No matter how voluntary it may appear, exile is never really a choice. Exiles, wherever they go, always feel a little posthumous, like a part of them dies and they are outliving themselves. In a sense, the exile’s love is absolute, pining as it does for an Ideal (and not the complicated reality they escaped).
In the devastating phrasing of Kenyan-Somali poet Warsan Shire, “Home is the mouth of a shark.”
Here are a few more lines from Shire’s poem “Home:
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying—
leave,
run away from me now
i don’t know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here
I admit that I felt a little like this when I fled from Egypt, around fifteen years ago, making the US my home.
Here is a love letter I wrote that speaks me better than myself:
Cairo
I buried your face, someplace
by the side of the new road
so I would not trip over it
every morning or on evening strolls
still, I am helplessly drawn
to the scene of this crime
for fear of forgetting
the sum of your splendor
then, there’s also the rain
that loosens the soil
to reveal a bewitching feature
awash with emotion
an eye, perhaps tender or
a pale, becalmed cheek
a mouth, tight with reproach or
lips pursed in a deathless smile
other times you are inscrutable
worse, is when I seem to lose you
and pick at the earth like a scab
frantic, and faithful, like a dog.
