Language Of Exile Research Articles

TALAR CHAHINIAN, Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2023)

TALAR CHAHINIAN, Stateless: The Politics of the Armenian Language in Exile (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2023)

Hidden Words: Searching for meaning in a rubber stamp

Hidden WordsSearching for meaning in a rubber stamp Uljana Wolf (bio) Translated by Sophie Seita (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mot Caché, 1978. [End Page 164] in 1978, theresa hak kyung cha made a stamp—a rubber stamp, not a postage stamp—for a small exhibition in Amsterdam. Cha, whose "mail art," writing, and performances explore patterns of public circulation, mistranslation, and exchange, made the stamp to fit on a standard postcard. At the stamp's center are two words, outlined in black: mot caché (French for "hidden word"). Arranged in an oval around them are other French words, in mirror image—empreinte révèle signe évoque énonce dévoile marque tache inscrite trace—all of which relate to the act of inscription. [End Page 165] After the stamp is applied to paper, the outer circle of words becomes legible. The words in the middle, however, hide themselves again. (They now say tom éhcac.) So the "correct expression," at least in this mode and direction of reading, stays behind, on the stamp, elsewhere. The words of inscription wrap around the hidden word(s) like a glove, within which: a center that doesn't send. But there's another word, too. In the lower right-hand corner of the stamp, uncapitalized: cha, Theresa's family name. At first glance, the name lies outside the word circle of inscription. But if you look again, you notice that the name also lies buried within the phrase in the middle of the stamp, in the rearranged letters of the word caché. In this way, "cha" itself is the mot caché: the hidden word. What exactly is being sent with this postcard? Is the hidden word meant to be a Korean name, or is it so untranslatable as to be absent, undetectable? Does everyone who sees the stamp or the postcard have access to the same hidden word? The same experience of displacement? When I came across Dictee in New York a few years ago, it was like receiving a dispatch, a linguistic memo I didn't understand. It stayed with me, this dispatch, because (I now realize) as a German poet writing mostly in the language I was raised in, I was and am always in search of paths that lead me away: away from the sorts of understanding that I've inherited; away from my ways of thinking as an East-, perhaps post-East-, perhaps multi-German writer; away from the categories of estrangement and non-estrangement in my life, which has long swung like a pendulum between New York and Berlin. For me, being a multilingual writer means that words are always inscribed with ghost-words. Cha's work was particularly relevant to my experience of multilayered cultural and linguistic self-estrangement. Dictee explores the same obsessions and methods that characterize Cha's mail art: fragmentary, translingual language pointing to the failure of translation; documentary material questioning the possibility of singular memory; conversations that straddle [End Page 166] Click for larger view View full resolution A postcard from Cha addressed to her brother John Cha and his family. A Mot Caché impression in black ink is stamped on one side. [End Page 167] multiple artistic mediums. In both the stamp and the book, Cha makes traceable what it means to be someone who has a language that is not "the right one," not their own, not original or real—a language that exists only on a fantasized, distant, handmade stamp. A stamp perhaps like: home. Like: nation. Like: mother tongue. When we use the term mother tongue, which language are we referring to? Just as the stamped image exists in an in-between realm, adrift and unbelonging, Dictee also demonstrates the failure to construct possible identifications through the actual language of the mother. Cha's own mother, Cha Hyung Soon, grew up as a refugee in Manchuria, moving between the language of exile (Chinese), that of occupation (Japanese), and that of her ancestral country (Korean). For Cha, the search for heritage, for the place of the mother and her language, is not a search for a state of monolingual belonging. Rather: her rebellious...

Conversations with the Dead

Conversations with the Dead

I am grateful to fate for this hour of grace: Children and Motherhood in the Life and Writings of Rosa Lebensbaum

Anna Margolin's innovative poetry has attracted the attention and admiration of Yiddish cultural research centers and literary critics worldwide. However, Rosa Lebensbaum—the real woman behind this pseudonym—has remained hidden for many years under the shadow of her well-known public figure. A family archive, carefully preserved by Rosa Lebensbaum's granddaughter in Israel, now allows the attention to be turned from Anna to Rosa. Private correspondence between Lebensbaum and her family—her divorcé, author Moshe Stavsky, and their son—reveals contradictions and understandings that illuminate new aspects in the poet's writing, as well as in her life and the lives of those around her. Based on this newly presented personal material, this article explores two aspects in the context of the life and writing of Rosa Lebensbaum; the first is personal while the other is cultural-historical. There was, on the one hand, a national, social, and creative renewal inspired by the Zionist movement, encouraging Jews to return to the land of Israel and the Hebrew language; yet, on the other hand, an American Jewish attempt to preserve and maintain the Yiddish culture, the language of exile against which the Jewish Yishuv in pre-state Israel fought vigorously. This clash of culture and languages—its implications and the price that many Jews were required to pay in pre-state Israel and America—form an additional central topic in this research.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Little Green Book, and the Dispute with Death

The most commonly recited anecdote regarding Dante Gabriel Rossetti recalls the incident surrounding the burial of his bound manuscript of poetry in 1862 alongside his wife Elizabeth Siddal. Buried in an act of contrition encouraged by his brother, the manuscript was retrieved from the exhumed coffin at Rossetti's behest in 1869 by his friend Charles Augustus Howell and returned to the poet in a severe state of decay and smelling of disinfectant. Three of the poems recovered would famously form an integral part of the 1870 Poems. This essay situates Rossetti's action in undertaking the exhumation as a trope for the way his poetry consistently revisits and reconfigures conceptualisations of life and death, often with regards to physical and spiritual embodiment. Without seeking to offer ethical justification for Rossetti's actions in retrieving his poems, I will focus rather on the ways in which his poetic vision is dominated by the language of exile and return, of burial and retrieval, and how these twin concerns are manifest in the poems of the little green book. These three long poems, which it appears he was most eager to recover through the distasteful act, are identified collectively as ‘the exhumation poems’: ‘Dante at Verona’, ‘A Last Confession’, and ‘Jenny’.

Deutschsprachige Kinder- und Jugendliteratur während der Zwischenkriegszeit und im Exil: Schwerpunkt Österreich ed. by Susanne Blumesberger, Jörg Thunecke

Reviewed by: Deutschsprachige Kinder- und Jugendliteratur während der Zwischenkriegszeit und im Exil: Schwerpunkt Österreich ed. by Susanne Blumesberger, Jörg Thunecke Kirsten A. Krick-Aigner Susanne Blumesberger and Jörg Thunecke, eds., Deutschsprachige Kinder- und Jugendliteratur während der Zwischenkriegszeit und im Exil: Schwerpunkt Österreich. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2017. 344 pp. English-speaking readers today may not be aware that Walt Disney’s celebrated 1942 animated film Bambi was based on Bambis Kinder, written 1938 by the forcibly exiled Austrian Felix Salten, or that popular 1930s U.S. proletarian children’s books were translations of works by the Austrian Hermynia von [End Page 143] Mühlen. This volume on German-speaking children’s and young adult (YA) literature written between the world wars and in the postwar period, focuses on these aforementioned and other underrepresented works and fills a much-needed void in scholarship. The articles are the result of a 2014 conference in Vienna led by the editors Susanne Blumesberger and Jörg Thunecke. This edition follows Blumesberger’s 2014 two-volume reference book on children’s and YA literature by Austrian women authors. The volume at hand is comprised of fourteen articles in German that are grouped thematically, ranging from socialist and worker’s literature, both in Austria and the United States, to propaganda and exile literature. At times the organizational structure is problematic as the grouping of the articles sometimes disrupts the flow of the overarching themes, but this does not take away from the fact that each article is in itself timely and engaging. Very helpful to international readers and those seeking specific information in the volume is each article’s introductory abstract in English. The framework of the volume provides readers and scholars with contextual information regarding children’s and YA literature, revealing not only the relevance of this body of literature today but also the need for further research on its authors and themes, especially on underrepresented and still unidentified texts written and published in exile, either in German or in a language of exile. The contributions highlight biographies, text analyses, the personal and professional situations of the authors, and, finally, the challenges of the publication, distribution, and reception of the works. The editors observe discussion points raised in the articles, highlighting especially how the political situation of this period affected the literary production in German-speaking regions, especially in Austria. While each article offers up new readings of texts and reintroduces lesserknown authors, articles also illustrate the texts’ import for readers today. In the opening article, Wiebke von Bernstorff states that reading children’s and YA literature through the lens of Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect,” an idea developed through Brecht’s own experiences under National Socialism and in exile, allows for a more didactic approach to the texts that reaches beyond the readers’ initial reaction of empathy. Von Bernstorff positions her analysis between the historicity of the texts and their timeliness, citing that the texts were written as a reaction to World War II and fascism and can therefore provide insight into contemporary social and political issues. The topic of exile is highly relevant to readers today, as a means of gaining intercultural knowledge [End Page 144] and providing insight into the refugee crisis in Europe and elsewhere. Von Bernstorff examines the aesthetics of the literary texts rather than their political intent, as identified in earlier research on children’s and YA literature in exile. Articles on the Socialist Party’s political texts for children, written in the “Red Vienna” between 1920 and 1934, highlight works such as the 1927 Kasperl sucht den Weihnachtsmann (Kasperl searches for Santa Claus) by Anton Afritsch, which warns of the perils of capitalism while revealing that Santa is a myth, and the 1930 Die verwünschte Fabrik (The cursed factory) by Alois Jalkotzy. Jörg Thunecke follows suit with an analysis of von Mühlen’s texts for children that were translated into English and published in the United Statesas Fairy Tales for Workers’ Children (1922), which aimed to combat social inequities and injustice while countering war through coexistence. While Murray G. Hall discusses the militarization of boys through propaganda literature of the early 1930s...

A Spirituality of Exile: Responding to God's Absence

In the journey of faith almost everyone experiences times of spiritual desolation when our sense of God's presence is stripped away and our certainty about his faithfulness is deeply eroded. Times like this are intensely disorienting as they leave us grasping for answers, but even more importantly searching for a way forward. The literature of the Bible provides us with both experiential companionship and language to guide our journey through the desolate places of spiritual experience. The prayer language of exile offers us a paradigm for engaging with God in the midst of our experience of his absence. In particular the biblical book of Lamentations and a number of Psalms (44, 74, 79, 89, 102, 106 and 137) provide language that helped Israel express the depths of their suffering in the face of their exilic experience. The prayer language of exile is the language of God's absence. Through the language of exilic prayer we encounter the bold movements of lament, remembrance, reorientation, and hope. These acts of prayerful speech form the core of a spirituality of exile that sustained the ancient community and can offer nourishment to contemporary journeys of desolation as well.

Ethnic Conflict in Burundi

In spite of the laudable political and humanitarian efforts to tackle the cyclical ethnic-related conflicts in Burundi, the impact of the refugee and returnee phenomena on the culture, education, and economy of the country and beyond has not yet received its full due attention. This study aims at increasing awareness on this issue. It first identifies the refugee- and returnee-related new linguistic trends in Burundi, together with their subsequent impact on education. How many Burundians learned Kiswahili in exile in Tanzania or in the Democratic Republic of Congo, not only for educational or professional purposes but also for survival, but who, back in Burundi, saw their language of exile become an obstacle to the pursuit of a standard education? Why has their plight not attracted as much attention as did that of war orphans, widows, and former child soldiers? This study also surveys the cultural exchanges between Burundian refugees and returnees with their host country and their motherland.

Escritos en el lenguaje del exilio

This essay explores Augusto Roa Bastos’s texts, an exemplary writer when we focus on exile as a complex experience that comes up in writing. If geographic exile is an exile from one's own language (Roa Bastos wrote his best narrative while living outside Paraguay), his cultural system is marked by a “diglossic” situation as constitutive exile (both linguistic and cultural). Thus, the concept “language of exile” becomes useful in the explanation of a poetic text and some narratives, images, and metaphors that we consider signs of Roa Bastos’s outstanding work in relation to Spanish, a distinctive writing style woven in the fabric of the conventional one.

New Last Words of Yiddish

New Last Words of Yiddish David N. Myers On the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer delivered a rich encomium to the Yiddish language, casting it as a way of life more than as a mere linguistic vessel. Yiddish, he noted, was a language of exile that lacked a vocabulary for matters martial—"weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics." And yet, Singer was far more taken by what the language could convey than by what it could not: "One can find in the Yiddish tongue and in the Yiddish spirit expressions of pious joy, lust for life, longing for the Messiah, patience and deep appreciation of human individuality." Indeed, Yiddish, which Singer famously promised in 1978 "has not yet said its last word," has had a remarkably diverse, eventful, and trying history. From its Western Askhenazic roots to its current Hasidic preserves in Brooklyn and Bnai Brak, it has traversed exceptionally rugged terrain over the course of its thousand-year history. This journey has not only steeled it to the inevitability of disappointment and danger but allowed for a stunning range of voices—from early modern penitential prayers for women to a daring and experimental modernist literature, from earnest ideological manifestoes devoted to the preservation of the language itself to biting, parodic humor that undoes self-serious piety or politics. In its many guises, Yiddish became the language—and glue—of a mythic "Yiddishland," a cultural nation with many capitals though no territory of its own. Noticeable today are a pair of interrelated attitudes toward Yiddish, both born of the language's grievous, nearly mortal, injury suffered in the Holocaust. First, there is an unmistakable nostalgia, especially among North American Jews in the postwar period, toward the intimacy, warmth, and innocence of Yiddish, the lost language of grandparents, no better symbolized than by Fiddler on the Roof. There is also a more recent form of nostalgia toward Yiddish—a kind of Diaspora cultural politics—that seeks to recover an explosive Yiddish vitality forgotten and suppressed by the Hebraist and Israel-centered agenda of much organized Jewish communal life. [End Page v] That latter impulse blends into a second identifiable attitude of note: a renewed scholarly commitment to grant the somewhat neglected language and its culture their due. This is hardly to suggest that scholarship on Yiddish is a recent creation. There was a scholarly enterprise devoted to Yiddish and its culture that preceded the establishment of YIVO in 1925 but reached its greatest fulfillment in that Vilna-based institution in the interwar era. And yet, over the past few decades, one senses a new sense of urgency to engage the subject with vigor and purpose, motivated, in no small part, by the trepidation that Yiddish may indeed soon speak its last word. The various disciplinary rubrics that fall under the heading "cultural studies" have demonstrated a particular receptivity to Yiddish, drawn to its status as an expressive, extraterritorial, minority language. And so, we have an ever-expanding scholarship on Yiddish that follows its journey from robust and multifaceted vernacular, spoken by millions, to "postvernacular" culture, anchored by material objects and cherished by the children and grandchildren of its native speakers for whom it is a pleasing, but distant, memory. From a different, even countervailing, angle, we also have research devoted to the study of the cradle-to-grave Yiddish worlds of contemporary traditionalist Orthodox communities. The interlocking fields of Yiddish studies have undoubtedly breathed new life into the language and its past. In recognition of this new energy, the editors of JQR decided to collect in this issue three fine essays that place Yiddish at the forefront. In his opening Note, Ber Boris Kotlerman uses historical-philological tools to identify, contextualize, and translate the two oldest letters written in Old Yiddish. Written in the wake of the blood libel directed against Jews in Trent in 1475, the letters reveal the central role played by Yiddish as the everyday (and epistolary) medium of European Jews in early modern times. Leaping ahead four and a half centuries, Rachel Seelig explores in her essay the literary experimentation of Yiddish poet Moyshe Kulbak during his Berlin phase...

“Oh, language of exile – woven of sorrow and mockery”: the Kalevala centennial jubilee as a bone of contention between Hebraists and Yiddishists

The article explores contacts between eminent Jewish Zionists and the Finnish cultural and political elite using the Kalevala centennial jubilee as a case study. The article shows how Finnish nationalists sympathised with the cause of Zionists propagating the use of modern Hebrew: members of the Kalevala Society warm‐heartedly invited the Hebrew poet Saul Tchernichowsky from Palestine to the centennial jubilee in 1935. The article also deals with the exclusion of the Yiddish representative, Hersh Rosenfeld, recommended by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in Vilna, and discusses the possibility of anti‐communism and anti‐cosmopolitanism behind his omission from the centennial jubilee. The Jewish community of Helsinki, which was experiencing a rapid Finnification process, was involved in inviting the Hebrew representative to Finland. The article ends by analysing a Yiddishist poem that can be interpreted as an individual’s protest about the exclusion of the Yiddish language from the Kalevala centenary.

The Marketing of Postcolonial Authors

The Marketing of Postcolonial Authors John Marx (bio) Sarah Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. 240 pp. $85.00. The author is not dead: he is a marketing tool. In Sarah Brouillette's hands, this contention—which, surely, every reader of contemporary literature must recognize, even if we'd sometimes prefer not to think about it—is far from cynical. Reminding readers of the author's survival is, rather, the point of departure for an argument that ends by specifying a "form of responsive authorial agency" (177). Brouillette argues that select writers have found ways to shake off the "excessive burden within specifically postcolonial literatures" of "the association between an author and a national authenticity" (177). Even though Brouillette argues that "postcolonial authorship" is "in part a generative and saleable feature" (7), she does not suggest that writers are dupes of a global publishing machine. Rather, Brouillette is interested in how writers respond to the market's dictates. They do so, she argues, by writing novels that display a keen understanding of an author's function. By scrutinizing a discrete set of canonical (and near-canonical) postcolonial books, Brouillette tracks a "trope of self-authorization," which writers acquire "through awareness of the political uses or appropriations of one's works" (74). In short, figuring out how writers work with and against the publishing industry is what Brouillette is after. Her argument is a bracing account of authorship that ought to make it harder for scholars to trot out the habitual romanticist and modernist account of writers as the innocent victims of an increasingly global market in cultural goods. Postcolonial Writers in the Global [End Page 811] Literary Marketplace also adds new complexity to the familiar contention that writers participate in the marketing of their marginality. Brouillette acknowledges that books sold as "postcolonial literature" have come to fill an important niche in a highly segmented book trade. The characteristics of such writing in its most salable form are easily recognized: "it is English-language fiction; it is relatively 'sophisticated' or 'complex' and often anti-realist; it is politically liberal and suspicious of nationalism; it uses a language of exile, hybridity, and 'mongrel' subjectivity" (61). Even as the appearance of poetry and prose fitting this description helped diversify the stock of books being sold worldwide, Brouillette reminds us that not only "the locus of production" but also the taste-making headquarters for transnational publishing remained entrenched "in a few key cities" in Europe and North America (56). Postcolonial writing shapes and is shaped by what she describes as the simultaneous extension and centralization of the publishing business. This dynamic favors writing that updates a worldly modernism, the likes of which Raymond Williams described as the product of immigrant communities of artists in London and New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.1 The most marketable of post-colonial prose, Brouillette argues, combines that urban, cosmopolitan aesthetic with the sort of local color that strikes contemporary editors and reviewers as exotic. Amazing but true, the exotic is still with us. Brouillette starts her book by explaining its continued appeal, and by distinguishing her argument about how authors manipulate the pleasures of exoticism from Graham Huggan's influential 2001 tome, The Postcolonial Exotic.2 Brouillette contends that Huggan imagines "postcolonial writers/thinkers" who can be neatly distinguished from the "market readers" who crave exotic prose (18). He critiques "an unnamed cosmopolitan consumer who seeks mythic access to exotic experience" and in so doing implicitly posits "a group of educated, elite, distinguished consumers who actually have access to the reality that the other consumer can only [End Page 812] ever wish to possess" (19). In place of such a contest between bad, touristic readers and good readers with access to insider knowledge, Brouillette finds it "more fruitful to understand strategic exoticism, and likewise general postcolonial authorial self-consciousness, as comprised of a set of literary strategies that operate through assumptions shared between the author and the reader, as both producer and consumer work to negotiate with, if not absolve themselves of, postcoloniality's touristic guilt" (7). Brouillette's first example of how this works appears in...

Linguistic Conflict and Language Laws: Understanding the Quebec Question

Notes On Contributors Introduction Language Policy and Planning Issues in Multicultural Societies C.Williams The History of Quebec in the Perspective of the French Language J-P.Warren Federal Language Policy in Canada and the Quebec Challenge C.M. MacMillan A Language Policy for a Language in Exile M.Chevrier Anglophones and Allophones in Quebec P.Larrivee A Final Note on Culture, Quebec Native Languages and the Quebec Question P. Larrivee

En/countering the New Language of Exile in Uche Nduka's The Bremen Poems

Many African writers have been very critical of Europe in their works, especially in relation to racism and the experience of colonization. Yet, with the conditions in African countries becoming unfriendly to the careers of these writers, many of them have had to seek refuge in Europe. The New European context of African writing (which means an entry into the space of the Other) raises a number of issues about literary style in the exilic/migrant text, especially with regard to the use of literature as a means of recreating the self and articulating the way the self experiences a new cultural space. To what extent does this entry into the space of the Other imply dialogism and transformation? The present paper discusses the stylistic and discourse patterns utilized by the Nigerian poet, Uche Nduka, who has been in self-exile in Germany, in his The Bremen Poems. It analyses the images that are enlisted in the textual politics of re/identification in the poems, especially in the articulation of Europe/Germany as a productive space. It analyses the images that are enlisted in the textual politics of re/identification in the poems, especially in the articulation of Europe/Germany as a productive space.

The Language of Exile: Heaney and Dante

The Language of Exile: Heaney and Dante

La langue maternelle : la grande absente

The awesome absence of the mother tongue. Native language is here understood as “ une enveloppe sonore” - a “loud frame” - (Anzieu). The article deals with linguistic and psychic identities when persons and peoples have been deprived of their native language. What does it mean to be born without a native language ? What of the splits between a forlorn language and an embraced one, between an exiled language and a language of exile ? What impact does a scorched language have, when the subject never inherited such a language and his life wanes and dissolves in an impossible anamnesis ?

Lewis Glinert (ed.), Hebrew in Ashkenaz, A Language in Exile

Lewis Glinert (ed.), <i>Hebrew in Ashkenaz, A Language in Exile</i>

Cultural versus Linguistic Competence? Bilingualism, Language in Exile, and the Future of German Studies

Cultural competence may very well have been the dream of a long humanist tradition in the ivory tower of the academy. But as encouraged and taught at many U.S. universities today, with their unprecedented ethnically and culturally mixed student bodies, the ability to stake out the cultural determinants ofglobalized social, economic, and political structures has come to be much in demand in the real world of

Review of Lalla &amp; D’Costa (1990): Language in exile: Three hundred years of Jamaican Creole

Review of Lalla &amp; D’Costa (1990): Language in exile: Three hundred years of Jamaican Creole

The Poetics and Practice of Iranian Nostalgia in Exile

Diaspora 1:3 1991 The Poetics and Practice of Iranian Nostalgia in Exile Hamid Naficy University of California, Los Angeles 1. Nostalgia as Cultural Practice In this article, I will focus on the poetics and practice of nostalgia in exilic popular culture, drawing primarily on examples from some 10 years of Iranian television programs and music videos produced in Los Angeles. Nostalgia, a feature of exile, has in recent years become a "cultural practice" and a "mode of representation" (K. Stewart 227, 238) as postmodernity, neocolonialism, communism, totalitarianism, imperialism, and transnational capital have displaced peoples and cultures the world over. Fredric Jameson tells us that this fragmentation and deterritorialization forces us to experience time differently; that is, we experience the present as a loss or, as Baudrillard would have it, as a phenomenon that has no origin or reality, a "hyperreality" (2). For the exiles who have emigrated from Third World countries, life in the United States, especially in the quintessentially postmodern city of Los Angeles, is doubly unreal, and it is because of this double loss—of origin and of reality—that nostalgia becomes a major cultural and representational practice among the exiles. In addition, nostalgia for one's homeland has a fundamentally interpsychic source expressed in the trope ofan eternal desire for return—a return that is structurally unrealizable. Freud speaks of homesickness as a longing for a return to the womb of the motherland, and Jane Gallop asserts: If we understand the nostalgia resulting from the discovery of the mother's castration in this way, then the discovery that the mother does not have the phallus means that the subject can never return to the womb. Somehow the fact that the mother is not phallic means that the mother as mother is lost forever, that the mother as womb, homeland, source, and grounding for the subject is irretrievably past. The subject is hence in a foreign land, alienated. (148) 285 Diaspora 1:3 1991 Although the lost mother is structurally irretrievable, the lost homeland is potentially recoverable and it is this potentiality—however imaginary—that drives the exiles' multifaceted desire to return. 2. Return to the Origin For some, separation from and loss of the homeland is a deliberate choice that indicates a desire to escape from the ravages of both a patriarchal family and a social order prevalent in the home country . For many, however, grief over forced separation and loss is unresolvable and thus leads to depression and dysphoria (Good, Good, and Moradi 391). As I have argued elsewhere ("Televisual"), some people disavow loss and separation either through creating and controlling fetishes or creating and submitting to fetishes. For others, the disavowal of loss and separation is supplanted by an impulse to return, to reunite with the object ofthe fetish, the (motherland ; to regress into the prelapsarian narcissism of childhood; to reestablish the communal self. This is a characteristic that sets exiles apart from all other displaced people, such as expatriates and immigrants. Indeed, "exile is a dream of glorious return" (Rushdie 205), a dream that as Freud and Lacan predicted remains alluring only as long as it remains unrealized. We must consider the paradigm of exile as it operates within the exiles' native culture, because it is through that paradigm that they think and experience their lives in exile. For Iranians, it is poetry, especially sufi (mystic) poetry, that provides the paradigmatic worldview and language of exile, embodying a variety of journeys, returns, and unifications. Such an assertion may seem implausible to readers unfamiliar with Iranian culture; certainly, a similar claim about any contemporary western culture would not be upheld. However, as historians, anthropologists, literary critics, and any number of Iranians can attest, theirs is a culture suffused by poetry and shaped by the citation of canonical, classical (and at times contemporary ) poets in daily life; rich and poor can and do cite Ferdowsi , Sa'adi, Hafez, Rumi, and Khayyam. The paradigm of exile is indissolubly linked with the Hejri calendar, the Iranian version of the Muslim Hijrah (hegira), dating from the prophet Mohammad's emigration to Medina, which was followed some years later by a triumphant return to Mecca. The exiled poet Nader...