The Fellowship of Exile

What follows is an attempt to shed some light on the question of the literature of exile and the special problems exile poses for literature. I have no talent for analysis; I limit myself here to a very personal vision. I will not attempt to generalize but merely offer a modest contribution to a multifaceted problem. As both a fact of life and a literary theme, exile dominates Latin American literature today. As a fact of life, we know only too well the number of writers who have had to leave their countries. As a literary theme, exile obviously shows up in many of the poems, short stories, and novels by these writers. A universal theme, at least since the laments of an Ovid or a Dante, exile is a constant in the present day reality and literature of Latin America, from the countries of the so-called Southern Cone all the way to a good many of the nations of Central America. This anomalous condition of the writer encompasses Argentines, Chileans, Uruguayans, Paraguayans, Bolivians, Brazilians, Salvadorans, Haitians, Dominicans, and the list goes on. By “writer” I mean above all the novelist and short story writer, that is to say, writers of creative prose fiction. Alongside them I include the poet, whom no one has been able to define with precision, but who stands beside the story writer and novelist to the degree that all play their game in a territory dominated by analogy, freeReview: Literature and Arts of the Americas, Issue 100, Vol. 53, No. 1, 2020, 95–101