Exiles: Three Island Journeys

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A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor. In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment – Michel’s New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulu’s St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternberg’s Sakhalin off the Siberian coast – in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home. In this era of virtually unprecedented mass movements of people, it seemed to me that there was no better time to try to understand what it means to be removed from the place you call home. I became interested in three late-nineteenth-century political exiles and the islands to which they were banished – a Zulu king, Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, who was exiled to St Helena in the South Atlantic; a French radical, Louise Michel, who was exiled to New Caledonia in the South Pacific; and a Ukrainian revolutionary, Lev Shternberg, who was exiled to Sakhalin, off the coast of Siberia. I read stories, a collage of stories if you like, but I wasn’t sure if they would create a bigger picture, something more than their passing impression. Atkins spins a marvellous tapestry of colourful tales, beautifully weaving history and travel accounts.'

It got worse. Michel was sent to New Caledonia, a French colony ill-at-ease with itself and with a brutally oppressed native population. Dinuzulu was stranded on Saint Helena – the same bleak South Atlantic islet Napoleon died on. Shternberg was immured on the “last refuge of the unshot”, Sakhalin island, in Siberia’s frozen east. All three could well have died. That was expected. Exile the noun is predicate on exile the verb. It’s always something done; something done to you. The powers that banished Michel, Shternberg and Dinuzulu had several names – Britain, France, Russia – of which only one really matters: empire. This is the story of three unheralded nineteenth-century dissidents, whose lives were profoundly shaped by the winds of empire, nationalism and autocracy that continue to blow strongly today: Louise Michel, a leader of the radical socialist government known as the Paris Commune; Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, an enemy of British colonialism in Zululand; and Lev Shternberg, a militant campaigner against Russian tsarism. Dinizulu kaCetshwayo was exiled from his kingdom of Zululand to St Helena (Atlantic) in 1890, after resisting the British (and Boer) encroachment of his country. When he returned to Africa, Zululand had been partitioned into smaller kingdoms, and when resistance to the British appropriation of land arose, he was held responsible and exiled within South Africa. Overall, an interesting read, but impressionistic, a collage allowing you to come to your own conclusions about exile, although Atkins indicates his own views. The book is top and tailed by broader thoughts about modern migrants, but although well meaning, these sections are dislocated from the main discussion of exiles, weakening the book. Each of his subjects felt that tension keenly; each suffered a painful collision between their desires and the insensate demands of state and law: the catch and pull of history on the make. Michel saw the streets of Paris run red with blood when the Commune was suppressed in the semaine sanglante , the “bloody week”. Dinuzulu witnessed the end of his kingdom: Zululand was politically and spiritually dismembered by the British empire. Shternberg, a socialist Jew in tsarist Russia, endured brutal political repression alongside the lifelong threat of antisemitic violence.

These nineteenth century political exiles have differing responses to their exile, although they all physically survive to return to their original homes, although these places have changed. Atkins travels to all three places of exile, which all remain remote, and provides us with his impressions and descriptions of his chance encounters, trying to get closer to feelings his subjects must have felt. These are interesting and the strongest part of the book for me. Atkins’s subjects defied expectations; defied, in a sense, exile itself. Shternberg invents modern anthropology; Dinuzulu reinvents kingship. Michel goes further, dreaming of a time when exile, a tool of oppression, could become the sign and seedbed of liberation. She imagined building a house of exiles, a universal asylum for the dispossessed and the refugee. It would be built in London, where, she said, “my banished friends are always welcome”. We’ve come a long way; we’re still a long way from home. Atkins – whose first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and whose second, The Immeasurable World, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year – explores issues of colonialism and nationalism, freedom and nostalgia, while the personal grief he experiences during the research and writing process underscores a vein of melancholy that runs through the book. On his visits to the three islands, Atkins examines the impact of forced displacement on Dinuzulu, Shternberg and Michel, as well as on the communities that received them. He also weaves in contemporary issues: an independence referendum on New Caledonia, life in a present-day prison on St Helena, the plight of the indigenous Nivkhi people, ejected from their homeland during the 19th century and now hemmed in by oil towns on Sakhalin.

Lev Shternberg was exiled for being a socialist agitator from Moscow to Sakhalin (in the Sea of Okhotsk, Northern Pacific) in 1889. He studied the customs of the indigenous Nivkh people, which formed the basis for his ethnographic studies. Louise Michel took part in the 1870 Paris Commune revolt against the restored monarchy and was exiled from Paris to New Caledonia (Pacific) in 1873. The island had been occupied by the Kanaks until French colonialism used the island as a penal colony, gradually moving the Kanaks off their land, claiming it as “owned” by the colonists. Atkins visits in 2018 when a referendum is being held as to whether New Caledonia will become independent from France, doomed as the French colonists now outnumber the original Kanaks. Empire took Michel, Dinuzulu and Shternberg from their homes. Atkins identifies a subtler, more radical dislocation at work, too: empire took home from them. A people uprooted are a people undone; disquieted, doubtful, easy to control. The movement of exile – the movement of empire – carries us away from ourselves. Exile’s strongest moments are worked out in the shadow of this insight: a present-day fete on Saint Helena, lit by the half-life glow of the sun that never set; the crude commercialism and dying machines of post-Soviet Sakhalin; New Caledonia, still a colony, still ill-at-ease. The exiles outlasted their exile. But empire outlasted both. I began to think I had been wrong: the main cause of our unhappiness was not loneliness, as I had always believed, but a desire to be somewhere else. It occurred to me that the lives of an earlier kind of displaced person, political deportees sent to a designated location, could show me things that accounts of migrancy, banishment or confinement alone could not: about the word ‘home’, and the behaviour of empires, and the conflict between leaving and staying that seems to animate the world.What connects French anarchist Louise Michel, Zulu prince Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo and Ukrainian revolutionary Lev Shternberg? Each of them was exiled to a remote island at the height of European colonialism. Each of them sacrificed freedom and home to larger ideas of freedom and home. The ‘imperial exile’ suffered by Dinuzulu, Shternberg and Michel is rarely used today, but Atkins notes that penal colonies and the desire to ‘insulate the metropole against “undesirable’ elements”’ persist, from the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay to the British government’s plan to send people seeking asylum to Rwanda.

View over St Helena looking out to sea Exiles is a thoughtful and perceptive exploration of the banished throughout history Occupying the fertile zone where history, biography and travel writing meet, Exiles is a masterpiece of imaginative empathy. By 1914 all of the Pacific and almost all of Africa had been colonised, and one of the tools of that vast occupation was penal expatriation. Whether they were common convicts or political dissidents, exiles were rarely just prisoners; they were at once machines for extracting wealth from foreign soil and flags planted in that soil. Deportation and coerced settlement have always been part of the arsenal of empire – even Ovid, banished to the edge of the Roman world, appreciated that he was not merely an exile but a ‘colonist of a troubled frontier post’. Sometimes the colonised and the exiled found common cause. During the ‘Kanak Insurrection’, for instance, Louise Michel, banished to New Caledonia for life, was able to see the islands’ indigenous people as allies with a common foe: a French colonial government that viewed the Communards and the Kanaks alike as different species of barbarian to be tamed.Atkins spins a marvellous tapestry of colourful tales, beautifully weaving history and travel accounts.’ In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment - Michel's New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulu's St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternberg's Sakhalin off the Siberian coast - in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home. Faber is to publish a luminous exploration of exile from William Atkins, the award-winning author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor.