Love, Banishment and Identity

Where do we begin when it comes to an issue as complex as a person’s identity, the sense by which he gathers purposes and meanings in life with respect to his various communities? For most of us, identity is complex enough when it forces us to make critical choices in life at the Archimedean point when allegiance to one’s beliefs is necessarily a denial of another.

Nothing illuminates this tragic-heroic dilemma more than the lives of intellectual/ political exiles, who in one way or another, are forced to leave their homeland because they threaten to reveal truths greater than what their own fellow men could grasp.

Nothing is perhaps more self-sacrificial than the person who is incapable of banishing himself to without, because of a peculiar and deeply rooted passion for someone who you are beginning to understand, and whom you are beginning to identity with. Stay, because nothing reaches the core of understanding one’s self more powerfully than the other who has become the invariable of all causes that are in constant flux.

Nothing is therefore more tragic-heroic than he who has become an exile from within, because while there are no more reasons for him to be loyal to an opportunistic society that endorses and stigmatizes him at once, the singular hope of him being rescued from civil death is to cling on to the motif of forbidden love; the lyrical travel-experiences that speaks of a nexus of coincidences and chance impressions, none inexplicable but many indefinably enigmatic.

(My own musings after watching an alfian sa'at play yesterday)