Tag: Diaspora

I’m note sure if this word belongs and ironically that seems to be the essense of it’s very meaning. I dive into it wondering if I will inadevertantly find myself in a refugee camp somewhere. It certainly feels like I have lived that at certain times of my life. You can check that out in my singualrly depressing upcoming book Down and Out In Penryn & Falmouth. Where some of us didn’t thrive to tell the tale.

As  species we’ve been on the move for a while now around two million years. So it’s hard to figure out what diaspora means in real terms. That people move. That can’t come as a surprise to many of us and yet parochial mindsets seem to prevail. This paraochial approach often gets me thinking about hobbiton and the shire. Where the centrel beings of teh story are barely know to anybody else. What a way to live life as a community totally centered in self. A community that believe that Tree Shepards are mythical creatures and magic only arrives with the combustable consumables of wizards and in fact that wizards are something to be toyed with.

We riducle and mock what we don’t know most of the time and the word diaspora seems to sum that up a lot. Diaspora is an othering of self in the land that you stay in. It’s saying I am not from here and somehow that seems integral to it’s basis. What if you just assimilated on arrival. Isn’t that what the USA used to offer new life, new identity. “What me, I’m an Amercian”. People give themselves the name of a lesser known explorer than intigrate the the complication of dual identities. Of course forced diaspora is ahwole othr sotry whether through human disaster or natural one. We are all scatterings of Africa and yet how far will we go to deny our origins out place in the world as one massive global family. One species, one kind. Diaspora seems to hold the toxic roots of seperation. That if you leave wyou must be seperate that if tyou arrive you must be different.  In a year that has be defined by it’s lack of movement it’s clear that progress has had to be made in other ways. I turn to the USA again to consider Black Lives Matter and the failing global respose to take on the mutually inherited roles of slavery. Of the dispossed and the possesion. The ownership of other humans and how their labour, the labour of slave built the nations that ignore them. What does it mean to be stolen from somewhere else, never return and never belong. To be ignored triggered and experience such visceral daily denial and rejection. Have you seen the Christmas adverts? Where we are going we can’t return, both in the physical and the metaphysical. Why can’t we talk about reparations? Today I heard and astouding figure realting to the Lockerbie Bombing.  That they payed out to all the relatives of the victims was in 2.16 billion US dollars. I can’t even imagine the figure that would be necessary to sort out the cost of slave reparations and the impact it has had on family descendents.

It’s not the same of course not but let me tell you it was the first post industrial landsacpe in the world. Now that will get all you human geographers very excited. Healing those Cornsih Mining villages may well bethe key to plantary evolution.

I am the diaspora.

Hmmm it’s a big word with an ever more complicated meaning. It’s a generalise word for an immigrant or even refugee population. Here’s the crux though it doesn’t apply to a specific population, demographic and can even apply to events. The Diaspora of WW2 Jews might be an example. You see it also applies to those in exile. It’s something that can often be very difficult for us to imagine. A life in exile. Many of us do it. In fact “Right to Movement” Is even a human right. Yet you wouldn’t think it with all the borders all over the place, that are a highly anti-human construct. You wouldn’t think that if you were Palestinian or even Syrian. Border control seems to high up there with Land Trauma as a place where authority over an imagined line has the power make, brake and even kill people. Borders are where power is highly corruptable more than this where corrupted power has its way with the vulnerable, the destitute and the throughly weary.

Anyways I’ve been interested in diasporas for a while. I might have been interested in Land Trauma a little longer, though I hadn’t fully made the connection as to how they were so fully connected. Land desecration and the bad development have haunted me for years and yet I still wonder am I guided by the spirit or the wound with this one. Where consumption is real just a route back to the feeling of oneness you get while watching butterflies. Why are diasporas important to me? Because they are so intangible and leave so many of us lost. They are the reason for that I frequently come back to this thing I keep banging on about Systemic Trauma and at a more base level trauma. Which is both systemic and relational. The systemic feeds the realtional, just as the personal is the planetary.

People move all the time if we take it at its base level it might just be to the next street because you have a family of your own. Maybe it’s to pursue your passion or even find work and less romantically a means to survive. The whole of human history is coded with the idea of the diaspora that humans have forever been on the move. That we can rarely go back to where we have come from like the hands that move time. Yet it seems to be a long standing fallacy that we might. Was Jesus born under a wandering star on the way back to his ‘father’s’ homeland. Yet here we all are trying to find home with the sense of belonging that it might afford us. It feel to me that the only thing that we can ever truly belong to is ourselves and that seems far too radical an idea for most of us to grab hold of wholeheartedly.

You see I’ve said this before that the western way fo seeing things is so linear that we think we can box people, the human story. That somehow we can all be contained within a neat filing system. Why won’t all those humans just stay in their boxes and be neatly ticked off as something we can easily categorise. Easy to understand and easy to maintain. You won’t find any of those things in the word diaspora.

How could there be. There’s got to be an emotional element to a human life somewhere? Yet it is so concisely over looked by these imaginary lines we draw across land and culture. None of come from one place we are all moving somewhere, even if it is only through time and there in lies and ever deepening element to this story.

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