Imperialism and exile

Who to talk to when no one can listen what to you is painfully loud and muffles all others? How to explain what no one can even pretend to understand? The inexplicability that is only to be experienced, and the experience that refuses to be replicated, the pain that you were chosen for as if by a divine decree.

Edward Said perhaps can talk about exile as it is something he is in a unique position to understand, a vantage point only few can boast. Said, himself a Christian, saw Palestine’s identity thrashed by foreigners, and became an alien in his own land. He can perhaps feel the pulse, where others can only surmise. The fact that Ibn-ul-Waqt too belonged to a time where his own nativity was challenged at the hands of the Whites does not mean that he would have been able to find a companion in another exile like Said. It only means that Said can look to him and be not befuddled at Ibn-ul-Waqt’s dilemma. But sharing no history, sharing no culture, or soil, the two could hardly have found haven in the other’s company. The difficulty that each experienced were unique to their own identity and situation. Bereft of one’s own identity, each sought it in their own manner, putting roots wherever they felt the soil was welcoming, perhaps more eager than would be appropriate, the situation in their lives having pushed them over an edge that only few people have seen. One indulging himself in his writing the other in his ‘mission’.