ORIGINS AND MYTHS
Civilization begets exile; in fact, being banished from
one’s home lies at the root of our earliest stories, whether
human or divine. As the Abrahamic traditions tell us, if disobeying
God was our original sin, then exile was our original punishment.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden
after eating the forbidden fruit, their return forever barred by a
flaming sword and a host of cherubim. Tragedy of course repeats
itself when Cain murders his brother Abel and is exiled east of
Eden. Genesis also tells us of the Tower of Babel, an edifice tall
enough to reach heaven itself, a monument to human hubris whose
destruction scattered its people across the earth and “confounded”
our original language, thus making us unintelligible to one
another for the first time since creation. The Tanakh, in fact, is rife
with exile: Abraham sends Hagar and Ishmael into the wilderness
of the Desert of Paran, while the young Moses voluntarily heads
into exile after murdering an Egyptian. Genesis and Exodus tell of
the captivity of the Israelites in Egypt and their subsequent escape
to Sinai, while the Book of Ezra records the end of the Babylonian
captivity — the inspiration behind Psalm 137’s immortal lines, “by
the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept / when we remembered
Zion” — and the eventual return of the Jews to Israel.
Nevertheless, our religious texts tell us that exile wasn’t a fate
exclusive to lowly humans. In the Ramayana, the ancient Indian
epic, Rama, the Supreme Being of Hinduism, is banished by his
father, the Emperor Dasharatha, after falling victim to court
intrigues and is ordered to spend fourteen years in exile in the
forest of Dandaka, seeking enlightenment amidst demons and
wandering holy men. Although Rama is recalled from his exile
following his father’s death, he decides to remain in exile for the
entire fourteen years. Similarly, in Greek mythology, Hephaestus,
the son of Zeus and Hera, is thrown off Mount Olympus by Hera
due to his deformities, only to be brought back to Olympus on the
back of a mule by the treacherous god of wine, Dionysus. While
exile was often a temporary situation for many gods, it was a more
permanent state of affairs for their mortal creations.
It was in Babel’s Mesopotamia, towards the end of the Third
Dynasty of Ur, that one of our earliest poetic epics, The Lament for
Urim, first depicted the vicious cycle of conquest and expulsion that
has largely characterized our history. In The Lament for Urim Ningal,
the goddess of reeds, pleads before the great gods: “I have been exiled
from the city, I can find no rest.” Bemoaning the destruction of her
beloved Ur by the invading Elamites, Ningal cries out its name:
O city, your name exists
but you have been destroyed.
O city, your wall rises high
but your Land has perished.
Employing the refrain “woe is me”, Ningal chronicles the annihilation
of her world: “I am one whose cows have been scattered”, “My
small birds and fowl have flown away”, “My young men mourn
in a desert they do not know”. The Sumerian epic ends with a
soft, sanguine prayer that Ningal’s city may one day be restored,
unleashing one of our first literary archetypes: the hopeful exile.
In fact, if The Lament for Urim is any indication, the very concept of
recorded history — and literature — appears to spring out of the
necessity of exile, preserving in our minds what had been bloodily
erased on earth.
Copyright © 2020 by André Naffis-Sahely. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
