Exiles

Last week I mentioned Edward Said, a huge thinker of Palestinian origin who died a few years ago after a long illness with leukaemia. Following a more or less deserved holidays we should all have settled down by now. Here I continue with his reflections on exiled intellectual life. No major short-circuits and no animals this time. Just a straightforward series of quotes on his honour, and a video clip by Joseba Sarrionaindia, perhaps the Basque writer who better epitomises the ups and downs of exile life.

We have already seen how Edward Said placed the experience of the migrant exile as existing “in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old”. This he said in “Exiles and marginals” (Representations of the Intellectual. The 1993 Reith Lectures, London, Sidney, Auckland, Bergvley: Vintage, 1994, pp 35-47). For Said, the exile is…

… beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, and adept mimic or a secret outcast on another. Being skilled at survival becomes the main imperative, with the danger of getting too comfortable and secure constituting a threat that is constantly to be guarded against.

Said did not only disagree here with the assumption that being exiled is to be separated and isolated from the place of origin; rather than analysing big migratory / exilic movements, his focus in dealing with the experience of displacement is also directed towards the search of individual intellectual responsibility. As he preferred to remain “outside the mainstream, unaccommodated, unco-opted and resistant”, he placed himself outside and against the dominant intellectual attitudes and discourses which seek to perpetuate the state of affairs, the state of things as they are. In such a context, the notion of exile refers not only to an actual condition but also to a metaphorical condition. For Said, even if one was not an actual exile, it was still possible to think, imagine and research as one. In spite of barriers, it was still possible to stand as a marginal figure outside the comfort of privilege and power, to move away from the conventional and comfortable, away from the centralising authorities towards the margins:

To be as marginal and as undomesticated as someone who is in real exile is for the intellectual to be unusually responsive to the traveler rather than to the potentate, to the provisional and risky rather than to the habitual, to innovation and experiment rather than the authoritatively given status quo. The exilic intellectual does not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, not standing still (p.46).

For Said, the vocation of the exile intellectual should be to develop the ability to see how things have reached a certain point, how they have come to be that way instead of describing then as they are, as they are prescribed by the guardians and redressers of things. All situations should be perceived as contingent occurrences that have taken place in society, as the outcome of historical choices made by humans. For the exilic intellectual there are no inevitable or natural situations. Situations are not permanent, predetermined, irreversible, unchangeable. In this metaphorical sense, exile for the intellectual is restlessness, movement, constantly being unsettled, and unsettling others since…

…you cannot go back to some earlier and perhaps more stable condition of being at home; and, alas, you can never fully arrive, be at one with your new home or situation (p.39).

But if exilic displacement means that one is going to always be marginal, this fate does not necessarily need to constitute a source of permanent deprivation and regret. On the contrary, exilic displacement can be lived through as a sort of freedom, as a process of discovery in which things are done according to one’s own pattern, according to the various interests that dictate one’s particular goals. And for Said, this constituted a unique pleasure:

The pleasure of being surprised, of never taking anything for granted, of learning to make do in circumstances of shaky instability that would confound or terrify most people (44).

Therefore, other than allowing unconventional, often eccentric life styles and careers, the condition of exile experience also carries with it certain pleasures, rewards, and even privileges in the words of Said. Positive things can stem from exile and marginality.