Exile is in fashion. It evokes images of a critical spirit operating on the margins of society, a traveller, rootless and yet at home in every metropolis, a tireless wanderer from conference to academic conference, a thinker in several languages, an eloquent advocate for minorities, in short, a romantic outsider living on the edge of the bourgeois world.
This may sound frivolous. For exile is surely no fun. There is nothing glamorous about the poor shivering Tamil, sleeping on a cold, plastic bench at Frankfurt railway station, or an Iraqi, fleeing from Saddam’s butchers, afraid of walking the streets of Dover lest he be attacked by British skinheads, or a young woman from Eritrea, standing at the side of a minor road to Milan, picking up truck drivers so that she can feed her baby. These are not fashionable figures, but outcasts, who have nothing in common with the multicultural intellectuals whom we honour as the poets of post-colonial narratives.
I have in front of me a book, Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile, Identity, Language and Loss. It is a collection of lectures given at the New York Public Library by five well-known writers “in exile.” Edward Said is introduced as a Palestinian in exile, Eva Hoffmann as a Pole in exile, Bharati Mukherjee, a Bengali in exile, Charles Simic, a Yugoslav in exile, and Andr?ciman, as an exile from Alexandria.
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