Contemporary society is deeply unsettled. Everywhere a new diaspora is emerging because of hunger and poverty. The subjects of this diaspora are the emigrants. Exile is difficult and disconcerting. You are uprooted. Something within us loves the continuity, shelter, and familiarity of our home place. Among your own people, you can trust the instinctive compass of your words and actions. You move in a natural rhythm that you never notice until you are away. Exile is difficult because you find yourself among strangers. And it is slow work to find a door into the house of their memory.
While at university, I worked a summer on the buildings in America. I met an old man from our village in the West of Ireland. He was over eighty and had left home at eighteen and never returned. He talked so wistfully of home. He could remember the name of every field and well. As he intoned the litany of Gaelic place-names, his eyes kindled in the warmth of belonging. Even though he had lived in exile all his adult life, there was a part of his heart which never left home. I imagine that he withdrew into this private sanctuary of memory when times were raw and lonely. Those in exile understand each other. You’d see it in the way they meet and talk. What they can presume about each other. How easily they slip into the rhythm of companionship. You’d see it in the Irish in a Kilburn pub, a group of Turkish people sitting by a river at the weekend in a German town, or the Filipina girls who gather near a bridge in Hong Kong every Sunday to talk of home. When you emigrate, you fracture your belonging to the language of your homeland.