The Exile from Above, Beside, and Within

Photo By Fatima Hassona, August 30th, 2024

“I crossed the border and so began my odyssey, outside all regulations and laws, without travel documents and across many national borders,” writes Khosravi. “I, my body, identity and culture were ‘out of place’, out of their place. In conventional terms, I had become ‘uprooted’, condemned to wither. A woeful destiny for those who do not abide by the rules of border” (Illegal Traveller, p. 24).

I was, after all, a child when my body, identity, and culture were first confined to being out of place. Like Khosravi, my exile cannot be romanticized. It does not fold into happy times. It does not shed pain, rather it bleeds it. Bleeds the loss of home. In reading Khosravi, his words pressed into me - sharp, cold - exposing the rupture and rawness of being cast out. He, like Benjamin and Said, writes of what happens when the line drawn in sand becomes a wall, and the body becomes evidence of trespass. His exile, like mine, has not only been physical but existential.

In his writing, I recognized myself. But my exile splinters threefold: a constant sense of guilt in my fractured dialogue with the divine above, an estrangement from the world beside me, and a fracture buried deep within. The double exile, now tripled, is no longer foreign but home. My muscles remember no life without estrangement. I have carried this pain with me since I crossed the poisoned water that separates my birthplace from the territories of Turtle Island.

Fractured Dialogue with the Divine Above

The guilt inside me, that old, familiar beast, has stained my ability to speak to the Almighty. This exile from above was not cast upon me; I invited it in. I made space for it, allowed it to settle in my chest, to rot and fester. I watched as it drained the light from my soul, severing the thread that tethered me to meaning in this dunya. This beast grows stronger with every image of my slaughtered siblings. He feasts when I scroll and wince, then look away. Each shake of the head, each sigh of powerlessness, is a quiet surrender, and he knows it. He grins every time I whisper أُفّ because he knows I have acquiesced. I have let apathy wrap its arms around me. By silence and comfort, I have colluded.

Khosravi writes, “Exile is when you live in one place and dream in another... One is possessed by longing, no matter where the exile takes place. The whole world becomes a prison” (Khosravi, Illegal Traveller, p. 74). This fractured dialogue, that is my dwindling focus and faltering commitment to God’s commandments, is the longing of my exile, a spiritual prison. I have become overwhelmed by the ruthlessness of this world, so consumed by this beast that I struggle to maintain the hope and love essential to sustaining a meaningful dialogue with God.

I perform my daily prayers, fast the sunnah days, send blessings upon God’s greatest messenger, yet my revocations to God are hollow. I struggle to feel God’s presence, to hear Him in His words, to connect the evils inflicted upon my beloved Gaza with the trials endured by Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him, and his companions by Quraysh. I have lost my sense of grace, the hopeful energy that once fueled my gratitude. Though fully aware of God’s mercy and the abundant blessings He has provided, I falter in maintaining hope when death and mutilated bodies become as mundane as making my bed. This is the exile no one sees, a dislocation not from land, but from grace.

Estrangement From the World Beside Me

And so, comes next the ‘exile from beside,’ where I am othered—even by my own dreams of the future. As I write this section, I feel deeply conflicted about how raw to be, because this exile is built on a quiet, aching desire to belong. Deprived of the love of a stable community, uprooted again and again by my family’s inability to settle, I was conditioned to treat every place as temporary. I never let my roots reach deep. I learned not to care too much about people I knew would only pass through my life. This taught me distance, the emotional, cultural, and relational.

But as life slowly stabilized and my family finally began to lay foundations, I found myself unprepared for the very thing I had longed for. Belonging. Khosravi writes, "In exile, one does not stand on firm ground. Exile is a condition of transience... Exile is only parenthetic to life, though it lasts and lasts" (p. 74). When permanence arrived, it unsettled me. I had no language for it. No habits to lean on. The walls didn’t feel like home. The people didn’t feel like kin. I was stunned by the silence that followed the absence of instability.

Khosravi describes how refugees are cast into a space that is both inside and outside society, “included without being members" (p.76). That is how I felt. Not just in institutions or in public spaces, but even in living rooms and casual conversations. I was present, but not quite included. Visible, but rarely seen. I stood beside others, but never with them. This exile from beside haunts in the everyday. It is the loneliness in shared laughter, the distance felt in a full room. It is in the paused moment before speaking, unsure if my words will land in a place that recognizes me. It is the life lived in parentheses, in between the sentences of other people’s stability.

Fracture Buried Deep Within

And finally, exile from within. I am not at home in my own body, nor in my own becoming. I drift through the streets of D.C. like an imposter, performing a self I no longer recognize. My interiority feels occupied. I have lost the locus of decision, surrendered the authorship of my own life. I am a leaf blown by unseen winds, tossed between bureaucratic regimes, institutional gazes, and survival imperatives that leave no space for volition.

For over a decade, I have not made a major life decision from a place of agency. I pounce on what offers provisional safety, chasing fragments of continuity while forfeiting the very integrity of choice. Khosravi writes of exile as a condition of perpetual anticipation, a “life interrupted,” where time itself loses coherence and linearity (p. 70). In this fractured temporality, I have ceased to live proactively as I survive on the reactive margins. Hannah Arendt wrote that the loss of citizenship is existential as it renders one expelled from humanity itself, incapable of claiming even the most fundamental rights (Khosravi, p. 122). Though I carry the privileged Canadian passport, I am internally denaturalized: not just from the realm of the nation-state, but from the realm of the self. “Citizenship,” Khosravi adds, “has become the nature of being human” (p. 122). And so, unaware of my nature, I move in the world as surplus. Disposable. Dispersed.

To be Palestinian is to be denied the grammar of citizenship itself. My body, by its very naming, becomes a threat to the logic of the nation-state. My flesh is illegible in a world that has territorialized rights. Statelessness becomes a permanent condition, not a transitional one. In Arendt’s words, the Palestinian body is a pariah, one whose humanity is unacknowledged until it disappears. Until it bleeds. Until it dies. And so, I inhabit a paradox. I am both documented and erased. I exist in systems that do not see me. I speak a language of legality with a body deemed illegitimate. Exile from within is not about loss of land, but loss of self-recognition. It is the awareness that the political order has no vocabulary for me. No place that affirms my being. It is living in flesh that the world refuses to read as human.

Conclusion

In mapping the contours of exile, from above, from beside, and from within, I have tried to trace the spatial, spiritual, social, and psychic dislocations that shape the exilic condition. Khosravi's reflections provide a mirror and a methodology to make sense of the diffuse, often invisible, ruptures that organize life on the margins. My experience, though personal, is not singular and belongs to a larger tradition of the displaced, the denaturalized, the undocumented, the pariahs of our world order.

Working Bibliography

Khosravi, S. 2010. “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Springer.