In 1688 a 19-year-old medical student from Berne named Johannes Hofer observed a condition that medicine had yet to define. Symptoms of this ‘melancholy delirium’ might include fever, disturbed sleep, palpitations, loss of appetite and anxiety – sometimes ultimately leading to death. Hofer noted the case of a fellow student from Berne, now living in Basel, who fell victim to this disease. He missed home so much he was dying. The Germans had a word for it: heimweh or ‘home-woe’. The French a phrase, la maladie du pays. But Hofer coined a new medical term for this affliction, from the Greek nostos, meaning a homecoming, and algos, denoting pain. He called it nostalgia, an unassuageable grief for a lost homeland, often only reachable only in memory.
The meaning of nostalgia may have changed, but the pains of exile, emigration and statelessness are very much with us. How Hofer’s insight might then resonate today in an age of both mass migration and renascent nationalism is explored, in different but complementary ways, by two new books that both dig deep into the difficult questions around identity and belonging, roots and uprootedness.
Exiles: Three Island Journeys by William Atkins takes as its starting point the lives of three late 19th-century political exiles, each a figure of resistance and change, each a victim of empire’s ability to fling its undesirables to the far reaches of the world. The French Communard and, later, anarchist Louise Michel was transported to the Pacific island of New Caledonia. Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, a Zulu king, was exiled by the British to St Helena in the South Atlantic. And the Jewish Ukrainian revolutionary Lev Shternberg was sent to Sakhalin Island, off the coast of Siberia, by tsarist Russia.
Atkins’ primary interest is in how his subjects adapted to these vast ruptures in their lives, and in the extent to which the fractures spread through them afterwards. That is, in how exile – the condition of forced estrangement from one’s home – corrodes identity and voids one’s sense of being. “The thought of the distance kills us,” one of Michel’s fellow Communard exiles said. In later life, Shternberg taught ethnography in St Petersburg. His students described him as a man “who seemed to be charred by some internal burning”. Anton Chekhov, who merely visited Sakhalin Island and wrote a book about what Russia wrought there, talked about how the experience changed him. “Afterwards, everything was Sakhalinised, through and through,” he said.
The pain of nostalgia, as Hofer characterised it, was temporal as well as spatial, Atkins writes. “What had been lost was not only the homeland but the life that should have been lived there.” Another exiled Communard “died of grief at receiving no news from home”. To be so unmoored was itself a kind of death-in-life, a sense of being already dead to those you love, to the place you love. And then home, should you ever reach it again, was never the same. You couldn’t go back, even when you did, in fact, go back.
For Dinuzulu, who adopted European clothing, manners and culture during his eight years on St Helena, this was literally true. The defeated kingdom he left behind him was broken up by the British, and he returned no longer a king, but as the ruler of what was essentially a vassal territory itself fractured by internecine conflict and the burden of imperial taxation. And yet the land and its people were the source of his political power: “Dinuzulu understood what the British did not… that the closer to his land he was allowed to be, the more powerful he grew,” Atkins writes. “Every mile, every minute, empowered him.”
Atkins has visited all the places of exile he writes about. In part he is in search of ghosts, the traces his subjects left on the spaces they inhabited. “They are retrievable to us there as they are not elsewhere,” he writes. But he is also exploring other kinds of exiles, other kinds of fractures, and in particular the legacies of empire on these island prisons: the traumas that unwilling exiles and unwilling hosts might share alike. The indigenous Kanak people of New Caledonia, for instance, are still struggling to free their country from French dominion; Atkins’ arrival coincides with a fractious, volatile independence vote, which the Kanak would lose. He quotes the Kanak independence campaigner Jean-Marie Tjibaou, assassinated in 1989: “the hardest thing is to stay alive and feel like a stranger in your own land”. Not all exiles are geographic, Atkins notes. When a people’s language dies, that is an exile too.
The numbers transported to penal colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries are extraordinary. France moved around 100,000 of its subjects either to or between its colonies. The British empire expatriated some 376,000. Tsarist Russia dispatched nearly two million to Siberia and the Russian far east; the Soviets later did the same to some twenty-five million. Exiles, then, is an intimate, profound and psychologically acute account of an epic phenomenon. Amaryllis Gacioppo’s concern in Motherlands: In Search of Our Inherited Cities is more directly personal. Her starting point is the legacy of four generations of matrilineal migration within her family – in the 1920s from Turin to Benghazi, then part of Italian colonial Libya; from Benghazi to Palermo by way of Rome in the 1940s; from Palermo to the Sydney suburbs two decades later; and, for Gacioppo herself, a recent return from Australia, her place of birth, to live in Italy, a country that has both always and never been home to her “to be in a place where I had business to grow”. In her family, she writes, “adulthood was always marked by a geographical move.”
But as Gacioppo traces these stories of serial displacement from city to city, country to country, she explores wider ideas about displacement and belonging, about nationhood and migration. She recreates daily familial journeys and routines, trying to “trigger a kind of temporal magic… [accessing] powers of memory or meaning or association”. She is particularly interested in photographs and maps, in the shadows they cast over memory and representation, in how they mediate our understanding of history. A map of Allied bomb damage to Rome pales before the reality of a satellite photograph; but in colonial Benghazi it is the great-grandparents’ photos that seem unreal – a kind of gauzy fiction to complement the imperial fantasies of fascist Italy.
The lives that didn’t happen haunt her travels too. Her grandmother might have been an Olympic fencer but had to give it up to study law and politics; she had to give up the law too when, at 29 and with three children to raise, she left her husband. “I know more about [her] potential futures than her actual past,” Gacioppo writes. If migration is the search for a home that, as Friedrich Nietzsche said of Turin, is “the first place where I am possible”, what of countries that make of migrants lives an impossibility? In Rome she meets a woman campaigning for the rights of young Italians without citizenship who number perhaps 1.5 million; many came in infancy, many are still in school. They call themselves ‘ghosts by law’, constantly denied what citizenship confers over residency: a connection to your homeland’s past and the certainty of a settled future.
She visits the former SS headquarters in Rome, now a museum. In the cells, scratched into the walls, are the messages of the soon-to-be-tortured, soon-to-be-dead. Love Italy, one reads. Those who die for the homeland live for eternity, reads another. What is this idea of home, of place, that belonging to it is more powerful than death? “Just like family myths,” Gacciopo writes, “national myths belong to a shared consciousness, and in the act of remembering we strengthen our sense of belonging.” I remembered a quote from Exiles. “Genealogies have no meaning if they are not inscribed in space, in a specific place,” the Kanak independence leader Jean-Marie Tjibaou said. “Otherwise one has no history.”
Home, in Gacioppo’s definition, is “a physical place which claims a reassuring ownership over one”. She writes powerfully about the alienating dislocation of the opposite experience, the unheimlich – usually translated as the uncanny, but literally the unhomely – what she calls “a dispersal of the self, a confused state of inner unmooring”. She notes that first-generation Italian migrants in Australia, under assault from Alzheimer’s, often revert to their mother tongue, cutting them off from their Anglophone children. It is, she says, “a particularly brutal instance of the unheimlich”. Exile might be another word for it.
Empires rise and fall. Cities and kingdoms too: Turin was for a few years the first capital of Risorgimento Italy. Founded by the Greeks, Benghazi was the principal city of Roman Cyrenaica. Like Benghazi, Sicily has been under a succession of colonial rulers: Romans, Byzantine Greeks, Arabs, Normans, and on and on. But people endure in the places they feel rooted in; the most meaningful kinds of belonging have nothing to do with borders or governments. “[A] relationship to the land as a basis of cultural identity is one that echoes the beliefs and religions of native peoples all over the world,” Gacioppo writes. “Even though I am sceptical about notions of blood, when I am in Sicily, something inside of me uncoils.” But yet, she notes, mobility – migration, exile, colonisation – has always been part of the human condition too.
Both these powerful and timely books look back to antiquity, where the West’s cultural roots lie. For Atkins, the Roman poet Ovid, exiled to the Black Sea, is a touchstone. “When I lost my country,” Ovid wrote of his grief, “was when I died, an earlier, grimmer death.” Gacioppo returns to Odysseus and his long-looked-for homecoming to Ithaca. When second- and third-generation migrants return to Italy they are often disappointed. It is not the place they remembered, or the place they dreamed of, the place they thought they knew. Inward migration, modernity, the simple processes of time and change make them feel displaced, lost. For Gacioppo, Palermo was always “the city that I saw when I glanced back over my shoulder”. Might home, like Orpheus looking back for Eurydice, also be the place we lose by trying to find it again?
Both books also look towards the larger idea that, as Gacioppo writes, “With each step forward into the future, something is lost, and this loss, the void created by it, travels with us. It is there to remind us that there is no such thing as returning.” That is, the griefs of time, of separation, of mortality are another exile from which there is no return. Hofer’s Bernese student, seemingly on his deathbed, was cured of his nostalgia by a journey home; it made him whole again, Hofer said. But if this greater kind of exile and the impossibility of a true homecoming haunt us all, who amongst us remains unbroken?
This is an extended version of a piece that first appeared in the autumn 2022 issue of New Humanist.
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Mathew Lyons 