Diaspora Consciousness: Fluid or Rootless?

It is 2000, the year of the Sydney Olympics, when my parents decide to emigrate to Australia. Their grounds are valid — they are tired of high crime rates, class and racial tensions, insidious stories told by witch doctors. But I am eight, intrepid and anxious; their decision worries me. Who will I be outside of Durban, away from the lush greenery and burning sands, away from my friends and the cradle of my extended family?

Things unfold more smoothly than I expect and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I remain much the same. Sydney’s sands burn familiarly underfoot, and I am charmed by the dry crackle of eucalyptus leaves. I settle in to Australia with ease, doubtless delivered from the typical migrant narrative of struggle by my family’s relative privilege.

This is not to say that my transition is seamless, that I somehow manage to slip between cultures with the slippery ease of an eel. Looking back, I can see that a particularly fraught strand of identity politics begun to unravel almost as soon as I set foot on the grounds of my first Australian primary school.

It’s not racism; not quite. But my skin tone marks me as ‘Other’ and so, of course, the children ask me where I’m from. I’m still too young to have begun to resent this question, to have glib responses such as “Your dreams!” poised on the tip of my tongue. I answer honestly — “South Africa, Durban” and am met with a medley of responses, none of which are placid acceptance. Confusion. Disbelief. A slight narrowing of the eyes. “But,” my schoolmates say skeptically, “you look Indian.” Sometimes, they follow their skepticism up with a challenge, “Prove it. Speak some South African!”

At twenty-three, things have changed. The people around me generally know that ‘South African’ isn’t a language, for one. But I’m still often met by confusion and curiosity when people learn that my heritage doesn’t align with their preconceived notions around culture and heritage. I’m not Indian, but neither am I not Indian. I am a fourth generation, South African-born woman with Indian heritage and I call Sydney home. I can’t say I blame those around me for their confusion — with an identity influenced by three distinct cultures, questions such as who am I? and where do I come from? become difficult  to address.

One of the most useful tools I’ve found to parse the complexities of my identity is the concept of ‘diaspora’. Originally invoked to describe, specifically, the traumatic exile and dispersal of the Jews from their homeland, the term has come to be more broadly employed, its umbrella now sheltering “expatriates, expellees, political refugees, alien residents and ethnic minorities” (Safran 1991, 83).

Nonetheless, the term still carries specific set of connotations, including dispersion, collective memory, exclusion and an ongoing involvement with the ‘homeland’. While I often refer to my experiences as doubly diasporic (that is to say, I belong to both an Indian diaspora and a South African diaspora), I have to acknowledge that my South African migration story sometimes fails to successfully twine with these desiderata: I may have migrated from Durban, but there remains a solid, core community of South African Indians who have not been scattered far and wide; I am unsure whether my collective cultural memory references India, South Africa, or both; and while I am still concerned with South African politics and the general state of things in the country of my birth, I’m unsure whether I continue to exert influence over affairs in my homeland.

Semantics and definitions aside, one of the most interesting strands of thinking I’ve seen in discussions of diaspora is the persistent attachment of trauma to dispersal. People are conceptualised as seeds who are scattered across oceans and find themselves in inhospitable climes, where they fail to take root and flourish. I can’t provide a real counterpoint to this narrative, can’t deny that I sometimes feel Othered in Australia, despite having been raised here, or that a number of subtle and overt aggressions negatively impact my social ease.

But I can say that I think a narrative that inextricably twines trauma and dispersal is reductive of lived experiences. Dispersal will almost certainly lead to fractured, fissured identities, but it also has the potential to create a powerful sense of cultural fluidity — mastery, even. I, for instance, switch from being Indian at Diwali, South African among my family and Australian at work and university, with little difficulty.

The gaps in my identity, the lack of deep roots, foster greater sense of flexibility. This could also be attributed to being schooled in particularly multicultural environments, but I’ve noticed, over the years, that I have a greater sense of ease when exposed to people from different cultural backgrounds than many of my friends who were raised and schooled in similar environments. I’ve come to think that this fluency is the silver lining of the ‘double consciousness’ that Dubois claims is so disruptive to the identities of members of diaspora communities (Black 2007, 393).

‘Double consciousness’ is the ability to self-define while simultaneously sieving one’s experiences through the lens of the majority. It’s a delicate dance that is generally linked to narratives of ruptured identity and isolation. And yet, if the sense of cultural ease and fluency I raised earlier stems from maintaining a ‘double consciousness’ then, perhaps, the script regarding diaspora communities requires significant revision.

It’s possible that there’s a greater overlap between diasporic and cosmopolitan consciousness than is initially apparent. Cosmopolitanism, traditionally associated with wealthy, European travellers, is an ‘intellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent cultural experiences’ (Hannerz 1990, 239). Cosmopolitan individuals are not wholly defined by cultural forces. Instead, they have enough cultural fluency and capital to shape things, to engage in activity that has the potential to “alter structures of meaning” (238, 1990).

More recent literature in anthropology has challenged the traditional link between the cosmopolitan and the elite, questioning the reservation of the term for wealthy Westerners. Scholars have suggested that perhaps locals who live in areas highly trafficked by tourists can develop a cosmopolitan consciousness (Notar, 2008). It’s only too easy to take this idea and run with it, to contend that non-Western migrants are also capable of developing a stance of openness that gives them the power to participate in cultural generation on a global scale and suggest that individuals who possess a diaspora consciousness are also able to alter global structures of meaning.

Of course, re-conceptualising those within diaspora communities as cultural influencers and creators runs the risk of failing to adequately account for global structures of power. As Gayatri Spivak contends, true cosmopolitanism proves elusive for minorities since they “must exist in race-class divided situations where it is impossible to feel or exercise…general equality” (Spivak 2012, 111). She’s right to ask “who pulls the strings?” (111) — but even so, I find her take difficult to reconcile with the lived experiences of those around me. A conversation with a friend about how she could traipse down the aisle in either a crimson sari or a white bridal gown with no feelings of discomfort either way; another friend with a strong Chinese identity and upbringing who refers to herself as ‘an Asian bogan, basically’; the fluidity with which some exchange and international students interact on campus.The current narrative about diaspora consciousness follows a singular thread of distress: dispersal, trauma, isolation. But as the world continues to globalise, the numbers of those for whom crossing borders is an element of both heritage and lived experience will soar and ‘migration’ will become mired in history. Perhaps we will have to weave a new thread into this narrative to support its growing complexity. Perhaps we should allow flexibility and fluidity, ease and influence, to sit alongside dispersal and trauma, isolation and despair.