Nathalie Karagiannis
What will we do without exile and the long night that stares at the water?
Mahmoud Darwish, ‘Who am I, without exile?’
Sur, espejismo, reflejο.
Federico García Lorca, ‘Suite del agua. Sur’
Figure 8.1 William Kentridge, drawing from ‘Felix in Exile’, 1994, charcoal and pastel on paper, 120 × 150 cm / 47-1/4 × 59-1/16 in. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Copyright: William Kentridge.
I
n the drawing in Figure 8.1, Felix looks into the mirror and faces Nandi through a double-ended telescope, while the blue water of memory is pouring into his room. The striking film, from which this still is taken, was made on the eve of the first general elections in South Africa and its explicit purpose was to reflect on the past as a necessary part of the present and perhaps as something that threatened to be obliterated.1 The poignancy and apparent confusion of the events/pictures of the film are the direct expression of the poignancy and confusion with which Felix, who is in exile in Paris, apprehends events in his homeland. Pausing a little bit longer on this picture compels one to see that, contrary to conventional thinking that makes of exile and home opposite poles, exile is the dynamic approximation of home.
Indeed, exile is not the opposite of home. Reversing María Zambrano’s intuition that the true homeland creates exile, I will explore in convoluted ways the idea that exile creates the homeland or, in essence, that exile is a homeland. During this exploration, it will emerge that between utter alienation and feeling/being at home, there is a very vast middle ground occupied by a variety of experiences, some more intimate, others more collective,2 which are all likely to be described by the notion of exile. The paths we will follow in this explo-ration lead into various areas: poetry, philosophy, psychoanalysis. Each of these accounts presents interesting particularities, and I look out for what they have in common. Exploring such paths partly captures the complexity of that which is otherwise currently called the refugee crisis. Each individual whose survival or death we hear of as pertaining to a number is likely to have gone through some of the experiences that are subtly but relevantly described by poets, philosophers and psychiatrists below. Accordingly, the dark South, which is explored in the last section, can be turned on its head: for those coming from Syria, it is called Europe.
In the particular light of this chapter, the South indicates the direction home, just as in the picture by Kentridge. It goes without saying that not all homelands are situated in the South. But the South is of central interest here because of very specific features such as juxtaposition, sharpness of contrasts and simultaneity, which will be detailed in the last section. The point here is one which speaks of an imaginary South:
this imaginary serves as a direction through which loss and disorienta-tion are reconfigured into home. It is in this sense that the feature that Edward Said ascribes to exile in his famous essay ‘Reflections on Exile’
(2002) takes on its full meaning: it is ‘strangely compelling’, because just
as strangeness and compulsion are centripetal and centrifugal and nev-ertheless cohabit spontaneously in this phrase, exile and home cannot but exist together, not apart. If the South is the reconfiguration of exilic loss (and disorientation) into home, then the South is an equivalent for return, which is a topos of any discourse on exile, as we will see later.
Let me then make clear that ‘the South as exile’ is a shorthand for the idea that the South means return from exile, that is, the tantalising remedy for the irremediable loss that characterises any exile. As such (as a shorthand, but also as its explanation) it is an idea that one has to undergo – as Jorie Graham would propose for a poem – as a journey. I grant the reader that there is nothing self-evident in what I propose; on the contrary, it is a deeply personal series of intuitions that stem from personal experience. One good example of this is the structure of this chapter: even though I claim that the South gives exile its direction, it only appears at the end of the exploration of exile. The main reason is that I want to show, physically as it were, how disorienting exile is before bringing the South to it – as a possible solution? (But the reader is warned from the very first line of Mahmoud Darwish in this chapter that one might feel lost without exile, whereas Federico García Lorca speaks about how the South may prove illusory.) Another example of the personal nature of this journey is the homage paid to the writers, almost all of them poets, in exile who have expressly struggled with this idea (and sometimes with the idea of the South too): each section bears one or more names, irrespectively of the significance of their visible contribution to this chapter.
One last word of caution: before starting this short but twisted journey, I would like to briefly dedicate a few preliminary lines to the relation between the exile and the foreigner. Talking of exile is one side of the coin; talking of the foreigner is the other. Thinking around exile centres on the relation between the movement towards somewhere and what (place) has been left behind. Thinking about the foreigner centres on the relation between the movement towards somewhere and what (place) has been encountered. Thinking about exile means thinking, among other thing, about solitude; thinking about the foreigner means thinking about, among other things, grouping people. Thinking about exile means thinking from rootlessness, thinking about the foreigner means thinking from a clear-cut space, that for which the person is foreign. Exile: escape. Foreigner: hospitality. These are the differences of the two sides: the coin is one and the same.
Let me now indicate that in the first three sections of this chapter, I
look at three issues for which I could not easily find answers elsewhere:
the connection between blindness and exile, the antagonism between exiles and those who stay, and the contemporary changes in the topos of return from exile. I then dedicate a section to María Zambrano’s thought on exile, because this extremely fruitful thought is not known by Anglophone readers and because it is María Zambrano who made me think of the many borders within exile. The next step the chapter takes follows naturally María Zambrano’s thought: in section 5, the psyche (lost and found and lost again and found again) is looked at from various angles: poetic, psychoanalytic, philosophical. Finally, in the last section, the South comes in to offer some direction.
1. Being blind and knowing: Oedipus (and Antigone) and Adam (and Eve), and Roberto Bolaño
I don’t believe in ‘exile’, especially when the word sits next to the word
‘literature’.
Roberto Bolaño, ‘Literature and exile’
True exile is the measure of every true writer.
Roberto Bolaño, ‘Exiles’
The word ‘exile’ was first offered to me by a Spanish-Swiss psychoana-lyst who had lived formative years in Argentina. It seemed to perfectly fit the need of the moment: to make sense of the mismatches between everyday life and experience and (cultural) expectations, and whereas it began as a satisfactory description, it later turned into a useful tool and then into a theme worth exploring as such. I have now come full circle and have lost my attachment to the idea of exile, and this might be the best position from which to write about it – as its emotional charge has lessened and been exorcised in a poetry book entitled Exorismos (Karagiannis 2016b), a word that has fallen out of usage in Modern Greek but that phonetically brings together the Modern Greek words for exile (εξορία) and for definition (ορισμός).
The trajectory of exile through the centuries retains a few unsolved ambiguities. It is often thought that death was a lighter punishment than exile in ancient Athens. The Socratic option for death in the stead of exile has consolidated the intuition that exile must have been taken to be the worst fate one could face. Set practically in the context of the not always amiable relations between city-states and of an infinitely
more reduced world in terms of language and communication, as well as against a code of honour which tightly related the person to the com-munity, we can imagine the gravity of the punishment of exile.
However, mentions of exile in ancient Athens usually focus on the moment of punishment itself. Being condemned to exile meant, in a second step, being given another opportunity to build a life in a community – even though this community would not be the one into which one was born. The practical difficulties of exile cannot be under-estimated, but what I now want to underline is that exile was not devoid of dignity. Taking distance from the place where the wrong was done allowed the recovery – for the wrongdoer – of dignity (just as it allowed the victims to remain dignifiedly in the same place, without facing the outrage of the wrongdoer’s presence). As Richard Sennett points out, Oedipus is an exile who retains all his dignity throughout the ordeal:
indeed, Oedipus introduces a moral dimension into the very act of displacement, showing himself to be a stranger of tragic grandeur rather than an unwanted foreigner of lesser position (Sennett 2011: 109–10).
In such a context, it is amusing to read Roberto Bolaño’s claim that Adam and Eve must be thought of as the first exiles.3 Among the many classic depictions of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden, Masaccio’s is certainly one of the most expressive. Eve hides her breast and pubis and mourns desperately, with the mouth open, and an upward-cast gaze. As for Adam, he hides his face in his hands, sobbing.
The desolate, dramatic effect of the fresco has often been commented on. I am struck by the discrepancy or non-continuity of the movement between the figures of Adam and Eve, which adds to their sense of des-olation and, mostly, solitude and separateness, as if by being separated from God they also become separated from one another. But what is centrally at stake here is the similitude of the movement between Adam and Oedipus, who also brings his hands to his face, in several early Renaissance depictions – in order to blind and then hold his wounded eyes. It is no coincidence that both prototypical exiles hide their eyes.
A great part of the exile that is about to happen features the blind spot (of knowledge) – both as origin and as consequence. Until he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge, Adam was ignorant of his ignorance, or blind to it. The fruit opened his eyes and made him fall into disgrace.
Leaving the Garden of Eden condemns him to not seeing it again, ever, until . . . he closes his eyes at the time of his death. As for Oedipus, his prior knowledge does not prevent him from committing the crimes that are his destiny – his knowledge has a blind spot. Horrified by his