A survival guide for exiles

• For the sake of your health get out of bed first thing in the morning before tuning into news and gossips from your homeland.
• Don’t collect anything you cannot carry with you—be prepared for a life on the move.
• Don’t expect your hosts to have ever heard of your country’s name. Don’t expect them to be responsible for your wellbeing. Expect them to give you a family name!
• Just as a second for gods is a life for humans, your one year in exile may translate into a lifetime in your homeland.
• Don’t burden yourself with the weight of the world. For some people exile means business. War and pandemic mean business.
• Do not associate with exiles who will add more woes to yours, be them compatriots or foreigners.
• Your nation-state you have clung to may go up in smoke overnight. The nation within you no one can destroy.
• Don’t be a trauma clown; analysed and anonymised by anthropologists, turned into a feature by film makers or your suffering co-written and edited by privileged White writers whose lives have nothing in common with yours—tell your story in your own chosen form.*
• Revolution will not be less perfect without you.
• Don’t look too far. Even the earth has her own fever, her own dukkah.
• Don’t look back—when you left it was spring. Today it might as well be a cold dark bitter winter.

* For trauma clown by Vivek Shraya and how to beat it, see https://nowtoronto.com/culture/how-did-the-suffering-of-marginalized-artists-become-so-marketable

“A survival guide for exiles” was first published in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, April 4, 2022.