In Exile From Exile: The Ethics of Uprootedness and Marginal Cosmopolitanism in the Poetry of Tomás Segovia

Abstract

The rhetoric of nomadism used by Tomas Segovia (Spain, 1927-Mexico, 2011) renders his exilic poetry suggestively paradoxical: the poetic “I” aims to become exiled from exile. Segovia saw himself as marginal and without a homeland long before the exile brought about by the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Mexico in 1940, and from 1976 until his death, lived between Spain and Mexico. He is considered a prominent representative of the Spanish Republican exile on both sides of the Atlantic, a characterization that the writer rejected. In light of the sociohistorical circumstances that defined the Spanish Republican exile in Mexico, this essay interrogates the ethico-political sense in which the condition of exile can be read in Segovia’s poetry. Thus it critiques the sometimes reductive contextual reading favored within political institutions. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s definition of cosmopolitan ethics as an ethics that addresses the challenge of harmonizing universality and particularity, I read Segovia’s poetry as pointing toward a universal horizon that derives from a difference that Segovia could not entirely shed.