Splaining Yourself
H. G. Carrillo
Three Berlin Essays
Translated by Brian Henry and Aleš Šteger
Customer Reviews
Christie Hodgen
The Collected Short Stories of Freddie Prothero, Introduction by Törless Magnussen, PhD
Peter Straub
Havana
Laura van den Berg
Dreamlives of Debris
Lance Olsen
Song of Magsaysay
John Parras
Folding Cythera
Marjorie Welish
Omobo
Paul West
Poor Belgium: The Argument
Richard Sieburth, Translated by Richard Sieburth and Charles Baudelaire
Five Poems
Maxine Chernoff
Cult
Brian Evenson
Celebrating Russian Federation Day with Immanuel Kant
Robin Hemley
Dog’s Journey
Edie Meidav
The Zip
Stephen O’Connor
Preparing One’s Consciousness for the Avatar
Gillian Conoley
Coal
Can Xue and Translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen
Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return
Martin Riker
The Gujjar at the River
Wil Weitzel
A Damn Sight
Matthew Pitt
Water Calligraphy
Arthur Sze
The Invention of an Island
Gabriel Blackwell
Aftershock
Robyn Carter
Cover art is a detail of the installation “Accumulation—Searching for the Destination,” from Chiharu Shiota’s solo exhibition Where Are We Going? at the Marugame Genichiro–Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa, Japan, 2012. Image is reproduced with the kind permission of Chiharu Shiota. © 2014 Chiharu Shiota; all rights reserved by the artist.
Few subjects are as rich, complex, and profound as exile. This is especially true if one allows its definition to venture beyond the political, religious, or cultural, so that it embraces the deeply personal, psychological, and emotional terrains in which individuals inhabit a place of self-exile, or even exile from sanity and surety.
From Africa to China, Pakistan to the Philippines to locales that are not to be found on any map, this issue examines exile as both a literal expulsion or ostracism and, as Primo Levi has it, “the prevalence of the unreal over the real.” H. G. Carrillo’s “Splaining Yourself” explores, with an incandescent ferocity of bilingualism, the difficulties of living on the racial, ethnic, linguistic divide between two cultures, a member assimilated into and yet estranged from both. Aleš Šteger investigates the sensibility of exile in Berlin. Edie Meidav offers a boxer’s-eye view of postrevolutionary Cuba, whose system of privilege and constraint under Castro drives a gifted fighter from his homeland across the waters to Miami, where he is a man finally without a country. Robin Hemley’s “Celebrating Russian Federation Day with Immanuel Kant” delves into that singular world of exclaves, with its own highly individual problems about nationality and cultural identity.
The permutations of our theme are extensive. Here is an agonizing story of love that impels a man far from the precincts of rational decision making, exiling him to a locus where all that remains is a guarantee of personal destruction. Here is an orphan who exiles himself from his home to live in makeshift proximity and spy on those who move in to take his place. Here is Charles Baudelaire’s proposal for a book excoriating Belgium, a country to which he has grudgingly fled after abandoning his native France—a vitriolic, painful, and hilarious document appearing for the first time in English in a superb translation by Richard Sieburth.
We hope this issue provides some fresh insights into the exiles’ worlds, and makes a modest contribution to a literature that is ancient, essential, and multifarious.
Managing Editor
Conjunctions | Bard College
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Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504