Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

is pain. Exile is a serious punishment, inhuman. It obliges one to leave behind
an immense part of one’s own life. Being conscious of having to live my new
existence in the shadow of memories, I have tried to make those shadows more
visible. This bitter feeling does not let the past become past and it keeps it
permanently alive.” 12
The reference to the past is central in the writing of exiles. It is always
linked to the concepts of memory and homesickness, of nostalgia. It gives the
tone of the mood of the Kurdish author – ‘a dumb sadness, a longing for
the birth place’, a common trait not only of many writers who live in social
conditions of exclusion but also of many ordinary men and women, the new
scattered exiles throughout the world. They are conscious that the road of
return (invoked but very often unrealistic) is signposted by broken bridges,
bridges in the physical, material and metaphorical sense. This is painfully true
for war refugees, for those in exile, for wandering people. But it is also true for
all those who do remain ‘at home’ but live under new orders of exclusion.
Self-writing by women is often in parallel with the writing of exiles in
excised existence, imbued with longing and a sense of loss. The feeling of loss
is embodied in reflexive nostalgia, a kind of profound mourning capable of
adding suffering and pain into actions directed towards the future. That is
how Svetlana Boym uses the term in her writings about nostalgia .13 According
to Boym, reflexive nostalgia focuses on past times, which are both individual
and collective. It ponders the sequence of time, its passing and fluidity, and
distance. It has not established the aim of recovering the past nor of rebuilding
the mythical place called home; it finds that the critical mind and aching
desires are not oppositional. And it generates new knowledge. That is why its
definition includes also the future and the potentiality of change. As many of
the female writers who are writing ‘outside the nation’ 14 note, being foreigners
produces new knowledge which is a prelude to metamorphosis, a pervasive
and destructive metamorphosis, but a necessary step to personal autonomy
and to becoming a ‘critical citizen’ .15
At this point I intend to use extracts of the autobiographical memories
of a female writer particularly interested in the processes of (re)defining identity
12
Mehmed Uzun, “Una rinascita curda in esilio”, in Autodafè (Milano: Feltrinelli, 2000), 67-68.
13
Svetlana Boym, “Ipocondria del cuore: nostalgia, storia e memoria”, in Nostalgia. Saggi sul rimpianto del comunismo,
ed. Filip Modrzejewski and Monika Sznajderman (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2003), 88.
14
Referring to the title of Azade Seyhan’s book Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2001).
15
Ruth Lister, Citizenship Feminist Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Mac Millan, 2003), 7.
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