Diaspora
Imagine having to leave your home, your heavy valuables, and the security of a place where your family has lived for generations to arrive in a different, often completely unfamiliar place with little financial or social support. It might be because outsiders are terrorizing, beating and killing those of your background. Or it could be because economic conditions have become so dire where you live than you have to decide between continuing to have shelter and eating on a daily basis. Now take this individual situation, and multiply by hundreds of thousands, even millions of people just like you. Here you have the beginning of understanding the trauma and trials of diaspora.
To give some personal context, allow me to paint a picture of my ethnic group and what I like to call its double diaspora. We were at one time in the past warriors, and in more recent centuries involved in commerce. My ancestors resided in small villages in a seasonal marsh, near a great western desert in Gujarat province in modern-day India. The pace of life was slower, roads and automobiles did not come to the area until much more recently, and the Hindu, Jain, and Muslim inhabitants coexisted with one another in relative peace. That is until 1947, and the Partition of India. After braving a trek which included train loads of living people set ablaze, riots, mass rape and killing, many reached neighboring Sindh province in the newly created Pakistan.
Unfortunately, cultural chauvinism was ever-present and those who had migrated to this state that was supposedly their refuge were called muhajirs, a labeling whose intent was not only identify but to discriminate and foment resentment toward these outsiders. Economic strangulation and lack of political empowerment left this group with two options: suffer in urban slums with little hope for advancement, or try to make a better life elsewhere. What I call the Greater Diaspora occurred, and these people left to East Africa, parts of the Middle East, and eventually to the West.
Stories like these have repeated themselves over and over, and looking at the last century reveals rapid increase in these mass migrations. The key features of these diasporas are movement to different places, the attempt to preserve some parts of the home culture, and eventually some sort of political activism or sentiment related to what is going in that group’s country of origin. How can the psychological dimensions of these processes be deconstructed?
There are three major institutions that seem to inform diaspora communities, and these three also serve as cultural locations of resistance. The first is religious institutions. Pure religion is simply not a reality in the present, and the fact certain cultural ways of life from the country of origin. Often, clergy is brought in from the home region, along with their specific theological and political ideas. For some, this is a primary area to resist. Whether it is in orthopraxy, or in patriarchal interpretations, or in the interaction between cultural religion and modernity, diaspora communities often have to struggle with how they can or should maintain their “flock.”
The second major area is the culturally segregated community in the receiving country, or in popular parlance what we call “Little (insert country name here).” What outsiders see may be an Epcot-ized version of the home country’s culture, but what is going on between the people of that background is a sort of invisible struggle. Due to the pressures of the market, and often arriving without the social or cultural capital to start at a high socioeconomic place in their new country of residence, they are left to commodify their culture for mass consumption. The central dilemma in this is: what of their culture do they package, and what do we choose to leave behind? Everyone loves the culinary delights of another land, the clothing, even the entertainment. Often it is the high culture, the rites of passage, and the folklore that begins to lose appeal for the youth in these areas and their disappearance is bemoaned by the elders of these communities.
The third is in the culture-specific media. Major diaspora populations have their own newspapers, their own radio stations, and their own television channels and internet sites. These help to connect those dispersed from their homelands to what is occurring back in the motherland, as well as articles about current events from particular cultural perspectives. In recent years, these media outlets have begun giving a forum to issues of the generation gap, of culture-blending, as well as family and social issues commonly faced by these communities.
The mentality of one foot in each culture begins to make itself clear. Each aspect of identity, in a diaspora community, is a polarizing force. On one end are the cultural traditions, the norms, and the values of the population’s country of origin. On the other is the assimilating force, which draws people toward those same aspects of the nation that community has ended up in. True integration seems hard to achieve, and it’s not always a matter of an even compromise between two extremes.
I, like many other second generation Americans, face issues of reconciling what my heritage informs me of with what I have experienced in this society. Being a diaspora kid means have a large population, not simply islands of people, who exert their own cultural force upon people of a similar ethnic background. I’d like to conclude by giving another personal example of diaspora in motion; we have a term in the South Asian community, a sort of insult toward second gens: “American-Born Confused Desi (person of South Asian descent).” Fascinating that my generation’s lives have been labeled as confusion, as the process of dispersal and the institutions put in place by the first generation do more than anything else to propel this uncertainty.
