ABSTRACT
"Exiled" is a strong marker of identity, a handy and rather sexy sobriquet. But to keep it forever as part of one's self-image surely involves a kind of mis-description or at least over-simplification. The upheaval of exile is undoubtedly dramatic, and often traumatic, but one's relationship to it does not remain static, any more than any other aspects of identity or existential condition are static in the longue duree. The very possibility of writing in exile and observing one culture from the perspective of another indeed, the very processes of translation and self-translation are enabled by the underlying elements of commonality among diverse cultures; a kind of common palette of human perception and experience. The task, for a certain kind of writer, is precisely to catch these deeper shifts to imagine the present, so to speak, in all its flux and unfamiliar strangeness.
