Exile Without Arrival

Displacement, Memory, and Time in Lamentations

Bibliographic Data

ID24239167
AuthorsCathleen K Chopra-Mcgowan (0000-0001-8708-0733, Santa Clara University)
Year2026
Volume17
Issue10
Pages1231
Publication date2026-10-20
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel17101231
OpenAlexW7223052022
LanguageEN
References cited29

Studies of forced migration frequently privilege movement: departure from a homeland, passage across space, and the construction of life elsewhere. Recent work on forced (im)mobility has complicated this model by attending to those compelled to remain amid conditions of violence. Lamentations pushes this complication further. Although the book names Judah’s exile, it does not follow the deported population to Babylon. Instead, its poems remain oriented toward Jerusalem, where geographical continuity masks the destruction of the relationships and practices through which place and communal time are produced. Bringing Lamentations into conversation with scholarship on displacement, relational place, migration temporality, and cultural memory, this essay argues that the book constructs displacement as the transformation of place and the rupture of temporal continuity through the interruption of cultic recurrence, the destruction of institutions’ ability to reproduce communal life, and the insecurity of inheritance and generational continuity. The poems formally stage the same disruption: memory preserves the world preceding catastrophe without making it recur, while lament, hope, and petition repeatedly open the present toward a possible future they cannot secure. “Exile without arrival” thus names Lamentations’ distinctive account of displacement: estrangement from a homeland that remains geographically present, from a past that remains available through memory, and from a future that can be imagined but not inhabited.

Book of Lamentations · Cultural memory · destruction of Jerusalem · displacement · Exile · Forced migration · Hebrew Bible · im/mobility · Inheritance · intergenerational continuity · Lament · relational place · Biblical Studies and Interpretation · Memory, History, Trauma, Identity · Migration and Exile Studies

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