methodologies. Its aporetic^34 nature within a war atmosphere is imbued with
ennui and discontent, and its rebellious spirit is tempered by distrust of any
political or social agenda. Indeed, there is a great deal of that creative drive,
which unsettles platitudes, pragmatic assumptions, and goals, that situates
the expatriate’s experience in writing at the liminal stage for postmodernism.
This liminality is an exit that opens into another space that distinguishes
expatriation. What separates this from exile as a state is its noncommittal
stamp.
Thresholds of exilic inertiaWhile accepting this expatriate achievement as a Post-Romantic flowering of
the estranged artist as rebel against suffocating circumstances, critics on the
side of theory are rather opposed to that confusion of willful drives and
aesthetic concerns with the harrowing experience of exile. It is the postmod-
ernist depiction of all these as manifestations of an overwhelming global
phenomenon that bothers theorists, who, like Aijaz A.mad, look with
suspicion on the tendency to collapse issues and positions whenever exile is
addressed. Emphasis, according to the latter, is laid “on the productivity,
rather than the pain, of dislocating oneself from one’s original community”
along with some equal adherence to “the idea [...]of multiple belongings”
(Ibid. 134) that, for example, shows forth in Rushdie’s Shame. Exilic writing
is never free from pain, anxiety, and longing. Its pain manifests itself in the
very rigidity of its discourse, its autobiographical reclamation, and its argu-
mentative tone. At times, it proclaims its presence in longing for, and recol-
lection of, a past that is transfigured into the present and the future. In terms
of tradition, language and lore coalesce into indispensable recollections that
invade the mind, and decide, for poetry, the flow of rhythm. In “Yakhtmrunl
al-’iqm‘” (The Rhythm Chooses Me), Darwlsh says: “The rhythm chooses me,
chokes me / I am the echo of the violin, not the player / In the presence of
memory / I am the echo of things, they speak through me / and I am the
utterance.”^35 Indeed, can exile be without a reconstruction of the past? Can it
be without claims of a taken-for-granted homecoming, which we also recog-
nize as impossible? Pain is there in the very threshold of exilic inertia. Ovid’s
experience is always a reminder of the complications of this issue, so is the
experience of every intellectual deeply rooted in his/her own culture. Memory
and longing take the person, like Ovid, back, “Not just back to Rome / but
to a particular street, a particular house, a room, / a space on the shelf beside
your brothers’ spaces” (Slavitt 6).
Issues of vagrancy and exile in Western culture find in Raymond Williams’s
distinction a valid beginning to challenge later views of extraterritorialism and
hybridity. According to Williams, “there is usually a principle in exile, there
is always only relaxation in vagrancy” (quoted in Ahmad 157). Other writers
hold similar views, for expatriation does not involve forced eviction, nor does
ENVISIONING EXILE