Exile Literature Research Articles

Manifestations of exile and diaspora in the poetry of Abdullah al-Baradouni

ABSTRACT This paper attempts to shed light on the contemporary issue of exile and diaspora and their manifestations in the poetry of Abdullah al-Baradouni, a modern Yemeni poet. Within the postcolonial hermeneutics and postmodernist theory, exile in the poetry of al-Baradouni becomes a signifier indicating not only being expelled outside one’s homeland but experiencing the feelings of isolation, exile, and diaspora caused by hard conditions, power struggle, ideological heterodoxy, and identity loss. Al-Baradouni’s dialectics of exile revolves on the concept that exile is a human condition beyond physical boundaries. Thus, exile is no longer treated as a singular event, it rather becomes a heterogeneous and multifaceted phenomenon. He succeeds in depicting the impactful consequences of exile and diaspora through the employment of bizarre, macabre, and surrealistic images and techniques. Hence, this piece of research adopts surrealism as a theoretical framework in illuminating and investigating al-Baradouni’s poetic texts under study. In his poetry, al-Baradouni becomes the voice of the voiceless and embodies a collective national consciousness as he engages himself in poetic enterprises that demand intrepidity, determination, articulateness, genius, vision, and prophecy. His contribution to the literature of exile and diaspora is significant.

Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile: Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story, by Joseph R. Farag.

Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile: Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story, by Joseph R. Farag.

Understanding Tibetan Exile: a review of literature and bibliometric analysis (1960-2021)

ABSTRACT This research aims to use VOSviewer to undertake bibliometric analysis to map the primary areas of Tibetan Exile literature to create a taxonomy of topic subareas and a research plan on this issue. Two hundred eighty-one papers published between 1960 and 2021, which were extracted from the Scopus database, have been examined to evaluate their interconnection, clusters, and citations to build a text-based map. The study highlights the most cited document, essential journals publishing on the issue, important keywords, prominent authors, and discussions on Tibetan refugees; also classifying the subthemes and the leading author’s name. The findings will guide researchers interested in contemporary Tibetan studies. This categorization table of subthemes explored in the last 61 years comprises the following subjects: identity & human rights, immigration, government, media, health, international politics, Dalai Lama, nationhood, preservation of culture, resettlement, and a new generation of Tibetans.

„Literatūros lankai“: dialogas su lenkų poetais

The article explores the translations of Polish literary publications in the Lithuanian Exile Literature Magazine Literaturos Lankai (Literary Folios, during the period 1952–1959). Like many of its contemporaries, Literaturos Lankai expanded the scope of foreign literature in its pages through translations. The staff of the magazine continued the Lithuanian tradition by presenting Polish poets related to Lithuania: Czesław Milosz (1911–2004) and Julian Tuwim (1894–1953). New readers were introduced to the poetry of the Polish exile Jerzy Pietrkewicz (Peterkiewicz) (1916–2007) whose writings so far have been almost not translated into Lithuanian. In exile, translator Juozas Kėkštas (1915–1981) played a pivotal role in disseminating of Milosz’s highlighting his multifaceted talents as a poet, prose writer, and literary critic. Milosz offers to break out of the feelings and impressions in Chalk Circle poetry, seeking a language that reflects epic consciousness and new forms of expression. The works of Polish authors published in Literatūros Lankai reflect the ‘pulse of the time’, revealing a disturbed lyrical subject and an ongoing quest for new artistic forms. The translations of Polish literature strengthened the literary and cultural connections between Lithuania and Poland.

Tracing Palestinian Literature: An Interview with Refqa Abu-Remaileh

In this interview, Dr. Refqa Abu-Remaileh discusses her new project, Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature. Country of Words combines literary history, a rich and expansive set of primary sources, and digital humanities tools to trace Palestinian literature’s development in the twentieth century. Abu-Remaileh resists the de facto use of the predominant nation state framework to categorize Palestinian literature, an approach, she asserts, that is inadequate for conveying continuities between periods and literary geographies. Instead, Country of Words demonstrates the possibility of methodologies for studying the creation and dissemination of national and exilic literature beyond set physical and temporal borders. Her project primarily uses periodicals published throughout the Arab world and across the North and South American mahjars to demarcate Palestinian literature’s development into seven separate, though sometimes concurrent, periods. Coupled with the use of digital humanities tools, her project offers readers the opportunity to not only interact with a comprehensive overview of Palestinian local and global works but also consider the overlapping networks and trajectories that characterize and continue to shape this literature. This interview discusses the project’s inception, accomplishments, challenges, and impact.

Meklējot piederību pēctrimdas laikā. Daži aspekti Indras Gubiņas un Gunara Janovska dzīvē un daiļradē

The present article aims to focus on a phenomenon that has received little attention in the context of not only the historical processes but also the Latvian literary process, literature as such, and creative personalities. The attention is centred on the period that was marked by substantial changes on both sides of the so-called Iron Curtain, which had created two separate closed spaces – that of Soviet Latvia and the various countries of residence of Latvian exiles. When Latvia regained its independent statehood, it changed the historical significance of the exile which included the idea of homecoming. For many years, living and working in a foreign country with their thoughts of lost Latvia, waiting for this significant event, the exiles were facing a choice – how and where to live, what was the justification of exile and life outside Latvia in the new situation. This new situation actualised the question of who were the Latvians outside Latvia in such circumstances, clearly understanding that they were no longer exiles. The metaphor of a gateway precisely expresses this feeling – should they remain standing at the gate (in exile) or enter the gate, that is, return to Latvia, the country that has changed, is undergoing change, and, in fact, is being recreated anew. The reality proved to be much more complicated, as nearly half a century had passed since the day when, at the end of WWII, such a great number of Latvians left their homeland. Based on archive studies, the article provides an insight into several aspects of life and creative activity of two exile writers – Indra Gubiņa (1927–2017) and Gunars Janovskis (1916–2000) – in the post-exile period, concentrating on the belonging, the feelings of being between Latvia and exile, and seeking the answers to the questions: what in their everyday life and creative activity was changed (if at all) by the closure of their exile, and if they managed to find in themselves the sense of belonging to the Latvian (cultural) space. The article not only uses the archive studies but also attempts to look for new opportunities for theoretical research; namely, it tries to carry over into the Latvian literature research the theoretical phenomenon of post-exile (Nachexil, Post-Exile) that has entered the German literary study (Bannach, Sarkowsky 2020), and provides a new potential in exile literature study, with the end of exile being the starting point, directly related to the restoration of Latvia’s independence.

«Очень по-русски, скажут французы... Очень по-французски, скажут русские»: метаморфозы романа «Тело» Е. Бакуниной во французской и русской литературной критике

The article is devoted to the reception of the novel “The Body” (1933) by emigré writer E.V. Bakunina in French and Russian literary criticism in the early 1930s. A number of researchers have already analyzed the responses of Russian critics to the publication of the novel but have not paid enough attention to a cross-sectional view of the perception of the writer’s work. This question is of interest insofar as it allows us to identify weaknesses and strengths of Bakunina’s work and rethink the literary and cultural norms established in the early 20th century. One of the article’s crucial questions is critics’ reaction to the verbalization of the female character’s body experience. In France, the literary context of the 1920s and 1930s, the presence of progressive journals, and some trends in the history of French literature contributed to the fleeting but genuine interest of critics in the novel. At the same time, the focus on preserving the best traditions of Russian literature in exile, the historical “memory of culture,” and the requirement to observe the artistic measure led to a sharp rejection of body discourse among emigré critics. The conclusion focuses on the stereotypical perception of the novel by French and Russian literary criticism, and emphasizes the importance of studying the creative heritage of “minor” authors. If French literary criticism often perceived Bakunina’s novel through the prism of the distinctive features of the “Slavic soul,” then Russian criticism judged the writer’s novel through an established grid of artistic criteria (measure, taste, femininity).

Someone Else's Home: Consciousness of Mother Tongue in Migration and Exile Literature

Identity, a multi-layered concept, is shaped according to the tools a person uses to define themselves. Mother tongue is one of the dominant elements within these tools. In times and places where the dominance of the mother tongue is lost due to reasons such as forced or voluntary migration, exile, captivity, occupation, the consciousness of the mother tongue operates in different ways. The bond an individual establishes with their mother tongue can manifest in behaviors such as acceptance, forgetting, denial, suppression, highlighting, sanctification, or belittlement, depending on these conditions. Depending on their consciousness of their mother tongue, the individual rejects their existing identity or chooses to create new identities while constructing a new identity according to these behavioral patterns in the abstract or concrete space where they do not feel they belong. Whatever the reason, the bond or disconnection established with language, an important element of identity and one of the tools of self-expression, is also reflected in literature. In this study, the reflections in literature of individuals who cannot speak their mother tongue for various reasons, the consciousness of the mother tongue in literary works, and the changing views on the approach to the mother tongue over the years will be discussed, examining the effect of social changes on the approach to the mother tongue.

A Life in Exile Literature: Linda Lê and the English-Language Literary World

Abstract: Linda Lê is distinctive for her intertextual engagement with global authors. Here, I examine her connections with exiled and nomadic English-language writers in her essay collections Tu écriras sur le bonheur (1999), Le complexe de Caliban (2005), and Par ailleurs (Exils) (2014). The dialogues within reveal two parallel authorial purposes: they substantiate the attitude Lê takes towards writing in exile and offer a roadmap to navigating her supplementary home in literature. I argue that Lê's reflections on English-language writers' biographies and her interpretations of their works thus had a defining effect on the construction of her life in exile literature.

Perpetual Exile: Legacies of a Disrupted Century

The transnational configuration of contemporary German literature cannot be detached from its historical continuum, since such a separation would render the archive of histories of exile in and out of Germany inconsistent and incomplete. Bringing literary histories of exile in a dialogue, in this instance, Exilliteratur, represented by prominent German authors, who, during the Second World War, immigrated to Southern California (Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Franz Werfel, among others), as well as Anna Seghers and Stefan Zweig, who went into exile in Mexico and Brazil, respectively, and the emerging literature of contemporary transnational or so-called hyphenated German (“Bindestrich-Deutsche”) writers would enable an inclusive paradigm that communicates across communities of research. To that end, I briefly review one novel each by Anna Seghers and Lion Feuchtwanger and essays by the Iranian-German poet SAID, which exemplify the two distinctive genres of exile literature: the long-established Exilliteratur and what I elsewhere described as transnational literature of writers mostly from the non-Western world, who in the latter part of the twentieth century began immigrating to the West. While I acknowledge the different circumstances and historical imperatives that have dictated the features of the two genres, I foreground the ethical implications and the cautionary tales the respective works of Exilliteratur authors and transnational writers share.

이주(移住)와 탈출(脫出) 사이: 이미륵의 망명문학

이주(移住)와 탈출(脫出) 사이: 이미륵의 망명문학

The Contribution of Andreas Mytze — Bookseller, Publisher and Publicist — To Exile Literature and Exile Studies in Great Britain

In July 2021 Andreas Mytze died in London, where he had lived since the mid nineteen-eighties. Based on his extensive archive as well as his published material this paper offers an assessment of his contribution to Exile Literature and Exile Studies in the various areas in which he was active. As a seller of second-hand books, he sourced exile literature, completed, circulated and published lists of this stock, much of it rare and difficult to obtain. As a publisher he redressed this deficiency by re-publishing rare or forgotten works of exiled authors and offering contemporary authors, particularly those living in Great Britain, an opportunity to place material which held little attraction for conventional publishing houses. Finally, at a time when Exile Studies was in its infancy, as editor of the journal europäische ideen, he used his skills as an investigative journalist to source and publish documents and correspondence which provided scholars in the field with valuable source material.

Embodying Identity: Exploring the Space and Place of the Émigré in Testimonies of Exile

Exile literature is saturated with the themes of rootlessness, loss of identity, and belonging. This article adopts an analytical perspective to explore Abena Busia’s poetry anthology Testimonies of Exile (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990) as a prototype of exile literature. To inquire into how the selected poems project the identity of émigrés in relation to place and space, stylistic analysis of the poems was employed. The findings highlight Busia’s construction of the émigré’s identity, ranging from that of an enlightened, sophisticated enthusiast to that of a stricken straddler. Busia reconstructs the spaces occupied by émigrés as vociferous, since these spaces ascribe ever-mutating identities to them. Experiences, or what Busia refers to as testimonies of exile, disrupt and alter the émigré’s identity. Drawing inferences from Edward Said’s conceptualisation of the disposition of the émigré, it is argued that the place and space of the immigrant is not only secondary and bordering on the peripherals of foreign culture, but also contemptible. The immigrant’s identity formation undergoes different stages. As his/her “arrival identity” confronts elements in the new environment, the immigrant comes to revise, adopt, and adapt what is considered an acceptable or model personality. The émigré either fully integrates into society or resists change and clings to his/her “old” self. Busia’s feminist didacticism, evidenced in her exploration of pertinent feminist issues in the context of larger immigrant concerns, is obvious in her collection. The article concludes by noting that the female émigré, especially, has to grapple with a “desecrated place” where any form of sacred insistence on self-acclamation is met with disdain. The exile experience then becomes a wound which might never heal, even as the immigrant’s identity is permanently altered.

Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro by Víctor Fuentes

Reviewed by: Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro by Víctor Fuentes Erick Dickey Fuentes, Víctor. Morir en Isla Vista. Novela del Destierro. Editorial Verbum, 2021. Pp. 240. ISBN 978-84-1337-727-8. Morir en Isla Vista is a non-traditional Spanish novel written by Víctor Fuentes that details the life of the Spanish exile living in the United States in the post-Spanish Civil War era. Unlike many Spanish exiles who fled Spain in the early months of 1939, Víctor Fuentes belongs to the generation of the “children of the civil war” who left Spain in 1954 and whose life as an exile would be embodied by numerous exiles that would take him from Spain to Venezuela, to New York and finally to Isla Vista, California as a Spanish professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. Adapting to life in exile proved to be difficult for Fuentes as the novel relates the many struggles that he faced integrating into his new adopted homeland particularly in the early years where he was forced to find menial jobs in order to survive financially. While the novel relates in diary form the many vicissitudes and personal troubles suffered by Fuentes throughout his life, such as his failed relationships, battles with depression and psychosis, and difficulties writing novels, the memory of Spain and the Spanish Civil War pervades the text. This becomes a recurring theme in exile literature, as the exile, who is separated and alienated from his home-land and longs to return to Spain, is forced to live off of memory. Therefore, the continual remembrance of Spain and his fellow exiles represents Fuentes’s endeavor to reconstruct new memory traces as their identity has been erased by the Franco dictatorship. This multifaceted novel veers from the traditional narrative structure of the post-war novel with Fuentes’s use of the Cervantine model of the found and transcribed manuscript in addition to the incorporation of multiple narrative voices that combine fiction with reality. It is also a work that reflects on one of the most important and recurring issues within the body of Spanish exile literature, namely the continual remembering of the mother country. The novel begins with the discovery of a corpse in the water, which is that of the author Víctor Fuentes. This initiates what one could call the appearance of the “split narrator” or “Yo-dividido” as Fuentes interjects himself as a character in his own novel recounting his life in exile as the narrative shifts between first- and second-person narrators. This symbolizes the metaphorical “death” of the exile as he is forced to reconstruct a new identity in exile, cut off and separated from his mother country, but still remains as the “other” in the adopted homeland. Upon Fuentes’s mysterious death, his narrative takes shape as a second narrator appears—the Transcriber—who reconstructs the life story of Fuentes’s exilic journey by recovering Fuentes’s discarded writings left in a box. As the Transcriber, he also takes the liberty of inserting, when he deems it appropriate, some critical commentary on Fuentes’s works and bears the responsibility of completing Fuentes’s unfinished text much like Cide Hamete Benengeli in the Quijote. The plurality of narrative voices is Fuentes’s way of creating a collective identity or memory for the exile community. More than an autobiography, this text could be seen as a co-biography given the many voices that appear in it. Fuentes’s narrative represents the memories of the Republican children of a collective suffering, which is illustrated by Fuentes’s usage of a Hispanic “Yo-nosotros” living in exile in the United States. Here Fuentes problematizes the question of the identity of the exiled. The allusion to the “I-we” dichotomy has now merged into what Fuentes believed to be the great deed of the collective subject. Fuentes is determined to rescue the memory of these individuals from what he terms “oblivion and the destructive [End Page 166] clutches of time.” He accomplishes this by enumerating a list of exiles who died and briefly describing their contributions in exile in the United States while also remembering...

НЕОТКРЫТЫЕ ТЕКСТЫ ЛИТЕРАТУРЫ ИЗГНАНИЯ: ТРАНСЛИНГВИЗМ И ВНУТРЕННИЙ ПЕРЕВОД НА МАТЕРИАЛЕ РОМАНА РОБЕРТА НОЙМАНА “CHILDREN OF VIENNA”

In the era of scholars’ growing interest in the phenomenon of translingual literature and recently emerged theory of inner translation, unfairly little attention is paid to the phenomenon of German exile literature, which is literature created by exiled authors in 1933–1945. This article analyses the novel “Children of Vienna” by R. Neumann, one of a few Austrian authors who fled fascist Germany. He managed to win recognition among critics and readers during his lifetime. The article evaluates the author’s internal translation from his mother German language into English. In conclusion the author of the article claims the value of Exilliteratur for diverse linguistic investigations.

The Lost Place of Childhood: Writer Indra Gubiņa’s Memories, Life and the Literary Geographical Aspect

Researching Latvian literature in exile is a relatively new phenomenon that emerged in Latvia at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s. As the writers’ archives became accessible, new opportunities for research opened up. In this article,1 I look into the historical situation in the context of World War II, marking out potential directions of my research and a theoretical basis. Using the archives of the Latvian writer in exile, Indra Gubiņa, I focus on the city of her childhood, Jelgava, as a lost place that acquired a symbolic significance in author’s memories, the course of her life and literary geography. The article explores the nuances of Gubiņa’s double belonging, her connection to the place of her childhood and the Latvian language. The methodology used in my research marks out the potential and prospective approach to the creative oeuvre of Gubiņa from the theoretical point of view of lost place, the topography of childhood and literary geography. This kind of research on the life and works of a single writer serves as a possibility to widen the field of investigation in studying literature, taking into consideration a broader spatial context, and working with the new tools of research.

Contributors

Contributors

Shifting Identity/ies in the Literature of Arab Immigration and Exile: Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Hikayat Zahra (The Story of Zahra) as a Case Study

In this age of mass migration, refugee crises, and global mobility, it could be argued that the experience of displacement, relocation, migration, and diaspora is no longer the exception but the rule. The tension between the centre and the periphery, the ‘homeland’ and the ‘host land’ raises, time and again, familiar issues of belonging, allegiance, affinity, estrangement and alienation. It is on this perspective- following various paths among which the postcolonial theory- that the aim of this paper is to try to shed light, and more precisely on the notion of “shifting identity/ies”/concepts of identity and difference based on Hanan Al-Shaykh’s Hikayat Zahra/The Story of Zahra .This paper hopes to answer the following question raised in the novel “Does the émigré become abnormal once he has departed his own land?” Keywords : migration-global- diaspora-postcolonial theory-identity-shifting-alienation DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/92-02 Publication date: October 31 st 2022

Joseph Conrad's Legacy in Postwar Polish Émigré Literature

Abstract Joseph Conrad, his life and oeuvre, had been of major influence in Polish literature almost from the very start of his literary career. This was due to the artistic innovativeness of the author of Heart of Darkness, his Polish origin and unique expatriate biography. It is therefore unsurprising, that Conrad would be of particular interest for writers and intellectuals who found themselves in exile after the Second World War. In that diverse community, he was the subject of critical literary discourse and a source of inspiration. And in such context distinct attention should be paid to Andrzej Bobkowski's stories written in Guatemala, as they often refer to the Conradian tradition. One of the stories in which the reader can easily locate motifs from Conrad's work is “Spotkanie” [An Encounter]. The text reveals the depth and breadth of the influence of the great predecessor on Bobkowski's work, e.g., in terms of the subject matter, the construction of characters, and the choice of narrative strategies. Yet as a detailed analysis of the story reveals, Conrad's model is recast here in a manner that addresses the issues prominent in the more recent exile literature, i.e., transformation of subjective identity and the opposition between the local community and the self-conscious outsider.

Literary Exile – Between Philosophy and Poetics

Abstract The article performs an analysis of the concept of exile as it was defined by major figures of Romanian literature. From the writing of a “faceless man” to a destroyer of time, the self-image of the exiled writer goes through a scenario of disorder, chaos and refinding of the origins.