Picketing the Zeitgeist: Writing in Exile

Page 3 July–August 2008 Since they uprooted me from the reed-bed, I have been making this lamenting sound. —Rumi True exile is the condition of being uprooted, an unhealable wound, an essential sadness that can never be surmounted. True exile is the condition of permanent loss. The exiled writer is cut from her land, her past, her heritage and language. She has to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement, and create a new self, make a house for the self in an environment that, if not hostile, is indifferent to her; she has to build a home out of her own breath, out of her words and imagination. Writing then becomes the exiled writer’s safe new home and allows her to return to the old home. The exiled writer travels back and forth between two homes, two languages, and creates a territory in which she alone can legislate. No one can tell her anymore how to behave. She compensates for disorienting loss by creating a new world to rule. She dwells in this home she’s built out of her solitude and sadness, and she knows that if she wants to survive, she must write. This distinguishes the exiled writer’s work from most of other literature. There is a necessity here, a commitment, an urgency. The exiled writer must write to prove that her imagination and craft haven’t been mortally damaged by uprooting. Each piece she writes is a gesture of defiance. The exiled writer is patient and persistent. If she is writing in the new language, she goes through multiple revisions. She cannot take for granted the basics of language, nor can she take for granted the essential aspects of narrative. The old metaphors don’t quite work; the dialogues and characters unfold at a different pace. Everything must be renamed. The exiled writer works harder than a native one; she earns the pride of authorship. But all her achievements are permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind. Success doesn’t bring vanity for the exiled writer; its flavor is bitter sweet; it has a taint of despair. The exiled writer knows that if she wants to survive, she must write. Exile teaches humility. She who once was known, read, and admired is now a needle in a haystack, but a needle someone is searching for, or at least that’s what the exiled writer assumes: I’m a grain of sand in this desert, but someone must be searching for me. So she constantly fights to restore her significance, her poignant role, her authority. At first, her main consideration is the old home, but slowly she realizes that she has to grow roots in the new home. Now she has to lay down her book, on this gigantic reading table, for the readers who do not care how many borders she has crossed, or how she’s arrived here. To keep herself from getting closed and shelved, she has to offer new readers something novel, something untold. The exiled writer lives in her self-made house, this house of words, in constant fear of failure, in moral torment. She has good reasons to fear failure, for only a few exiled writers possess the resilience necessary to oppose the corroding effects of uprooting and isolation. Not all of the exiled writers are able to build a new house out of their own words. Some remain homeless in the new land, anonymous members of the mass, unable to adapt the new language, slowly losing the old. When my life was in danger in 1983, I left my country on foot with my two-year-old son sleeping on my back. I was thirty-two when I lost my home, my readers, my language, and a career that had just begun to shape my life as a professional writer. I was brutally uprooted, and my roots didn’t recover for years. I went through the pain of linguistic barrier and writer’s block. I built and rebuilt a home that could shelter me and meanwhile fought for survival, raising my son. I knew very well that either exile would destroy me or I had...