The Heart of a Stranger Read online

  This anthology is dedicated to Sarah Maguire (1957–2017) poet, translator, friend to exiles

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ORIGINS AND MYTHS

  Naguib Mahfouz, The Return of Sinuhe

  The Torah, Exodus 23:9

  The Book of Psalms, Psalm 137

  Homer, from The Odyssey

  Sappho, Fragment 98B

  Xenophanes, Fragment 22

  Seneca the Younger, from Moral Letters to Lucilius

  Plutarch, from The Life of Cleomenes

  DARK AGES AND RENAISSANCES

  The Desert Fathers, Abba Longinus

  Abd al-Rahman I, The Palm Tree

  Du Fu, from Dreaming of Li Bai

  Bai Juyi, Song of the Lute

  Christopher of Mytilene, On the ex-emperor Michael Kalaphates

  Ibn Hamdis, Oh sea, you conceal my paradise

  Moses ibn Ezra, I am weary of roaming about the world

  Anna Komnene, from The Alexiad

  Attar, from The Conference of the Birds

  Dante, Cacciaguida’s Prophecy

  John Barbour, from The Bruce of Bannockburn

  Michael Marullus, De exilio suo

  EXPULSIONS, EXPLORATIONS AND MIGRATIONS

  William Shakespeare, from Coriolanus

  Andrias MacMarcuis, The Flight of the Earls

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie

  Olaudah Equiano, The Middle Passage

  Mirza Sheikh I’tesamuddin, from The Wonders of Vilayet

  Phillis Wheatley, A Farewell to America

  Francis Baily, The First Discoverer of Kentucky

  Mary Shelley, Voltaire

  Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus

  Robert W. Service, The Spell of the Yukon

  Sol Plaatje, from Native Life in South Africa

  Mary Antin, from They Who Knock at Our Gates

  A.C. Jacobs, Immigration

  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, A Colonial Affair!

  Sargon Boulus, Du Fu in Exile

  Jusuf Naoum, As a Dog

  Luci Tapahonso, In 1864

  Adnan al-Sayegh, Iraq

  Ribka Sibhatu, In Lampedusa

  DYNASTIES, MERCENARIES AND NATIONS

  Percy Sholto, An Irish Colonel

  Polish Legion in Haiti, Letters Home

  Madame de Staël, from Ten Years’ Exile

  Ugo Foscolo, To Zakynthos

  Giacomo Leopardi, On the Monument to Dante Being Erected in Florence

  Adam Mickiewicz, While my corpse is here, sitting among you

  Pierre Falcon, General Dickson’s Song

  George W. Cable, from Café des Exilés

  Romain Rolland, from Jean-Christophe in Paris

  Khushwant Singh, from Train to Pakistan

  Tin Moe, Meeting with the Buddha

  Michèle Lalonde, Speak White

  Mahmoud Darwish, from A State of Siege

  Abdellatif Laâbi, from Letter to My Friends Overseas

  Valdemar Kalinin, And a Romani Set Off

  Souéloum Diagho, Exile gnaws at me

  Ahmatjan Osman, Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile

  Kajal Ahmad, Birds

  Omnath Pokharel, from The Short-Lived Trek

  REVOLUTIONS, COUNTER-REVOLUTIONS AND PERSECUTIONS

  Victor Hugo, To Octave Lacroix

  Louise Michel, Voyage to Exile

  Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, Zola Leaves France

  Card No. 512210, Bisbee

  Emma Goldman, from Living My Life

  Teffi, The Gadarene Swine

  José Carlos Mariátegui, The Exile of Trotsky

  Leon Trotsky, Letter to the Workers of the USSR

  Victor Serge, from Mexican Notebooks

  Marina Tsvetayeva, Homesickness

  Anna Seghers, from Transit

  Cesare Pavese, Lo Steddazzu

  Yannis Ritsos, A Break in Routine

  Carlos Bulosan, American History

  Barbara Toporska, The Chronicle

  Silva Kaputikyan, Perhaps

  Alessandro Spina, The Fort at Régima

  Miguel Martinez, Spanish Anarchists in Exile in Algeria

  Martha Nasibú, from Memories of an Ethiopian Princess

  Elena Shvarts, Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep

  Elias Khoury, from My Name Is Adam

  Ashur Etwebi, A Dog Hides Its Tail in the Darkness of Night

  Mohsen Emadi, from The Poem

  COSMOPOLITANISM AND ROOTLESSNESS

  Gabriela Mistral, The Foreign Woman

  Nelly Sachs, I’m searching for my Right to Roots

  Luis Cernuda, Impression of Exile

  Fernando Sylvan, Invasion

  Gisèle Prassinos, Nobody Is Going Anywhere

  Roque Dalton, Spite

  Breyten Breytenbach, from Notes from the Middle World

  Mimi Khalvati, The Soul Travels on Horseback

  Michael Schmidt, The Freeze

  Aamer Hussein, from Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda

  Fred D’Aguiar, At the Grave of the Unknown African

  Farhad Pirbal, Waste

  Iman Mersal, The Idea of Houses

  Sholeh Wolpé, The World Grows Blackthorn Walls

  Kaveh Bassiri, 99 Names of Exile

  Fady Joudah, He came, the humanitarian man

  Jee Leong Koh, To a Young Poet

  Jenny Xie, Rootless

  Editor’s Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  ORIGINS AND MYTHS

  CIVILIZATION BEGETS EXILE; in fact, being banished from one’s home lies at the root of our earliest stories, whether human or divine. As the Abrahamic traditions tell us, if disobeying God was our original sin, then exile was our original punishment. In Genesis, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden after eating the forbidden fruit, their return forever barred by a flaming sword and a host of cherubim. Tragedy of course repeats itself when Cain murders his brother Abel and is exiled east of Eden. Genesis also tells us of the Tower of Babel, an edifice tall enough to reach heaven itself, a monument to human hubris whose destruction scattered its people across the earth and “confounded” our original language, thus making us unintelligible to one another for the first time since creation. The Tanakh, in fact, is rife with exile: Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness of the Desert of Paran, while the young Moses voluntarily heads into exile after murdering an Egyptian. Genesis and Exodus tell of the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt and their subsequent escape to Sinai, while the Book of Ezra records the end of the Babylonian captivity — the inspiration behind Psalm 137’s immortal lines, “by the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept / when we remembered Zion” — and the eventual return of the Jews to Israel.

  Nevertheless, our religious texts tell us that exile wasn’t a fate exclusive to lowly humans. In the Ramayana, the ancient Indian epic, Rama, the Supreme Being of Hinduism, is banished by his father, the Emperor Dasharatha, after falling victim to court intrigues and is ordered to spend fourteen years in exile in the forest of Dandaka, seeking enlightenment amidst demons and wandering holy men. Although Rama is recalled from his exile following his father’s death, he decides to remain in exile for the entire fourteen years. Similarly, in Greek mythology, Hephaestus, the son of Zeus and Hera, is thrown off Mount Olympus by Hera due to his deformities, only to be brought back to Olympus on the back of a mule by the treacherous god of wine, Dionysus. While exile was often a temporary situation for many gods, it was a more permanent state of affairs for their mortal creations.

  It was in Babel’s Mesopotamia, towards the end of the Third Dynasty of Ur,
that one of our earliest poetic epics, The Lament for Urim, first depicted the vicious cycle of conquest and expulsion that has largely characterized our history. In The Lament for Urim Ningal, the goddess of reeds, pleads before the great gods: “I have been exiled from the city, I can find no rest.” Bemoaning the destruction of her beloved Ur by the invading Elamites, Ningal cries out its name:

  O city, your name exists

  but you have been destroyed.

  O city, your wall rises high

  but your Land has perished.

  Employing the refrain “woe is me”, Ningal chronicles the annihilation of her world: “I am one whose cows have been scattered”, “My small birds and fowl have flown away”, “My young men mourn in a desert they do not know”. The Sumerian epic ends with a soft, sanguine prayer that Ningal’s city may one day be restored, unleashing one of our first literary archetypes: the hopeful exile. In fact, if The Lament for Urim is any indication, the very concept of recorded history — and literature — appears to spring out of the necessity of exile, preserving in our minds what had been bloodily erased on earth.

  The ancient Egyptian “Return of Sinuhe”, written during the Twelfth Dynasty, however, ends on a far happier note. Sinuhe, either a prince or a courtier, depending on the adaptation, flees his native country after an unspecified plot against the throne. Although Sinuhe finds power, wealth and respect in barbaric lands, he cannot quieten the loss that turns all his foreign-won sweetness to ash: “Desire disturbed me, and longing beckoned my heart. There appeared before my eyes scenes of the Nile and the luxuriant greenery and heavenly blue sky and the mighty pyramids and the lofty obelisks, and I feared that death would overtake me while I was in a land other than Egypt.” Fortunately for Sinuhe, his earnest patriotism wins the pharaoh’s mercy when he returns to Egypt as an old man and he is welcomed back into the fold, able to die in his unforgettable homeland. This uncharacteristically happy conclusion to an exile’s suffering shares some similarities with Luke’s “Parable of the Prodigal Son”, where the spendthrift younger son returns home to his father’s undying love — and to the biblical tale of Joseph, who is sold into slavery by his envious brothers, but who then rises to unimaginable heights in Egypt, triggering a series of events that would lead to Moses and the Exodus to the Promised Land, the founding myth of the Israelites. As was written in Exodus 23:9, “thou shalt not oppress a stranger: for ye know the heart of a stranger, seeing ye were strangers in the land of Egypt”.

  While exile has accompanied our every step, and our earliest stories and religious myths are studded with tales of woe and banishment, much has been lost precisely because of exile’s oblivion-inducing force. The Greek poet Sappho (c.630–c.570 BC) is perhaps our most famous example. While we know she lived on the island of Lesbos, we do not know what caused her to be exiled to Sicily in her earlier life, and only the tiniest fragments of her reputedly voluminous works have survived. Although exile originally appears to have been the outcome of divine retribution, war or intrigue, it wasn’t long before humans began to play god with the concept themselves. Greek literature shows us that exile was the most common form of retribution for murder, and exile therefore shapes the stories of many of Greece’s most famous mythical heroes, like Peleus, Perseus, Bellerophon and Patroclus, all of whom were killers cast out of society until such time as they could be readmitted. As society grew more complex, however, exile came to be seen as far more useful than simply a punishment for murder. Aristotle’s (384–322 BC) Athenian Constitution introduces us to the law of ostracism, whereby the names of powerful men suspected of abusing their political offices were submitted to a public vote. Assembling in the agora, citizens would scratch the name of the intended exile onto shards of broken pottery and the shards would be tallied up. The man with the most pot-shards was subsequently banished. The chosen exile could be sent away permanently or for a period of ten years, at which point they would be welcomed home and their rights duly restored. This practice proved popular enough to spread to the Greek colonies of southern Italy in Magna Graecia. In his Bibliotheca historica, Diodorus Siculus (90–30 BC) mentions the practice of petalism — from the Greek word for leaf — whereby the citizens of Syracuse wrote the names of the intended exiles on the leaves of olive trees instead of pot-shards.

  Regardless of the voting method, this was the way democracy’s enemies were dealt with: if a man grew rich enough to make tyranny inevitable, he was simply banished. Aside from recognizing wealth’s inherent tendency to subvert the public interest, the particular wisdom of this law lay in its focus on exiling powerful individuals rather than their poorer, more numerous partisans, who were often allowed to remain in the city even when their leaders were not. Exile thus not only offered an attractive alternative to execution; it simultaneously hindered the widening of existing social rifts. Themistocles (c.524–459 BC) was perhaps the most famous of these ostracized exiles. After building the Athenian fleet into a major force and fighting the Persians at Marathon, Artemisium and Salamis, Themistocles was implicated in a plot involving the Spartan tyrant Pausanias — most accounts claim unfairly so — and he was subsequently forced to end his days serving the very Persians he had once warred against.

  Almost needless to say, however, war never lagged far behind human law-making as the chief wellspring of exile. A fragment by Xenophanes of Colophon (c.570–c.475 BC) provides a clear picture of how the dispersion caused by the Greco–Persian Wars fundamentally reshaped Greek society:

  When a stranger appears in wintertime,

  these are the questions you must ask,

  as you lie reclined on soft couches,

  eating nuts, drinking wine by the fire:

  “What’s your name?”, “Where do you come from?”,

  “How old were you when the Persians invaded?”

  Orators, dissidents and artists could be banished just as easily as politicians in ancient Greece, and while many of them were able to secure shelter in faraway cities for some time, exile was never a solid guarantee of safety. Determined to extend his mastery over Greece following his victory in the Lamian War, the Macedonian general Antipater hired a number of “exile-hunters” to capture anyone who had once defamed or opposed his power. For these exiles, no island was distant enough, no temple imperviously sacred. One of Antipater’s most infamous hunters was Archias of Thurii, an actor-turned-mercenary whose scalps included some of Greece’s brightest lights, including Hypereides, Himeraeus and Demosthenes — who committed suicide by chewing on a poisonous reed after Archias finally tracked him down.

  While Greek ostracism was engineered to protect a city’s democracy, it was a dictator who first codified exile into Roman law. In 80 BC, Sulla’s Leges Corneliae constitutionalized an already established practice: rather than execute convicted criminals, problematic tribunes or ambitious generals, it was deemed easier to expropriate them, thereby enriching the state’s coffers, and to banish them from the city. Indeed, Polybius tells us that a Roman citizen accused of a crime could voluntarily go into exile in order to avoid being sentenced. Although banished from the capital, such a citizen could travel to certain civitates foederatae — allied cities of Rome — where they could enjoy safety and tranquillity, Neapolis (Naples) being a notable example. As Gordon P. Kelly points out in A History of Exile in the Roman Republic (CUP, 2006), refracted through the prism of Roman law, exilium could describe a variety of situations: “traditional voluntary exile, flight from proscription, magisterial relegatio, retirement from Rome for personal reasons, extended military service, and even emigration or travel”. Furthermore, in order to avoid an exile’s premature return, the policy of aquae et ignis interdictio — exclusion from the communal use of fire and water — created a buffer zone between Rome and the exile’s new “home”, making it illegal for anyone to offer said exile a welcome hearth or refreshment within its bounds.

  Strictly speaking, however, softer shades of banishment tended to prove the most popular, given that exilium techni
cally meant that a Roman could be stripped of both his wealth and citizenship, while the lesser relegatio ensured said citizen never lost his rights or property. Many of the more famous Roman exiles belonged to the second category. Ovid (43 BC–AD 18), banished to the Black Sea by Augustus, spent much of his time weeping, sighing and penning servile poems which he hoped would restore his good fortunes in the capital, often interrupting his lyricism in mid-flow to remind his readers that he was merely a relegatus. As for Cicero (106–43 BC), his letters clearly indicate he spent the majority of his eighteen-month exile hopping between luxurious villas, cursing the heavens for his undeserved misfortunes. As such, it is to the Stoic Seneca the Younger (54 BC–AD c.39) that we must turn for a pragmatic outlook on Roman exile: “I classify as ‘indifferent’ — that is, neither good nor evil — sickness, pain, poverty, exile, death. None of these things are intrinsically glorious; but nothing can be glorious apart from them. For it is not poverty that we praise, it is the man whom poverty cannot humble or bend. Nor is it exile that we praise, it is the man who withdraws into exile in the spirit in which he would have sent another into exile.”

  Such a sober perspective might have helped Gaius Marius (157–86 BC) make sense of his ironic fate, when, after being hounded across Italy by Sulla’s wrath, he was turned away by the Roman garrison at Carthage, the very city he had once helped Rome to conquer. Marius would have undoubtedly identified with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (Act III, Scene 3):

  Let them pronounce the steep Tarpeian death,

  Vagabond exile, flaying, pent to linger

  But with a grain a day, I would not buy

  Their mercy at the price of one fair word.

  Once the Republic perished, Rome’s emperors began to favour the practice of deportatio insulae, or deportation to an island. Tiberius, Caligula and Domitian, among others, exiled quite a few of their family members and enemies — not that the two categories were mutually exclusive, especially in Roman society — to the Pontine islands in the Tyrrhenian Sea. This exilic tradition in the Tyrrhenian would last for thousands of years — until the end of Benito Mussolini’s rule in 1943 — and in its final moments the Pontines housed such prisoners as the novelist Cesare Pavese (1908–50) and the politician Altiero Spinelli (1907–86), who wrote his famous pro-European Manifesto while confined to the island of Ventotene.