With their memories perpetually on overload, exiles see double, feel double, are double. When exiles see one place they're also seeing – or looking for – another behind it. Everything bears two faces, everything is shifty, because everything is mobile, the point being that exile, like love, is not just a condition of pain, it's a condition of deceit … exiles can be supremely mobile, and they can be totally dislodged from their original orbit, but in this jittery state of transience, they are thoroughly stationary

I sometimes think I envy those people who know where they belong; writers who have a language and a history that is granted them with no catches, no hooks … Along with a nation of willing accomplices, compatriots who see their own fate and that of their nation's history and literary tradition reflected in the mirror of the writer's labor. It is all so neatly sewn up. Of course, I enjoy no such privilege. I belong to that nomad tribe, the great unwashed, those people born in the joins between continental shelves, in the unclaimed interstices between time zones, strung across latitudes. A tribe of no fixed locus, the homeless, the stateless. I have two passports and quite a variety of other documents to identify me, all of which tell the world where I have been, but not who I am, nor where I am going to. My language is a bastard tongue of necessity, improvisation, bad grammar and continual misunderstandings. I am a stranger wherever I go. (Mahjoub 2004: 4–5)

When in 1940 I decided to switch to English, my difficulty was that previous to this, for more than fifteen years, I was writing in Russian and during all these years I left my own personal imprint on this instrument of mine, my facilitator.