Summary
In Anna Bernard’s reading of Said and Barghouti, a term with irreconcilable double meanings — collective, unchosen displacement and dispossession, and a figurative, chosen stance of critical non-belonging — which the two writers hold in counterpoint rather than resolving (Rhetorics of Belonging, PDF p.56-58, p.67-68, p.77).
Details
- Said’s After the Last Sky gives the epigraph to Bernard’s Chapter 2: “all residence is exile.” (quoted PDF p.50).
- Said’s ‘Reflections on Exile’ (1984) distinguishes the exile of Joyce and Nabokov from ‘the uncountable masses for whom UN agencies have been created’ (2002c, 175, quoted PDF p.57-58), and its much-quoted ‘contrapuntal’ plurality of vision (2002c, 186) is qualified at the essay’s end: exile is never ‘satisfied, placid, or secure’ and is, in Wallace Stevens’s words, ‘a mind of winter’ (2002c, 186, quoted PDF p.58).
- Critics Bernard cites charge Said’s notion of exile with a ‘nonpopular tinge’ (Cocks, 2002, 154, quoted PDF p.57) and with resembling ‘spiritual self-help’ (Collini, 2006, 432); Bernard answers that such statements are distorted when quoted out of context, as Said’s own reading of Adorno’s ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home’ (2005, 39, quoted PDF p.57) shows.
- In Out of Place, the title’s meanings multiply: embracing non-belonging, belonging to a self-excluding elite, and being a victim of colonial rule and its legacies (PDF p.58). Said’s metaphorical exile — the responsibility ‘to imagine and investigate in spite of barriers, and always to move away from the centralizing authorities towards the margins’ (1994b, 63, quoted PDF p.68) — is the counterpoint and inversion of his literal exile, not its vehicle or a necessary condition for it; it is an ongoing taking of sides (PDF p.67-68).
- Said claims in The Question of Palestine, as Bernard presents it, that exile is the ‘fundamental condition of Palestinian life’ (1992, xxxi, quoted PDF p.77); his foreword to Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah has the returnee ‘uprooted forever’, the return re-enacting exile rather than repatriation (ISR, xi, quoted PDF p.77). Barghouti’s memoir, in Bernard’s reading, moves away from that emphasis, narrating Palestinians in occupied Ramallah alongside the diaspora and refusing to define the collective by shared exilic identity (PDF p.77-78).
Related pages
Rhetorics of Belonging, Edward Said, Mourid Barghouti, Bildungsroman, Affiliation, Demographic imaginary