Exiles

Exile or ex-pat? What is the difference in any case? As is not uncommon the dictionary definitions yield no obvious differences although the day to day social meanings are quite another thing. There is something pejorative and provincial about the ex-pat for me and something romantic and creative, possibly even slightly dangerous, about the exile. Joyce and Beckett were exiles -self imposed exiles. The dour memsahibs who were the backbone of the Raj - the British occupation of India - were ex-pats as are the middle aged men from the north of England whose livelihoods were taken away from them by Thatcher's close down of the north, and who now work in Saudi Iron and Steel for the mighty Real. And there I suppose is the nub of it - the difference that is. Exile, or ex-pat, I am not talking here about unwilling separation from ones homeland.

We left our birthplace, not because we were disenchanted with it. not because we were looking to set up a little England, not because we had to, and not simply because it would be cheaper to live here rather than in London although the last mentioned is certainly true. We were not running from anything - we were moving toward and hopefully into something that we loved and not just the scenery (I'm with Huysmans on landscape and such) and the climate, wonderful though they are. Ex-pats here, on the other hand, love the scenery (at the same time as their estate developments spoil the very scenery that they profess to love) and the climate whilst a great number of them do not actually seem to like the people or the ways of life. They also love the fact that their money buys so much more here than it would at "home" whilst ignoring the very real distortions that it produces on the local economy.

Now "home" is an interesting ex-pat sentiment. Ex-pats never give up on their birthplace as home: never take on their chosen place as home. They take trips "back home" and often ask "when did you last go home?". People -often family -visit them from "home". Their lives in their adopted domicile and everything relating to it is compared to standards and norms "back home". There is a strange dualism that operates in ex-pats: many have left "home" because they had serious objections to what it had become or was becoming and yet they constantly use it and its ways as the measuring stick for everything in their new place of residence. In fact many of them seem to spend a lot of their time complaining either about how things here are not done in the same way as they are "at home" and at the same time running down "home" for all that they perceive as wrong with it. They live daily with a very real dichotomy: constantly attempting to construct a simulacrum of "home" in a foreign land that they supposedly love and that will be changed irrevocably should they succeed and that is damaged irreparably in the attempt, and that is where my carping reference to neo-colonialism comes from. If these people succeed in making this place a home from home will destroy it - or at least will destroy their part of it.

We, on the other hand, simply and gratefully. accept the otherness and the beauty of the people and the place. We chose this place to live in as it is and not to change it to suit ourselves and our social and cultural prejudices. We chose these people and their ways and we live deep amongst them - not in some peripheral, exclusive, ghetto. We accept, and we try to understand but to the ex-pats we have "gone native". We cannot and do not want to be Cretan. In the same way that Joyce and Beckett lived abroad, lived the French life, and remained intrinsically Irish, Beckett even wrote in French eventually. so we remain English while living the Greek/Cretan life. We are English living in Crete but we are not ex-pats.

This is not the piece that I was talking about writing but there was some interest in how we saw ourselves as different from the ex-pats and this is a sketch of what it means to us. The effects of the influx of the cheap money that ex-pats bring with them is the subject for another blog.