Conditions for the State of Exile

These conditions include lack of freedom, oppression, poverty, ignorance, inhumanity, misery, narrow-mindedness, intolerance, cruelty, aggression, women’s degradation, threats to thought and life, conditions that cause tears, screams, crying, actual and metaphorical conditions of jail, deception and absence of sincerity and honesty, discouragement of the expression of criticism and emotion.

From times immemorial until the present, human beings have had experienced a cultural, economic, political, intellectual, emotional state or states of exile, parallel to the conditions that were factors in these states. Such states sometimes brought about a geographical state of exile. To be in a state of exile means to be in a different cultural, emotional or intellectual space, whether actual or imagined. The opposite of being in a state of exile is being or the sense of being at home or homeland in the actual or metaphorical sense. A human being can experience one state or a combination of states of exile. Nature of conditions and states of exile and the changing circumstances under which a person lives create various combinations of such states.

Memory can create a state of exile or a state of belonging to home. This depends on whether the memory’s contents are conditions for a sense of exile or a sense of belonging to home. States of exile influence each other. The more relevant one state for other state or states, the more influential the first state on the other states. In certain circumstances, intellectual conditions and state of exile perhaps are more related to, or dependent on, political condition. If the political state of exile is more relevant for the intellectual state of exile, should the political state is weakened or strengthened, this weakening or strengthening would have its influence, assuming the other factors are constant, in the weakening or strengthening the intellectual state of exile.

Fear of governmental authorities, injustice and ethical degradation; cultural, emotional and intellectual want and deprivation; conditions that bring forth human tears, screams, crying; hypocrisy, ignorance, biases and stereotypes; suppression of women, children, the elderly and the handicapped; nazism, national chauvinism and racism and other conditions are ones that create for some individuals in all societies difficulty of social, cultural and psychological adjustment; they have and still creating emotional, cultural and psychological alienation. The distance between this condition of alienation and a state of exile is short.

Lack of freedom or a sense of lack of it has been and still is one of the most important factors for the creation of a state of exile. In order for the human being to feel that he/she is not in a state of exile and to feel that he (and this applies to the other gender) is at home, he must feel that he enjoys a space of freedom in which his thought and emotions in all fields can move without restriction or without much restriction.

Lack of experience and of knowledge of the conditions of the space of exile or refuge, whether actual or imaginary, sometimes are driving forces for the human being to seek refuge and exile in that space. After he discovers or experiences the psychological, cultural, intellectual or emotional climate prevailing in that space of exile, he might feel he is still in a state of exile in it, and he might look for another space for exile and refuge.