Exile According to Julia: The Essence of Home

Gisele Pineau’s novel Exile According to Julia is all about a sense of belonging, of home. As this novel demonstrates, home is not always a place: sometimes it is a person. For the young narrator of this story home is embodied in her grandmother Julia (affectionately called Man Ya). This is a story of immigration, exile, alienation, and of discovery of home and self. The novel details Man Ya’s ‘exile’ from her home in Guadalupe to Paris to live with the narrator and her family. Depressed and constantly longing for home, Man Ya eventually returns to Guadalupe leaving the narrator and family bereft. After her departure, the narrator continuously writes to Man Ya as years go by. She never responds. Eventually the family returns to Guadalupe to be with Man Ya. The novel ends with Julia sharing her Guadalupe with her grandchildren, climbing trees, gardening, and laughing. The time that the narrator spent with her grandmother had a profound impact on her life. Julia was her teacher, her connection to her Caribbean ancestry, and her home.

Man Ya strives to set an example for her grandchildren while in Paris. She felt that her grandchildren “who are growing up there, in the prison of these concrete houses, [were] surely losing the way to good sense, wandering about so far from the essence of life”, and thus she would help them to find their way (94). In the section “Training” the narrator lists the qualities that Man Ya taught her: obedience, politeness, truth, work, entertainment (79-80). Man Ya taught the children about things that were outside of their Parisian paradigm, in which “[r]eading, writing, arithmetic, represent the holy trinity in the pantheon of knowledge” (80). Though the narrator felt that there was a lot that she need...

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...mesick Man Ya “possesses that power too” and will one night disappear (52). Though there is a lot more to be extrapolated from this passage, one thing it certainly does is paint Julia to be this kind of powerful, mystical figure. Then again, in the section “Deliverance”, after Julia has left and the narrator is writing her letters this depiction is seen again. The narrator says that she is “writing Julia’s tales and legends” (106). She writes about how Julia is “delivering lost souls pledged to the devil, undoing Br’er Rabbit’s tricks, restoring riches and confidence to the black man, the power of speech to dogs . . .” (106). Such a depiction of her grandmother shows that the narrator truly looked up to her grandmother, that she was a powerful figure in her life. Man Ya taught the narrator to be strong and courageous in facing life’s challenges including racism.