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Exile

from Gift by Ana Silvera

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about

=== Liner Notes ===

Exile

This song was a commission from BBC Radio 3's 'The Verb' show, in response to an anthology called "The Language of Leaving" compiled by André Naffis-Sahely. It was inspired by a line from a poem in this anthology entitled, 'The World Grows Blackthorn Walls' by Iranian poet Sholeh Wolpé:

I carry seeds in my mouth, plant / turmeric, cardamom, and tiny /aromatic cucumbers in this garden, /water them with rain I wring /from my grandmother’s songs. / They will grow, I know, against these blackthorn walls. / They can push through anything, uncut.

As I considered this commission, I thought about the different kinds of exile that there are – the importance of distinguishing between them and naming them. Because in the act of naming, we transform the strange into the familiar and in many ways, familiarity is the wellspring of empathy

The first kind of exile is the most common vision, a refugee - in Hannah Arendt’s words, the ‘rightless’ person - who has to leave their land because of war or persecution and can never return.

Or if they do eventually return, their home is bombed out of all existence – they become a stranger in their own land. And that’s a second form of exile – when a person's internal psychic geography of a town, a village, a landscape called 'home', with all the meaningful memories and moments that a place holds, no longer has a physical analogue or reality. A vital thread is broken between the past and the present.

Then there’s an internal state of exile – the kind you get in mental crisis. In the language of psychoanalysis I guess you’d talk about parts of the self that have been exiled and need to be reclaimed. It’s an inner-odyssey. Edward Said talks about the ‘crippling sorrow of estrangement’ that someone in exile feels and I think that’s applicable to self as well. In my own experience of my brother suffering from a severe form of schizophrenia (to use that blunt, unspecific term from psychiatry): I think one of the hardest things about that experience is the loss of a collective, coherent memory of our shared past and the sudden break in what you assume will be a continuous narrative. Now when I return to my childhood home, I feel like an exile, like I’m walking among ghosts. It’s the mirror image of the bombed-out country – the physical analogue still exists, but the psychic geography of it is full of disturbance, severances and distortions.

Amidst all these versions of exile, the creative act is its own snail shell, a home that can be grown and carried . An artist, whether nomadic or exiled, is never truly rootless. Because there is always the potential and capacity to forge our own world through words, image, stories, song.

lyrics

I carry these seeds in my mouth
Hawthorn, oak and hazel
I’ll bury them deep in the ground
As soon as I am able

I carried the weight of the world,
Myself, my worst accuser -
So I set it down on the earth
And fled into my future

And I met a sage in a roadside cafe
He was only passing time -
He said "Lucky’s the man
who roams his own land
but the stranger’s blessed twice”

I carry these seeds in my palm
They change and they reveal me
They bloom and they soften to scars
Each day I bind them newly

And I’ll raise a glass after dark
To the night, my sole companion
I’ll dive in her river of stars
My worries all abandoned -

And if my heart was tinderwood
You’d burn it up with ease
This flame who's revelation - love -
can still bring me to my knees

I carry these seeds in my mouth
As soon as I am able
I’ll bury them deep in the ground
I’ll bury them deep in the ground

credits

from Gift, released December 26, 2020
Vocals and harmonium - Ana Silvera
Recorded by Ana Silvera, mixed by Gerry Diver.

Album photo by Matt Hensby
Track photo by Alice Williamson

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Ana Silvera London, UK

'Stunning...magical storytelling' -The Guardian

Ana Silvera is a London-born singer- songwriter and composer whose folk and bluegrass-tinged tunes are lyrical, intimate and emotive, works of ‘lavish, vivid imagination’ (Metro). ... more

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