“Exiles: Three Island Journeys”, a brilliant new travelogue by William Atkins, deftly explores the word “home” and what it means to belong
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitaskAs the ancient world’s best-known deportee, Ovid is often invoked by those who write about displacement. They look at his outpouring of nostalgia—in its original meaning of homesickness—and his descriptions of sadness. He wrote in one letter, for example, about feeling dismembered by exile, seeing himself as a metaphorical Mettus. “A part of me”, he wrote, “seemed wrenched from my body.
The trio were all sent to remote islands in the late 19th century by different imperial powers. Louise Michel was exiled to New Caledonia in the Pacific for her role in the short-lived Paris Commune, an insurrection brutally quashed in 1871. Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, a young Zulu king deemed a threat to British colonial interests, was dispatched almost two decades later to St Helena, the South Atlantic outpost where Napoleon Bonaparte had been held.
Mr Atkins visits New Caledonia, St Helena and Sakhalin on his travels, weaving together a layered portrait of the exiles’ personalities, back stories and interests. He shows that, like Ovid, they contended with sorrow and heartache. But they also found new hobbies to pass the time: Michel became an enthusiastic botanist, Dinuzulu learned the piano and Shternberg began to study indigenous cultures.
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