Roots of the Exile

     When you think of home what comes to mind? A home to me makes the person feel comfortable and loved. No boundaries to establish or to have to tear down. An exile will experience several feelings such as discomfort, disorientation and uncertainty within leaving their home land.

     In Letters of Transit, we get to hear 5 different voices with their own unique experiences as an exile.

     Places have a huge amount of nostalgia with the exile. The exile in this case does not want to even think of change. The exile wants to know that no matter how old or not so pretty something is, that it will remain the same way they remembered it.

     When we as the exile community start thinking about this concept, we realize several things. It is not the actual place that we are afraid of losing. We are just afraid of losing the moments we had in these places. Whether it is with our families, our friends or the food we ate or that perfect book we bought at the vintage store. We want that place to remain untouched by any commercial, greedy hands that are just looking to make a profit.

     In the United States, parks and stores are constantly being remodeled to either be made bigger and more commercial so that the state and the city make money off of it.

            

Aciman states this fact ,“The thing I liked most about the square was gone, the way so many other things are gone today from around Strauss Park.”(20) At times people long to get away and begin a brand new start somewhere new and somewhere you can have a fresh new beginning with new faces.

      Does being an exile really mean that you have to leave one literal place and emigrate to another? According to Hoffman, many have been ejected from their own homeland within their land. Let’s take for example the Jewish people of Israel. “The Jews have had the most prolonged historical experience of collective exile; but they survived their Diaspora----in the sense of preserving and maintaining their identity-----by nurturing a powerful idea of home.”(42)

     In recent years, it has come to pass that within Europe many are moving to other parts of the country and leaving their homeland. It can be for many reasons. Governmental authority and economic reasons can drive someone to leave their home. Exile is no longer considered a foreign term to the foreigner and definitely considered not such a difficult condition.

  

      

      The exile can go through so many different paths in this world and even within the different countries that they may travel. I completely agree with Hoffman when she says, “A culture does not exist independently of us but within us.”(52 ) This reminds me when someone has grown up in another city as myself, but having the Latin heritage I do. I feel the cultural change fluctuate whenever I am in a very American environment and also when I am with my Latin friends. The feelings of both cultures do meet and they meet within me.

      As a community you can migrate to another country and learn a new language. You can even like their culture, food and everything else that comes within being a citizen of the country that you inhabit.

     Your heritage and who you become will always be linked together. Your native self will always dominate and be that home away from home. The exile remembers his native land, but now has a second home that rescued them from their first.







Aciman, Andre;Hoffman,Eva;Mukherjee Bharti;Said Edward and Simic Charles. Letters of Transit-Reflections on Exhile, Identity, Language, and Loss. New York. The New York Press.1998.