The issues of language, identity, and moods of depression are interrelated
and intertwined. The sense of loss, so characteristic of exilic writing, and the
impossibility of survival in uncongenial cultures lead to a state of depression
and suicide. Since ancient times, the record of suicides has been increasing.
Ovid noted then, “Suicide’s drastic cure for all of my ills / began to look more
and more attractive” (Slavitt 14). Intellectuals like Walter Benjamin, Stevan
Zweig, and Arthur Koestler, among many, took their lives also in reaction
against a calamity that had been overtaking the human scene. Following Jean
Amçry, J. M. Ritchie finds both suicide and language dislocation as “domi-
nant” themes of exile.^66 For moods of depression and despair accumulate
when the loss of homeland involves a loss of communication and cultural
roots. Certainly, memory has its defensive strategies whereby a reconciliatory
cusp could be maintained to offer a portion of one’s own in the language of
the host culture. Such are Thomas Mann’s writings, and the exile output of
Erich Maria Remarque, Joseph Conrad, Milan Kundera, and Jerzy Kosinski.
Quite often poetry resists morbidity and suicide. It is mostly through
recognition of the dilemma of recollection where no recompense or replace-
ment is at hand that the poet invents his or her ways to thwart depression.
Memory reproduces itself in dreams, hallucinations, and absentmindedness.
It creeps back to birthplaces and redraws them regardless of physical changes.
In Bachelard’s view, memory finds its starting and most pleasant point
there.^67 Nevertheless, brought back and recalled in dreams, those places are
also the mind’s defenses against the actual annihilation of trace and sign.
Unless these are inscribed onto the page, memory never tires of return.
Inscription offers a textual release, an antidote to nagging memories. For the
exile homecoming, rather than an actual event, is more or less an act of mem-
ory. If there is a distinction between the wanderers of poetry and narrative and
the fate of exiles, it has something to do with return. To Homer, Ulysses
should return, but to Ovid, this was beyond reach: “Homer understood from
the start / that beyond all the adventures, Ithaca waited; / my fate is not so
clear, nor is there any convention / forcing my author toward a happy ending”
(Slavitt 16). This is the dislocation which Sa‘dlYnsuf recognizes, and due to
it a poetics of anxiety grows, “neither heaven is a priori, nor predecessors,
homes, memories or playgrounds” (i: 9–10). Exile sets trajectories and their
negations, too, between tradition and modernity.
Poetic reinscriptionHence, to certain intellectuals, memory reconstructs the past as a permanent
way of forestalling or accommodating calamity and change, including the
probability of no return. In ‘Azlz al-Sayyid Jmsim’s “Monologues of the
Seventies,” recollection materializes in a monologue that brings back the past
to make an opening in a present that witnesses perpetual annihilation. It is
the speaker who addresses himself, as if exposing that past and preparing for
ENVISIONING EXILE