Exile is the art of before and after, a negotiation with memory. Among displaced people, there are those who tend to their loss like a garden, nourish it, prune it, pledge allegiance to it, guard its borders against all manner of trespass, pick from its rank flowers to decorate the house, and inevitably force it into the hands of their children, for whom it becomes a burden, a bitter heirloom. Then there are those who turn their backs on loss forever, never speak of it, deny it even a sideward glance, banish it to deep memory, or beyond memory, until inevitably their children, impatient with this conspiracy of unsaid things, go digging for their inheritance.
I begrudge no one his individual strategies of survival—an obstinate nostalgia, or the amnesiac’s peace. It’s simple to understand how the failure to memorialize what was lost may feel like a betrayal of it. And yet, as Nietzsche implored us, sometimes one must have the strength to forget. (Exile and cunning, remember, make up only two pieces of Joyce’s tripartite vow: the third was silence.) So it’s a question of emphasis, with countless attitudes in between, variously healthy or neurotic. I’ve even encountered a few immigrants who seem to transcend that negotiation entirely—miracles of adjustment for whom the love of foreign things comes easily, who let go of the past with just the right dose of grateful sorrow, who neither repress nor fixate on pain, who by the sheer heat of their self-belief laugh at the local racist, and who, without forsaking old friends, keep their eyes on the road forward, on their new bonds and attachments. We should all be so lucky. Most of us aren’t like that. Most of us answer to imperfect, imbalanced minds, and it’s at the extremes that we recognize ourselves most clearly.
If maladjustment is so common, it’s because, as John Berger put it, to leave home under duress is “to dismantle the center of the world.” His metaphor was an ontological one. Home, he wrote, exists for us all at the intersection of two perpendicular lifelines—a vertical one “leading upwards to the sky and downwards to the underworld,” and a horizontal one representing “all the possible roads leading across the earth to other places.” At home, then, we are surest of our place between the past and the future (that is, our cultural bearings), and guaranteed a safe harbor of return at the end of our outward journeys. But the force of exile takes this structure apart. The vertical line breaks down, and the immigrant, disconnected from the gods above and the dead below, drifts across a lonely horizontal axis affixed to nothing, “a plain of pure distance, across which everything is swept.”
My father left Iran for England in December 1978. A few weeks later, the shah was overthrown, and a theocracy installed itself. The political upheaval was not in itself the cause of my father’s departure. He was neither a monarchist nor a revolutionary; he was an eighteen-year-old sick to death of the copper-red mountains in his provincial hometown, which promised to cut him off from the wider world. His yearning, then, was an ancient human yearning for experience and adventure. It just happened to coincide with a contingent and grand historical event that, in the following years, entrenched his separation from his country. His plans to return to Iran after his studies in London were undone first by Saddam Hussein’s invasion in 1980, and then, joyously, when he met my English mother and started a family. Forty-five years later, they are still together. Between necessity and choice, immigrants improvise their lives.
My father doesn’t call himself an exile. The term applies neither in the strict sense (he visits Iran when he can) nor in the metaphorical (he has succeeded, at least partially, in rebuilding the vertical line, alongside his wife and children). Anyway, exile is a grand word, a romantic honorific, and the risk of ridicule is high for those who claim it as Joyce did. That’s why even Joseph Brodsky—an authentic exile by any definition—began a 1988 lecture on the subject with an embarrassed disclaimer. The world’s refugees and exploited laborers, he said, “make it difficult to talk about the plight of the writer in exile with a straight face.”
Moreover, since Joyce’s time, society has transformed in such a way that renders his famous prescription for art-making less compelling, even for a writer. Back then, Joyce went abroad to protect his autonomy against the stifling parochial discipline of Irish public life. He craved expatriation to escape the “nets” of fatherland and church. But today, in Dublin or Paris or Zurich alike—all cities shaped by diffuse networks of transnational capital—an artist will find almost no public sphere to speak of, few lasting traditions to rebel against, and a level of autonomy that has, for many, degraded into loneliness, hyper-individualism, and the unyielding pressure to determine one’s identity in the jungle of the self. In that environment, a Joycean exile changes nothing. Estrangement is no longer a state of being one must leave home to find. As for the immigrants, delivering food on bikes and mopeds, their insecurity is both greater and more dangerous, because they have been made the guilty face of this broader fragmentation. They are what Bertolt Brecht called “harbingers of bad news”—feared and reviled by an immiserated public precisely because, in the immigrant condition, the locals see reflected the sort of alienation that is just around the corner, or already here, for themselves.
An entirely different style of cunning is required of us now, one which recognizes that true exile is intolerable. The challenge is not detachment but how to live in place, to commit to a particular landscape and history while resisting the paranoid appraisals of its friends and enemies. The task is enormous. How to find one’s feet in the traffic of all possible worlds? How to rebuild the point where the two lifelines meet?
Kasra Lang, a writer from London, is working on a book about a journey in Iran.