Ester Nelly Abuter Ananías - Fachbereich Philosophie und ...

Nora Strejilevich ( San Diego State University, California, u sa )
Exile as a Way of Life
In my presentation I want to focus on how exile becomes a way of being from which
there is oft en no “return.” Exile has many meanings, one of them is banishment
( forced exile systematically practiced, among other places, in the Argentina of the
‘70s ). Aft er becoming a desaparecida in 1977, I survived and turned into an exile—this
is why I am interested in this topic from a personal perspective.
I have already published a story about disappearance and exile—combining my
personal memories with testimony— in my Letras de Oro awarded novel A Single
Numberless Death ( U of Virginia Press, 2002 ). I am now writing another book ( from
which I will select paragraphs ) based on my own life, but centered on traveling during
exile. Traveling, in this case, oft en appears as the other side of despair, of existential
nausea, of meaninglessness. From the perspective of those who have lost their country
of citizenship, traveling has to do with loss, with the impossibility of belonging, with
the utopia of creating new roots. At the same time, traveling ( as Walter Benjamin
already new ) is an “international cultural action” that allows for the overcoming of
the old passions rooted in customary surroundings. Peregrination gives us access
to a variety of artistic, social, and political situations that color our experience
of modernity, allowing us to explore our times within a global framework that
overcomes the idea of belonging defi ned by territory and shared culture and language.
In short, my paper is a voyage through the geography of the nomadic condition.
Email strejil@yahoo.com
Section Narrating Voyages : the Scholar-Traveler
Panel 99
Date July 31
Time 16 :45
Location k l 29/111