Lost and Found: Reflections on Exile and Empathy

In just one year I had lost my home, my friends, my job, the possibility of returning soon, but also the desire to return . . . At forty-five years old I found myself in the world with a bag containing the most essential items, as though the world were a bomb shelter.

Over coffee, Kira tells me . . . 'You know, we're all alike in a way, we are all looking for something . . . As though we had lost something.'

--Dubravka Ugresic, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (London, 1996)

In reflecting on the psychological aspects of geographic exile, a condition that has become ever more prevalent globally at the turn of the century, I have wondered whether it might not be worthwhile to consider that, in a variety of different ways, each human being is obliged to go forth from an original home and, in one way or another, lose the more-or-less sustaining environment of his or her earliest childhood. Thus, even persons who have been spared the forced abandonment of homeland, mother tongue, and basic learned ways of being in the world must nonetheless withstand a form of psychological exile that might be related to other more traumatic forms. In the following pages, I shall explore an aspect of this possibility with the demurral that no simple parallel or reduction is implied. These pages contain merely juxtapositions that may prove fruitful for certain readers. Even though I myself am not a person who grew up as a child of exiled parents, this theme has for me, nonetheless, a certain autobiographical resonance. To address it, I have connected it with aspects of my own life, and, like anyone lost in unfamiliar surroundings, related whatever seemed new and different to that which was previously known. The risk in this endeavor has been that what formerly seemed firm and fixed became, in the process of being used this way, somewhat destabilized. This alchemy, in fact, constitutes one of the quintessential features of the subjective experience of exile.

I shall draw in this essay on an autobiographical novel, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996) by Dubravka Ugresic, a Yugoslav writer, because her work has helped me more than any other I have yet encountered to feel my way into this state. Deeply honest but also canny (and uncanny), funny, wise, and dense, written always consciously from the perspective of a woman, it gives me hope that the understanding I seek is a possibility. This is, however, a paradox, for Dubravka herself is skeptical.

Written originally in Croatian, her book has appeared in print in Dutch, German, and English only, a publication history that derives from her status as an exile from Zagreb. When I asked Dubravka (we met as fellows at the Bunting Institute in 1995-96) how she felt about this aspect of her work, she told me immediately that it made her sad. But then she quickly added: "There [in the former Yugoslavia] I am a 'deleted' author, and they deleted me, my colleagues." She went on to say that it makes her happy now to think that her books live on "in other and, to be honest, much more important languages"; that being expelled from the local literary scene of her youth has made her a better writer; that local literary milieus can be shelters for all kinds of eccentrics; that, in fact, she is "proud not to belong any more to the local literary milieu which burns the books of 'others' (in Croatia there were many cases of 'book burnings' of 'Serbian' and 'other' books)."

Thus, to my question, she gave a concatenated response, one that moved from an open acknowledgment of her loss--of her mother tongue and of her artistic community--to an almost jubilant (she used the word "happy") surmounting of that loss and an adaptive re-evaluation of her altered situation. It was a mixed answer condensing many layers of feeling, an answer that did not...