Can we finish with exile? "The shawl" by Cynthia Ozick. Can we finish with exile? Exile, from the old French essil, which comes from the Latin exsillum, means the expelling of someone from his/her homeland and the forbidding to return. It's the enforcement to living out of a place, away from someone whose absence is mourned. In the novel The Shawl, by the American novelist Cynthia Ozick, the baby's shawl can be drunk as if it was liquid, as if one were a baby, one's own child. We cannot leave once and forever our condition of infans, that which doesn't speak. There's no lost paradise from where we were exiled - our childhood, for instance.

homeland Shawl Exile child Infantile

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