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Title: Letters of Transit: Reflections on Exile and Memory by Andre Aciman, New York Public Library, Edward W. Said, Charles Simic ISBN: 1-56584-504-8 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 1999 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.75 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Interesting Perspectives
Comment: This is a great book for those who want to be able to place Exile, Identity, Language and Loss in some kind of coherent context. It allows the reader to be able to understand his/her own behavior and the behaviors of those around them. It can also be applied to novels written in the various genres that deal with immigration and exile--to understand the motivation of the authors regarding plot and character development.
There is not, however, based on just one perspective. We read five different authors' point of view and their personal experiences, which allows for a range of inquiries.
I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: Engaging
Comment: I loved the book becuase the authors have written very honestly about their feelings and about being different in a society. As a emigrant who has lived in the United State for the past 20 years, the book hits home for me. And I will read it again and again.
Rating: 4
Summary: Deeply Insightful Readings of Exile, Language and Loss
Comment: "Letters of Transit" is a collection of five essays originally presented, in somewhat different form, as lectures sponsored by the New York Public Library from November, 1997, through February, 1998. Andre Aciman, the editor and author of both the Foreward ("Permanent Transients") and the first of the essays ("Shadow City"), focuses on the theme of being an "exile" (as opposed to being an "expatriate" or a "refugee" or an "emigre"). Aciman suggests, in his Foreward, that "[w]hat makes exile the pernicious thing it is is not really the state of being away, as much as the impossibility of ever not being away." He goes on to elaborate, in his ensuing essay, that the exile is not just someone "who has lost his home; it is someone who can't find another, who can't think of another." Aciman, impressionistically explores the way in which living in a new city (New York) can vividly reincarnate the memories of cities in which the exile has lived previously (the "shadow cities" of his title). Aciman's essay is fascinating, perceptive and insightful; it is a wonderful short piece which illustrates why his much-praised memoir, "Out of Egypt", has become a minor classic of the genre.
Similarly, Bharati Mukherjee's essay, "Imagining Homelands", provides thoughtful elaborations on the nuances and connotations of the words "expatriate", "exile" and "immigrant"; she draws fine and interesting distinctions among these words and carefully entwines these distinctions with an elaboration of her own life experiences.
The strongest essays in this collection, however, are those of Eva Hoffman, Edward Said and Charles Simic. All three of these writers provide classic insights into the experience of "exile, identity, language, and loss" which are worth careful thought and consideration. All three suggest (as does Mukherjee when she describes herself as an "integrationist" and a "mongrelizer") that the exile can only ultimately be redeemed by rejecting irrational devotion to the narrow and myopic tribalism of nation, ethnicity, religion, and ideology which so often encumbers the exile community; that redemption comes only through freedom, reason and syncretism. Thus, Simic writes, in concluding his essay, "Refugees", that the poet "is a member of that minority that refuses to be part of any official minority, because a poet knows what it is to belong among those walking in broad daylight, as well as among those hiding behind closed doors."
Hoffman's essay, "The New Nomads", is clearly the best of this collection. She carefully delineates the universality of the exilic experience, an experience which can be found in the Ur-text of Adam and Eve's exile from the Garden of Eden. She then discusses the way in which exile can magnify the impulse to "memorialize" the past. The result, she suggests, is that exile distorts the vision of the past, tending to make it an idealized "mythic, static realm" which forever impedes the ability to deal with the present (what Hoffman perceptively characterizes as the "rigidity of the exilic posture"). She then provides an interesting discussion of A.B. Yehoshua's provocative essay, "Exile as Neurotic Solution", wherein he postulated that there were many opportunities for the Jews (prior to the creation of the modern State of Israel) to settle in Palestine more easily than in countries where they had chosen to live, but it was the one location they avoided. In Hoffman's words, "[i]t was as if they were afraid precisely of reaching their promised land and the responsibilities and conflicts involved in turning the mythical Israel into an actual, ordinary home." The ultimate result of the "memorialization" of the past and the "rigidity of the exilic posture" is that exile communities often cannot function in the locus of the larger society; rather, they conceive of themselves as perpetually "Other".
Edward Said's essay, "No Reconciliation Allowed", describes the dislocation of the exile in vivid terms: "a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport, and no certain identity at all." Thus, he finds himself in a secondary school where only English is permitted to be spoken, even though none of the students is a native speaker of English. While his entire educational experience is Anglocentric in the extreme, he is also trained to understand he is a "Non-European Other", someone who can never aspire to being British in any true sense of the word. While Said has been criticized recently for allegedly misrepresenting his past, he is quite forthcoming in this essay in acknowledging his admiration for "self-invention". In some sense, Said's essay and the narrative of his life reflects his theory, specifically the notion that we can (and do) use language instrumentally to construct social realities (in this case the reality of his life).
While somewhat uneven, as all collections are, "Letters of Transit" ultimately provides a rich, varied and deeply insightful range of readings on what it means to be an exile.
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Title: False Papers by Andre Aciman ISBN: 0312420056 Publisher: Picador USA Pub. Date: 08 September, 2001 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Out of Egypt: A Memoir by Andre Aciman ISBN: 1573225347 Publisher: Riverhead Books Pub. Date: April, 1996 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity by Isabelle de Courtivron ISBN: 1403960666 Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Pub. Date: 18 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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Title: Out of Place : A Memoir by Edward W. Said ISBN: 0679730672 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: A Viewer's Guide To Film: Arts, Artifices, and Issues by Richard Gollin ISBN: 007023700X Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages Pub. Date: 01 November, 1991 List Price(USD): $43.35 |
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