The Moradas of Angelina Muñiz Huberman, Esther Seligson and Teresa of Avila: Exile as Spiritual Experience

An exploration of the theme of exile in Angelina Muñiz Huberman’s Morada interior (1972), drawing on the related texts La morada en el tiempo (Esther Seligson 1981) and Las moradas (Teresa of Avila 1580), and utilizing Michel de Certeau’s theory of mystic speech. Exile and related identity issues are typically explored through selecting textual elements that locate exile and related identity issues within physical place, within concepts of nation, and within particular imagined communities. In the selected texts the protagonists are female and Jewish or crypto-Jewish, aspects of their being, which serve to distance them from their historical contexts. This essay undertakes a novel exploration of exile as not only upheaval and rupture from physical place, but also more specifically as the void felt when exiled from something, which is signified as God.