Feeding on Dreams: Confessions of an Unrepentant Exile (review)

[...]my literature has been constructed out of an incessant struggle not to take that freedom for granted and, simultaneously, to understand the uncertainty not as a curse (as it first appears when everything around you in a foreign land feels alien and the ground is shifting under your very feet) but as a challenge. [...]very slowly, exile "scoured" me (I use the exact word from the memoir), made me hit bottom, forced me to scrape despair as if it were rust-and only then was I ready for a rebirth that has, I hope, never ceased and that culminates, in some sense, in this memoir and in its prequel, Heading South, Looking North, both of them a way of fathoming how to survive while far from home, both of them not lying about the price we may have to pay for that survival. A3: For many years, I thought that being bilingual was a disadvantage; something that made me so double (and perhaps even duplicitous) that it blocked my political activism.\n But this pluralism does not extend to morality, where we must be careful not to succumb to the virus of relativism, which is all too often defined as joined to cosmopolitanism.