A young Chicana woman, wrestling with conflicting identities in the 1950s on the Texas-Mexico border. An Afghan boy fleeing his war-torn homeland to build a new life in Iran in the late 1980s. Three decades and three thousand miles apart, queer theorist and author Gloria Anzaldua (1942- 2004) and poet and painter Elyas Alavi (b.1982) may appear to have little in common; but their shared experience of inhabiting complex physical and emotional borderlands became, for both writers, the beating pulse of their work. From their respective outsider viewpoints, of a Mexican-American lesbian woman and Hazara Afghan refugee, Anzaldua and Alavi each harness a rich sensory hinterland to portray the exilic condition, presenting apophenic networks of connection – with inanimate objects, animals, and nature – to justify and stabilize shifting identity. Both sought to communicate the reality of border consciousness by locating it in the corporeal and sensory realm, hoping to find, perhaps, some consolation for displacement in the one ‘home’ we can never fully leave – ourselves.

In what follows I will examine Alavi's narrative poem, Brother Khosrow (Kak Khosrow, 2013), published in his collection, Frontiers (Hodud, 2014),1 and Anzaldua's seminal work, Borderlands: The New Mestiza (La Frontera, 1987),2 to further contextualize the common threads in their sensory depiction of borders and exile. Placing these works in conversation with one another dissolves the problematic binaries that can arise in hermetic analysis (orient/occident, male/female, exile/non-exile literature and so on), and allows the exilic condition to emerge as an area of literary study in its own right. Marginalized voices that have worked hard to be heard can all too often be further muted by wider literary misclassification that places them once again in a peripheral space as niche or minor works. In recalibrating their belonging and finding points of connection, the canon of exilic literature can mirror the process of transcending borders at the core of its texts.

This chapter is the first attempt to explore the written borderland experience through a transnational, sensory framework, examining the ways in which Alavi and Anzaldua harness touch, taste, and smell.