The Exile Experience

Antíteses, 2010

Exile is a circumstance different from other migrations, although it resembles them in the possible insertion or alienation from the receiving society. It is with no a doubt a forced migration process which is always accompanied by an idea and an imaginary: the disappearrance of the conditions that forced to exile and thus, the return. Although it is not possible to generalize, because there is no one single experience of exile and the subjectivities that compose it are diverse, it undoubtedly produces a sensation of alienation, which can lead to the rejection of the cultural norms of society; it is part of a process of “being in one place, but thinking about another.” However, as exile is prolonged, the experience of adaptation for the different generations involved becomes diversified, communication vessels develop, feelings of inclusion, of adaptation, of attachment with the social and cultural environment that the place of refuge offered. The present text builds on testimonies of Uruguayans exiled in Mexico who have returned to their country. In their narrative, the meanings that relate to the subjective perspective that provoked the “return” to their country of origin as being viable and a palpable event are perceived. In summary, an incursion through the testimonial plot explains to what extent the return is a recovery of the space of identity longed for and the subsequent abandonment of the foreign space, in other words, it adds to the perspective of identity as a dynamic and relational.

CRITICAL STAGES, 2011

British Journal of Psychotherapy, 1998

Since the mid-nineteenth century, millions of people have migrated to Latin America, choosing to endure multiple losses in the anticipation that life in the`New World' would offer a positive alternative to the limited opportunities in their countries of origin. Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral captures the complex but essentially optimistic essence of this kind of migration: I am two. One looks back, The other turns to the sea. The nape of my neck seethes with goodbyes And my breast with yearning. (Akhtar 1995, p. 1066) However, in the past several decades, another migration has taken place as hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been forced from their homelands into exile in a flight from the terrors of political repression. Exile is a specific kind of migration, without yearning and shorn of hope and aspiration. Refugees are journeying from, not toward, something, and what they leave behind nags at the psyche, wedding it to the past. My city-Los Angeles-is a city of exiles, where since the late seventies large numbers of Central Americans have been forced into a continual exodus from civil war and military dictatorship. They bring with them a legacy of social trauma that infuses their experience of arrival in the United States with a profound pessimism about the past and about what lies ahead in the uncharted future. Exiled poet Etelvina Astrada describes the conditions that have driven her and other refugees from their countries: The hordes came, Created darkness And terror, the hunt, goon squads kidnappings walls interrogations olive green

Nordic Theatre Studies

The Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who were forced to leave their respective homelands after World War II in the wake of Soviet occupation came to form exile communities across the world. These communities continued their cultural traditions and practices with the arts becoming a medium to reaffirm their identities in exile and narrate their experiences. But with a quarter of a century having passed since their migration, the 1970s became a period of re-evaluating this focus, often represented by topics of generational conflict or inability to change with the times. In North America, first generation Baltic exile playwrights Ilmar Külvet, Alfreds Straumanis, and Algirdas Landsbergis often scrutinized the condition of exile within their works. In this study, I will examine the Baltic narrative of exile as a cultural trauma and take into focus three works by these authors with representations reflecting on the changing times and crises of belonging and identity. The three plays ...

After reading Norman Manea's writings, one can notice that their major theme, that is, the main obsession of the author is the exile, as he has always considered himself an éxilé (exiled man), no matter where he happened to live. Both his fiction and his essays are autobiographical, speaking of the author's traumatizing existential experiences: as a child, he faced the anti-Semitic laws culminating in the deportation in Transnistria, then the impossibility of reintegration in a still hostile society; as an adult, he suffered the trauma of yet another totalitarian regime (the communist dictatorship); and as an old man, that of the impossibility to adapt to the consumerist society that offered him refuge. Resumen. La lectura de la obra de Norman Manea permite establecer que el tema fundamental de la misma, la obsesión principal del autor, es el exilio; que siempre se ha considerado a sí mismo un exiliado (éxilé), sin importar el lugar en el que haya tenido que vivir. Tanto sus...

J. Michel, C. Canullo (eds.), Renewing Hermeneutics. Thinking with Paul Ricoeur, 179-208, 2021

Life is closely connected to narrative insofar as the selfhood of the self constitutes itself in a life history, which is open to twists and strokes of fate. This applies particularly to the limit- experi-ence of exile, which illustrates the conflicting relationship between narrative, life, and the manner in which life makes sense by bridging the gap between disruption and reconfiguration. After presenting exile as a paradigmatic experience of otherness, I'll appeal to Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity in order to inquire into the meaning of the word "other". The central part presents the main thesis by connecting Ricœur's narrative hermeneutics to the experiential dimen-sion of exile as described by the Uruguayan writer Mario Benedetti: The encounter with the other causes a reconfiguration of the self in the sense that when someone makes elements of a foreign lifeworld her/his own, there is a correlative discovery of some hidden aspects in her/his own self.