Breytenbach’s one-sided paradigm for all its breathtaking import, requires nevertheless
that we examine the experience of exile and how it is intruded upon by the space of
home. For whether as a form of political banishment or the logical consequence of
economic crunches, Olu Oguibe (2004:22) reminds us that:
What gives exile its peculiar poignancy ... is not so much the essential act of departure, as the
nature and condition of that departure. The sojourn of exile is particularly tragic because it is
inevitably, inescapably bracketed by the fact of loss, not of things willingly forsaken but of
things forcibly left behind, things from which there is no healing even to the grave. Even in
the bravest and most optimistic of circumstances, exile is also marked from the beginning by
the fact that the exile leaves or flees certain only that they may never return.Even the very knowledge of the uncertainty of return keeps the thought of home in mind
and accounts for the impossibility of escaping the implication of nostalgia in the
discussion of exile. Or if exile is expressed to be some kind of independence from home,
an externalization of freedom which is construed to mean a condition that is an end in
itself because the thought of home is a foregone issue, the fugacious duration of such
mindset emerges when physical separation from home turns out not to mean exactly the
same thing as psychological independence of the mind from the thoughts of home (Janet
Perez 1992:34). As a foregone conclusion in some circumstances from generation to
generation, the depression that the thought of home engenders is illustrated in Suleiman’s
(1996:5) reflections:
Those who leave home with no thought of return and succeed, well or badly, in settling
elsewhere, occasionally cast backward glances at what they left behind. Interestingly, so do
their children, who may never have seen the left-behind place at all, except through the
words or the silences of their parents.To put the discussion on the relationship between exile and home at rest in the meantime,
Said (1994:44) deserves a last say: “Because the exile sees things both in terms of what
has been left behind and what is actual here and now, there is a double perspective that
never sees things in isolation. Every scene or situation in the new country necessarily
draws on its counterpart in the old country.”