self-exile

English

Noun

self-exile (countable and uncountable, plural self-exiles)

1. (countable) A voluntary exile; One who chooses to leave their homeland or community.
   • 2004, Michael Hanne, Creativity in Exile - Volume 1, page 116:

     One source for the views of certain of these self-exiles is the newsletter of the Union of American Exiles, American Exile in Canada, published in Toronto for at least two years (1968 and 1969).

   • 2011, Scott Lyall -, Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid, page 137:

     Indeed, in looking to Pound, Eliot and Stein, self-exiles all, he looks more to London and Paris than across the ocean.

   • 2019, Katharina P. Coleman, Markus Kornprobst, Annette Seegers, Diplomacy and Borderlands:

     Camara looked at written works from Guinean exiles, self-exiles, and political prisoners, and listed several types of these opponents of the ruling Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG), namely people leaving after having committed economic and financial crimes against the state;

2. (uncountable) The state of voluntary exile; The condition of choosing to leave one's homeland or community.
   • 2000, Laurence L. Bongie, Sade: A Biographical Essay, page 212:

     Self-exile to a convent residence was the traditionally dignified solution for an injured wife of her class.

   • 2001, Anthony J. LaVopa, Fichte: The Self and the Calling of Philosophy, 1762-1799, page 298:

     He did not return to his "great idea" until the summer of 1795, when his self-exile in Osmannstadt freed him from the day-to-day demands of lecturing and allowed him to devote several months to preparing a new course on natural law.

   • 2007, Ralph J. Hexter, “Ovid and the Medieval Exilic Imaginary,”, in Jan Felix Gaertner, editor, Writing Exile: The Discourse of Displacement in Greco-Roman Antiquity and Beyond, page 209:

     Through the twentieth century we—the 'we' of the 'civilized world'—have often associated the exile or expulsion of artists with totalitarian regimes; likewise we regarded self-exile, voluntary exile in other words, as tarnishing the reputation of the abandoned country rather than that of the courageous artist who fled repression and censorship.

   • 2009, John Neubauer, Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, The Exile and Return of Writers from East-Central Europe:

     Like him, we ask when political suppression becomes so unbearable that self-exile remains the only self-defense, and we believe, like him, that no hard-and-fast rules can be established for this, partly because we usually have only the evidence given by the exiled person, which is subjectively experienced and may change with time.

3. (uncountable) Isolation from the world; A retreat from involvement with one's environment.
   • 1998, Eileen Chang, Ailing Zhang, The Rice Sprout Song, page xi:

     Chang's self-exile, however, aroused rather than thwarted her readers' desire; and they consumed anecdotes and hearsay about her life as eagerly as they did any of her works.

   • 2005, Carolyn A. Becker, Domingo A. Mercante: A Democrat in the Shadow of Perón and Evita:

     He resolved that this would be his last appearance on the political stage. Following his return to Buenos Aires, Mercante entered what his friend Rudolfo Decker would later describe as a period of “self-exile,” a self-imposed abstention from politics that would last until his death.

   • 2016, Kaptan Singh, Women in Exile and Alienation, page 78:

     Such an imposed isolation leads her to live in a cold and affectionless environment of self-exile and alienation.

4. (uncountable) A separation or alienation from ones inner self.
   • 2008, John T Hamilton, Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language, page 91:

     The autobiographical gesture, writing the word “I,” is a move into self-exile or even self-extinction.

   • 2011, Sarah Beckwith, Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness, page 9:

     Part of the crisis and difficulty in this understanding is that we lose sense of ourselves and our communities together, in one and the same movement of self-exile from shared words and shared expressions.

   • 2017, John Martis, Subjectivity as Radical Hospitality, page 22:

     Because of the entailment of an existent “home,” corollary to any declaration of exile, “self-exile,” at best, in establishing nonlocation, establishes simultaneously location (or relocation) of the subject thus dislocated.

Verb

self-exile (third-person singular simple present self-exiles, present participle self-exiling, simple past and past participle self-exiled)

1. To go into self-exile.
   • 2008, Cecilio D. Duka, Struggle for Freedom, page 154:

     The agreement provided that Aguinaldo and his officers and men would self-exile abroad; Primo de Rivera will pay the rebels ₱800,000.00 in three installments until all the rebel soldiers would have surrendered; amnesty would be given to all those who would surrender; and an additional ₱900,000.00 would be paid by the Spanish government to the Filipino civilians and their families who were affected by the conflict.

   • 2010, Amadou Sambou, African Rural Darkness, page 60:

     If noticed, some will self-exile and accuse the government wrongfully without adequate reasons and are never extradited to face the justice against the crime they have committed and will be seen as African self-exiles (ASE).

   • 2015, David Kalat, The Strange Case of Dr. Mabuse:

     How odd that Mabuse scampers off to South America to establish his new life, where the Nazis would self-exile themselves at the end of the war.