Exiles: Three Island Journeys

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View over St Helena looking out to sea Exiles is a thoughtful and perceptive exploration of the banished throughout history

Combining biography, history and travel writing, Exiles focuses on three 19th-century dissidents and the far-flung islands to which they were banished. In 1889, Zulu king Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, a staunch opponent of British colonialism in his homeland, was convicted of ‘high treason’ and sent to St Helena in the South Atlantic, where Napoleon Bonaparte had been exiled more than half a century earlier. The same year, Lev Shternberg, a militant campaigner against Russian tsarism, was banished to Sakhalin, ‘a large, sparsely populated, coal-rich island’ off the coast of Siberia. In 1873, Louise Michel, a leader of the Paris Commune, a radical socialist government in France, was charged with insurrection, fomenting civil war and murder – among other offences – and exiled to New Caledonia, a French territory in the South Pacific. The ‘imperial exile’ suffered by Dinuzulu, Shternberg and Michel is rarely used today, but Atkins notes that penal colonies and the desire to ‘insulate the metropole against “undesirable’ elements”’ persist, from the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay to the British government’s plan to send people seeking asylum to Rwanda. I began to think I had been wrong: the main cause of our unhappiness was not loneliness, as I had always believed, but a desire to be somewhere else. It occurred to me that the lives of an earlier kind of displaced person, political deportees sent to a designated location, could show me things that accounts of migrancy, banishment or confinement alone could not: about the word ‘home’, and the behaviour of empires, and the conflict between leaving and staying that seems to animate the world. William Atkins said: “‘Exile’ is a word that has haunted me all my adult life; this book is my attempt to grapple with its meanings, by following the journeys of three people I came to love and admire. I couldn’t be more delighted that Laura Hassan, Mo Hafeez and their brilliant colleagues at Faber are shepherding it into the world.”

These nineteenth century political exiles have differing responses to their exile, although they all physically survive to return to their original homes, although these places have changed.

Each of his subjects felt that tension keenly; each suffered a painful collision between their desires and the insensate demands of state and law: the catch and pull of history on the make. Michel saw the streets of Paris run red with blood when the Commune was suppressed in the semaine sanglante , the “bloody week”. Dinuzulu witnessed the end of his kingdom: Zululand was politically and spiritually dismembered by the British empire. Shternberg, a socialist Jew in tsarist Russia, endured brutal political repression alongside the lifelong threat of antisemitic violence. In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment - Michel's New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulu's St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternberg's Sakhalin off the Siberian coast - in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home.

Occupying the fertile zone where history, biography and travel writing meet, Exiles is a masterpiece of imaginative empathy.

I read stories, a collage of stories if you like, but I wasn’t sure if they would create a bigger picture, something more than their passing impression. Atkins – whose first book, The Moor, was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and whose second, The Immeasurable World, won the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year – explores issues of colonialism and nationalism, freedom and nostalgia, while the personal grief he experiences during the research and writing process underscores a vein of melancholy that runs through the book. On his visits to the three islands, Atkins examines the impact of forced displacement on Dinuzulu, Shternberg and Michel, as well as on the communities that received them. He also weaves in contemporary issues: an independence referendum on New Caledonia, life in a present-day prison on St Helena, the plight of the indigenous Nivkhi people, ejected from their homeland during the 19th century and now hemmed in by oil towns on Sakhalin.A luminous exploration of exile – the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit – from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor. In this era of virtually unprecedented mass movements of people, it seemed to me that there was no better time to try to understand what it means to be removed from the place you call home. I became interested in three late-nineteenth-century political exiles and the islands to which they were banished – a Zulu king, Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, who was exiled to St Helena in the South Atlantic; a French radical, Louise Michel, who was exiled to New Caledonia in the South Pacific; and a Ukrainian revolutionary, Lev Shternberg, who was exiled to Sakhalin, off the coast of Siberia.

In Exiles, William Atkins travels to their islands of banishment – Michel’s New Caledonia in the South Pacific, Dinuzulu’s St Helena in the South Atlantic, and Shternberg’s Sakhalin off the Siberian coast – in a bid to understand how exile shaped them and the people among whom they were exiled. In doing so he illuminates the solidarities that emerged between the exiled subject, on the one hand, and the colonised subject, on the other. Rendering these figures and the places they were forced to occupy in shimmering detail, Atkins reveals deeply human truths about displacement, colonialism and what it means to have and to lose a home.

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A luminous exploration of exile - the people who have experienced it, and the places they inhabit - from the award-winning travel writer and author of The Immeasurable World and The Moor.