ABSTRACT
Exiles or Diasporas have typified the modern era since the turn of the nineteenth, and particularly during the twentieth, centuries. This phenomenon of emigration for economic, political, and cultural reasons, of individuals as well as communities who sought to settle in other countries, is reflected in various spheres of art, including literature. Emigrant writers moved from their countries of origin, especially from ‘Third World’ to ‘First World’ countries; from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh they went chiefly to the United Kingdom, from African countries to France and the United Kingdom, and from China, Japan, and Vietnam to the United States of America and France. It is apparent that from a number of aspects a traditional phenomenon was created, since this was not merely one generation of emigrants but rather several waves in terms of time, space, and place. During the twentieth century, the second generation of emigrant writers, not to mention the third and fourth generations, not only changed countries from homeland to Diaspora, but also the language in which they wrote, from their mother tongue to the local language, primarily English, French, and German.1 In many respects, the key word to describe their situation is loss, since we are dealing with loss of territory, loss of mother tongue, loss of language usage, loss of environment or, in short, partial loss of the past in favour of the present and the future.2 In addition to these waves of emigrants, we should bear in mind that there is also a continuous wave of those who leave unrelated to collective events, that is, political, economic, and cultural events, but rather for individual reasons.
