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UAEM Invites Notable Writers to Speak on Exile

Exile is a nightmare from which the affected never awaken, it is a heart-wrenching and demolishing reality that affects everyone, it is truly a disgrace and humiliation, agreed writers Mohsen Emadi from Iran; Eduardo Milán from Uruguay and Philippe Ollé-Laprune, from France.

Speaking on exile in during the program “April, Month of Reading,” from the Autonomous University of the State of Mexico (UAEM), the authors stated that “exile does not kill writers, it silences them!” In exile, they expressed, there is nostalgia, rupture, a world left behind, but also enrichment.

At the event held at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of the UAEM, they considered that Mexico had grown greatly with the arrival of exiles: Jewish, Palestinian, Spanish, Chileans, Uruguayans, among others. They indicated that Spanish exiles, for example, founded the best editorials in the country and with it strengthened the academic work in the country.

Eduardo Milán — Uruguayan poet, essayist and critic based in Mexico — underlined that in the country, as in all over the world, the exercise of authoritarianism by certain power structures, the submission of populations, are still current.

The author also added that the most illuminating book on the idiosyncrasy of Mexican literature was not written by Octavio Paz, Revueltas or Carlos Fuentes, but by the French writer, translator and editor Philippe Ollé-Laprune, titled “Mexico: visiting the dream” published in 2011 by the Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Educardo Milán pointed out that it was “a book that touches on something essential in Mexican literature, that cannot be read in the great Mexican writers and critics because they are too close to it, they are part of the phenomenon and to see it you need a great distance.”