ABSTRACT

The experience of exile can be characterised in terms of the movement of an individual from one place, through dis-placement, to re-placement, that is the final adjustment to the new environment. For the exiled intellectual, writing becomes an ‘act of replacement’ (Millington 1991: 65), the reinvention of the symbolic structure of the old place that works to ultimately destroy the sense of placelessness of exile. The exile undergoes a process of identification, or several identifications: the nostalgic identification with home in which the exile re-establishes the ‘imaginary wholeness’ (Millington 1991: 70) of his or her existence in the homeland, either through metonymic practices or through the diasporic strategies of the myth of the return or the idealisation of the homeland; and the identification with the place of exile that eventually leads to a sense of resignation, and often to a reconfiguration of the sense of home. If, however, as some theorists of exile suggest, the exile remains in a state of continual marginality, an unending crisis of identity and sense of fragmentation, how then can a ‘return’ be achieved? It is the sense of resignation to the exilic situation and the realisation of the final ‘impossibility of return’ that leads to a sense of acceptance on the part of the exile, creating new bonds to the place of exile and a feeling of strangeness as regards the homeland.