Exile

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigationJump to search
For other uses of the word, see Exile (disambiguation).

Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena by Franz Josef Sandman (1820)

The First Night in Exile – This painting comes from a celebrated series
illustrating one of Hinduism's great epics, the Ramayana. It tells the story of
prince Rama, who is wrongly exiled from his father's kingdom, accompanied only by
his wife and brother.

Dante in Exile by Domenico Petarlini [es]

To be in exile means to be forced away from one's home (i.e. village, town, city,
state, province, territory or even country) and unable to return. People (or
corporations and even governments) may be in exile for legal or other reasons.

In Roman law, exsilium denoted both voluntary exile and banishment as a capital
punishment alternative to death. Deportation was forced exile, and entailed the
lifelong loss of citizenship and property. Relegation was a milder form of
deportation, which preserved the subject's citizenship and property.[1]

The term diaspora describes group exile, both voluntary and forced. "Government in
exile" describes a government of a country that has relocated and argues its
legitimacy from outside that country. Voluntary exile is often depicted as a form
of protest by the person who claims it, to avoid persecution and prosecution (such
as tax or criminal allegations), an act of shame or repentance, or isolating
oneself to be able to devote time to a particular pursuit.

Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "No one shall be
subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile."

Contents
1 For individuals
1.1 Exiled heads of state
1.2 Avoiding tax or legal matters
1.3 Avoiding violence or persecution, or in the aftermath of war
1.4 Euphemism for convict
2 For groups, nations and governments
2.1 Comfortable exile
2.2 Nation in exile
2.3 Government in exile
3 In popular culture
3.1 Drama
3.2 Art
3.3 Literature
4 See also
5 References
6 External links
For individuals
Exiled heads of state
Main article: List of heads of state or government who have been in exile
In some cases the deposed head of state is allowed to go into exile following a
coup or other change of government, allowing a more peaceful transition to take
place or to escape justice.[2]

Avoiding tax or legal matters

Main articles: Tax exile and Fugitive
A wealthy citizen who moves to a jurisdiction with lower taxes is termed a tax
exile. Creative people such as authors and musicians who achieve sudden wealth
sometimes choose this solution. Examples include the British-Canadian writer Arthur
Hailey, who moved to the Bahamas to avoid taxes following the runaway success of
his novels Hotel and Airport,[3] and the English rock band the Rolling Stones who,
in the spring of 1971, owed more in taxes than they could pay and left Britain
before the government could seize their assets. Members of the band all moved to
France for a period of time where they recorded music for the album that came to be
called Exile on Main Street, the Main Street of the title referring to the French
Riviera.[4] In 2012, Eduardo Saverin, one of the founders of Facebook, made
headlines by renouncing his U.S. citizenship before his company's IPO.[5] The dual
Brazilian/U.S. citizen's decision to move to Singapore and renounce his citizenship
spurred a bill in the U.S. Senate, the Ex-PATRIOT Act, which would have forced such
wealthy tax exiles to pay a special tax in order to re-enter the United States.[6]

In some cases a person voluntarily lives in exile to avoid legal issues, such as
litigation or criminal prosecution. An example of this is Asil Nadir, who fled to
the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus for 17 years rather than face prosecution
in connection with the failed £1.7 bn company Polly Peck in the United Kingdom.

Avoiding violence or persecution, or in the aftermath of war

Examples include:

Iraqi academics asked to return home "from exile" to help rebuild Iraq in 2009[7]
Jews who fled persecution from Nazi Germany[8]
People undertaking a religious or civil liberties role in society may be forced
into exile due to threat of persecution. For example, nuns were exiled following
the Communist coup d'état of 1948 in Czechoslovakia.[9]
Euphemism for convict
Exile, government man and assigned servant were all euphemisms used in the 19th
century for convicts under sentence who had been transported from Britain to
Australia.[10]

For groups, nations and governments

Comfortable exile
Main articles: Social alienation and Identity (social science)
Comfortable exile is an alternative theory recently developed by anthropologist
Binesh Balan in 2018. According to him, comfortable exile is a "social exile of
people who have been excluded from the mainstream society. Such people are
considered 'aliens' or internal 'others' on the grounds of their religious, racial,
ethnic, linguistic or caste-based identity and therefore they migrate to a
comfortable space elsewhere after having risked their lives to restore
representation, identity and civil rights in their own country and often capture a
comfortable identity to being part of a dominant religion, society or culture."[11]

Nation in exile
Main articles: Diaspora and Refugee
When a large group, or occasionally a whole people or nation is exiled, it can be
said that this nation is in exile, or "diaspora". Nations that have been in exile
for substantial periods include the Jews, who were deported by Babylonian king
Nebuchadnezzar II in 586 BC and again following the destruction of the second
Temple in Jerusalem in AD 70. Many Jewish prayers include a yearning to return to
Jerusalem and the Jewish homeland.[12]

After the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, and following the
uprisings (like Kościuszko Uprising, November Uprising and January Uprising)
against the partitioning powers (Russia, Prussia and Austria), many Poles have
chosen – or been forced – to go into exile, forming large diasporas (known as
Polonia), especially in France and the United States.[13] The entire population of
Crimean Tatars (numbering 200,000 in all) that remained in their homeland of Crimea
was exiled on 18 May 1944 to Central Asia as a form of ethnic cleansing and
collective punishment on false accusations.[14]

Since the Cuban Revolution, over a million Cubans have left Cuba. Most of these
self-identified as exiles as their motivation for leaving the island is political
in nature. At the time of the Cuban Revolution, Cuba only had a population of 6.5
million, and was not a country that had a history of significant emigration, it
being the sixth largest recipient of immigrants in the world as of 1958. Most of
the exiles' children also consider themselves to be Cuban exiles. Under Cuban law,
children of Cubans born abroad are considered Cuban citizens.[15]

Government in exile
Main article: Government in exile
During a foreign occupation or after a coup d'état, a government in exile of a such
afflicted country may be established abroad. One of the most well-known instances
of this is the Polish government-in-exile, a government in exile that commanded
Polish armed forces operating outside Poland after German occupation during World
War II. Other examples include the Free French Forces government of Charles de
Gaulle of the same time, and the Central Tibetan Administration, commonly known as
the Tibetan government-in-exile, and headed by the 14th Dalai Lama.

In popular culture
Drama

Jason and Medea, by John William Waterhouse, 1907

Rama on the way

Exile is an early motif in ancient Greek tragedy. In the ancient Greek world, this
was seen as a fate worse than death. The motif reaches its peak on the play Medea,
written by Euripides in the fifth century BC, and rooted in the very old oral
traditions of Greek mythology. Euripides’ Medea has remained the most frequently
performed Greek tragedy through the 20th century.[16]

Art

Exiled Klaus Mann as Staff Sergeant of the 5th US Army, Italy 1944

Cover of Anna Seghers’ Das siebte Kreuz

After Medea was abandoned by Jason and had become a murderess out of revenge, she
fled to Athens and married king Aigeus there, and became the stepmother of the hero
Theseus. Due to a conflict with him, she must leave the Polis and go away into
exile. John William Waterhouse (1849–1917), the English Pre-Raphaelite painter’s
famous picture Jason and Medea shows a key moment before, when Medea tries to
poison Theseus.[17]

Literature
In ancient Rome, the Roman Senate had the power to declare the exile to
individuals, families or even entire regions. One of the Roman victims was the poet
Ovid, who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was forced to leave Rome and move
away to the city of Tomis on the Black Sea, now Constanta. There he wrote his
famous work Tristia (Sorrows) about his bitter feelings in exile.[18] Another, at
least in a temporary exile, was Dante.

The German-language writer Franz Kafka described the exile of Karl Rossmann in the
posthumously published novel Amerika.[19]

During the period of National Socialism in the first few years after 1933, many
Jews, as well as a significant number of German artists and intellectuals fled into
exile; for instance, the authors Klaus Mann and Anna Seghers. So Germany's own
exile literature emerged and received worldwide credit.[20] Klaus Mann finished his
novel Der Vulkan [de] (The Volcano. A Novel Among Emigrants) in 1939[21] describing
the German exile scene, "to bring the rich, scattered and murky experience of exile
into epic form",[22] as he wrote in his literary balance sheet. At the same place
and in the same year, Anna Seghers published her famous novel Das siebte Kreuz (The
Seventh Cross, published in the United States in 1942).

Important exile literatures in recent years include that of the Caribbean, many of
whose artists emigrated to Europe or the United States for political or economic
reasons. These writers include Nobel Prize winners V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott
as well as the novelists Edwidge Danticat and Sam Selvon.[23]