E(xilic)ncounters

Loulwah Kutbi

"Friends
I grow more convinced
that the poem
can only ever be
a dialogue
made of live flesh and sound
that stares you straight in the eyes
even if the poem has to cross
the cold wasted of distance
to finally reach you"

— Letter to My Friends Overseas (1980), Abdellatif Laâbi

Encountering cultural memory through the entrails of links, open access archives, and the proliferation of "archival fever(s)" allows us to grasp how the abstraction of its figure(s) is now in perpetual manipulation, particularly when looking at the representation of home or the homeland through digital media, mediation and digital archival impulses. Exile is polyvalent; it splinters subjectivity and spacetime and usually begins at "home", the origin of deterritorialisation. The concept of belonging is thrown into flux when we ponder exilic art. The exilic is a state shaped by subalternity, by a traumatism from an encounter with forces of modernity, that shapes an Other through national exceptionalism, sketched through the sacrifice of community and solidarity towards self-interested subjectivism, limited by Cartesian conceptions of the self.