to collapse it into that of a colonizer. With little or no concern for people
there, the expatriate sees himself/herself as too self-sufficient to need further
communication or knowledge. Aside from immediate needs or scenes of dis-
traction, rapprochement does not exist. Speaking of these “unimportant
strangers,” Nabokov says, “These aborigines were to the mind’s eye as flat
and transparent as figures cut out of cellophane, and although we used their
gadgets, applauded their clowns, picked their roadside plums and apples,
no real communication, of the rich human sort so widespread in our own
midst, existed between us and them” (Ibid. 276). Nabokov was certainly self-
critical of this whole outlook, but his revelations could lead us into some dis-
tinction between expatriates and exiles. Especially when exiled intellectuals
fit in well within their adopted circumstances, like the ones made available
for Iraqi journalists and writers in Europe in the Xaddmm era (1970–2003),
there is a possibility of turning exile into luxurious life, unthought-of before,
and quite compromising to the inexperienced and the novice.
Although forced at times to recognize their limitations or insularity,
expatriates often indulge in complacency or dilettantism in respect to other
cultures. Regarding these “aborigines,” Nabokov adds, “It seemed at times
that we ignored them the way an arrogant or very stupid invader ignores a
formless and faceless mass of natives” (Ibid. 276). The reversals to this situa-
tion are no less surprising than the ones a colonizer meets. Using the analogy
of the invader and the native, the colonizer and the oppressed, Nabokov
argues reversals as follows: “occasionally, quite often in fact, the spectral
world through which we serenely paraded our sores and our arts would pro-
duce a kind of awful convulsion and show us who was the discarnate captive
and who the true lord” (Ibid.). Although expatriates also pass through
reminders whenever needing “some trashy ‘visa’, some diabolical ‘identity
card’ ” (Ibid.), this “utter physical dependence on this or that nation, which
had coldly granted us political refuge” (Ibid.), could rarely imprint itself into
writing without the painful sense of dislocation. Obviously, the Russian
communal feeling alleviated the pain and involved the group in expatriation
as a pleasurable, albeit an unsettling, experience.
Another note may differentiate further between Arabic poetics of exile and
the norms as set in Europe and North America in the first decades of the
twentieth century. Especially in matters of literary and cultural tradition and
belonging, Arabic poetics deviates from classical norms only to make a coun-
terassertion of belonging, even when this belonging entails a reconstruction
of facts. To comfort the nagging self, the Palestinian poet Ma.mnd Darwlsh
has to rely on his precursor’s experience, the ‘Abbmsid AbnTammmm: “If you
return by yourself, say to yourself: / Exile changed its profile.../ Wasn’t Abn
Tammmm so disturbed before you/ upon facing the self: / ‘you are not the
same/ nor are the abodes.’ ”^31 Tradition is readily available for the well-versed
to offer its succor and comfort despite the disheartening occasion of returning
home to see the remains of a past under Israeli occupation.
ENVISIONING EXILE