Please provide a summary of the essay "Reflections on Exile" by Edward W. Said.

Said's
essay explores the implications of being exiled from one's homeland, with an emphasis upon the
special characteristics of the phenomenon in the modern age and the broader cultural factors
influenced by it.

Exile, Said asserts, has been viewed in literature in the
romanticized sense of somehow enriching the one who experiences it. This may be true in some
way, but the overriding fact is that there is something irredeemable and unbearable about it,
especially in the modern age when the technology available to governments wishing to expel
people from their homelands is overwhelmingly powerful.

Groups that have
been forced from their homeland have tended to engage in an extreme nationalism and a suspicion
of anyone not part of the group. The ethnicities Said regards as most typical of the attributes
caused by the phenomenon, in the twentieth century, are the Jews, Palestinians, and Armenians.
Each of these peoples, Said says, has had to construct a special kind of identity
for...