Exile begins with loss, when one is torn from one’s roots and prevented from returning, either temporarily or permanently. For some this can represent new beginnings, while for others it is an insurmountable calamity, or, as Edward Said called it, the “unhealable rift”. Regardless, once one finds oneself, as Joseph Conrad once put it, in some “obscure corner of the earth”, one must either busy oneself with returning home, like Ulysses did, or grow reconciled with one’s lot, like the Pakistani writer Aamer Hussein, who finds comfort in “feeling foreign” wherever he goes. To speak of exile, however, is inevitably to speak of human history, and my aim with this anthology, quite simply, was to produce a miniature history of humanity as seen through the prism of exile. As such, The Heart of a Stranger is to be read as a series of meditations which, while acknowledging the narratives of time and nation, is otherwise focused on showcasing a wide spectrum of exilic experiences through verse, fiction, letters and memoirs.
Over the course of the past three years, I have sought to assemble a modest picture of what it means to be an exile and the emotions that it engenders, while simultaneously attempting to portray the myriad situations that might lead one to becoming an exile in the first place. Thus, while the initial sections, “Origins and Myths” and “Dark Ages and Renaissances”, follow a conventionally linear approach to history, taking the reader from Egypt to Israel, Greece, Rome, China, Muslim Sicily, the Byzantine Empire and Renaissance Italy, the authors selected to represent these cultures and epochs do not necessarily belong to the time in question, as is made evident by my selection of Naguib Mahfouz’s adaptation of the ancient Egyptian myth of Sinuhe as the opening contribution. The following four sections of this anthology, “Expulsions, Explorations and Migrations”, “Dynasties, Mercenaries and Nations”, “Revolutions, Counter-Revolutions and Persecutions” and “Cosmopolitanism and Rootlessness”, have instead been arranged chronologically by the date of their authors’ births, while taking a more sharply thematic direction than the preceding two sections.
While the mechanisms of how exile occurs can be relatively simple and straightforward — brutality and unlawful extirpation being the primary tools in most cases — what happens after one is deracinated is often left to fate and the causality of context. Therefore, I have sought to portray as vast an array of “exilic” situations as possible. Although the Ovidian conception of exile has taught us to see the “Exile” as a whiny, withered husk forever longing for the branch it was unhappily torn from, I wanted this anthology to showcase an alternative genealogy of misfits, rebels, heretics, contrarians, activists and revolutionaries, particularly in the later sections of the book. Exile, this anthology argues, can be defiant, like Emma Goldman aboard the USS Buford, or Leon Trotsky’s stirring “Letter to the Workers of the USSR”, written months before Stalin’s pickaxe found him in Mexico City; it can be horrifying, as the Polish legionnaires learnt while fighting to oppress a people they knew nothing about in Haiti; it can be depressing, like Giacomo Leopardi’s poem on Italy’s sorry state following the tumults of the Napoleonic Wars; it can speak of heroism, like the sacrifices made by poets such as Yannis Ritsos and Abdellatif Laâbi, all of whom spent long years in prison for their peaceful activism, or for their “crimes of opinion”; some exiles even end in triumph, the way the revolutionaries of 1905 returned to rule in 1917 — a political sea-change crystallized in the image of Lenin arriving at Finland Station.
All too often, however, exile ends in tragedy, as it does for Ribka Sibhatu’s Eritrean refugees aboard their ramshackle boats while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to begin new lives in Fortress Europe. On the other hand, fleeing one’s home may gain one a kingdom, as is shown by the excerpt from John Barbour’s (c.1320–95) The Bruce of Bannockburn, which details the rise to power of Robert the Bruce, King of Scots (1274–1329). Indeed, while history has taught us to look upon exile as a judgement passed by inscrutable higher powers or power-drunk despots, it is abundantly clear that exile can also be a choice. As Robert W. Service tells us in “The Spell of the Yukon”, “I wanted the gold, and I sought it”, which appears as popular a reason to leave home as any. Encouraging one to go into self-imposed exile can also be sound advice, as Jee Leong Koh does in “To a Young Poet”: “Quit the country soon as you can” he counsels, adding “Pay no heed to the village elders. / They are secretly ashamed that they did not leave.” After all, what does “home” truly mean if it does not truly accept who you are? While this anthology does not seek to define exile, what should hopefully be clear by the time one has read this book cover to cover is that there never has been — and never will be — a definitive definition for this famously elusive condition.
Entirely unsurprisingly, I am indebted to the translators featured in these pages for their warmth, generosity and enthusiasm for this project. The overabundance of material uncovered during my research was probably as daunting as the condition of exile itself, and I must therefore beg the reader’s forgiveness for the sins of omission I will undoubtedly have committed. In the end, I was forced to discard more than three times the number of poems and stories than what eventually made the cut. I agonized over certain decisions, while others proved far easier. The reader will see nothing here by favorites of mine such as Abdelrahman Munif, Bertolt Brecht, Pablo Neruda, W.H. Auden, James Baldwin and Gore Vidal, none of whose works I could afford to feature in these pages. As there was no attempt on my part to put together a “canonic” portrait of the literature of exile, this was no great restriction. In fact, this allowed me to make the anthology more pronouncedly political. Rather than focus on clichéd accounts of happy lives in sunny climes — Paul Gauguin in Tahiti or Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa spring to mind — I wanted the reader to experience Madame de Staël’s thoughts on Napoleon’s tyranny, or to picture the Communard Louise Michel on her way to the penal colony in New Caledonia, or to see the parallel to our present times in Mary Antin’s campaigns for immigrant rights during a particularly xenophobic moment in American history.
In addition, I feel it necessary to add here that the fetishization of privileged cliques who took to “exile” like some take to resort holidays has never held any interest for me; ergo my decision to overlook the Lost Generation of the 1920s — Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes and Ernest Hemingway — since they’ve all been amply dissected over the course of the past century. There is something sickeningly self-satisfied about the self-imposed exiles of James Joyce in Trieste, the Beats in Morocco or Joseph Brodsky in Venice. If you’re going to stare into a mirror, you might as well do that at home, especially if you are fortunate enough to have one. As an exile myself, I have little love for well-heeled “literary expatriates” who write the same books elsewhere that they could have written in their home towns, and as such tend to think of most of them as “parasites in paradise”, to borrow from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s description of European settlers in Kenya.
What readers will find here, instead, especially in the more contemporary sections of the anthology, are non-Western poets who deserve far more attention in the English-speaking world than they have thus far received: examples here include the Iraqi-Assyrian poet Sargon Boulus, the Chinese Uyghur poet Ahmatjan Osman, the East Timorese poet Fernando Sylvan and the Egyptian poet Iman Mersal, to name only a few. In conclusion, owing to its historical scope, I must stress that this anthology does not seek to give an accurate portrayal of what exilic literature looks like today and this is a task I am sure will be taken on by younger poets in not too distant a time. I imagine such an endeavor would spill into several volumes — many thousands of pages at least — and I certainly hope someone will undertake that task in the near future. After all, we have been banishing one another for ethnic, religious, sexual and political reasons for longer than we can remember, and unfortunately, as the first two decades of the twenty-first century have shown us, since we do not appear to have tired of these practices, the topic remains as ripe for investigation as ever.
André Naffis-Sahely