Diaspora Quotes

“Here’s to the security guards who maybe had a degree in another land. Here’s to the manicurist who had to leave her family to come here, painting the nails, scrubbing the feet of strangers. Here’s to the janitors who don’t understand English yet work hard despite it all. Here’s to the fast food workers who work hard to see their family smile. Here’s to the laundry man at the Marriott who told me with the sparkle in his eyes how he was an engineer in Peru. Here’s to the bus driver, the Turkish Sufi who almost danced when I quoted Rumi. Here’s to the harvesters who live in fear of being deported for coming here to open the road for their future generation. Here’s to the taxi drivers from Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt and India who gossip amongst themselves. Here is to them waking up at 4am, calling home to hear the voices of their loved ones. Here is to their children, to the children who despite it all become artists, writers, teachers, doctors, lawyers, activists and rebels. Here’s to international money transfer. For never forgetting home. Here’s to their children who carry the heartbeats of their motherland and even in sleep, speak with pride about their fathers. Keep on.”
― Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

“The day your education makes you roll your eyes at your father. The day your exposure makes you call your own mother uncivilized, the day your amazing foreign degrees make you cringe as your driver speaks pidgin english, may you never forget your grandfather was a farmer from Oyo state who never understood english.”
― Ijeoma Umebinyuo, Questions for Ada

“Sometimes we feel we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

“Who am I but someone others define? It's easier to be a stereotype. It hurts when you are yourself.”
― Trang Thanh Tran, She Is a Haunting

“Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness— myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me.”
― Luisa A. Igloria

“The formation of a diaspora could be articulated as the quintessential journey into becoming; a process marked by incessant regoupings, recreations, and reiteration. Together these stressed actions strive to open up new spaces of discursive and performative postcolonial consciousness.”
― Okwui Enwezor

“The Door of No Return - real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us who are scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction - a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing.”
― Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return

“I am forced to admit that I am, to them, nothing but a series of destinations with no meaningful expanses in between. ”
― Monique Truong, The Book of Salt

“Our exile organizations have been our way of replacing the cities and villages we have lost.”
― Henning Mankell, The Dogs of Riga

“Isn't content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn't free-floating; it's enmeshed.

That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora--that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind--global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves--all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change.

Nationalism is on the rise, I say.

He nods. That's a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“‎I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples”
― Elizabeth Catlett, Elizabeth Catlett: An American Artist in Mexico

“You go out into the world to acquire all manner of habits and learn all sorts of languages, but the one tongue you neglect most is the one you’ve spoken at home, just as the customs you feel most comfortable with are those you never knew were customs until you saw others practice completely different ones and realized you didn’t quite mind your own, though you’d strayed so far now that you probably no longer knew how to practice them.”
― André Aciman, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere

“She asks, "Do you ever want to go back to Mars?"
"It's a weird little place," he replies. "Stuck in its ways. I feel more like a Martian when I'm not there, if that makes sense.”
― Elaine U. Cho, Ocean's Godori

“You are very brave, Noa. Much, much braver than me. Living everyday in the presence of those who refuse to acknowledge your humanity takes great courage.”
― Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

“By the first century CE, Jews living abroad had long outnumbered those inhabiting the Holy Land. The diaspora's existence inaugurated an ongoing, pregnant dynamic for Judaism and Jewish identity. On the one hand, Eretz Yisrael, especially Jerusalem, maintained its emotional resonance and ritual importance; diaspora Jews flocked to the Temple for the pilgrimage festivals and, in the later second century BCE, began to pay annual half-shekel contributions toward its support. For some, particularly after the Second Temple's destruction, the homeland beckoned as the place of return, a distant object of longing. At the same time, diaspora Jews seem to have experienced little dissonance between the respect they accorded the Holy Land and the loyalty they paid their own communities and governments.”
― Charles L Cohen, The Abrahamic Religions: A Very Short Introduction: A Very Short Introduction

“For about a century, Filipinos have remained subjugated bodies in a market-centered panopticon, dispersed as a 'warm body export' into the fetishized and fetishizing space of international commodity exchange, their memories of the injustice done to them temporarily suspended under the illusionary force of promised freedom and material success which that space imposes.

But this amnesia is fast evaporating

—E. San Juan. Jr. "Configuring the Filipino Diaspora in the United States”
― E. San Juan Jr

“Israelis can win a war but in doing so they submit to us. They can occupy Palestine, yet they remain captive to the dialectic of its existence. They can banish the native presence, but cannot ostracize its reality.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“The starving children of Tel Zaatar who arrived in West Beirut will never be the same again. These were children who walked all the way from their camp and on the way found themselves walking alone. Children who saw their parents bayonetted to death in front of their eyes. Children who were shellshocked. Children who, before the siege, had been physically and mentally healthy and were now deaf-mute. Children who went into convulsions when they heard the word "water." Children who woke up in the middle of the night screaming. Children who lost every member of their families. Children who did not play, or run around, but sat staring, responding neither to questions nor the offer of food.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“The siege of Beirut brought with it all the ancient terrors of sieges -- city gates broken, libraries burned down, fire dropped on defenders. A truly medieval event recalling these sieges of Jerusalem in 1099 and Acre in 1189. This siege also was a metaphor of confrontation between East and West and a fascinating symbol of the clash of self-definitions between settler-colonialism and native resistance. It was a mirage from the medieval age that bespoke, as sieges then often did, the most dreadful catastrophe that could befall people: the destruction of their city and their subsequent wanderings in search of shelter to house their passions and the outward expression of their culture. To Palestinians everywhere, the siege of Beirut became the most monumental event in their modern history -- even more monumental than the dismemberment of, and exodus from, Palestine in 1948.
The Israelis tried everything during these siege. To starve the city. To bomb it to rubble. To terrorize its inhabitants with psychological warfare. To cut its water, medical, and food supplies.”
― Fawaz Turki, Soul in Exile

“Look at them leaving in droves, the children of the land, just look at them leaving in droves. Those with nothing are crossing boarders. Those with strength are crossing boarders. Those with ambitions are crossing boarders. Those with hopes are crossing boarders. Those with loss are crossing boarders. Those in pain are crossing boarders. Moving, running, emigrating, going, deserting, walking, quitting, flying, fleeing --- to all over, to countries unheard of, to countries whose names they cannot pronounce. They are leaving in droves.”
― nonviolet bulowayo

“کچھ تو فرق ہوتا ہے

نہیں جانے میں، اور لوٹ کر آنے میں۔

،نظارے چاہے وہی ہوں

پر فرق آ جاتا ہے اُن کے نظر آنے میں۔


مِل جاتے ہیں کچھ پہیلِیوں کے جواب،

کچھ سوال بھی نئے ڈھونڈ لیتے ہیں ہم نئے ٹھِکانوں میں

، روح میں اُتر جاتے ہیں کُچھ رِشتے اور بھی زیادہ

کُچھ دم توڑ دیتے ہیں، دور دراز کے بازاروں میں


عجب سے اب لگتے ہیں جان نے والوں کو ہم

کُچھ گِن بھی لیتے ہیں اب ہمیں دیوانوں میں

یہی فرق ہوتا ہے نہیں جانے میں، اور لوٹ کر آنے میں

کُچھ کھو جاتا ہے گُزرے زمانے میں

کُچھ مِل جاتا ہے نئے افسانے میں”
― Adeel Ahmed Khan

“This obsessing heart which does not correspond
To my language, nor to my customs,
And on which encroach, like a clinging-root,
Borrowed feelings and the customs
Of Europe, feel this suffering
And this despair—equal to no other—
Of ever taming with words from France
This heart which came to me from Sénegal.
- Haitian poet”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Black Orpheus

“Contiguity brings into sharper focus our essential separatedness.”
― Han Suyin

“I only ever know myself hanging, in the exulted tempest untouched
by nativities—the possibilities of my name
emptied to the firmaments, which could not care to claim me
yet labour to intubate the clouds, blithely feeding my body to the greying
furies. My own jettisoned to the moors, a bay of white
polyester sheets, illuminated by ornate keys, bandaged
after Catastrophe.”
― Saif Sidari, Visiting Hours

“If you take a seed, [...] and scatter it across the lands, some will end up in marshes, some in rich fertile lands with flowing streams, others in sand, and others among the mountains and rocks. If the seed is tough, it will adapt and survive in all conditions; if it is weak, it will perish. The same seed in one country may yield a baobab but in another an oak. Our race is a potent seed. Whether you are from Ghana or Guyana, you are born of the same seed and you will be of the same fruit. We must recognize our fruition in London, in Paris, in Dakar, in Harare, and in Maputo. Our roots are deep and wide. We must extend our hearts and minds, like bridges, over the swamps of racial injustice, to link us together.”
― Nozipo Maraire, Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter

“Nick nodded. "My mother said that always surprised her-all the houses made out of wood here, especially in the suburbs. She said growing up in the Soviet Union, it was all concrete and cinder blocks where she lived. Wooden houses were for old Russian fairy tales."
Sawyer reflected, mulling. "Have you ever wanted to go there?"
"Sure. But growing up, I was always told that's was impossible," he said. "At least for me and my mom, given her political history. But it's strange; there were times when I was super aware that she could never bring me back to where she was from, but other times I felt so completely that I have been there in my mind, I forget that I haven't, even now."
"Do you speak Russian?"
"Of course. My mom's English is perfectly fine, but we always wind up speaking in Russian together."
"Do you ever...dream in Russian?"
"I do.”
― Suzanne Rindell, Summer Fridays

“Inoshiro laughed. "So what am I now? Wise enough to be weak? Or strong enough to be foolish?”
― Greg Egan, Diaspora

“I admired my father not only for his kindness and intelligence, but also for his memory. He could quote long passages of the Talmud and Plato, the Zohar and the Upanishads. He could recall in rich detail his visit to the ghetto in Stanislav, his first skirmish as a partisan, his arrival in Palestine. He envied the character of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who remembered what he had done in his mother's womb and even in his father's desire. Immersed in his own past and the world’s, my father was nevertheless a man of his times, reacting to all its convulsions. Politics stimulated him, and so did the international situation. Famine in Africa, racial persecution in Indonesia, religious conflict in Ireland and India: What men did to other men they did to him. When someone said that as a Jew he was wrong to care about anything but Israel, he answered angrily, “God did not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.” And yet he loved Israel with all his heart and soul. Why didn't he go back there to end his days? He did not know, and admitted that to me. “Maybe it's cowardice on my part. Maybe in Jerusalem every stone and every cloud would remind me of your mother; I'd be too unhappy.” Another time he told me, “I know it's convenient to love Israel from a distance. It's even a contradiction, but I'm not afraid of contradictions. In creating man in his own image, didn't God contradict Himself? Except that God is alone and free while man, still alone, is never free.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Forgotten

“Who are you and who am I to set ourselves up as judges of an ancient people, and furthermore our own?”

“Who are you and who am I not to help an ancient people, and furthermore our own, refrain from serious error? Their salvation may depend on it, and ours certainly does!”
― Elie Wiesel, The Forgotten

“Don't fight it, Tamar. Don't say no just for revenge; no more revenge. No more games. Let's take whatever comes along—the good and the less good alike—simply and in harmony. Despite pain and sorrow, we'll put our trust in what exalts us—my father’s relentless sufferings—and in what thwarts us, too—the ambiguities of life, most of all Jewish life in the diaspora. Will forge new links from which new sparks will rise. Spoken words will become signs, words unspoken will serve as warnings. And we'll invent the rest.”
― Elie Wiesel, The Forgotten