Concept: Exile

Definition: (noun) the state of being barred from one’s native country, typically for political or punitive reasons

Related Terms: Instability; Strangeness; Alienation

Description: Until quite recently, the terms ‘migration’ and ‘exile’ were contiguous, if not synonymous. The experience of dislocation is common to both, and migration, even when undertaken voluntarily, is often seen as a form of exile from one’s native land. If migration denotes physical movement, exile is a psychic condition, a feeling, a state of being (displaced). Not surprisingly, therefore, exile has been a powerful theme in literature and cinema, in song and poetry, in art and painting. The relationship between physical and spiritual exile is explored in multiple ways and often through formal experimentation. In her review of Snow (2004) written in exile by the Turkish novelist Orhan Parmuk, Margaret Atwood notes some of the narrative extravagances that the depiction of inner turmoil produces. The protagonist Ka is a journalist who returns to his native Turkey from political exile in Frankfurt. His profession allows him to channel a number of opposing viewpoints and diverse genre elements. Atwood writes: “Like Pamuk’s other novels, ‘Snow’ is an in-depth tour of the divided, hopeful, desolate, mystifying Turkish soul.” It’s the story of Ka, a gloomy but appealing poet who hasn’t written anything in years. But Ka is not his own narrator: by the time of the telling he has been assassinated, and his tale is pieced together by an “old friend” of his who just happens to be named Orhan.”

Gloom and melancholy is the exile’s condition. In a film called The Tenant (1976), Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski explores a Jewish migrant’s isolation in a searing drama set in Paris. The tenant, Trelkovsky, slowly takes on the persona of the woman whose room he occupies and whose attempted suicide has left her in a vegetative state. Hovering between silence and language (French is not his native tongue), madness and sanity, and reality and hallucination, the character’s foreignness translates into his existential anonymity. As a tenant he occupies space that is not his own.

The age of globalization makes of the exile its characteristic figure, as artists of all stripes explore their own and their contemporaries’ shifting notions of identity and belonging.

S.C. 2016

“The statue of any hero in the Prado or Avenida Central is almost always that of a man who was familiar with the bitter bread of a stranger in a foreign land… It has been estimated that, at the close of the nineteenth century, the number of Latin American exiles in Paris alone reached into the hundreds.”

— Robert Caldwell, Exile as an Institution