"Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer"
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Exile, here, isn’t being romanticized as the novelist’s glamorous wound; it’s being filed as paperwork. Cabrera Infante’s “Well” lands like a shrug that’s really a snarl: the weary preface of someone tired of having his life turned into a metaphor by critics, enemies, and even sympathizers. He refuses the heroic posture of the dissident artist and insists on something colder and more damning: exile is a condition imposed from outside, then internalized because it has to be. “I have no choice” is the key phrase. It’s not lament so much as diagnosis.
The sentence performs the trap it describes. The logic is circular by design: if you can’t return, you are exiled; if you are exiled, your work is read through that lens whether you want it or not. “See myself” signals the psychic cost - identity becomes compliance. Not with a regime, but with a category. Once the state bars the body, language gets drafted into the border control too.
For Cabrera Infante, a Cuban writer who broke with the Revolution and spent decades abroad, exile wasn’t just geography; it was an ongoing argument about who gets to claim “Cuban” as a cultural property. The line also contains a quiet rebuke to the literary marketplace that fetishizes exile as brand value. He’s saying: don’t confuse my subject with my strategy. I’m not writing “from exile” to sound interesting; I’m writing because the door is locked, and the only way left to inhabit the country is to reconstruct it on the page.
The sentence performs the trap it describes. The logic is circular by design: if you can’t return, you are exiled; if you are exiled, your work is read through that lens whether you want it or not. “See myself” signals the psychic cost - identity becomes compliance. Not with a regime, but with a category. Once the state bars the body, language gets drafted into the border control too.
For Cabrera Infante, a Cuban writer who broke with the Revolution and spent decades abroad, exile wasn’t just geography; it was an ongoing argument about who gets to claim “Cuban” as a cultural property. The line also contains a quiet rebuke to the literary marketplace that fetishizes exile as brand value. He’s saying: don’t confuse my subject with my strategy. I’m not writing “from exile” to sound interesting; I’m writing because the door is locked, and the only way left to inhabit the country is to reconstruct it on the page.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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