Rod Stewart, Edward Said, and the Music of Exile
There are songs we listen to, and there are songs that seem to listen to us. We may encounter them accidentally, on the radio, in a passing car, at a gathering, or in the solitude of a room far from the place we once called home. We do not necessarily know the circumstances in which they were written, nor do we share the experiences of the people who composed or performed them. Yet something happens between the song and the listener. A familiar feeling rises unexpectedly. A memory returns. A place we thought we had left behind suddenly becomes present.
For those who have experienced exile, displacement, or migration, music can have this extraordinary power. A song written in another language, by someone from an entirely different cultural background, can become intimately connected to one’s own history.
Rod Stewart’s Every Beat of My Heart offers one such possibility. The song need not have been written specifically about refugees for its emotional world to resonate with people who have crossed borders, left families behind, and attempted to make homes in unfamiliar societies. What happens when a song becomes part of a person’s memory of home? And what becomes of home when we can no longer inhabit it?
The Song That Remembers
Every Beat of My Heart is particularly moving when heard through the experience of separation. There is something about the emotional intensity of Stewart’s performance that invites the listener to think about attachment, distance, and the persistence of affection. Its significance for the displaced listener need not depend entirely on the song’s original intention. Music acquires additional meanings as it travels across languages, places, and individual histories.
Consider someone who left Eritrea many years ago and now lives in Australia, Britain, Canada, Sweden, or the United States. That person may have established a comfortable life. Children may have been born and educated in the new country. Friendships may have developed. The language of everyday life may have changed. What once seemed unfamiliar may gradually have become ordinary. Yet a song can suddenly bring back the sound of a childhood neighborhood, the face of a parent, the laughter of siblings, or an afternoon that appeared entirely unremarkable when it was first lived.
The remarkable thing about memory is that it does not always preserve what we considered important at the time. Sometimes what returns is the sound of someone calling us from another room. Sometimes it is the smell of bread, the sight of a familiar street, or the particular quality of light falling across a courtyard. The song does not contain these memories. The listener brings them. And in that meeting between music and memory, something new is created.
This is one reason music can cross cultural boundaries so effortlessly. A Scottish singer does not have to know the geography of Eritrea for an Eritrean listener to hear something of home in his voice. The song travels outward. Memory travels inward. Somewhere between the two, recognition occurs.
Edward Said and the Meaning of Exile
The Palestinian intellectual Edward Said offers a powerful way of thinking about these questions. In his reflections on exile, Said refuses to treat displacement merely as a change of geographical location. Exile involves a separation that can alter one’s relationship to language, identity, memory, and belonging. For Said, exile is not simply an unfortunate interruption before the individual returns to an original state of wholeness. It can become an enduring condition in which the relationship between the individual and home remains unsettled.
His thinking also warns against making exile appear beautiful merely because it produces moving literature, music, or reflection. There is suffering in separation. There are losses that cannot be recovered through imagination. A song may provide consolation, but it cannot restore a parent who died during one’s absence or return the years that families were forced to spend apart. This distinction matters. When we listen to a song about longing, we may find ourselves drawn to the beauty of the emotion. But the experiences of actual refugees remind us that longing can arise from circumstances involving fear, uncertainty, deprivation, and danger.
Not everyone who crosses a border does so willingly. Not everyone who leaves knows whether return will ever be possible. Said’s reflections therefore complicate our response to music. A song may express longing beautifully, but beauty does not cancel the conditions that produce longing. At the same time, exile can create an unusual awareness of multiple worlds. A person who has lived between languages and societies may begin to recognize that no single place contains the entirety of their identity. This does not make displacement desirable. It means that people continue to interpret, adapt, and create meaning even under circumstances they did not choose. And music often accompanies that process.
The Horn of Africa: Many Departures, Many Homes
For people from the Horn of Africa, the relationship between music and displacement has particular historical resonance.
Generations of Eritreans, Ethiopians, Somalis, Sudanese, and others have experienced different forms of migration, forced displacement, political exile, and family separation. Their journeys cannot be reduced to a single narrative. Some left because of war. Others fled persecution or insecurity. Some departed as students and discovered that political circumstances had made returning difficult. Others migrated for work, education, or family reunification. Their experiences differ, even when their emotional attachments to home appear similar.
An Eritrean who left during the liberation struggle may remember home differently from someone who departed after independence. A Sudanese family displaced by conflict may understand the meaning of safety differently from someone who migrated voluntarily decades earlier. A child born in Stockholm to refugee parents may experience Eritrea primarily through family stories, language, food, and music. Yet these experiences can meet in a shared question: Where does home reside when one’s life has unfolded across more than one country?
Perhaps home is the place where one was born. Maybe it is where one’s children are growing up. Perhaps it is where one feels safe enough to sleep without fear. Or maybe home is not one place at all. Every Beat of My Heart invites us to consider these possibilities without demanding a single answer.
The Home That Changes in Our Absence
There is another difficulty that confronts those who live far from their places of origin. The home they remember continues to change in their absence. Streets are rebuilt. Neighbors move away. Children become adults. Parents grow old. Political circumstances change. Familiar institutions disappear or acquire new meanings. Meanwhile, the person who left is also changing.
Years of living elsewhere reshape habits, expectations, language, and relationships. When return finally becomes possible, the encounter may be unsettling. The remembered home and the present home do not necessarily resemble one another. This does not mean that memory was false. It means that memory preserved a world at a particular moment, while life continued moving. This is why the longing expressed through music can be so persistent. We may think we are longing for a place when we are also longing for a time.
We may imagine returning to a neighborhood when what we desire is another afternoon with people who once lived there. We may wish to recover a language as it sounded in our childhood, spoken by voices that are no longer present. The homeland becomes inseparable from the people and moments through which we first experienced it. No journey can completely reverse time. And yet, this recognition need not lead only to sorrow.
People create new homes. They form friendships, raise families, develop new attachments, and discover unexpected forms of belonging. The old home does not necessarily disappear. It becomes part of a larger geography of experience.
When Memory Becomes a Place
What, then, does Every Beat of My Heart offer the listener who has experienced exile? Perhaps its deepest significance lies not in providing an explanation of displacement but in allowing memory and emotion to meet.
The refugee, the migrant, and the exile do not all experience separation in the same way. Their circumstances, freedoms, losses, and possibilities differ. Yet music can offer a space in which some of their experiences become emotionally recognizable. The song may have originated in a cultural world far removed from the listener’s own. But as it travels, it acquires new associations. A melody becomes connected to a journey. A voice recalls a person. A familiar refrain brings back a place. The song has not changed, but its meaning has grown.
And the deepest difficulty of exile is not simply that we leave home behind. It is that home continues to accompany us, even as the world we remember continues changing in our absence. But remembering is only one half of the experience. The other begins when we ask where, and toward whom, we are still traveling.
Link to the song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RD3RtRmtSA8&feature=youtu.be
Rod Stewart – Sailing (Official HD Remastered Video)
Reference
Said, E.W. (2001) Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays. London: Granta Books.
