Alejandro Jodorowsky: “The Only Exile I Know Is the Exile from Myself”

The thing is, I grew up as a foreigner.  Look, my father was a Jew who tried to pass for a Russian.  My mother was half-Russian, because a Cossack raped her mother, and she tried to pass for a Jew.  So, I was Chilean and not Chilean, because I was the son of immigrants.  I was trying to pass for a Chilean, but never completely.  I was never anything.  Therefore, the only exile I know is the exile from myself.  Because I was never myself.  The nostalgia I would have to get back to myself, what am I?  But not what am I as nationality.  What am I as a spirit without limits.  I have limits.  So, each day I try more and more to go toward the anonymous which is precisely the impersonal.  To try to be an impersonal person.  I don’t think in terms of cities now.  I think of the planet.  I don’t think in terms of nationality.  I think of human beings.

From a 1995 interview with Alejandro Jodorowsky by Jason Weiss (who was kind enough to forward a link to me).