Abstract
This paper reconsiders the representation of exile in the memoirs of the American modernist Malcolm Cowley and modern Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki, arguing that against the privileged use of exile by Cowley, Turki represents exile as a catastrophic condition. In so doing, my paper asserts the necessity of accounting for the catastrophic aspect of exile as represented in the modern Palestinian canon for a wider understanding of the notion of exile in the modern discourse. I argue that the modern Palestinian experience of exile as delineated in Turki’s Exile’s Return has tragic, historical and political specificities that disrupt the view of exile as a desired position in the modernist American canon, which Cowley’s Exile’s Return capitalises on. However, this juxtaposition does not look forward to negating or dismissing American modernists’ glorification of exile as a space offering possibilities for freedom, resistance and creativity. Instead, I aim by this juxtaposition to reuse the concept of exile in ways that do not gloss over the differences between various exilic conditions.
Highlights
In the course of this article, I initially contextualise and discuss the circumstances that necessitated the voluntary exile of Cowley and the writers of his generation as represented in his autobiography Exile’s Return
I consider the treatment of the exile/home dichotomy by Cowley and Turki, showing that its collapse means the loss of their attachment or belonging to a place
Contrary to the American modernists’ glorification of voluntary exile in Paris illustrated above, Turki’s Exile’s Return shows the catastrophic side of exile for the Palestinians forcibly expelled from their homes in the 1948 Nakba. He begins his book by stating that ‘the Palestinians who have lived in exile – and there are four million of them scattered around the Arab countries and beyond – have a story to tell about their own unspoken pain.’xiii Turki, sees himself as a speaker of that pain on their behalf
Summary
In A Companion to Comparative Literature, Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas note that scholars of comparative literature have recently adopted the tendency to compare literary works by exiled, diasporic and immigrant western and non-western writers in order to explore new interpretations of the terms ‘exile’ and ‘diaspora’.i These evolving interpretations have problematised traditional representation of exile in western literary canons.ii In the same book, Emily Apter argues that the Palestinian experience of exile is crucial for a wider understanding of the notion of exile, for ‘Palestinians inherit the dubious mantel [sic] of statelessness from the Jews’.iii In addition, some scholars have recently suggested that Palestinian experience of exile can be compared with Western configurations of exile from different perspectives, yet as far as I can ascertain no comparative literary study has attempted to test these arguments. iv These theoretical insights facilitate my argument in this article that the modern Palestinian experience of exile as represented in Turki’s memoir has tragic, historical and political specificities that disrupt the view of exile as a desired position in the modernist American canon as represented in Malcolm Cowley’s memoir. Iv These theoretical insights facilitate my argument in this article that the modern Palestinian experience of exile as represented in Turki’s memoir has tragic, historical and political specificities that disrupt the view of exile as a desired position in the modernist American canon as represented in Malcolm Cowley’s memoir. According to Gertrude Stein and Alfred Kazin, American modernists of the 1920s became the pioneers of the literary modernism movement and the inheritors of the western modernist discourse of exile.v. In the course of this article, I initially contextualise and discuss the circumstances that necessitated the voluntary exile of Cowley and the writers of his generation as represented in his autobiography Exile’s Return. I examine Turki’s representation of the politics of his involuntary and voluntary experiences of exile in his autobiography Exile’s Return as a counter narrative to Cowley’s.
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