Beyond Hope and Nostalgia

Which home is mine?
Where do I live?
My home is writing
Cristina Peri Rossi, “My Home is Writing”

When my children were small, they always asked me to tell them a story to delay naptime as much as possible. They also wanted made-up characters and adventures. Most of my stories were about animals trying to find their way back home. None of the characters had individual names. They were “bee” or “fish” or “bear.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but looking back on it, I believe those animals were a version of me: the “me” that struggled with ideas of home, belonging, and family, looking for ways to adjust to life in an adoptive country. But also, the “me” whose name kept being mispronounced and substituted for something “easier” on the tongue. It has taken many years for me to process—and eventually accept—that I will never return to my homeland. In this sense, exile for me is a lived experience that has influenced my sense of self and my relationships with land and with others. 

And what does it mean to be an exile? Critic and scholar Edward Said says that exile is “terrible to experience.” He defines it as an “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” The circumstances surrounding exile are different for everyone, but there is a common element of loss and the impossibility of return. A great number of Latin American writers and poets have lived—are living—in exile and have written extensively about it. 

One author who reflected on the complexities of exile was Argentine Julio Cortázar. He emigrated to Paris—by choice—in the early 1950s and was officially exiled when his country’s government became a dictatorship in the 1970s. He lived as an exile until his death in 1984. In his well-known lecture “Literature Class,” the author talks about the connection between exile and nostalgia by recalling Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano’s words: “Nostalgia is good, but hope is better.” Cortázar assures us that whatever we left behind is not dead. It is simply not where we are and writing can help us to “take it back,” to make it visible and bring it alive for ourselves and for others. 

In addition, exile can be experienced in more than one way, as Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni so well expresses in her poem “You Who Want Me White,” in regard to her isolation as a woman writing about love and desire: “You want me snow,/ You want me white,/ You want me dawn.” The tone in this poem oscillates between defiance to the patriarchy and the difficulties of navigating her own inner turmoil as a consequence of rejecting traditional expectations. Something similar can be observed in Costa Rican Jarol Segura Rivera’s poem “I Write Senselessly,” about the displacement of indigenous communities: 

I write senselessly,
because I have been robbed,
I have been stripped of my land.

Segura Rivera does not romanticize, but rather reconstructs his experience and claims that writing senselessly is not something he chooses. It is “how they have forced me to” because

we protect the only thing that
we have,
this land that gives us shelter.

The poem is an accusation and a lament for what has been lost. Home is embedded in the writing. “Writing is my home” says Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi in the epigraph at the beginning of this essay. For exiles, writing is also about re-locating the self and reconfiguring notions of home-land. In my case, home is not necessarily a place, but a state of being: home is wherever I am.

A Prompt

1. Make a list of 3–5 times in your life when you felt like an outsider (e.g., first day in a new school, moving to a new town, traveling to another country and not speaking the language). 

2. Choose two of those times and describe them in detail. Write down as much as you remember. Be specific.

3. Now choose the one you feel more connected to and write a poem—of any length—about it.