Diaspora

is a term first used to describe the involuntary displacement of the Jews exiled from Judea in 586BC and Jerusalem in AD 136, and then again in the consequent genocidal actions of the Nazis. It's a term that has become synonymous with the forced exile of peoples from their homelands. Diaspora literally means 'to scatter'.

The 20th century has seen the mass migration of peoples from all continents, persecuted scatterings of nationalities, faith, ethnicities. In Rwanda, Palestine, Iran, China, South America, diaspora - the violent painful extraction from one's homeland - is a common condition.

Such a turbulent and belligerent act of being torn away from one's identity, familiar surroundings, cultural location, and land is trauma words cannot put into sense; the emotional destruction, the violence enacted upon one's sense of being, is horror that is untranslatable. How does one find a sense of self in constant and consistent displacement. Where does one seek stability within and without? How can one live without fear, the fear of being extracted, removed, depleted, extricated?

As real as diasporas are - as socio-political conditions that prevail then and now - the diasporas we face within are those that perhaps are unspeakable. The daily donning and peeling off of selves, the routine performances that remove us further from a sense of any notion of a stable self, the fictions that lead us away from the truth, the deceptions we screen to bury the 'I' we fear others to see, the 'me' we fear to look. These are the diasporas that are by far more destructive for they are silent, invisible, unseen and unheard yet hauntingly real.

The diasporic condition is the condition of the postmodern self... for some a lot more than others...

Where are you?