As said earlier, exile is intricately linked to other terms. I shall, therefore, explore these
other related terms beginning with migration. According to Shailja Sharma (2001:596),
“ migration refers not only to the displacements of people in history but to a state of
displacement that befalls humankind in general.” In the same vein, King et al shed more
light on the dynamics of migration in contemporary times when they explore its
complexities, contradictions and propensity towards defying any straight jacket, over-
determined apprehension especially of the binarism of home and exile, or here and there.
Therefore, migration is
Not a mere interval between fixed points of departure and arrival, but a mode of being in the
world– “migrancy”...The migrant voice tells us what it is like to feel a stranger and yet at
home, to live simultaneously inside and outside one’s immediate situation, to be permanently
on the run, to think of returning but to realize at the same time the impossibility of doing so,
since the past is not only another country but also another time, out of the present. It tells us
what it is like to traverse borders like the Rio Grande, or “Fortress Europe,” and by doing so
suddenly become an illegal person, an “other.” (cited in Carine Mardorossian 2002:16)Yet the tendency to subsume migration under a planetary categorization smacks of an
absolutism which cannot go unchallenged. First, it must be conceded that migrancy, an
increasingly favoured term, has become an index by which humanity is levelled.
Nevertheless, as Sharma (2001:597) contends in response to Rushdie’s assertion that “we
all cross frontiers; and in that sense, we are all migrant people”, it is still very crucial
especially within the postcolonial context to recognize the verity of the understanding
that “while that may be true on some abstract level, still we all cross them differently, and
thus we are not all migrants in the same way. That the experiences of migration differ...
is one of the crucial distinctions to be made in any discussion of the subject.” Drawing
such distinctions is, moreover, necessary because the status of the postcolonial world as a
an unwilling participant in the Western project of migrancy which was prosecuted
through the idea of modernity and the subsequent crisis that it bred, already demands that
the postcolonial migrant is not a migrant the same way a migrant from the West is.