The Exiled Mind—A Tale of Untold Trauma


"We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, and our ravages. But our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others."

Albert Camus

Jayasree Nair


The term 'exile' translates into separation, anguish, dislocation, loneliness, anxiety, depression, fear and what not.... Taking this into account, exile need not necessarily be a physical break-off from everything one is familiar with, or comfortable with. The psychological impact exile from one's own country and people can create has been much talked about and accepted. Exile is more traumatic at the purely mental level. You can be very much among the things you love and yet be an exile. You can be in your own country and yet be an exile. You can lie next to your beloved and still remain an exile.

The mind is a very intriguing part of the human system. It can destroy your sense of complacency in a second, and bring back that complacency with equal speed. This veritable bundle of fleeting thoughts very often takes absolute control of you, dissociating you from everything around you, pushing you into the depths of despair, anxiety, fear and everything negative. However, the irony rests in the fact that very often this is a kind of willing surrender or yielding to situations fabricated by oneself. But most individuals fail to realize or refuse to see that they have landed in this quicksand that is their own creation. I am referring to the thousands and thousands of human beings who have forced themselves to live the lives of exiles. You come across them in society, among people close to you, and those you hear about.

There are a number of stressors that individuals exiled from their native land commonly experience, social isolation being one of the most prominent among them. Suddenly you find yourself cut off from the social network you are familiar with and are at a loss, unable to communicate to those you meet in the new environment. Coupled with this is the loss of one’s social identity and the valued role one used to play. Then comes separation from loved ones; health problems, loneliness, psychological problems, bad memories and so on. Interestingly, all these are experienced by the individuals I have been talking about too. The difference however, is that while the geographically dislocated exiles might learn to adjust with the changed circumstances, the mentally exiled sink more and more into the depths of the ocean of despair.

I wish to highlight this kind of mental exile as represented by some of the immortal characters in the Shakespearean canon. The themes of exile and banishment are important in many plays of Shakespeare. It can be convincingly said that the psychological and physical experience of the refugee is beautifully represented in his plays. The bard has also thrown much light on the effect exile has on these characters-some become revengeful and full of hate towards those responsible for their exile, some develop a resigned attitude, some decide on fighting for their land and some others opt for self-exile, consequent mostly on a feeling of guilt and assuming responsibility for the situation.

Coming back to the issue of the exiled mind, one only needs to look at King Lear to realize with a shock how simple it is to impose self exile by one's own impulsive action. The haughty and powerful old king who is a victim of his own foolish action and a representative of many such doting individuals in this world is an exile in his own kingdom. His mental exile and madness follows his action of banishing his favorite daughter, Cordelia for the simple reason that she couldn’t bring herself to be insincere to him. Thus he is responsible for initiating a sequence of tragic events, at the end of which he senses that his wits have begun to turn.

An exile wandering the heath on a stormy night, it is pathetic to listen to Lear ask, "Where is this straw, my fellow?
The art of our necessities is strange,
That can make vile things precious."

Whether we call it haughtiness, or senile dementia, or foolishness, or tragic flaw, Lear is solely responsible for his physical and mental exile. Cut off from his dignified position as the almighty king, Lear starts inhabiting a world of his own; a world where the most common things assume the value of the most precious. His action brings retribution from which he has no escape-his Karma comes in search of him. When he hopes that he can once again reunite with his dearest daughter, ask for forgiveness, pray, sing and tell old tales and laugh at gilded butterflies, Fate takes her away from him. His mental trauma is such that it is as if he is being stretched out upon the rack of this tough world. As the character Kent in the play rightly remarks, it was a wonder that Lear "endured so long; He but usurp'd his life."

Yet another character in the Shakespearean repository that endures a traumatic isolation from her known world is Lady Macbeth. The outwardly authoritative figure comes across to us as a weak character at the mental level. Like Lear, she too forced herself into exile. Whether it was her wish to see her husband as king, or whether she cherished the title of queen, her heinous action brought forth the terrible outcomes. She appears to the audience as the very personification of cruelty who calls upon supernatural powers to unsex her so that she can commit the crime of killing King Duncan who had come as her guest, and was under her care. What more cruelty can one expect than what is portrayed in the words, "I have given suck, and know how tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, have pluck'd my nipple from his boneless gums, and dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn as you have done to this. "

Critical studies on Lady Macbeth introduces her as one already weak at heart, her mind is as frail as an egg. She is one who can be pleasant as a flower outwardly while nurturing the poison of the serpent deep within. However, after Macbeth murders the king, we see her control slipping away with each passing second, until at last she cannot bear the guilt anymore and falls headlong into the pit of mental illness, of course a consequence of her own action. Although she did not herself kill the king, her hands appear bloodstained to her and she develops the condition of obsessive compulsive neurosis, washing her hands again and again to remove the imaginary spot of blood, pathetically crying out that “all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Her condition is so terrible that as her doctor points out, it is "A great perturbation in nature, to receive at once the benefit of sleep and do the effects of watching!" Lady Macbeth is in a constant state of "slumbery agitation," from which there seems to be no escape.

The great moor Othello is another true to life character who falls from his rightful majestic position on account of the negative emotions of jealousy and suspicion. Othello too is a representative type, so many of his kind we see around us on a daily basis. While the issue of race and Othello as an outsider or the “other’ in the Venetian society is an important one in the plot, my concern is with the mental makeup of the moor. Othello is undoubtedly mentally isolated from others due to his color difference and cultural difference. That is also the reason why he falls easy prey to the manipulations of Iago, considering himself inferior to the Venetians and believing that his wife would deceive him. Othello’s tragedy is that he could not find anyone to whom he could open his mind.
From a state of mind when he declares, and doubts "Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul/But I do love thee! And when I love thee not, /Chaos is come again" he comes to a point when he says, "Why did I marry?" His mental decline and sense of isolation is conveyed when he utters confusedly,

I think my wife be honest and think she is not;
I think that thou art just and think thou art not.
I'll have some proof. Her name, that was as fresh
As Dian's visage, is now begrimed and black
As mine own face. If there be cords or knives,
Poison or fire or suffocating streams,
I'll not endure it. Would I were satisfied!"

Exile at both the physical and mental level is characterized by the feeling of inhabiting a strange world. The sights, sounds, experiences are all unnatural in the sense that they are different from what one is at home with. The Shakespearean figures pointed out here persuade one to think of the real reason for their tragedy. It all boils down to the mind-the mind can make or break an individual. As Camus stated, if each of us could successfully fight our negativities, not unleashing them into the world, this would have been a "brave new world." It is the large scale influx of negative emotions and feelings that poisons and weakens the human mind, making it vulnerable. Weak minds cross the fine line that divides sanity and insanity and pass into a land of no return. They inhabit the twilight zone, an unreal world where they are totally dislocated with no scope of relocation. When the writer in literary exile can at least try to give expression to her innermost thoughts and feelings in a world that is totally foreign to her, what can such real life characters do? Unequipped with the skills of language and expression, they go round and round in a vortex of their own creation. Do they deserve our sympathy?