Talk of the Nation Response
If the French etymology of the word exile lead us to think about banished peoples, the greek etymology of the word nostalgia motivates the pain of being separated from one’s home and the ache of return. As Jennifer Ludden describes in her introduction to the NPR Talk of the Nation episode from November 15th 2010, the pain motivated by banishment, and the ache to write oneself into the limbic space between here and there is itself a source of creativity for many writers. A means of staying ‘connected to a life which seems increasingly distant’. For the writer Azar Nafisi, who argues that literature is often the best answer to the feelings of loss and absence felt by exiles, it is the distancing from home which causes the writer to lose a reality and only grasp at its essence. In writing about home, Nafisi is tracing an echo of a past life, a still active physical location, but no longer available to her, only for others. A restlessness which propels her writing forward through the pain of loss and absence. And in the search to fill the vacuum of loss, her writing seeks to fill that space with a presence created by her writing. If she exists in exile in a limbic space neither here nor there, it is her writing which seeks to act as a bridge between the two, allowing her to pass between past and present.
In doing this, she affords herself the opportunity to see both here and there, then and now with the fresh perspective of an outsider looking in. A visitor in both her adoptive land but also a stranger in her own home, and motivates a conversation between them in the third space in between. It’s the ache of no longer feeling ‘at home in your own home’ through which her writing seeks to provide relief. But it’s a relief which is at best only temporary, with the past being rewritten as swiftly as the present is being created. One can only put down provisional stakes in the shifting ground and mark the passing of time between the cultures of here and there. In Nafisi’s writing, this is a fertile space of absence, into which she is able to populate the both aspects of ‘not home’ with the creation of work which is both ‘new home’ and ‘both homes’. She as the writer is the bridging mechanism between the two destinations, and creates a third place over the limbic space. But in this absence comes a new way of seeing. She’s able to see the adoptive home through the lens of a visitor, an outsider, and the original home through the lens of those who have left but remain invested observers. Those who have put a stake in the ground between two homes, but still have a stake in where they’ve come from and a growing stake in where they are.
Similarly, for the writer Chenjerai Hove, the emotional distance motivated in exile of not knowing when you might go back, propels a different writing from those who know with more certainty when they will return. That it is the ambiguity and unknown of exile which itself motivates a different form of writing. Heightening the loss and pain of the absence created by one’s exile, and experiencing place through an element of longing. A longing which aches for the nostalgia of the past, but also the pain brought about by the unfamiliarity of the new. But as the time and space increase between the writer and their origin, one increasingly feels a sense of growing apart from where one is from, operating in the space between ‘where I’m from’ and ‘where I call home’, something German philosopher Adorno describes as the highest form of morality.
For Nafisi, this sense of carrying one’s past with them is something she finds uniquely American. That a country built upon immigration still holds to definitions of self based on inter-generational origin. And it is literature which acts as a vehicle through which these disparate worlds might talk to each other. It’s what writer Edwidge Danticat refers to as ‘the mixed gaze’. In his case looking at American culture through Haitian eyes as much as observing Haiti through the American experience. Inside of that gaze, Hove describes being able to feel the grain of his home country, the coarseness or softness of place. He feels the rough edges as much as the polished elements of one’s culture. And in their writing, treating it more as a journey of exploration between coarse and smooth, but with an outsider’s distanced perspective. Of being of there but over here. Of being able to see and feel the coarseness of a culture impossible from the inside. For Hove it is ultimately a search for self, modeled out of the limbic clay of exile.
As an immigrant, I have spent the past twenty years in the space between here and there. In that time I’ve often embraced America and rejected many elements of British, or more specifically English culture. In that time I’ve seen the English vote for Brexit and the growing division of populist politics take hold in abhorrent ways. I’ve also seen similar seismic changes in American culture too of course. Whenever I visit ‘there’, now with a young family of my own, I feel an acute sense of Hove’s being neither here nor there. It’s like visiting a ghost. It all looks the same, but I’m different. I no longer ache for the people and places of my youth, but I do feel the pain of the places I used to live as a student. I long to visit my tiny old attic studio apartment in London, or the even smaller place I rented when lived in Holland. These are the places which hang from me like barnacles of memory. Unable to be chipped off and cemented on with permanent attachment, they haunt me with the longing to go back, but only to visit. I do not want my time in those places over again. But I do feel the richness of the absence all three writers describe in the episode. And how in the absence of today’s ubiquitous photographic documentation, I am only able to broach the gap with my own memories, which bounce around in time and space. I wish I had taken more photographs.
There’s also an aspect of regret which comes with the immigrant experience. The sense of leaving something behind as much as a desire to make the most of one’s adoptive new country. It’s a regret which propels the seizing of opportunity and making every day count as much as it is a distanced look back and the ache of not making more of one’s time in the past. The nostalgia for old friends as much as the realization that the last time you saw them might be the last time you ever see them. It’s like the character Andy Bernard says at the conclusion of the show The Office. “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days, before you’ve actually left them.”
In this ache comes the pain of nostalgia but also the self-imposed banishment of exile which provides fertile ground for writing. Like Hove and Danticat, I have often written to seek the sense-making of my own mixed gaze. I write with increasingly American perspective but often about British things. The distance of immigration lends itself to bolder positions. It helps me find larger rocks to throw. And when I throw them, there is a safety in that outsider’s distance. I’ve often written critically of Empire and Brexit, and their consequences for a country I no longer call home but still feel slipping away. And as I often tell others, I don’t miss the country itself, but I miss my friends with a daily intensity only partially medicated by modern communication. I ache for the times we had together, but then I realize that the times ahead are exponentially more exciting, and can of course, also include them.
