Very Far from the Homeland

Beginning with Edward Said's 1984 milestone "Reflections on Exile," this essay argues that exile remains the political problem of our time. Stretching back to Hannah Arendt's and Simone Weil's writings of the mid-twentieth century, forward through the long history of the dispossession of the Palestinian people, to the present, the essay turns to contemporary readings of the Iliad to make the case that at the heart of the violence of forced exile is the question of human community.