In Parallel With My Actual Diary: On Re-writing an Exile

Abstract

How can the production of migratory texts provide social and political agency for migrants? My starting point for investigating connections between literary acts of resistance and literal acts of resistance is in fact multiple: the discontinuous pathways of exile. In re-drafting Walter Benjamin’s seven-year exile from Paris to Lourdes, Lourdes to Marseilles, Marseilles to Port-Vendres, Port-Vendres to Portbou, ‘In Parallel With My Actual Diary’ also re-evaluates the xenophobic culture of the European cities that we each traverse, bridging gaps between 1940 and today to shed light on the often undocumented microhistories of migration and the dead end of diaspora: the largest human displacement since the Second World War. In my endeavour to converge past and present, I collage letters written by Benjamin during his exile; scenes of departure culled from interviews, photographic evidence, and testimonies; reportage of political and social upheaval in Europe in the summer of 2017; and finally, my own letters, written to Walter as I read him back. The goal of re-writing Benjamin’s exile as epistolary essay is to engender empathy, while forming parallels between his piecemeal, processual, itinerant (and unfinished) Arcades Project and the migratory–collaborative, anonymous, transmedial–texts produced by displaced persons today.