Life & Wisdom Quote by Peter Bichsel

There is a sly sting in Bichsel's phrasing: people do not merely allow poets to go into exile; they rush to "obligate" them there, as if banishment were part of the job description. The line exposes a cozy cultural habit in the bourgeois West as much as in censorious states: we like our writers distressed, displaced, and legible. Exile turns an unruly artist into a familiar type - the conscience on a suitcase, the moral witness with a stamp in his passport. It is politically flattering, too. If the poet is elsewhere, we can applaud their courage without letting their words metabolize into local responsibility.

The odd little hedge "as it were" matters. Bichsel is warning you that the mechanism is often informal, dressed up as concern or respect. Nobody has to issue an edict. A publisher hints that the "real" book will be the one written from afar; journalists ask the same tired questions about homeland and loss; audiences expect the poet to speak in the register of trauma. Even freedom can become a script: you may write anything, as long as it's your exile.

Bichsel, a Swiss writer suspicious of grand poses and heroic narratives, is poking at the romantic myth of the suffering poet. The subtext is an ethical rebuke: when a culture needs poets to be exiles, it's not just persecutors at work. It's consumers, too, turning displacement into a credential and distance into entertainment.