Exile, Literature and the High Price of Freedom

Publishers Perspective

Authors exiled from Iran, Cuba, Afghanistan, Egypt, Algeria and the Congo discuss oppression, inspiration, and freedom
Last week, to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the City of Paris organized a seminar on the theme of “Exile and Literature.”
The first event addressed the writer’s relationship to language and offered a variety of views from across the Francophone world. Congolese novelist Alain Mabanckou and Palestinian poet and writer Elias Sanbar (who grew up in Lebanon) pointed out that they both French as children — Mabanckou at home in a former French colony and Sanbar as a child in a in a French “protectorate.” Egyptian-born author Paula Jacques noted that she was educated in French, as were the Egyptian elite and bourgeois classes at the time.


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