Notes on Exile

It was in grad school that I learned about the exilic condition. I even took a seminar on it and we read a bunch of poststructuralist theory books, articles and fiction. All of this stuff had the same take: Exile was liberating; it was empowering; it was postmodern; it offered you the opportunity of transformation—the chance to forget what you had become and the mechanism to become something else.

There was a subtext: exile was cool. If you were an exile, you possessed a deep conscience; you wrote exquisite, tortured prose about some sort of trauma; most likely you were a loner, sipping espresso at a quaint café on the sidewalks of the metropole.

Along with this came a fashion: If you studied exiles, you dressed in black and carried upon your person exilic accessories: intellectual sunglasses, jaunty hats and scarves. Maybe you even spoke a foreign language.

How I wished I were exilic. How I aspired to that level of glamour. Many of the students had been on a year abroad to Europe. They often confessed, during the cigarette-and-coffee-breaks–the midpoint of any seminar–that throughout that glorious time of displacement, they thought they could never look back upon the continent of the United States without turning into a pillar of salt.

The theory books–dense, abstract, convoluted in their Byzantine architecture of citations, footnotes and terminology—only reinforced a sense of inadequacy I have carried with me since arriving in the United States: the sense that I was not truly “up” on the lingo, that I was missing a crucial element in a thigh-slappingly good joke; or perhaps that I couldn’t even follow the joke through its meandering path, filled with allusions and misdirections, toward its inevitable punchline.

For a week, I tried reading some poststructuralist theory in the North Campus courtyard with a pair of cheap sunglasses bought on the Boardwalk but the coffee I sipped was a domestic; worse yet, it was a house blend; and it came from a Styrofoam cup.

The way people talked in grad school, you might imagine that exiles would make great dinner guests, as if Proust’s Monsieur Swann would have been honored to make the acquaintance of one at a fete in which would be described mounds of jeweled cakes and meaty trifles, braised so long they collapsed like dwarf stars into their centers.

Boy was I pissed when, years later, I realized that for most of my life, I had been an exile. In fact, most people in my social universe were exiles. I had just never seen them this way. This was entirely their fault: none of them wore the proper accessories. The exiles I have known are not people you might invite to a really nice dinner party with triple-cream Brie and stems of Bordeaux. More likely, most of the exiles of my childhood would attend such a smart soiree as invisible people—the sort of people who noiselessly carry incised silver trays and sweating decanters, wrapped in a napkin of white linen.

There is something shabby, little that is chic, about a true exile.

Yet all I heard throughout that first year when I developed the life-long habit of coffee, sunglasses and cigarettes was that exiles were rare creatures with extraordinary capacities. They were like the mighty orca or the elusive narwhal; you had to traverse deep waters and, still, you would be lucky to spot only a fin, cresting through a shivering undulation of swell. How could this ever jibe with my experience, floundering in the ocean of childhood among whole pods of such creatures who were, like myself, in every way unremarkable?

–Khanh Ho

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3 COMMENTS

  1. Nicely put. This notion is really just a grown-up, cleaned up version of high school with its counter-culture cliques: ie. the goths, the stoners, the I-could-give-a-fuck-about-fashion-intentionally-badly-dressed misfits. Posers are posers in any realm and people with any sort of fitting in issues can gain self esteem by stepping out of the mainstream and identifying with those who have intentionally, willfully and sexily said “fuck it.” The real challenge is maintaining possession of that air of confidence when the posing stops and the real self emerges.

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