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member of a community, to some extent Said's conceptualization of exile runs the risk of projecting
modern assumptions about exile onto all places and times. It's hard to square Said's assertion that the
modern age is “the age of the refugee” against Aṛak'el's conceptualization that the entire Armenian
people were in “exile” during the early modern period.
This paper attempts to fill a gap in comparative literature and exile studies by understanding the
deeply perspectival dimension of “exile” from the point of view of medieval and early modern subjects
themselves. By placing primary texts in dialogue with one another, I hope to particularize—not
universalize—different ways that notions of foreignness or strangeness produced epistemes about self
and belonging. My hope is that by arguing against a Saidian understanding of universal exile, we might
better understand how a “plurality of vision” across cultures may have mattered for the formation of
individual and group subjectivity. Being an exile did not mean the same thing (or produce the same
kind of knowledge about one's subjectivity) to a displaced Armenian as it did to a displaced Persian,
even in cases where both hailed from the same city. However, even competing pluralities of vision
tacitly require the presence of “others” whom that vision encompasses and against whom that vision is
conditioned.
It would likewise be a mistake to project modern terminology backwards onto the primary
sources themselves—even terms in English as seemingly innocuous as “exile.” Aṛak'el's description of
Armenians as vtarandi can mean exile, but can also mean vagabond, wandering, in doubt, and
anguish. 7 He also uses ōtar, meaning foreign or alien, as well as panduxt for stranger, foreigner, alien,
or pilgrim to describe the sense of alienation that Armenians felt after resettling in the Safavid Empire.
Strikingly, and perhaps not accidentally, Aṛak'el's word choice reflects the language of the classical
Armenian translation of the book of Exodus in both lexical and thematic senses. Aṛak'el frequently
notes that the Armenians were a “new Israel” and had need of a “second Moses” to save them from the
clutches of a “second Pharaoh,” further suggesting Aṛak'el's attitude that the Armenians were a
7 Bedrossian, Matthias. New Dictionary: Armenian-English. Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1974. Print. p 683