This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures.

This lecture in the series' Representation of the Intellectual,

given by Edward Said, was originally broadcast in 1993.

Exile is one of the saddest fates.

In pre-modern times, banishment was a particularly dreadful punishment,

since it's not only meant years of

aimless wandering away from family and familiar places, but also meant being a sort of permanent

outcast, someone who never felt at home and was always at odds with the environment,

inconsolable about the past, bitter about present and future. There's often been an association between the idea of exile and the terrors of being a leper,

a social and moral untouchable.

During the 20th century, exile has been transformed from the exquisite and sometimes exclusive punishment

of special individuals, like the great Latin poet Ovid, who was banished

from Rome to a remote town on the Black Sea, into a cruel punishment of whole communities and

peoples, many of them the inadvertent result of impersonal forces such as war, famine, and disease.

In this category are the Armenians, a gifted but frequently displaced people,

who lived in large numbers throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Anatolia especially,

but who after genocidal attacks on them by the Turks,

flooded nearby Beirut, Aleppo, Jerusalem, and Cairo with their numbers,

only to be dislocated again during the revolutionary upheavals of the post-World War II period.

I've long been deeply drawn to those large expatriate or exile communities who peopled the landscape of my youth in Palestine and Egypt.

There were many Armenians, of course, but also Jews, Italians and Greeks, who,

once settled in the Levant, had grown productive roots there. These communities, after all,

...