Forced migration is a bitter muse, but a very powerful one. The experience of exile has played a major role in literary history for millennia, paving the way for writers like Hannah Arendt and Edward Said to explore its many facets. These are just a few examples of the millions of writers who have contributed to exilic literature. The heartbreaking memoirs of those forced to leave their homes have influenced theories around language, identity and memory. Should exiles write exclusively in their native language, or in their adopted language, or rather in the dominant lingua franca? How can writers translate embodied experience? And where does literature produced in exile belong?
Twentieth-century European literature was marked by the era of exile writing, by writers fleeing Nazi rule, by exiled writers fleeing Soviet rule to make an impact on the world, and by the writings of stateless refugees who continue to fight for freedom and sovereignty.
Because not everyone has the luxury of mourning their homeland. At least 10 million people are currently stateless, and more than 108 million are forcibly displaced, according to the UNHCR. The reasons for statelessness are varied, but international law is structured around nation-states, not universal human rights. Stateless people face particular challenges when it comes to accessing healthcare, education, employment and freedom of movement. And that’s just a small sample.
A simple definition of statelessness refers to people without a nationality, but the status goes beyond mere legal documentation or recognition. Diasporas such as Palestinians, Kurds, Roma and Rohingya are considered to belong to a nation without a state, and many of them have long accepted a stateless status in their work, even though some hold citizenship of other countries.
Writers who emigrate to another country find themselves in a kind of exile, always out of place, constantly reminded of the homeland they left or never had the chance to visit.
Writers in exile resist with pens filled with the ink of nostalgia, encompassing genres from fiction to biography to prose: poets, scholars and artists carve out a path for memory and claim history that will influence the future.
Now that the importance and potential of this form of literature has been made clear, let us address some pointed questions: How much influence, platform and space do writers have today, with readership plummeting and being replaced by more superficial media? Is their job always to represent their people and their cause? Can exiles write about anything other than exile? Well, I suppose they can, but can they get published? Do we value and appreciate unconventional work?
Today’s guest talks about disappearances, alternative stories, and who he writes for.
Behruz Boochani Award-winning Kurdish author, journalist, cultural advocate and filmmaker. His memoirs I have no friends but the mountains (Pan Macmillan 2018, translated by Omid Tofigian) was written during his seven years incarcerated by the Australian government in Manus Island Prison in Papua New Guinea, and was composed and sent over the years as a single message in Persian to the media. He is the co-director of the documentary. Chauka, tell me the time (Director: Arash Kamali Sarvestani) and the author of the book Freedom, just freedom (Bloomsbury 2022). Boochani currently lives in New Zealand.
Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist based in New York. She was born and raised in Taybeh, near Jaffa. She works for Al-Arabiya al-Jadeed newspaper as a senior correspondent covering New York and the United Nations. She has published two novels in Arabic. Her second novel is “Book of Disappearance” has been translated into English, Italian and German. Her first collection of short stories is scheduled to be published in the summer of 2024. Azem holds an MA in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies with minors in German and English Literature from the University of Freiburg, as well as an MA in Social Work from New York University.
Bilgin Ayata He is professor of South-East European Studies at the University of Graz (Austria) and leads the project. Elastic Borders: Rethinking Borders for the 21st CenturyShe holds an MA in Political Science from York University, Canada, and a PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Free University of Berlin (Germany). She has published extensively on displacement, border regimes, citizenship transnationalism, affective politics, memory and violence. Her regional expertise includes Europe and the MENA region, and her research focuses on migration, borders, citizenship and postcolonial studies.
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Standard Time Podcast S1E26 – Voices from Exile: Identity and Literature
team
Rekha Kinga Pappu, Editor-in-Chief
Merve Akiel, Art Director
Sylvia Pintel, producer
Digital Producer, Zofia Gabriela Papp
Salma Shakya, writer and editor
Priyanka Hutchenreiter, Project Assistant
management
Hermann Riesner, Managing Director
Judit Csikós, Project Manager
Csilla Nagyné Kardos, Office Management
OKTO Crew
Senad Helgic, producer
Leah Hochdlinger, video recording
Marlena Stolze, video recording
Clemens Schmiedbauer, video recording
Recorded by Richard Brusek
Post-production
Milan Gorović, Editor of Dialogue
Nora Ruszkhai, Video Editor
Istvan Nagy, post-production
art
Victor Maria Lima, Animation
Cornelia Frishauf, theme music
Captions and subtitles
Julia Sobota Closed captioning, Polish and French subtitles, language version management
Farah Ayyash Arabic subtitles
Hosted by
ERSTE FoundationVienna
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