ABSTRACT
Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a Syrian public intellectual whose writings cover the questions of Arab modernity, Islamism and the Syrian state. Exile is not a main theme in al-Haj Saleh’s work. His writings on exile are scattered and fragmented throughout many of his essays which are published mostly in Arabic. Discussions of al-Haj Saleh’s work centre around his analysis of the Syrian revolution and the Assadist regime. As refugee knowledge, in this chapter, I describe al-Haj Saleh’s understanding of exile. His emerging account aims to articulate the phenomenon of exile beyond its personified, literary and figurative aesthetics. For al-Haj Saleh, exile is not exclusively about displacement and uprooting. Exilement, as a cluster of practices and forces, is a modality of government which is constitutive of the Assadist regime’s rule in Syria. Diverging from that, I present al-Haj Saleh’s view on undoing exile and turning it into home, which is inspired by his personal experience both in prison and in exile.
