The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature

by Andre Naffis-Sahely (Editor), Various (Translator), Ngugi wa Thiong'o (Introduction)

Overview

A fascinatingly diverse anthology of the literature of exile, from the myths of Ancient Egypt to contemporary poetry

Exile lies at the root of our earliest stories. Charting varied experiences of people forced to leave their homes from the ancient world to the present day, The Heart of a Stranger is an anthology of poetry, fiction and non-fiction that journeys through six continents, with over a hundred contributors drawn from twenty-four languages.

Highlights include the wisdom of the 5th century Desert Fathers and Mothers, the Swahili Song of Liyongo, The Flight of the Irish Earls, Emma Goldman's travails in the wake of the First Red Scare, the Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani's ode to the lost world of Andalusia and the work of contemporary Eritrean fabulist Ribka Sibhatu.

Edited by poet and translator André Naffis-Sahely, The Heart of a Stranger offers a uniquely varied look at a theme both ancient and urgently contemporary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782274278
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	01/14/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	637 KB

About the Author

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of The Promised Land: Poems from Itinerant Life (Penguin UK, 2017). He is a Visiting Teaching Fellow at Manchester Met's Writing School and is the poetry editor of Ambit magazine. He is from Abu Dhabi, but was born in Venice to an Iranian father and an Italian mother. His translations include over twenty titles of fiction, poetry and nonfiction from French and Italian, including The Last Days by Laurent Seksik and The Crew by Joseph Kessel, both published by Pushkin Press. Several of these translations have been featured as 'books of the year' in the Guardian, Financial Times and NPR.

Read an Excerpt

ORIGINS AND MYTHS
Civilization begets exile; in fact, being banished from
one’s home lies at the root of our earliest stories, whether
human or divine. As the Abrahamic traditions tell us, if disobeying
God was our original sin, then exile was our original punishment.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden
after eating the forbidden fruit, their return forever barred by a
flaming sword and a host of cherubim. Tragedy of course repeats
itself when Cain murders his brother Abel and is exiled east of
Eden. Genesis also tells us of the Tower of Babel, an edifice tall
enough to reach heaven itself, a monument to human hubris whose
destruction scattered its people across the earth and “confounded”
our original language, thus making us unintelligible to one
another for the first time since creation. The Tanakh, in fact, is rife
with exile: Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness
of the Desert of Paran, while the young Moses voluntarily heads
into exile after murdering an Egyptian. Genesis and Exodus tell of
the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt and their subsequent escape
to Sinai, while the Book of Ezra records the end of the Babylonian
captivity — the inspiration behind Psalm 137’s immortal lines, “by
the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept / when we remembered
Zion” — and the eventual return of the Jews to Israel.
Nevertheless, our religious texts tell us that exile wasn’t a fate
exclusive to lowly humans. In the Ramayana, the ancient Indian
epic, Rama, the Supreme Being of Hinduism, is banished by his
father, the Emperor Dasharatha, after falling victim to court
intrigues and is ordered to spend fourteen years in exile in the
forest of Dandaka, seeking enlightenment amidst demons and
wandering holy men. Although Rama is recalled from his exile
following his father’s death, he decides to remain in exile for the
entire fourteen years. Similarly, in Greek mythology, Hephaestus,
the son of Zeus and Hera, is thrown off Mount Olympus by Hera
due to his deformities, only to be brought back to Olympus on the
back of a mule by the treacherous god of wine, Dionysus. While
exile was often a temporary situation for many gods, it was a more
permanent state of affairs for their mortal creations.
It was in Babel’s Mesopotamia, towards the end of the Third
Dynasty of Ur, that one of our earliest poetic epics, The Lament for
Urim, first depicted the vicious cycle of conquest and expulsion that
has largely characterized our history. In The Lament for Urim Ningal,
the goddess of reeds, pleads before the great gods: “I have been exiled
from the city, I can find no rest.” Bemoaning the destruction of her
beloved Ur by the invading Elamites, Ningal cries out its name:
O city, your name exists
but you have been destroyed.
O city, your wall rises high
but your Land has perished.
Employing the refrain “woe is me”, Ningal chronicles the annihilation
of her world: “I am one whose cows have been scattered”, “My
small birds and fowl have flown away”, “My young men mourn
in a desert they do not know”. The Sumerian epic ends with a
soft, sanguine prayer that Ningal’s city may one day be restored,
unleashing one of our first literary archetypes: the hopeful exile.
In fact, if The Lament for Urim is any indication, the very concept of
recorded history — and literature — appears to spring out of the
necessity of exile, preserving in our minds what had been bloodily
erased on earth.

Table of Contents

Origins and Myths,
Naguib Mahfouz, The Return of Sinuhe, 9,
The Torah, Exodus 23:9, 17,
The Book of Psalms, Psalm 137, 18,
Homer, from The Odyssey, 19,
Sappho, Fragment 98B, 22,
Xenophanes, Fragment 22, 23,
Seneca the Younger, from Moral Letters to Lucilius, 24,
Plutarch, from The Life of Cleomenes, 26,
Dark Ages and Renaissances,
The Desert Fathers, Abba Longinus, 36,
Abd al-Rahman I, The Palm Tree, 37,
Du Fu, from Dreaming of Li Bai, 38,
Bai Juyi, Song of the Lute, 39,
Christopher of Mytilene, On the ex-emperor Michael Kalaphates, 43,
Ibn Hamdis, Oh sea, you conceal my paradise, 45,
Moses ibn Ezra, I am weary of roaming about the world, 46,
Anna Komnene, from The Alexiad, 47,
Attar, from The Conference of the Birds, 49,
Dante, Cacciaguida's Prophecy, 51,
John Barbour, from The Bruce of Bannockburn, 56,
Michael Marullus, De exilio suo, 59,
Expulsions, Explorations and Migrations,
William Shakespeare, from Coriolanus, 67,
Andrias MacMarcuis, The Flight of the Earls, 68,
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie, 71,
Olaudah Equiano, The Middle Passage, 74,
Mirza Sheikh I'tesamuddin, from The Wonders of Vilayet, 76,
Phillis Wheatley, A Farewell to America, 81,
Francis Baily, The First Discoverer of Kentucky, 84,
Mary Shelley, Voltaire, 86,
Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus, 89,
Robert W. Service, The Spell of the Yukon, 90,
Sol Plaatje, from Native Life in South Africa, 93,
Mary Antin, from They Who Knock at Our Gates, 98,
A.C. Jacobs, Immigration, 101,
Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Colonial Affair!, 102,
Sargon Boulus, Du Fu in Exile, 109,
Jusuf Naoum, As a Dog, 111,
Luci Tapahonso, In 1864, 113,
Adnan al-Sayegh, Iraq, 117,
Ribka Sibhatu, In Lampedusa, 118,
Dynasties, Mercenar ies and Nations,
Percy Sholto, An Irish Colonel, 126,
Polish Legion in Haiti, Letters Home, 128,
Madame de Staël, from Ten Years' Exile, 129,
Ugo Foscolo, To Zakynthos, 137,
Giacomo Leopardi, On the Monument to Dante,
Being Erected in Florence, 138,
Adam Mickiewicz, While my corpse is here, sitting among you, 145,
Pierre Falcon, General Dickson's Song, 146,
George W. Cable, from Café des Exilés, 148,
Romain Rolland, from Jean-Christophe in Paris, 153,
Khushwant Singh, from Train to Pakistan, 157,
Tin Moe, Meeting with the Buddha, 162,
Michèle Lalonde, Speak White, 165,
Mahmoud Darwish, from A State of Siege, 169,
Abdellatif Laâbi, from Letter to My Friends Overseas, 172,
Valdemar Kalinin, And a Romani Set Off, 176,
Souéloum Diagho, Exile gnaws at me, 178,
Ahmatjan Osman, Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile, 179,
Kajal Ahmad, Birds, 183,
Omnath Pokharel, from The Short-Lived Trek, 184,
Revolutions, Counter-Revolutions and Persecutions,
Victor Hugo, To Octave Lacroix, 199,
Louise Michel, Voyage to Exile, 201,
Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, Zola Leaves France, 203,
Card No. 512210, Bisbee, 209,
Emma Goldman, from Living My Life, 212,
Teffi, The Gadarene Swine, 217,
José Carlos Mariátegui, The Exile of Trotsky, 224,
Leon Trotsky, Letter to the Workers of the USSR, 228,
Victor Serge, from Mexican Notebooks, 232,
Marina Tsvetayeva, Homesickness, 234,
Anna Seghers, from Transit, 236,
Cesare Pavese, Lo Steddazzu, 239,
Yannis Ritsos, A Break in Routine, 241,
Carlos Bulosan, American History, 242,
Barbara Toporska, The Chronicle, 244,
Silva Kaputikyan, Perhaps, 246,
Alessandro Spina, The Fort at Régima, 247,
Miguel Martinez, Spanish Anarchists in Exile in Algeria, 249,
Martha Nasibú, from Memories of an Ethiopian Princess, 253,
Elena Shvarts, Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep, 256,
Elias Khoury, from My Name Is Adam, 260,
Ashur Etwebi, A Dog Hides Its Tail in the Darkness of Night, 265,
Mohsen Emadi, from The Poem, 266,
Cosmopolitanism and Rootlessness,
Gabriela Mistral, The Foreign Woman, 271,
Nelly Sachs, I'm searching for my Right to Roots, 272,
Luis Cernuda, Impression of Exile, 273,
Fernando Sylvan, Invasion, 275,
Gisèle Prassinos, Nobody Is Going Anywhere, 277,
Roque Dalton, Spite, 278,
Breyten Breytenbach, from Notes from the Middle World, 279,
Mimi Khalvati, The Soul Travels on Horseback, 285,
Michael Schmidt, The Freeze, 286,
Aamer Hussein, from Nine Postcards from Sanlucar de Barrameda, 288,
Fred D'Aguiar, At the Grave of the Unknown African, 290,
Farhad Pirbal, Waste, 294,
Iman Mersal, The Idea of Houses, 295,
Sholeh Wolpé, The World Grows Blackthorn Walls, 297,
Kaveh Bassiri, 99 Names of Exile, 300,
Fady Joudah, He came, the humanitarian man, 302,
Jee Leong Koh, To a Young Poet, 304,
Jenny Xie, Rootless, 306,
Editor's Afterword, 309,
Acknowledgements, 315,

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A wonderful, provocative and resonant anthology. This is a necessary book. I loved it', Edmund de Waal

Editorial Reviews

"Lovingly and purposefully prepared." — Times Literary Supplement

"Offers a uniquely varied look at a theme both ancient and urgently contemporary." — London Review Bookshop

"A wonderful, provocative and resonant anthology. This is a necessary book. I loved it." — Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes

From the Publisher