What is this blog all about ?

This blog is about exile (voluntary and involontary). 

About being away from your roots, your family. About leaving and (never ?) going back. 

Since the dawn of time, more or less large parts of a population have been displaced, at the mercy of natural disasters, wars, laws and edicts, calls from the sea etc. The reasons for leaving one's country can be multiple, and the life one led before and after could be very similar or very different. In any case, emigration is an experience common to many people, experiencing the same stages of (in) adaptation.

It is almost 10 years since I live abroad (in France, in my case), and I wanted to explore this very disparate community I am part of: the group of Romanian women and men who left their country at a certain point and who came back or are still living abroad. With that being said, I do not exclude, in this quest, going towards much more general considerations on what is exile, (in)adaptation to the host culture(s), relying on testimonials or theorizations on these themes.

To embody this personal quest, I rely on 2 symbols that accompanied my own departure from Romania, and 1 that I rediscovered recently, linking together the first 2 :


1°  The boat - No, I did not go to France by boat. But I left often reciting 2 verses of a poem of a Greek poet born in Alexandria, Egypt – an exiled himself : “As you set out for Ithaka / hope the voyage is a long one,
/full of adventure, full of discovery.”

2° The tree  - When I left, I took with me a picture a tree under which I noted a quote from a book whose name I cannot remember: “if you have to leave, take your roots with you”. That's not exactly what I did, but let's move on. And building a boat needs trees. A way of bringing one's roots with oneself when looking for Ithaca..

3° The “Zburator” or “The Flying man” – this symbol reunites the previous ones. You might remember the “Flying Dutchman” myth (it is actually a boat), used by Wagner in an opera. Well, when talking about ghosts, Romanians are pretty strong, and in that area, let me introduce to you “The Flyer”, a Romanian folklore roving spirit who has inspired one of the most beautiful Romanian poems, “The Night Star” (Luceafarul).

Romania is all about exile, roots and myths.

I want to show you how. 

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