Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies Vol. 5, No. 2 (2013) “Unwilled Choices”: The Exilic Perspectives on Home and Location in the Works of Zulfikar Ghose and Mohsin Hamid By Muhammad Safeer Awan ‘I once went to sleep and dreamt that I was a butterfly. And then I woke up. What am I, now? Am I the man who went to sleep and dreamt that he was a butterfly; Or am I the butterfly the man dreamt about?’ (Loa Tse, ‘The Way’) Writing Home in Exile Iocasta: What is an exile’s life? Is it great misery? Polyneices: The greatest; worse in reality than in report. (Euripides’s The Phoenician Women) The phenomenon of human migrations and resultant shifts in cultural boundaries and shaping of identities is as old as human history itself. With the onset of the 20 th century, the great imperial structures began to dismantle, resulting into large- scale immigrations from the former colonies to the erstwhile imperial centres. Never before in human history had so many crossings – geographical, cultural, racial – happened at such scale. On the heels of those crossings, the problem of identity of the immigrants emerged as the biggest issue among all such post- imperial concerns. The problem of cultural identity as it is studied in the postcolonial academia now is a result of the colonial encounter. The concepts of home/exile, cross-culturality/cultural purity, assimilation, and hybridity have become more important than the older forms of group identifications. Particularly “Home has become such a scattered, damaged, various concept in our present travails’ (Gurr 10). Closely related to the concept of home or Home is the classical idea of exile which has multiple layers of meanings. Andrew Gurr has suggested that a distinction should be drawn between the idea of exile, which implies involuntary constraint, and that of expatriation, which implies a voluntary 6