Exile and the Kingdom

How the announcement of an election brought back old memories

Ancient Italy: Ovid Banished from Rome, by JMW Turner (1838)

As you may have read, a general election has been called in the UK and will take place on 4 July, when it’s widely expected that the 14 years of Conservative government will end.

Although I currently live in Tokyo, I’m checking out my status on the electoral register. And doing this makes me think back to the early days of when I was first able to vote, in 1983.

By then, four years after she first came to power, Margaret Thatcher’s reforms were gathering pace, and the country was being transformed. I’d arrived at university two years earlier identifying, if anything, as a Conservative, but I gradually found myself more and more alarmed about what was happening to my country, with its urgent drive towards privatisation and the entrenching of the reign of the market as the one and only true god. And there was that short, bitter conflict with Argentina over the Malvinas/Falklands in 1982, which had unsettled me. 

I left the UK in 1985, not knowing then that there were still 12 years of Conservative government left to run. 

Following that, I would sometimes style myself as “in exile,” as if I had been fleeing the ugly political state of my country. I would even glibly repeat this to friends in Spain, who were much better versed in such matters.¹ This was preposterous nonsense on my part, of course. I had not been forced to leave the country, nor did my departure to the Canaries have anything to do with politics. 

However, what was also true was that I had no specific plans for my life in the UK. I didn't want to chase the money of the City of London, while the glamour of politics in Westminster held no allure. The farm I’d  grown up on had been sold and anyway, I always knew agriculture wasn't for me. An academic career didn’t seem attractive either. In short, I didn't feel very settled and had no career plans. I didn’t seem to fit in. Leaving the country seemed like a solution, even if the problem was only vaguely defined in my mind. 

Technically, I became some kind of migrant, which is a large group covering many categories. Overall, in 2023, “about 184 million people—2.3 percent of the world’s population—live[d] outside of their country of nationality. Almost half of them are in low- and middle-income countries.”²

But somehow this vague sense of being an “exile” clung to me for many years. Even the fact that I didn't move back to the UK until the end of 2000—more than three years after Tony Blair's "New Labour" became the ruling party—added to the feeling. Again, the timing had nothing to do with politics. Why was I so hung up on this term?

The word exile in English ultimately derives from the Latin exilium or exsilium "banishment, exile; place of exile." The Romans gradually codified what exile meant (they were good at codifying). In time, it became an accepted alternative to capital punishment. By the time of the late republic, “the magistrates were required to allow a condemned person time to escape before a capital sentence was executed.”

It now means “a situation in which you are forced to leave your country or home and go to live in a foreign country” or “to force someone to go to live in a distant place or foreign country.”³

Since exile clearly didn’t fit my case, I occasionally thought I’d try the word émigré on for size: “a person who emigrates for political reasons.”⁴ This word had many colourful, even romantic, connotations. Among other images, it conjures up eccentric Russian aristocrats in early 20th-century Paris.⁵

But I was no wandering aristocrat. 

To look once more at the word exile, let’s turn to Albert Camus, who I invoked in the title of this post. His collection of stories, Exile and the Kingdom (1957), doesn’t really deal with exile in its classic sense, as I recall. But it would seem that exile was a state of mind for Camus. One characterisation of him is as “an infidel among Muslims, a lapsed Catholic, a Communist Party drop-out, an underground resister...[Camus] lived most of his life in various groups and communities without really being integrated within them. This outside view, the perspective of the exile, became his characteristic stance as a writer.”⁶

This is much more extreme than my case, of course. But I also know what it is to have lived most of my life “in various groups and communities without really being integrated within them.” Perhaps that’s why the term wouldn’t go away?

When I moved to Mexico City in the late 1990s, from where I would watch the celebrations that accompanied Blair’s electoral victory in May 1997, I was moving to a city famous for its exiles, including Latin Americans from the 1920s and Spanish intellectuals who arrived after the collapse of the Republic in Spain in 1939.⁷ 

One day, I was at a working lunch at a fancy restaurant with a kind host from the Mexican cultural establishment who, at some point in the conversation, perhaps after we’d finished the excellent sopa de flor de calabaza, discreetly pointed out a balding figure in earnest conversation with another man in the same restaurant. “That’s the exiled Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko,” he murmured softly. I’d heard of the poet’s glamorous pop star status in Russia and took a long sip of my tequila to celebrate being so close to a deity of poetry in exile.

That’s how I remembered it.

But when I went to check out this “memory,” I found that Yevtushenko had never been an exile, unlike his compatriot, Joseph Brodsky. Maybe I’d just got the story mixed up? Or my host had? Or maybe it hadn’t even been Yevtushenko?

Realising this, I felt another fragment of my youthful fancifulness about exile slip away. 

A 1914 painting by Leonid Pasternak of the Pasternak children, left to right: Boris, Josephine, Lydia, Alexander Pasternak. The occasion was their parents' 25th wedding anniversary.

But, in fact, I’d already met an exiled Russian poet, Lydia Pasternak Slater, a biochemist by training who turned poet and translator. She was, of course, the sister of Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Pasternaks were Jewish, and in 1935 Lydia left Berlin, where she was working as a scientist, to flee the Nazis and sought exile in Britain. She settled in Oxford, and while I was a student there, attending every poetry event I could, I turned up at a reading by her from her 1971 publication, Before Sunrise. She kindly signed my old copy of Boris Pasternak’s The Last Summer (Penguin, 1960), to which she‘d contributed an introduction. This would be the closest connection I’d ever have to true exile.

I’d bought Boris Pasternak’s The Last Summer second hand for just fifty pence. Lydia Pasternak Slater kindly signed it for me.

When I moved back to the United Kingdom at the end of 2000, I'd basically lived overseas for 15 years. It was hard to re-adjust. And to be honest, I didn't much enjoy the days I spent at head office. All I was interested in was landing my next overseas appointment as soon as possible.

Of course, it was great to see more of my wider family. And the country felt more optimistic in those days. But I still felt like an outsider. To take a trivial example, I'd been driving for years overseas, but when I applied for car insurance, I was treated as someone with no driving record and paid more accordingly. Similar things happened with government bureaucracy. Where was my NHS number? Why were there gaps in my national insurance record? I'd returned to my home country. But I wasn’t sure it really was my home. Was I now in a state of permanent foreignness, not quite fitting in anywhere? 

When I left two and a half years later, it was on assignment to Shanghai, a move that delighted me. And as I was packing my bags, the UK was getting embroiled in another war, this time in Iraq. The public hostility and the protests took me back to the Thatcher years. Here was another war that felt like part of the post-colonial hangover that many in the United Kingdom seem determined to wake up to every morning. 

I was pleased, once more, to be on my way. 

Perhaps the most famous of exiled poets was Ovid (43 BC–AD 17/18). Publius Ovidius Naso, to give him his full name, is, of course, most famous for his Metamorphoses. Despite (or because of?) enjoying huge popularity in his lifetime, he managed to annoy Emperor Augustus so much that he was banished to Tomis on the Black Sea coast (now modern-day Constanța in Romania). Ovid was always vague—even coy—about the reason, blaming it on “a poem and a mistake,” and exactly what he did to provoke the Emperor's anger and remains a mystery. 

He spent the last years of his life in Tomis, dying in exile. The tone of his poem Epistulae ex Ponto (Letters from the Black Sea), written from Tomis, feels at different times bitter, hectoring, or resigned. 

In book 3, poem 7, he writes, 

“recalling the sight of places

renews the bitterness of exile, makes it recent.”

The sense of increasingly hopeless longing in the work is palpable. As I read Ovid’s sad, frustrated poem for the first time, I felt a slight twinge of recognition at his obvious deep longing for home. My case was so different, of course; in usual circumstances, I could return by plane to England whenever work and my budget permitted it throughout my years abroad.

But when the pandemic came and borders closed in 2020, I was unable to return to the UK for over two years. I began to have a sense of what true exile might feel like.

Yet, I felt only a vague yearning for a place that no longer felt truly home, while Ovid had pined viscerally for Rome.

A happier story of an exiled poet is that of Li Bai. He was initially sentenced to death for being on the wrong side of a battle over the throne between two brothers, but after much petitioning, his sentence was commuted to exile in Yelang, in the far south-west of China. Li Bai then proceeded to make his way so slowly to his place of exile that when news of his pardon arrived a couple of years later, he hadn’t actually reached his destination.

Nevertheless, he wrote a heartfelt poem about exile, Exile’s Letter, which was translated by Ezra Pound. 

It ends (in Pound’s translation):

“And then the crowd broke up—you went north to San palace.

And if you ask how I regret that parting?

It is like the flowers falling at spring’s end,

      confused, whirled in a tangle.

What is the use of talking! And there is no end of talking-

There is no end of things in the heart.

I call in the boy,

Have him sit on his knees to write and seal this,

And I send it a thousand miles, thinking.”

After my thousands of miles of journeying and my decades of living away from my home country, plus plenty of thinking, I still wonder how to describe myself.  Edward Lear wrote of his “pilgrimage” but I don’t think “pilgrim” quite fits me.

I long ago tried to shrug off the affectation of calling myself an “exile.” Yet I feel the word, as Camus uses it, at least—as a kind of wider estrangement—might still somehow apply.

And what if we all have an element of exile within us? Surely many of us have complicated feelings about where we are, where we’re from, and where we might belong? In the beautiful words of Exile’s Letter, “There is no end of things in the heart.”

After all this time, I probably shouldn’t worry about what I call myself—not exile, émigré, or even emigrant.

And it turns out that with the election drawing near, the government of the United Kingdom has suddenly cut through all the confusion. According to them, I’m now registered as an “overseas voter.” Maybe that’s all I am?

So perhaps this is the moment to settle on a term and forget the fanciful notions of my youth.

After all, who ever heard of an exile who could vote?

1. Spain only became a democracy in the late 1970s, after Franco's death in 1975. Many Spaniards knew or knew of real exiles from that regime: https://www.britannica.com/place/Spain/Francos-Spain-1939-75

2. https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2023

3. https://www.britannica.com/dictionary/exile

4. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/%C3%A9migr%C3%A9

5. A young Ernest Hemingway wrote in 1922 that the Russians were “drifting along in Paris in a childish sort of hopelessness that things will somehow be all right … No one knows just how they live except by selling off jewels and gold ornaments and family heirlooms that they brought with them to France.” https://tocqueville21.com/books/after-romanovs-russian-exiles-paris/

6. See: According to The Internet Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, https://iep.utm.edu/albert-camus/#H1 And also: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-6300-920-1_2

7. For example, the philosopher and essayist María Zambrano: https://www.cervantes.es/bibliotecas_documentacion_espanol/biografias/roma_maria_zambrano.htm (in Spanish)