Exile and Expatriation in Modern American and Palestinian Writing

Ahmad Rasmi Qabaha

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319914152
• Categoría: Literature
• Categoría: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature

This book examines the distinction between literary expatriation and exile through a 'contrapuntal reading' of modern Palestinian and American writing. It argues that exile, in the Palestinian case especially, is a political catastrophe; it is banishment by a colonial power. It suggests that, unlike expatriation (a choice of a foreign land over one's own), exile is a political rather than an artistic concept and is forced rather than voluntary — while exile can be emancipatory, it is always an unwelcome loss. In addition to its historical dimension, exile also entails a different perception of return to expatriation. This book frames expatriates as quintessentially American, particularly intellectuals and artists seeking a space of creativity and social dissidence in the experience of living away from home. At the heart of both literary discourses, however, is a preoccupation with home, belonging, identity, language, mobility and homecoming.

© The Author(s) 2018

Ahmad Rasmi QabahaExile and Expatriation in Modern American and Palestinian Writinghttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91415-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Ahmad Rasmi Qabaha¹

(1)

An-Najah National University, Nablus, State of Palestine

End Abstract

[As a critic of literature] you see different experiences in parallel lines, that is basically counterpoint , operating together without the necessity of being reconciled at any one moment. (Edward Said , The Last Interview, 2003) ¹

Inspired by Edward Said ’s idea of counterpoint and postcolonial, mobility , space and place theories, this book examines the distinction between literary expatriation and exile and is a contribution to the fields of comparative , postcolonial and diaspora studies. This book specifically explores the differences between the departures and returns of the involuntary exile (in this case, the Palestinian ) and the expatriate or voluntary exile (in this case, the American ). ²

This book shows that the American expatriate of the 1920s voluntarily departs from his or her homeland to perform a displaced relation with it and he or she can physically return, while the post-1948 Palestinian exile is forced into exile by a colonial situation and he or she is not allowed to return. This book further demonstrates that American expatriate protagonists of the 1920s have the ability to reconnect with their roots , which enables them to choose the routes they intend to follow afterwards. This pattern reflects that they have chosen to live in ‘exile ’. By contrast, the representation by their Palestinian counterparts of their inability either to access their roots or choose their routes reflects that they have been driven into exile by an external force.

Expatriation Versus Exile

This is the first study, to the best of my knowledge, that substantially and in a comparative framework articulates the distinction between literary expatriation and exile . While a number of literary scholars have acknowledged the difference between these two modes of displacement , none of them has explored it in a detailed comparative project, or even made it clear. In an oft-cited piece, Edward Said , the most prominent of these scholars, briefly argues:

Exile originated in the age-old practice of banishment. Once banished, the exile lives an anomalous and miserable life, with the stigma of being an outsider . Expatriates voluntarily live in an alien country, usually for personal or social reasons. Hemingway and Fitzgerald were not forced to live in France . Expatriates may share in the solitude and estrangement of exile , but they do not suffer under its rigid proscriptions. ³

In this passage Said sees the expatriation which American expatriate Modernists such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) exemplify, as opposed to exile , as a matter of choice . In Said’s view, although expatriates and exiles share the terrain of solitude and estrangement , exiles, unlike expatriates, are destined to live (miserable) and discontinuous lives. Said’s thought is significant; yet he reduces in this context the distinction between expatriates and exiles. Said does not tell us, for example, that expatriates, unlike exiles, intend by their expatriation to create a sense of solitude and estrangement necessary for the artist, nor does he talk about the different conditions that prompt expatriates, and enforce exiles, to leave their homeland . In the above passage Said further fails to comment on the different perceptions of homecoming by exiles and expatriates.

Not only does Said reduce the distinction between exile and expatriation , but he also blurs it. Consider, for example, the following passage from Said’s ‘Intellectual Exile : Expatriates and Marginals’:

While it is an actual condition, exile is also […] a metaphorical condition. By that I mean that my diagnosis of the intellectual in exile derives from the social and political history of dislocation and migration […] but is not limited to it. Even intellectuals who are lifelong members of a society can, in a manner of speaking, be divided into insiders and outsiders: those who on the one hand belong fully to the society as it is, who flourish in it without an overwhelming sense of dissonance or dissent, those who can be called yeasayers: and, on the other hand, the naysayers, the individuals at odds with their society and therefore outsiders and exiles so far as privileges, power, and honours are concerned. ⁴

Said in this passage obscures the fact that expatriation , not exile , is the category that best describes intellectuals who feel ‘at odds with their society’. Likewise, Said fails above to argue that ‘an overwhelming sense of dissonance and dissent’ inside homeland is a characteristic that primarily pertains to expatriates, not exiles. As my book explains, these feelings usually generate the voluntary departure or expatriation of intellectuals . Expatriate intellectuals , unlike exiled intellectuals , reflect in their departures from their homes a sense of displaced relation and disaffection with those homes. This book also draws a line of distinction , blurred by Said above, between feeling like an exile and being an exile . There is a big difference, I argue, between feeling like an exile inside one’s homeland (or even outside one’s homeland ), due to the reasons Said introduces above, and being cast into exile by an external force.

Some of the following chapters will comment on the inconsistency in Said’s theoretical insights on exile , yet it is worth noting in this context that the fact that Said sees the intellectual as an exile is problematic. As Svetlana Boym writes in another context, in looking at the intellectual as essentially an exile we risk ‘fall[ing] into the somewhat facile argument that every intellectual is always already an exile ’. ⁵ This book illustrates that such generalisation (that is, every intellectual is an exile ) runs the danger of blurring the differences between the circumstances of intellectuals who are forced into exile and those who see themselves as exiles but, as I argue, should be called expatriates. Ironically, Said himself worries in his other works that looking at exile aesthetically , by extension as a metaphor , will trivialise the fact that exile is ‘unbearably historical: that it is produced by human beings for other human beings’ and ‘like death but without death’s ultimate merc...