Exiles from Power

Abstract

This article relates two forms of political and cultural marginality and emancipation to a third one, which, in traditional patriarchal cultures, is the embodiment of marginality par excellence: that of the female self. It explores their similar positioning in the spatial and temporal economy of power relations in a detailed analysis of Irina Grigorescu Pana's novel Melbourne Sundays(1998), a fictionallyrical account of the Romanian author's 11-year exile in Australia, read as a narrative counterpart of her critical approach to exile in The Tomis Complex: Exile and Eros in Australian Literature(1996). These two works describe an experience happening at the intersection between the author's (communist, then postcommunist) national background – that of Romania – and the postcolonial one of her country of adoption – Australia – as they become relevant from her personal and professional experience as a woman writer. Exile is thus reflected in language (negotiated within the English/Romanian opposition), being spatially constructed by means of metaphors such as book, theatre, carnival, garden, which are also relevant for the process of identity formation. The argument mainly relies on Kristeva's theories, an approach motivated by Pana's own choice of the Kristevan discourse of love/hate in relation to the theme of exile in her fictional and critical works, since, as she remarks, exiles and lovers share a marginal, though at the same time essential, position in postcolonial cultures.