Writing as an Exile

Guest blogger, Sarah Wetzel

I want to talk about exile, about how exile, though chosen in my case, can prove a source of inspiration and an impetus for writing. The Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky wrote: “One more truth about the condition we call exile is that it accelerates tremendously one’s otherwise professional flight—or drift—into isolation, into an absolute perspective: into the condition in which all one is left with is oneself and one’s own language, with nobody or nothing in between.”

While Brodsky’s words highlight the isolation that often results from expatriate living, it also hints at its potential as catalyst for creativity. That is why so many stories and poems occur when writers are far from the places they call home. Think of Ovid and Dante. Think of Elizabeth Bishop and James Joyce. The estrangement of waking up in another land surrounded by people whose culture, language, experiences differ from our own ignites the imagination. This makes sense to me. In study after study, when we free-associate, we turn out to be not very free. For instance, if someone says to us “blue,” chances are that our first answers will be “sky” or “ocean.” The reason for this is simple: Our associations are shaped by language, and language is full of clichés.

For six years, I’ve lived in Israel, representing for me another culture, another language, another religion. Daily there is discomfort as well as surprise. Daily I am forced to consider things from different perspectives. Certainly since being here, I’ve reconsidered the meaning of “blue.” Blue has become an interior color of mosques, the edging of the Jewish prayer shawl called Tallit, the word kakhol in Hebrew, which sounds to me like charcoal in English or kohel in Hebrew meaning spirit. Meanwhile, say “sky” to me, and I’ll probably come back with “Negev desert,” or “Cairo,” or “grit in my teeth,” because the Israeli sky is often diffused through a film of sand. In fact, not only have I gained new perspectives, but new vocabulary.

That’s not to say that physical dislocation is the only source of inspiration. I think emotional and imaginative dislocations can emerge from a multitude of sources–a museum can be a catalyst, a lecture by someone whose views are different than one’s own, a conversation with a total stranger can be a catalyst, or even walking through parts of one’s own city never before visited. Strangers can say such strange things! As Richard Hugo writes in “Triggering Town:” “The Poem is always your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another.” Sometimes it only takes a stranger, a bit of estrangement, and we are transported.

Of course, mere geographic dislocation doesn’t necessarily lead to originality. I admit I’ve written quite a few poems about Israel decorated with stone courtyards and flocks of sparrows, colorful Jerusalem characters, war poems peopled by stock terrorists and grieving mothers. Clichés exist for a reason. We say “sky” when someone says “blue” because it often is. Yet attempting to go behind the stone courtyard to absorb the sound of another language, observe how particular people live and love, has changed how I encounter my own life. Isolating, yes. Frightening, at times. Enlivening, always.

Sarah Wetzel, poet, essayist, and engineer, is the author of Bathsheba Transatlantic which won the 2009 Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and will be published by Anhinga Press in Fall 2010. A daughter of the American South, Sarah somehow ended up in Israel after job-hopping across Europe. She graduated from Georgia Tech in 1989, and in 1997, received a MBA from Berkeley. Sarah completed a MFA from Bennington College in January 2009. A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work appears in Barrow Street, Valparaiso, Quiddity, Rattle, Pedestal, Stirring, Folly, TwoReview, Shampoo, and others. Sarah divides time between Israel and Manhattan, where she lives with her husband and one needy dog. www.strangelandpoems.blogspot.com

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