Thoughts on Diaspora

What does it mean to be a people in motion?

A few weeks ago, I went to an international conference in Washington D.C. hosted by Howard University. The topic of the conference was extremely broad (“Africa and People of African Descent: Issues and Actions to Re-Envision the Future”), and as a result the papers presented touched on almost every subject you can imagine. Although there were several aspects of this conference that I could talk about in relation to this week’s readings, the notion of home discussed in chapter 2 of the Morely piece seemed particularly relevant.

Prior to presenting my paper I had not given much thought to the hosting institution. Although I was personally excited to be visiting a historically black university, I hadn’t thought at all about how this location might impact the way my paper was received. However, as I was standing there at the podium discussing what I referred to as “the myth of Africa” in the 1993 Halie Gerima film Sankofa, I suddenly became very aware of the specificity of my location. Howard University was, after all, one of many sites where I felt these myths were reproduced. It was not surprising then that, during the Q&A, I received several comments from those who took issue with my position that the film constructed Africa and the diaspora in ways that were inaccurate. “How can you say that?” one gentleman asked, “I am Sankofa!”

As the conference progressed and I was able to attend other panels, I became increasingly grateful for having gone first, as I would have risked feeling much more self-conscious had I presented later in the program. Although the paper topics varied widely from science and pedagogy to performance and literature, discussions always seemed to circle back to issues of identity and naming, with Africa commonly used as a means of articulating unity. Even though conference participants were from all over the world (countries represented included the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Togo, Algeria, Central African Republic, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, Nigeria, Gabon, Colombia, Cuba, Costa Rica, Brazil, Mexico, Panama, Dominican Republic, Peru, Ecuador, Puerto Rico and US), Africa was frequently articulated as “home” for all diasporans. Yet, much like in the film I had critiqued in my paper, the Africa voiced throughout the conference remained illusive, romantic, and largely undefined.

This practice was, in my estimation, a natural response to the threat of “homelessness” that often plagues diasporic groups. How else can a people who belong nowhere yet live everywhere possibly hope to develop a sense of belonging or a common identity? Yet, as Morely noted via Ashis Nandy, “in …response to the racism of which they are the object in their host country, migrants commonly look to an idealized and fossilized image of their mother country to redeem their own self-respect, and are enraged when their home country falls short of their expectation” (49). Which leads me back to the underlying theme of the conference: can these inconsistencies be overcome? Is it possible to foster unity between the exiled/migrated peoples and those who stayed or were left behind? I strongly believe that such a feat is next to impossible as long as the spectral or imagined homeland continues to dominate the minds of those living abroad. Until it is realized that this specter must constantly be annexed by the minds of those abroad, and freed of the living bodies who remain on the continent, it seems that any connections made to the people and cultures occupying those bodies will remain superficial and ephemeral.