Immigrants and Exile

I think this idea, of one's struggling back and forth between two states of exile throughout their life, is exactly the point that Said raises when he says that "the exile therefore exists in a median state" (493). Rather than readily reasserting their place in the new setting, the struggling individual is still trapped because of the nostalgia of the past setting. This results in a tension within the individual and his/her group members. I think that the issue that Said is trying to get at is: through forms of displacement, the individual is exiled as a whole being by being exiled from both (the previous and current) states. This is an interesting relationship−the struggling individual is metaphysically exiled from being actually exiled. In the former and possibly harsher type of exile, the exiled individual does not fit in here or there. The tension leaves the individual with a lack of self-identity and belonging (which is a crucial source of self-awareness and self-consciousness). This begs the question: how can robust communities be developed from groups of intellectuals whose "consciousness [is] unable to be at rest anywhere" (494)? Said points to some examples like Jonathon Swift who have surpassed our expectations toward exiled people, but there are only a handful of cases like such.

As an international student who has been here for only 3 years which is not long, I've been feeling that I'm adapting to the current environment and slowly being isolated by the previous one. It's interesting that I don't feel entirely Canadian or Chinese, I think this is the "median state" that Said talked about. It sometimes confuses my sense of identity because I am still kind of like a foreigner for both countries, but I do know about both cultures and languages. I think there may be a lot of people like me.

I can definitely relate to that. Even Canadians who are born and raised here can also be considered an exile, what more to immigrants like us.

Definitely. I spent three years in India and about 5 years in Canada, while I'm originally from Korea. It is now hard for me to make sure what typical lifestyle/ personality/ insight of the world I can fit in. Based on that, I can say I'm in the median state as well but not like those who are exiled, because it was my voluntary decision to move to other countries, but not being forced to move out of my homeland. That makes a difference between myself and the exiled explained by Said.

I would like to comment on Barbara's remarks and the insightful question of: "how can robust communities be developed from groups of intellectuals whose "consciousness [is] unable to to be at rest anywhere" (494)?" I do not aim at providing an answer, and I may actually take it quite on a detour from its original scope of query, but there are interesting layers that could be added to it, and that actually tie this issue with most of the others that have been raised in these threads and that are dealth with by the other readings as well - issues such as oppression, racism and racialization, the Syrian refugee crisis, and ultimately the processes of othering and integration, that we could imagine as the tense extremes of a dialectical relation in the life of an exile, especially if an intellectual. In the first place, it is useful to keep in mind the personal and cultural history behind Edward Said's intellectual career and standpoints. As a Palestinian, he knows and carries better than anyone else today what it means to be displaced and systematically oppressed for generations, floating in that limbo of being costantly hoping yet not having concrete perspectives of returning, to be adjusting to a new place and yet to be nostalgic and attached to one's "native" identity, which is particularly threatened and longed in the case of the Palestinian people. Now, it is fundamental, in my opinion, to frame Said's piece within his broader work and theories before being able to make inferences or deepen our reflections. The only text I have read from him entirely and that I feel confident enough using as a reference point is his major book Orientalism. One of the book's main arguments could be summarized (altough probably over-simplified), just to the limited means of our limited discussion, by Said's claim that "“Neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other.” This importantly leads to theories of decoloniality and postcolonial thought, of which Said is considered to be one of the fathers exactly through his work Orientalism. Being aware of this and especially keeping in mind the arguments made by Fanon and Wilson, and even DuBois, in the extracts we have been reading, everything seems to connect together in depicting the modern world as one of scattered "exiles" whose own consciousness undergoes complex processes of attempting to reconcile itself within a distorted, liquid (referring to Bauman's theories of liquid modernity, for example) conception of space and time, such as that of the globalized society. Furthermore, in this world, the exile with a restless, because aware, consciousness, enters relationships with the people of the country he enters as foreigner that are fundamentally relations of power, where the possibility of a positive and desirable notion of "integration" is made ever slighter by the nude facts of colonization, cultural appropriation and inequality itself. How can there be (and should we wish there was) real integration or adjustement, as it seems to be mentioned by the several testimonies of our own immigration as international students to Canada, when our relationships with the Other, may that be the foreigner or our host if we are the foreigners, are so much shaped by the material and cultural power embedded within our identities? Is the process of othering unavoidable, especially in a global capitalist consumer society where we relate to each other on material bases of individual advantage?