Exilic Meditations: Essays on a Displaced Life

The six reflections and conceptualizations of Exilic Mediations explore the relationship between exile and emigration, the (im-)possibility of return, accent and foreignness, multiculturalism and sovereignty, trauma and memory, and a life lived poetically in an unhomely world. Situated subtly between reflections on personal experiences and post-Heideggerian philosophy, these exilic meditations show how a life lived as an exile enables a journey into the very concepts that we hold so dear to our hearts: home, belonging, justice, and the future. Vahabzadeh wishes to find a place where the singular experiences of the exiles and emigrants can be heard. This requires, he argues, a poetic life-one of creative responses to the very conditions of injustice, a life of making and crafting a new world. Exilic Meditations calls for attending to the common wounds of the banished and marginalized, displaced and abandoned, exiles and refugees, in these inhospitable times of ours.