#diaspora

Mosiah (2022) the movie features Marcus Garvey’s lifetime. Soon out!

have you ever identified a singlular thing you want most in life? as a child of immigrants, i feel constantly starved for a motherland seem a world removed from. this craving is seated in so much of what i pursue throughout each day - in tastes, sounds, media, aesthetics, materiality, knowledge, personal liberation, relationships. i want to breathe its air for the first time. i want its earth beneath my feet. i want the saltwater in my hair. i want the mountains towering above me. i want the language in my mouth. it hurts so bad, how much i want it. 

My hatred towards Zionism arises from the false and injurious position Zionism once adopted towards work in the Diaspora. As long as Zionism adheres to its Diaspora-hating position, my hatred will remain alive and the struggle against it will remain necessary.

— Chaim Zhitlovsky

Imagine this:

Two little girls enter their elementary school cafeteria. Everything from their haircut to the multitier plastic lunch box brands them as FOBs. Fresh of the boat. They sit down with their new peers, whom they have already overheard making cruel comments about their accents, and lay before them an assortment of history, culture, and love. It should have come as no surprise that the same tongues incapable of pronouncing their names correctly would also be incapable of understanding the wealth before them. But the girls are young, and their parents believed in the American Dream. So it hurts. The sniffs of disgust, the mocking, the exaggerated recoils of horror. 

Their peers may be young as well, but they know what they are doing. They are following in the well trodden path set by their predecessors.
Two girls, two reactions. See when people hurt us, and we don’t understand why, we either get angry or sad. In other words, we either realize they are wrong, or we agree with them. 

One girl gets angry. She doesn’t know why, and she can’t put it into words. Bot yet anyway. But every tear running down her cheek makes her ever more determined. She marches home that day, and asks her mother to make her the most fragrant and colorful meals she can. Her daughter has some new friends she would like to share them with. 

The other girl gets sad. Her new friends (and they are her friends, aren’t they?) do not like her food. So she puts on a brave face, and smiles. Soon she is bringing lunchables and sandwiches to school like everyone else. Well, everyone except that one weird girl. She loses her accent quickly, and begins to go by a new name. This time, it is one only her parents struggle with.
So the angry girl stays angry, and the smiling one tries not to think about why her laughter never fully feels fully genuine. They are not quite friends, but there is a connection between them. Pity and jealously are a strange mixture to build a foundation from. But there it is, strong as any cement. 

One wonders why the other can’t just be happy for once. The other wonders what it is like to hate yourself that much. Both wish they could be a little more like the other. More confident. More accepted by parents, or peers. More at ease in their social positions. But they are ten, and they do not have the language for this.  They can’t ask their parents who are already struggling just to decipher 5th grade worksheets instructions. They can’t ask their teachers who still get their names mixed up sometimes even though one of them wears glasses and the other doesn’t. And their friends, well they definitely can’t talk to them. So the angry girl stays angry, and the smiling girl never realizes she is sad.  

caryophylla:

The Jewish connection is so strong that I can see it after centuries of diaspora separation, hear it in languages removed several families, and feel it in villages thousands of kilometres away from my own. I can see myself and my family reflected in stories about the Jews of Birobidzhan despite not sharing cuisine, language, or religious rites. I fully expect that European Jewry just as easily sees theselves in Baghdad, Tinghir, and Zakho.

For anyone to tell me that Jews are not a cohesive or relevant nation of peoples is telling. It lets me know that they’ve never experienced, or haven’t let theselves experience, what incredibly strong ties a Jewish neshama was blessed with.

I grabbed this book today at a secondhand store and finished the whole thing in one go. It’s one of the most compelling standout reads for me this year (not that I’ve read many books) on multiple levels which I don’t think that western publishers and reviewers have really put their pulse on, but first, a quick debrief:

The novel is unconventionally told using second person narrative through the superbly tight and acerbic monologue of a local man who has encountered an American (thereby us, the captured audience) at a market in Lahore, Pakistan. Over tea and dinner, the Pakistani stranger implores you to listen to his life story as from his beginnings, leaving his family at eighteen to study at Princeton and his brief early career at a high finance firm working on valuations, before plummeting into crisis just as the twin towers crashed on 9/11 and his American lover – a spiritually broken WASP princess – retreated into psychotic despair, forever out of his reach. 

At a turning point, the veils gradually reveal multiple complexes that fuels the narrator’s crisis: the fragile outer ego that the narrator has donned in order to join the upper echelons of the American corporate world, the sense of old world entitlement that still lingers with him since his family came from aristocratic lineage that has suffered alongside Pakistan’s relative economic decline, the fact that he is essentially a high ranking corporate slave working at the mercy of an American employer and whose acceptance into its society is broken as easily as by donning a beard among his coworkers, and the rage at how easily America can wage war over regions in which there is no real possible retaliation. 

Coupled with the obvious metaphor of his love for an American girl who is completely absorbed in her own life over a dead childhood sweetheart, and the fact that his prized Wall Street analyst job is basically destroying the livelihoods of other people by narrowly following and applying financial models and principles in order to single-mindedly achieve an outcome, it’s not hard to see how eventually he dropped out from the base of the pyramid and went back to Lahore at the height of the tensions between Pakistan and India in the aftermath of 9/11.

Western publishers and reviewers gave this book high praise for its “disturbing, chilling” aspects which I contend with, but of course, it’s understandably from an American point of view to see how a Princeton star child could go back to Pakistan to become a university lecturer that becomes embroiled in anti-American protests and (spoiler) a political plot, and thereby, a “reluctant fundamentalist” and a terrorist of sorts. I mean after all, he was using American scholarship dollars working at a prestigious American job. Anybody would be insane to give that up, right?

The prose is not so much sociopathic (as you should think) as it is acidic and witty in the narrator’s observations over entrenched behaviours in American society (through the micro-aggressions and gestures between people that ranks each other both in the corporate world and between racial divides), because the narrator had to mine every interaction deliberately in order to ensure his own survival (you have to either be an immigrant or a corporate base slave to understand this). The prose is also concise in the sense that the narrator does not indulge in excessive sentimentalism, just as the way that you would expect a high performing business analyst should write. And through very simple underpinnings, the author directs you to the heart of the rage that has eventually directed the narrator back on the path to his homeland. I mean, who wouldn’t be in a rage if they got quarantined at an airport for having a beard and knowing full well that their old country was about to get sacked?

A second observation of mine: the original author has worked at a professional services firm, otherwise he could not have easily penned all about those acquisitions and cash flows and written about the toxic professional atmosphere with such clarity that I literally feel so attacked lmfao. (This guy worked at McKinsey in management consulting and wrote his first novel at the same time, which honestly … I feel like I should just talk to this guy one day.)

Anyway this also got made into a movie which has become one of those trite exotic bomb plot movies where once again the western front conquers all, the narrator is again reduced to a Jafar villain type with the moustache and love from an American woman, above all, is a righteous thing to aspire to, which I don’t have enough eyeballs to roll over anymore. 

Oh also, this book just fuels my drive to write and create even more because I enjoy the crisp savagery of this novel very much and I would like to announce my intention and existence for the remaining decades of my life co-existing on multiple planes, by doing the thankless labour of writing, which I have to eventually come to terms with – just like the narrator in this story. This book just gives me the savage fuel, man.

Perhaps one day, I will rise to the ranks of a real intellectual but I would not play on your terms and I would not be on your team. I would be powerful enough to create through a team that I’ve assembled on my own. 

Diaspora Nova by Monica Ong

rosewater1997:

Literally every diaspora kid ever: “I was caught between two worlds; unaccepted in each. I was a foreigner wherever I went, only partially belonging to any land or people. The monsoon rains shed the tears that I cannot. I bite into my mango, letting the juice drip down my chin. The sticky sweetness of it clinging to me like my grief. I am a wanderer, belonging nowhere and everywhere. I blast the latest Coldplay, wondering what will become of me and the dissonance I was born into”

“I bite into my mango.”