever looming, wandering, jumping ahead. However, most writers-in-exile and exiled authors, describe their own ‘exiled state’ as a rather passive form, a passive attempt to return to the active presence of ‘living’. Perhaps, indeed, it is this rather impassive life which necessitates the process of writing, as the ‘exile’s’ attempt to ‘live’, to be active and living again. On the other hand, it seems as if, at least to the ‘naked eye’ (and the voracious reader of texts produced through exile) that there is more to this want to change states: if in fact an exiled life is forcefully nothing but a passive form of being, then what are we to make of bilingualism, i.e., exiled writers, who like Nabokov and Beckett, started multiple ‘linguistic events’, thus creating in more than one language simultaneously, and with great success, ‘words on paper’ which propelled other forms of looming, wandering, jumping ahead, from each and all of us, their readers?
As I prepare for a life in exile (not banishment or exclusion), a chosen form of living on the outside of my given (home) environment, thus anticipating multiple linguistic events in my near future, I wonder about other writers, out there. Not the famous kind, you see. The published footnotes. My concern lies with the league of extraordinary young men and women whose exiled writing selves are found on the pages of term papers, research abstracts and lengthy tests, at universities abroad. In the case of their writing, call me romantic, I’d like to believe that the writing they produce, though necessitated by the exiled condition in which they dwell as academically displaced people, is mostly an active form, a conscious attempt to live a present life, one of value, one of ethics.
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