The Last Migration: A Novel of Diaspora and Love – Jad El Hage

Jad El Hage’s first English-language novel, The Last Migration: A Novel of Diaspora and Love, published in Australia in
2002, is here considered as an example of post-war Lebanese fiction. It won the presentation prize at the Writers’ Festival in Sydney, and has been translated into Italian and French. In discussing the attitudes and sentiments that El Hage’s uprooted characters maintain or develop vis-à-vis Lebanon, I define unresolved feelings towards one’s homeland, both positive (nostalgic) and negative (critical), as equally debilitating, and therefore as fostering a mental condition of exile.