Diaspora

The word ‘diaspora’ explained by Fernando Galvan, a well known researcher and a Professor at University of Alcala, Spain in his essay “Metaphors of Diaspora: English Literature at the Turn of the Century” originates from the Greek verb “speirein” (to sow, to scatter) and the preposition “dia” (through), which in agricultural metaphor is associated to the signification of the act and aftermath of the “dispersion, of sowing or scattering seeds” (114). Sociologically, it was originally used in reference to the Greek settlers and colonisers in the Mediterranean as stated by Marianne David and Javier Munoz-Basols in their introduction “Defining and Re-Defining Diaspora: An Unstable Concept” to the book Defining and Re-Defining Diaspora: From Theory to Reality. The Hebrews adopted the word ‘Diaspora’ politically and sociologically as a reference to their own people of exile after the Babylonian captivity in 587 BC. As well explained by David and Munoz-Basols, the term at the outset referred to diverse groups such as settlers, colonisers, victims, slaves, and others who suffered hardships in their homeland (place of primary domain) and chose to leave or were forced to leave resulting in trying to find a home away from home in search of a better life – a collective identity of their old country, homeland buried deep in their religion, language and tradition; this created a sense of separate identity from their host land resulting in the diasporic experience of the memory of the home lost (xi).

The anguish of displacement and the home lost is engraved deep in memory and idealised by nostalgia produces a dichotomy between the desire for the lost home and the pressure to live in the host land (xi); a dichotomy between forced expulsion and voluntary attraction which ends up in the search of both a home and a land, hence a homeland. The term hence has two specific distinctions namely ‘Diaspora’ with ‘D’ in the upper case denoting the exile of Jews and the ‘diaspora’ with ‘d’ in the lower case denoting  a cross-cultural displacement in general.

The online dictionaryreference.com comes out with this meaning which is found in Greek translations of the Hebrew Bible (Deut. 25). It explains that the definition of Diaspora often with an initial capital letter refers to the displacement of the Jews and also to the Jews living today outside of Israel. Diaspora also has been applied to similar experiences of other people who have been forced from their homelands; for example, to the trans-Atlantic passage of Africans under the slave trade of the seventeenth through nineteenth-centuries, which has been called the African Diaspora.  More recently, we find a scattering of the meaning of diaspora now being used to refer not only to a group of people, but also to some aspect of their culture, as in “the global diaspora of American style capitalism”. (dictionaryreference.com).

The term was first created as a result of translating the Hebrew Bible, into Greek, where it was used to refer to the people who were dominant enough to conquer other lands into a large empire through emigration. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term was first recorded to be used in the English language in 1876 relating to national Protestant churches. Later, the term became more common in the mid twentieth-century where people from different countries became expatriates for various reasons which resulted in the study of diasporic studies in the academic field of sociology and literature.

In a sense, the term means displacement of a certain group of people or a population separated from their land or territory with the displaced people for various reasons with the hope and desire to return to their homeland at some point. Writers write about the multiple homes that people form by moving to places and thereby obtaining some sort of attachment to each place. They create a mixed and nouveau cultural development that in due course varied with respect to culture, traditions, language and other factors.

The above mentioned definitions of diaspora mostly involve the physical and geographical displacement of the people, signifying their crossing of their territories and borders, moving from one’s homeland to another. More than the aspects of physical migration and dislocation, the other sides of diaspora have to be taken into account while examining the cause and effects of diaspora as presented in novels. The recent studies explain the other major dimensions and ramifications of diaspora as historical, psychological and cultural aspects that fully explain the dislocated self as a result of crossing borders.

Based on these cultural and geographical developments of the phenomenon, diaspora can be divided into three phases – the ancient and the medieval, the colonial and the post-colonial. The ancient and the medieval phase became the early period of migration over factors like trade and religion towards Greek and Mesopotamian civilisations. It even dates back to the Buddhist monks who had spread the religion and religious practices across Southeast Asia. TLS Bhaskar in his “Indian Diaspora” quotes from Tinker stating that the Cholas had organised expeditions in the eleventh century to vanquish the great Indonesian Empire of Sri Vijaya. The colonial period records the majority of migration of Indians between the 1830s and 1930s. The British rule had great impacts on Indian peasants leading to famine and economically backward status thus resulting in mass migrations. The numerous “imperial diaspora” (GD 18), as Cohen calls them, had settled in the colonies of the Europeans thus creating a shortage of food supply to them by the influx of the natives. Hence they had to create plantations which needed labourers; but, it was the time when slavery (Africans) was banished. A “new system of slavery”, according to Tinker, was formed naming them the “indentured labourers” (a new name for an old trade) from India and other parts of Asia. The post-colonial phase brought about a different and a somewhat better economic status for the middle class people who had migrated to many countries like UK, USA, Canada, Australia as professional elites and other migrants to UAE and other Muslim countries as skilled labourers.

Hence, the perplexity of defining diaspora has become more and more complicated in the present era along with the growth of technology and communications. As Asma Sayed in her introduction to her book Writing Diaspora: Transnational Memories, Identities and Cultures notes, “Technologies of travel – from the automobile to the airplane to the space rocket – combined with communication technologies have also transformed diasporic encounters, whether direct or virtual, and made them more intricate and complex than ever before” (ix).