CĂLIN DAN

Fast Forward / Painful Rewind

The term exile comes from the Latin exsilium, literally meaning banishment. The exiled is an exsul, a banished person, therefore someone upon whom a higher instance forced a legal decision. The use of the word in a larger, symbolic way cannot ignore those terminological roots and it is interesting to see what brings to the concept its opening towards other horizons of meaning.
Being a Romanian both by origin and by education, the term exile sends me immediately to the figure of Publius Ovidius Naso, the famous author of the Metamorphosae, a poet so famous in his times that we could easily say that in the Rome of Octavianus Augustus he was a pop star. Still, political insubordination, intrigues from jealous enemies, a love affair with someone close to the Emperor (the reasons remain fuzzy) brought upon him the sentence of exsilium. Ovidius ended his days on the fringe of the Empire, at Tomis (today Constanta), on the shores of the Pontux Euxinus (Black See), after writing two poignant testimonies about his alienating experiences far from what embodied for him the concept of civilisation.
The descriptions from “Tristae” and “Ponticae” (the sad poems, respectively the poems written on the Black Sea) are in my case at least the origin of the modern use of the term exile. There is a certain cultural aura surrounding for us the concept, and Ovidius complies with that expectation. Further on, his case is a graphic illustration of the technicalities implied by this situation: the exiled person is displaced from the centre - the only place validating the condition of citizen (civis – the source of the word civilization) - to the margins, where all the laws that guarantee urbanity (urbs – city) are abolished with the exception of the one keeping at work the machinery of exsilium. Falling from the condition of citizen, the exiled is a second rate person whose only aspiration becomes to reintegrate the previous condition. But the efficiency of exile, its symbolic power, comes from irreversibility: the sentence is unlimited in consequence, being in that sense a perverse substitute to the death sentence. The exsul is dead for his social context, his properties and family are estranged from him, and he vanishes forever.
I always looked with suspicion at the desperation manifested by famous Russians towards the prospective of exile. The example coming immediately to mind is again that of a poet – Boris Pasternak, who refused to attend the ceremony of the Nobel Prize in Stockholm fearing that he would be refused re-entry in his country. Growing up in an environment obsessed by the immobility forced upon people by the communist regime, I found that Pasternak was used in a subtle propaganda sting – cashing a check and having a drink with the Swedish royalties was not worth the prospective of loosing access to his own country! Bullshit – I thought at that time, nobody normal would do that. But now, a few decades closer to the end, I understand that people are hardly willing to accept situations reminding them the irreversibility of death.

I brought up those stories in order to shed a critical light on the contemporary use of the concept of exile – which is in my interpretation rather complacent and superficial. Superficial because there are not too many cases in which people are forced through legal procedures into exile. Political and economical refugees are not, legally speaking, exiles, but the media like to coin them with this term tainted with romanticism, probably in order to raise sympathy, certainly with the effect of blurring both the sense of the word and – more important – the reality supposedly covered by it. Complacent because on one hand the relativism defining our society tends to annihilate the absolute dimension of exile – its exercise beyond time. In our impatient and sceptical view, nothing lasts, and therefore exile is just a legal ornament, that can always be reversed. Of course it can, but then it is exile no more. On the other hand, complacency makes it possible to enhance the desire aspect implied by the concept: the exile is obsessively pursuing the dream of returning to the very country that rejected him. While in real life, most of the people forced into this category are just trying to settle in a place where they can continue their exercise of life far from the violence or just humiliation that was allotted to them in their country of origin. The prospective of return is not compulsory and by far not that obsessive, but the idea that the millions of immigrants spread over the world are there just because a legal accident and they can hardly wait to return home might alleviate some of the panic growing among the locals against the aliens.

Coming, after those illustrious examples, to my own modest case, I have to say that I am anything but an exile. Growing up in a small provincial city on the Romanian-Hungarian border imbued me, I suppose, with a mittel-Europa set of standards concerning urbanity - concerning the place of the individual in the community, the morality of work, the subtle balance between independence and discipline. All that sounds fine but the peculiarity of it is my retrospective realization that I never looked at my hometown as being home, and from as far back as I can remember myself able of planning – the idea was to go away. Which I did – moving to Bucharest, a small metropolis of 3.000.000, where I spent the most exciting and the most horrendous years of my active life to the date. Bucharest is a Balkan city, sophisticated and chaotic, and with that posing a set of challenging dilemmas to someone coming from a different culture. I guess that this type of polarity offered by my own country and my own existence made it rather easy to step further and establish my base in Amsterdam.
The Netherlands is a unique country, in the sense that it openly uses a set of terms – autochtoon / allochtoon – in order to define people born in the country from those who just live here. Coming from ancient Greek, the words are using roots for other (allos) and same (autos) in order to separate the legal status offered by citizenship or family bond from a reality based on race and land (chthon = ground). You can be living for all your life in the country, be a citizen with full rights, if your place of birth is somewhere else you still remain an alien. I do not control all the legal intricacies and cultural subtleties of this phenomenon, but I find it a good instrument in the analysis of my case, since it brings to mind such concepts as strangeness and alienation. I guess that people with similar trades (the contemporary art crowd) are defined by a kind of restlessness defined by these concepts so beautifully put at work by l’existentialisme français.

What else is L’Etranger of Camus than the exile standard book of the 50s? What else are we, the self-exiled drifters of the 21st century but the strangers looking around at our environment and getting from it an urge to leave in order to be able to feel anything? After cinema (so important in defining the mental displacement of Camus’ character), the advent of television enhanced the hysterical mindset of those people constantly looking elsewhere for kindred spirits and homey places. Their numbers multiplied exponentially as electronic images were sending out phantasms of locations other than those from down here and now - those offering the rudiments of shelter, social interaction, safe sex, retirement etc. Spoiled by a brief economic relapse and deluded by the illusions of ubiquity induced through media we are star-trekkers nostalgically hoping to be beamed on another shore, more hospitable and less demanding. Meanwhile exile is for us just an urge to move ahead, and not anymore a desperate longing to go back.