Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

There are certain places whose fate is to live only in the elusive language of the literary text; nevertheless, their memory, however utterly subjective it might be, is still able to generate a whole history and mythology that shape reality, a reality in a way quixotically mediated by allegiance to the written text. The layers of memory and exile are deep in al-Andalus, which started by being a place of exile for all the children of Abraham and ended in a terrible experience of loss and desolation that left an indelible mark on the collective memory of her exiled inhabitants. In order to understand how the stubbornly individual memory deals with the experience of exile and translates it into literature, the paper focuses on the articulation of exile motifs in the texture of poetic language, as well as on the reconstruction of lost or vanishing contexts in the same medium. The disintegration of the Umayyad Caliphate marked the beginning of an endless cycle of uprooting and exiles “within one’s own country” and, as people became more and more lost and alienated within her geographical borders, al-Andalus was doomed to fictional survival, and she found herself in the Foucaultian heterotopic mirror of a poetry that makes the absent context dramatically present and strives to build up a “memory palace”, pointing at a forever nostalgic and problematic return.