Exiles (III)

More against that kind of fashionable metropolitan cosmopolitanism where freedom of decision seems always guaranteed. The name of the clip “Betik eskamak kentzen” refers to a Basque popular song by fishermen’s wives ”always removing the scales from the fish” .

The global economic system, which has increasingly developed over the past decades, has expanded the international migrant experience to unknown limits. Simultaneously, permanent political unrest and conflict in many corners of the world have multiplied the cases of exile displacement. In such a context, the political apprehensions of host nation-states deriving from the economical and social burden that migration and exile apparently originate have come to darken the travelling experiences of both migrants and exiles. We only have to think of the emotions and arrangements of departure, the consequences of journeying, of changing places and losing the way, the efforts to find a new “home”, the expectations of return etc. All these experiences of movement and precarious resettlement are meaningless for the bureaucratic discourses of the State, always-already established within the fixed limits of its own boundaries thought of as immutable and unchangeable.

Facing the constraining visions and structures of the state, the formation of new diaspora and exile cultures across the world brings about the possibility to study new discourses, practices and attitudes towards the modern travelling experience. As a consequence, the traveling discourses of departure, loss, resettlement and return are attainable through a myriad of knowledges, stories, traditions, musics, books, personal diaries and other cultural expressions which denote, simultaneously, the material and spatial conditions underpinning the narratives of travel.

The members of the new diaspora and exile cultures which are now being established across the world feel thus a real urge to talk, sing and write in the metaphoric / melancholic language of travelling and return; and if they do so, it is precisely because, at the end of it all, we know that all hope to return back “home” is lost. Unlike the privileged nineteenth century traveler, or the ethnographer, for that matter, and unlike both cosmopolitans and tourists nowadays, our return to the past is impossible; but this impossibility of return does not imply that links and identifications are not kept with the place of origin and its traditions. What it means is that return is impossible even in the case of actually going back home to the place of origin, which will have by then known transformations beyond recognition.

On the one hand, therefore, diaspora and exile cultures bear the traces of their own particular cultures, traditions, histories, languages and systems of belief. On the other hand, we have to come to terms with, and make sense of the new host culture and society they take residence in without simply assimilating to them. In this sense, we are necessarily the product of different and interrelated cultures and histories; and necessarily inhabit different “homes” at the same time. Or, what is the same, no special home at all.