Exile and Creativity: A Search for Home
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This paper explores the relationship between exile and creativity in order to examine pathways in which the agonizing human condition of exile can serve as a source of creativity. To this end, the paper focuses on autobiographical writings by Polish-American writer, Eva Hoffman, and Vietnamese-American writer, Andrew Lam. In their writings, both remember and represent their experiences of exile. Concurrently, they attempt to represent and reconcile the temporal and spatial distance ruptured between the present and the past, influenced by abrupt and reluctant departure from their homelands, while attempting to make sense of the exilic moments at which (times) they were forced from their homelands. Memory and writing assist them to grasp and fill such negative emotional experience of rupture in their lives. We can perceive an enduring sense of longing for home in their writings—their agonizing search for home. This longing and search becomes the source of energy of their struggle for survival and writing. For them, writing becomes a place in which to dwell, as does home, which signifies more than a physical place for life. Philosophically, home closely resembles the human condition of exile, indicated by the fact that Hoffman and Lam do not aspire for a better physical place in which to live, but rather seek answer(s) to the question of their existence as exiles. In this pursuit, they must deal with the traumatic experience of exile as those who were forced to leave their homes, against their will, and without the knowledge of events proximal to them, more so as at the time of exile, they were too young to grasp the whole picture of the situation. The paper explores how the painful experience of exile serves strongly/affectively to inspire, rather than to thwart, a creative energy of imagination. In this respect, it also considers the role/effectiveness of writing, as Hoffman and Lam struggle to recover from the traumatic experience of exile: writing as a way of representing trauma and as a way of searching for home.
Abstract
This paper explores the relationship between exile and creativity in order to examine pathways in which the agonizing human condition of exile can serve as a source of creativity. To this end, the paper focuses on autobiographical writings by Polish-American writer, Eva Hoffman, and Vietnamese-American writer, Andrew Lam. In their writings, both remember and represent their experiences of exile. Concurrently, they attempt to represent and reconcile the temporal and spatial distance ruptured between the present and the past, influenced by abrupt and reluctant departure from their homelands, while attempting to make sense of the exilic moments at which (times) they were forced from their homelands. Memory and writing assist them to grasp and fill such negative emotional experience of rupture in their lives. We can perceive an enduring sense of longing for home in their writings—their agonizing search for home. This longing and search becomes the source of energy of their struggle for survival and writing. For them, writing becomes a place in which to dwell, as does home, which signifies more than a physical place for life. Philosophically, home closely resembles the human condition of exile, indicated by the fact that Hoffman and Lam do not aspire for a better physical place in which to live, but rather seek answer(s) to the question of their existence as exiles. In this pursuit, they must deal with the traumatic experience of exile as those who were forced to leave their homes, against their will, and without the knowledge of events proximal to them, more so as at the time of exile, they were too young to grasp the whole picture of the situation. The paper explores how the painful experience of exile serves strongly/affectively to inspire, rather than to thwart, a creative energy of imagination. In this respect, it also considers the role/effectiveness of writing, as Hoffman and Lam struggle to recover from the traumatic experience of exile: writing as a way of representing trauma and as a way of searching for home.
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