Anywhere but home

Prasenjit Chowdhury takes a look at writers in exile (link courtesy Partha--thanks):

Taslima’s bind is hardly unprecedented. Gao Xingjian, the Nobel-winning Chinese writer said, “A writer relies on language and not to speak for a prolonged period is the same as suicide.” The writer seeking to avoid being silenced is left with no option but exile. This has always been so: from Qu Yuan to Dante, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and to the many Chinese intellectuals who went into exile after the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. There are writers who have been accused of being traitors because they left their homelands, from Joseph Conrad to Gabriel García Marquez to Gunther Grass to Mario Vargas Llosa. Gao himself lived in exile in France for 14 years.