The Linguistic Aura of the Liminal’ in Contemporary Exilic Discourse

Abstract

Exilic literature has a distinctive way of experiencing the trial of life in a new land, characterized by an exilic angst that exemplifies the predicament of personal displacement and cultural dispossession through the various stages of location, relocation and their subsequent transformation. This experience of the exiled informs and inspires specific strategies of artistic resistance, particularly in the linguistic domain, by using innovative strategies that will bring to the fore the ‘exilic double bind’. Specific linguistic strategies that characterize exilic writing may include appropriation, abrogation, subversion etc., as hybrid poetic strategies to supplant the language of their homeland with an exilic discourse that adapts itself to the exiled space. This paper intends to analyse the linguistic aura that characterizes exilic literature with reference to select migrant writers in exile, by bringing out the salient features of exilic writing, and proposes a third space of enunciation – the liminal space – as the interstitial space between home and host, which characterizes the ‘double binded’ ambivalence of exilic discourse.