Much is said about the diaspora, whether forced political displacements or voluntary transnational mobility. We come in varying forms as first- or second-generation, third-culture children or with mixed heritage.
So, here you are
Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
Never enough for both.
For the first generation, being foreign for here is a very known consequence of uprooting ourselves. With the passage of time, there comes a point when we’ve become estranged from where and how home was. Perhaps we came to visit our old home and found that certain things were not the same as before. A longstanding tradition did not evoke the same respite as it used to. A shared ritual failed to bring us comfort the way it did. An unspoken rule now seems absurd. Pop culture references become indistinct from the rest of foreign noise. We have changed, for better or for worse.
Saudade (Portuguese):
The School of Life
a bitter-sweet melancholic yearning
for something beautiful that is now gone:
perhaps a love affair, a childhood home,
a flourishing business.
There is pain yet also a pleasure
that such loveliness once graced our lives.
Grieve but do not be defined by our real and imagined foreignness. When we see ourselves as part of the diaspora continuum, we are transcending our original roots and building new ones. We are not only a tiny spring flower defiantly forming roots despite being weighed down by piles of dead leaves brought by the previous season, burdened by the weight of resistance. Each of us is a garden of our own and the new roots we are allowing to form are just one part of our multidimensionality as complex beings, yet another addition to our ever-growing spectrum as a person.
Our sense of ancestral kinship and national identity may fade but only because they are replaced by the sustained act of intertwining with different peoples who may not exactly look like us but feel like us. That our concern for politics and economics move beyond the geography of our birth, that truly and not just by giving lip-service, our ethics, our humanity and our principles of sovereignty apply to peoples other than our ethnicity. Ultimately, our sense of belongingness becomes rooted in diversity and the overarching call for inclusivity.
And so because of diaspora, we are not exposed to the danger of lives lived in closed circles in perpetuity that lends to exclusivity. True depth does not come from developing an acute incapacity to grasp the nuances and subtleties of lived experiences outside our own. Character evolves outside the confines of what we consider as comfortable. Enrichment is forged outside our similarities, in the intermingling of our differences, not in the toleration but in celebration of such differences, and in finding our shared humanity within.
And yet exactly because of this, our dynamics with families we were born with are forever altered. There is the sudden disruption of physically witnessing each other. For us who have left, there is the heaviness of our disconnection from our closest and dearest in their small joys and in their daily adversities. While those who were left behind by us, they have had to constantly readjust to the emptiness of the space we used to occupy, until the weight of that absence faded with time.
In their eyes, there is the unfolding implicit loss of a family member because of an empty chair whose person rarely comes to visit. And when we do, when we actually do come to visit, after many years some of us come in a different form through no fault of our own. We bring with ourselves disparity in thought, in values, in language, in philosophy, in capacity, in economic mobility, unintentionally creating a sense of asymmetry in what used to be safe and predictable, if not sacred.
Their eyes would quietly say: you have changed. In our diasporic journey, we have had to irrevocably shed the person we once were. There is a palpable loss in that inasmuch as there is hope in the emergence and strengthening of an identity that is more whole, if only to adapt to the path we chose. Our once close observers are coming to terms with this very familiar yet strangely new person. Nobody said it was easy. But nobody said it was insurmountable either.
And yet exactly because of this, may we develop appreciation for people who opted and continually opt to stay in all-too familiar structures since birth. We rarely distinguish the strength it takes to stay in spite of waves of political instability or in the face of mounting economic necessity. In the pervading pressure of individualism, there is immense wisdom in the simple recognition that dreams and ambitions exact a high price and there is courage in saying no to that.
May we be comforted by those who safeguard cultural heritage grounded in inclusion. They remind us of our origins and parts that we still carry in us. May we be grateful to those who stand by family togetherness with openness for others. For they too, open their homes to those who have had to leave theirs. In the face of the history of movements of peoples, forced and voluntary, among lost arts and dying indigenous languages, may we celebrate those who stayed behind. They weave a rich tapestry of connectedness, finding an audience among us from the diaspora, at times with deep longing, in the postmodern digital but disconnected age.
And so within the blanket of the diaspora in our own quiet individual rootlessness and collective nostalgia, in our vague yet palpable sense of loss and assimilation; here’s to us who have had to reinvent ourselves so many times that we lost count, to us who’ve had to redefine the concept of home, family and belongingness. We, who weave our own narrative by piecing together our origins and our journeys, may we celebrate the uniqueness of our own story and its commonality with those from generations before us ― the same human race in centuries-old diaspora.
