The Identity of Exile; An Epiphany of Escape, Endurance and Ecstasy

Kaushal Kishore Sharma

Whether imposed by self or society displacement, breeds catastrophe including agony, nostalgia and flashback of something or someone indispensable and irrevocable. Nevertheless, the same factor often serves as the touchstone for the writers who touch zenith in the changed environment, indicating that perhaps the same sublimity might have remained unimagined had the shift in any form of exile may have not hovered their lives. John Simpson in The Oxford Book of Exile writes that exile “is the human condition; and the great upheavals of history have merely added physical expression to an inner fact”. The same finds expression in many works from Sigmund Freud  to Salman Rushdie and from W.H. Auden to Nabokov, of which the last one has revolutionized the ramifications of the term Exile to a great extent. Influence of exile, both shocking and liberating, encompasses the oeuvre as well as the writer and leaves writing as to be the only means to acquire a temporary relief from the continuous haunt of reminiscences, thus resulting in exile literature. Accepting and analyzing many exiles, both internal and external, writers and other artists endure the enigma of self identity in the alien world. Ever struggling and ever loosing either to escape or to endure from the exile these great writers find expression of hope via means of writing that is perhaps the only source replacing the void with ecstasy in their life