The Jewish Diaspora

Chapter 1

“Exile is the human condition; and the great upheavals of

history have merely added physical expression to an inner fact.”

(Simpson “Introduction”).

“But I am the one

who always goes away.

…But I never left home.

I carried it away

With me- here in my darkness

In myself.” (Bhatt viii)

A “forced or self- imposed displacement” according to Amit

Shankar Saha “is in many ways a calamity”. (Saha, Exile Literature and

the Diasporic Indian Writer). Diaspora criticism became a theoretical

genre of writing around 1997. It is news which always remains

news if we move according to Ezra Pound, as the crisis still

exist. It is positing a new critical site. The word Diaspora can

be identified as the derivation of the term Exile. It can be

described as social formations that are exemplary communities for

a transnational moment. It is a transnational movement, for it

becomes space nor is it a transnational moment for it becomes

time. It designates social communities. The term Diaspora evolved

from the Greek term ‘Diasper’ which stands for ‘scattering’,

‘speir’- it is originally a botanical name which suggests the

biological phenomenon of seed dispersal. In its scientific

dispersal, the term suggests growth and fertility where as in the

literary connotation equates to the term exile. Diaspora is the

dislocation of a group of people from a landscape which could be

their homeland, and relocating them in a new landscape. The

altered physical and psychological landscape of the writers

stimulated their imagination and the works which they wrote

during their Diasporic existence is came to be known as Diasporic

literature. “…but writing is one of the most interesting and

strategic ways in which diaspora might disrupt the binary of

local and global and problematize national, racial and ethnic

formulations of identity” (Ashcroft 218). Identity crisis is one

of the major punctuations which the diasporas address. Being

exile from their homeland, the Diasporic writers, undergo a

scalding alienation which they negotiate with using their

writing. The physical and the psychological trauma which they

undergo, is reflected through their works.

The diaspora deals with three major trans-national movements

like the Classical or the pre modern, the early modern and the

post modern. We need to classify because we need to map these

historical vectors and we need to deal with the characteristic of

each phase as occurred in relation to the schema drawn from

earlier Diasporic formations. Each phase is motivated by their

respective physical and mental circumstances.

The Pre- Modern diaspora consists of the Jews, the Armenian

and the Greeks. They are called Ethno Diasporas because one

ethnic group is driven away. Arjun Appadurai calls this large

scale group of ‘ethnic social clusters’ as Ethnoscapes. When the

diaspora is chronicled, the first will be the Black Atlantic, the

slaves sold for serving some other countries. ‘Girmit’ is a term

collectively assigned to ‘the atemporal ontology of suffering,

hardship and deceit in plantations’. It becomes atemporal because

one is almost pushed into a period of endless suffering. The

history of girmits was written by girmityas. Their narratives

depart from the archives of officialdom as they were

marginalized. When people are branded using an umbrella term then

this narratives of the girmityas will create counter histories.

Modern diaspora deals with the act of self imposed diaspora for

commercial purposes. There were mass rural displacement; they

think they can take root in a place to which they do not belong

to. They are forced to adapt through resilience and through the

medium of writing. Economics becomes very important in this

context of diaspora.

“Being Diasporic is a matter of personal choice, wherein the

journey of life becomes an exploration of an individual’s ‘self’

and a quest for liberation of the human spirit.”(Stephen, Stanley

Mohandoss 71). The self imposed Diasporic exclusion gave them an

opportunity to write about their mother land but in an impartial

way. They were independent and committed; independent and

impartial. Writers like Ovid, Virgil, Shelley, Byron, Eliot or

Henry James are Anglo American exiles, who perceived the

provincialism of America and its intellectual barbarianism, and

fled from it. The result of the internal exiles often tends to be

extensively traumatic because they tend to be aliens in their own

soil. The Jewish diaspora can be considered as one of the most

primitive strand of diaspora. The sufferings and the traumas they

underwent can be considered as the major themes in most of the

works of the Jewish writers and poets. The journey of life for

them then becomes a path of understanding the ‘self’ and a quest

for the liberation and recognition of one’s identity.

“We are refugees and mercenaries and guest workers; you

see us sleeping in airport lounges; you watch us

unwrapping the last of our native foods, unrolling our

prayer rugs, reading our holy books… we are the

outcasts and deportees, strange pilgrims visiting

outlandish shrines…” (Jasmine 100-101)

The term ‘Diaspora’ is problematized these days as it deals

with the crucial matters of identity, the nostalgia for the lost

past, the attempt or the quest for the revival of the ‘self’,

culture, hybridity and so on. Diaspora can be analyzed as a genre

in itself, which brings the periphery to the centre and deals

with the important binaries like the outsider and the son of the

soil who gets trampled and marginalized.

The idea of ‘homeland’ need not be a geographic area but a

product of our own imagination. As the Indian women get adjusted

to their new home and its ambiences, the diaspora adapt to their

new environment. According to Joyce, in The Portrait of an Artist

as a Young Man, “When the soul of a man is born in this country

there are nets flung at it hold back from flight (...) I shall

try to fly by those nets”. Joyce, here is talking about diaspora

in a different way- diaspora as a socio-political conditioning.

He calls the conditioning as nets, the moment one is born, the

net is flung and he soars up along with this net. The

consciousness, here, would become a repository of memories of

multiple spaces. The consciousness is cultural and is associated

with the place, therefore, when a person is uprooted from his or

her place, he or she experiences a culture shock. The memories

try to hold him back, but he takes off with the net thereby

conveying the idea that he is not netted at all.

Diaspora writing usually deals with the expression of the

pangs of being separated from a particular landscape. They always

believed that it was their right to come home, yet those who were

privileged to return home, were often disappointed with the

changes. Once they return to their homeland they understand that

both the landscapes have changed. The idea of ‘home’ makes this

particular genre of literature very powerful.

I shall bring Ganga

as Bhagiratha did of old,

to our land

our Assiniboine.

and the flute player

Dark as kaya blossom

Shall dance on the waters of La Salle” (...)

Here, we can see the deliberate use of cultural and mythological

associations one is able to bring two cultures together. Once we

overcome the efficacy of the binary of the local and the global,

it is possible to use writing, which is a kind of therapy and a

kind of ‘katharsis’, to blur the binaries. According to Bill

Ashcroft, “but writing is one of the most interesting and

strategic ways in which diaspora might disrupt the binary of

local and global and problematized national, racial, and ethnic

formulations of identity”. The concept of diaspora exists only in

the consciousness. The binary of the local and the global

problematized the national, racial and ethnic problems of

identity. For writers such as Uma Parameswaran, writing has

enabled her to overcome the boundaries. The Diasporic experience

shifts its course when it comes to forcible dispersion from the

‘homeland’, like in the case of the Jews and the Armenians. The

first major displacement was the forcible throwing out of the

Armenians by the Turks from Constantinople. The idea of Exodus

can be associated to the displacement of Armenians as well.

The components which compose an identity according to Bill

Ashcroft move from, ethnic to race and from race to a nation.

This becomes an integral part in the study of diaspora as the

Diasporic study mainly deals with the problems of identity and

identity crisis. When it comes to Jews, the term Exodus itself

conveys the sense that one’s relationship with his homeland is

severed. They wander around through various suffering until they

come to the Promised Land and even after that period of trauma

they are exploited and tortured by Hitler during the holocaust.

The art of writing becomes a sure means in negotiating with the

problem of diaspora that is, both an emotional and an

intellectual appraisal of that condition.

“I think that if one is an intellectual, one has to

exile oneself from what has been given to you, what is

customary, and to see it from a point of view that looks as

if it were something that is provisional and foreign to

oneself. That allows for independence- commitment- but

independence and a certain kind of detachment.” (Ashcroft,

Bill).

If diaspora is considered as a problem, if one wants to be the

citizen of the world marring all the walls of differentiation and

mental construction then self imposed diaspora will not be a

problem. They consider the boundaries between the local and the

global as parochial. They analyze the situation with a certain

degree of detachment that they suggest and believe that on is

bound to exile from what is given to you- looking at yourself as

an alien. This helps them to develop a keener insight of your

condition, an attitude to accept. An intellectual approach to

diaspora will be to deconstruct the notion of identity.

The diaspora criticism can be analyzed as a theoretical

domain. But it is a theoretical domain because it has a creative

domain and any good creation on diasporic writing is a process of

confrontation and negotiation. We can come to a point that

subaltern histories are caused by diaspora. The diasporic

consciousness is a divided consciousness, but a multi cultural

consciousness is an expansive and an accommodative consciousness

where the identity is not hinged with any tags of specificity and

a well formed identity.

The basic elements that lead to the formation of diaspora is

social formation which leads to cultural production which is

governed by the brute socio-economic processes. When social

production is linked to diaspora it is inevitably linked with

culture. The work of an Indian in India and his work in a

Diasporic atmosphere have different textures and tones. The

difference and the Diasporic experiences based on the class and

culture is mainly based on economics. The base structure is

always economics and the super structure is built from that base

structure. Tras national economies encourage

Transnationalization, and thus you will never be able to assert

individuality; once sucked into the system, then the identity is

lost. In the name of accepting, there will be suppressing, in the

name of pariochiality, there will be an actual wastage of

vitality. Diasporic criticism, thus, is associated with the

social and aesthetic effects of transnational or global particle,

which it assumes to be a part of late modernity.

Every Diaspora will have its own discursive practices.

Discourse takes us back to Foucault and Said, discourse is

nothing but an ideology which gets rigidified into a belief

system; the moment it becomes a belief system it becomes an agent

of action, the components of this discursive apparatus being,

literary, historical, sociological, philosophical, psychological.

Diasporic literature ultimately deals with the conflict between

the homeland and the hostland which is in the consciousness.

Memory becomes a very important element in Diasporic literature

and criticism. Memory of the homeland creates the problem of

diaspora. David Safron has put forward six characteristics for

defining and delimiting a diasporic formation.

1. Their ancestors have been dispersed from specific original

‘centre’ to two or more ‘peripheral’ or foreign regions.

2. They retain a collective memory, vision as myth about their

original homeland- its physical location, history and

achievements. The adults carry the collective memory which

remains indigenous for every community.

3. They believe that they are not and perhaps cannot be fully

accepted by their host society and therefore, feel partly

alienated and insulated from it.

4. They regarded their ancestral homeland would or should

eventually return- when conditions are appropriate.

5. They believe that they should, collectively, be committed to

the maintenance or resolution of their original homeland to its

safety and prosperity.

6. They continue to relate to that homeland (personally or

vicariously) in one way or the other and their ‘ethno communal

consciousnesses’ and solidarity are constantly defined by the

existence of such a relationship.

The consciousness for all the diaspora remains

ethnocentric, and it gets preserved in the minds of the people.

Diaspora is nothing but the history of the roots. It is

predicated on the purest cartography of the homeland. When the

homeland is marked, there is a history of root and a history of

routes, the physical and the mental journey that they underwent

to study other cultures. They regard the concept of homeland

would come back when the conditions are appropriate. They

construct the concept of ‘homecoming as a thought process. The

host land is not a familiar geographical terrain and the feeling

of alienation and insulation emerges which forces one to move

with his particular community. They try to create the ambience of

their homeland there by building temples and mosques and they

create their own ethnic community as well. They try to recreate

the ethnicity to assert their identity and individuality. The

consciousness here is an ethno centric consciousness and they try

to preserve it. They come back to their homeland to maintain the

bond and their connections with their ethnicity. To be the

citizen of the world is more of an abstract perspective as

leaving one’s homeland is a very painful process. The border

paradigm might resemble a post modern- adrift from its prefix and

its suffix. In a phrase like Asian- American, the hyphens can

create unstable relationships between; classically auto centred

and ideologically homogenized nation states and ethno communities

whose affiliations and allegiances maybe territorially as well as

culturally disaggregated. This leads to the problem of a nation

state.

“Nation embodies a coherent culture united on the basis of

shared descent or at least incorporating a ‘people’ with

historically stable coherence” (Shapiro, Michel). Nation

represents a coherent culture, united on the basis of shad

descend or at least incorporating people with historically stable

coherence. The coherent culture comprises of a nation state. The

question that we are facing today is which culture is Indian

culture? Which culture is authentically Indian? because of the

diasporic consciousness. The concept of the Nation State can

also marginalize because it can take you to a kind of

homogenization. It marginalizes certain communities and keeps

them in the periphery. These unknown citizens are deliberately

kept outside of history and geography so that dispensing with

them is so easy. Nation State aims at coherent culture and any

aim at coherent culture attempts to wall out. According to Michel

Shapiro, “The symbolic maintenance of nation state requires a

management of historical narratives as well as territorial

space.” The marginalized diasporic communities remain outside the

history and therefore they lack geography as well. The diasporic

consciousness can be developed positively and negatively.

Negatively, it can be developed as an exclusion and

discrimination. Positively, it can happen through identifications

with world historical and political forces. It is a larger

identification with the nations of the world.

Citizen-subjects receive a double coding where the

citizenship is located in the legal territorial entity which is

associated with the privileges of sovereignty. It is also

associated to the rights of individuals and in a cultural

community where it is associated with a history of shared ethnic

and social characteristics. Diasporic communities are, but,

inserted schizophrenically into this ideological scheme by either

integrationist as well as pluralist nation states. Integrationist

could also mean that you lose your identity, in the name of

history; they see to it that the individuality and personal

history is not manifested. Diasporic clusters may enjoy the

abstract rights and privileges of citizenship manifest in

judicial and constitutional sense but in the abstract sense of

the word. They may not share a common cultural ground with the

hegemonic community whose particular values and goals are, at

least in an ideological way, meditated by the nation state and

subtly incorporated into its law but the right to culture-

specific practices may be denied to them. They preserve this

hegemony through the idea of the nation state. This in

integrationist and one will be called and African- American but

that hyphen will always be a problem. The concept of a pluralist

nation state will always lead to ‘schism’- the idea of breaking

away leading us back to the idea of a feudalistic society. Even a

pluralistic Nation-state will tolerate only those practices that

do not directly collide with the universal rights abstracted from

the belief systems, historical struggles, discursive practices

and economic ambitions of the foundational community. Even a

pluralist nation state is therefore one sided, one dimensional

and hegemonic.

The idea of ‘writing diaspora’ has lead to the concept of

wandering. According to Uma Parameshwaran, “Home is where your

feet are and may your heart be there too”. She also shares a part

of her own experience that,

“When one arrives in a new land, one has a sense of

wonder and adventure at the sight and feel of a landscape so

different from what once has been accustomed to: there is

also a sense of isolation and fear; and intense nostalgia is

a buffer to which they retreat. One feels nostalgic about

your own country which acts as a buffer.

The idea of ‘nostalgia’ can act in two ways, propensity to

downgrade and denigrate all things North American. Nostalgia can

also face a crisis when they encounter the darker side of India.

Physical distance provides you with a capacity for objective re-

viewing of your culture. Nostalgia, which is apparently a

romanticising of one’s own land, should not paralyze one’s

capacity to develop new bonds within one’s adopted homeland. Here

she brings in the concept of women, who with centuries of

cultural indoctrination and expectation are able to adapt more

quickly and accept two homes without conflict or ambivalence.

“Nostalgia as the only sustenance can become quite toxic,

vitiating the living stream into a stagnant c’esspool”

(Parameshwaran, Uma).

Ultimately, the problem is to know, than unless we educate

ourselves to know the chronological and geographical continuum we

will see only through perforated sheets, in fragments. We need to

recognize the question, is Ethnoscapes a mere mindscape? These

are the major trajectories of diaspora. Uma Parameshwaran also

argues that the publishing industry does not want a diasporic

writer to write happily, they would have to write ‘tales of woe’.

The term diaspora, in all the terms, has open new avenues of

study into the world.

Chapter 2“And I come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians

and to bring them up out of that land unto a good land and a

large, land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus: 2:23)

The origin of the Diaspora is considered to be the result of

the conflict or the dissolution of language in the tower of

Babel. The roots of Diaspora but goes further back till the exile

of the jews from Palestine. The traits of Diaspora can be

identified in this exile as they also had to undergo the identity

crisis and lack of space thus both a geographical and a

psychological isolation from their mother country as well as from

their host country to which they settled. The origin of the Jews

can be traced to Abraham, the patriarch, who emigrated from

Mesopotamia to the Promised Land according to the word of the

Lord in Genesis: 12:1-5. They had to exile to Palestine later

during the time of Jacob, the grandson of Abraham. The first act

of Diaspora is found in the Jewish community around 732BC as a

result of the shift of the Israelites from Palestine to the

Promised Land Canaan. The first Diaspora was lead by Moses who

took the Israelites from Palestine to Canaan through the desert

which took them forty years. The Jewish Diaspora is the

fulfilling of God’s word to the prophets Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

that God will deliver their race from their bondage under the

Herod and give them the Promised Land.

“And it came to pass in process of time, that the king

of Egypt died; and the children of Israel sighed by reason

of the bondage, and they cried, and their cry came up unto

God by reason of the bondage. And God heard their groaning,

and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac,

and with Jacob. And God looked upon the children of Israel,

and God had respect unto them.” (Exodus 2: 23-25)

They moved as twelve Hebrew tribes from Palestine which is

the descendants of the sons of Jacob. The ten clans are the sons

of Jacob are Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun,

Joseph, Benjamin, Dan, Naphtali, Gad and Asher. Their expedition

through the desert can be analyzed in the physical as well as

their spiritual level where their body as well as their soul was

put to the test of faith. The tribe underwent a spiritual and

psychological metamorphosis which remoulded them into a tribe who

are known not as the Palestinians or Canaanites but as ‘God’s

People’. For the Israelites, Palestine was the host country to

which they had to relocate during the time of their ancestors.

Through Moses the religious leader they were being led to their

home land which was the Promised Land. They faced the problems of

Diaspora when they faced an anxiety of not belonging to their

homeland to which they migrated.

They moved out of Palestine to honour the word of God and to

give Him sacrifice. They had a religious aim as well as a

physical one which is to escape the bondage in Palestine. The

desert can be a symbol which cleanses them from the pleasures of

the world. It consumes all the sin and the evil which they had.

Therefore the desert can be considered as a symbol to describe

the Divinity. The purification which the people undergo through

the desert can be compared with Yeat’s poem Sailing to Byzantium

where the soul is purged in a gyre to cleanse it from the worldly

pleasures. They conquered every land on the way to their Promised

Land thereby galvanising their strength outside their home

country as well. The Jewish Diaspora can be even considered as a

religious pilgrimage like that of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a

spiritual rejuvenation and a form of reformation to their earthly

and pleasure seeking soul. The journey is to heal the corrosive

soul and make it glow again by coating it with the Grace of God.

Moses is the pivotal figure when we trace the Jewish

Diaspora from Palestine. He acted as a tool in the Hand of God

from the moment God appeared to him in the burning bush. The rod

which he carried can be considered as his own spirit which was

completely surrendered before God. The relationship between Moses

and the Israelites can be considered as a symbol of God’s

relationship with man. The Diaspora is usually associated with

the anxiety of the dispossessed. The Israelites however, prove to

be a different tribe who overcome all the anxieties of the

Diaspora and installed a religious Preamble- The Ten Commandments

and a social Code of Conduct thus constructing a Nation and a

culture of their own.

The historical survey of the Jewish Diaspora can be thus

traced from the Israelites. The dispersion of the Jews around

586BC has a religious as well as a historical explanation.

According to Robin Cohen in his critical work Diasporas and the

State: From Victims to Challengers suggests that,

“The Jewish leader, Zedikiah, had vacillated for a

decade, then impulsively sanctioned rebellion against the

powerful Mesopotamian Empire. No mercy for his effrontery

was shown by the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar. His

soldiers forced Zedikiah to witness the execution of his

sons; the Jewish was then blinded and, with his followers

dragged in chains to Babylon. Jews had been compelled to

desert the land ‘promised’ to them by God to Moses and

thereafter forever became dispersed” (2).

The religious perspective and the interpretation refer to

the belief that God confused the language among the people of

Babylon and thus they had to disperse to avoid the massacres that

followed the dissolution. The dispersion of the Jews from Babylon

by 586BC authentically triggered off the genre of study-

Diaspora. The dispersed Jews migrated to Iran, India and to other

countries around the globe. This second phase of Jewish Diaspora

was for their survival and with another mission which excluded

spirituality. Being the minority in their home as well as the

host countries they were forced to subject themselves to the

suppressions and oppressions of the country. The muteness and the

vacuum, as a result of the frail or the lack of roots in their

residing soil, is well described through their works of art;

especially through the poems of the poets like Yehuda Amichai and

others. They interrogate the people in power and those people who

exercise it over them, and raise the questions and portray their

plight to the outside world. For the oppressed, violence is the

last resort; here, they try to bring out their mental conflicts

and confusions through their poems. The colour and the tone of

their poems are soaked with their tears, blood, agonies and the

turmoil through which they lead a devastating life.

The origin of Judaism has an association with the Jewish

Diaspora. According to the literary critic Adam Kirsch, the

origin of Judaism can be traced in two ways. The first root has

its origin from Abraham, in the book of Genesis, where God told

Abraham to leave his homeland to the Promised Land. In this

covenant between God and Abraham, the Jews were a family. The

second root is found in the book of Exodus: when God delivers the

Israel from their bondage to their Promised Land, He gave them

the Ten Commandments to follow and the covenant between the

people and God was limited to the, more politically inclined

relationship between God and His people. The complexities

associated with the origin of the Jewish Diaspora can also be

substantiated by the derivations made regarding the race dualism

as the Diaspora is the result of the promise which God made

between Him and the sons of Abraham and it also led to the

establishment of Judaism through the Ten Commandments which God

gave to His people from mount Sinai. Though Adam Kirsch suggested

the two levels or the two channels of the origin of Judaism, it

is possible to locate a point of convergence between the two

streams. There is an archaic and generic link which binds the two

derivations of Judaism. The ancestral line of Moses heads up to

his predecessor Abraham, concluding that the first stream of

Judaism, according to Kirsch is the spring which actually

nourished and gave rise to the sea of Judaism which we see in the

book of Exodus. The covenant set between the Israelites and God

through the commandments was actually enlivened by Abraham again

proving that the two streams of Judaism is actually the two

levels of the development of Judaism.

The concept of ‘imaginary homelands’ which is suggested by

Salman Rushdie in his essay entitled “Imaginary Homelands” can be

allied with the concept of Diaspora and Migration as well.

Rushdie recalls the same experience by pondering on the concept

that the present existence is foreign and the past is home.

Rushdie’s essay ‘Imaginary Homelands’ opens with the famous lines

from the novel of L. P. Hartley, “The past is a foreign country-

they do things differently there” Rushdie then moves onto say in

the essay that, “it reminds me that it’s my present that is

foreign, and that the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost

city in the mists of lost time”. For the Israelites the foreign

country can be considered as the symbol of their past identity

which they try to reclaim through the migration or dispersal.

For them the past is a lost identity which they are striving to

reinvent. The Israelites are trying to build a future by climbing

the ladders of the past. They try to retrieve or restore the past

so that they would have a future to sustain themselves. They were

reclaiming the past to re-live their future by exiling to the

Promised Land. The physical geography and the psychic geography

are connected in such a way that the physical exile, dispersion

and migration leads to the alteration of their psychic landscape

as well.

“Moses from whose loins I sprung.

Lit by a lamp in his blood

Ten immutable rules, a moon

For mutable lampless men” (Issac Rosenberg).

The dispersion of the Jews from Egypt had led them to

another hemisphere of perspective; the identity of the Jews got

altered in a complex pattern which even the genetic code will

fail to transcend. They were no longer Egyptians nor were they

Canaanites. They became an outcast which got rejected by the

world as a whole. They were ransacked physically and

psychologically by the world that there generations had to go

through a constant state of traumatic experience. The

psychological and mental ordeal found a vent or expression

through words. They were not mere “words, words, words” which

Hamlet mentions, but each expression and word contained the

colour and the smell of their blood and the taste of their tear.

For them, the only mode to make their voice heard was the mode of

writing. In his forward to The selected poems of Yehuda Amichai,

Chana Bloch admires the power and the magnificence in the works

of Yehuda Amichai’s poetry and other such writings. He says that,

“pungent, ironic, tender, playful and despairing by

turns, it draws me by the energy of its language, the

exuberant inventiveness and startling leaps that fresher the

world making it seem a place where anything is possible”

(xi).

Yehuda Amichai is one of the most prominent Jewish writers who

describe the traumatic experiences of the Jews through his poems.

Blanch considers his poetry and his poems as impenetrably and

unmistakably Jewish because of the quarrel with God which is a

watermark in all his poems. Blanch comments that,

“Amichai’s quarrel with God is what stamps his poetry

as so unmistakably Jewish. That quarrel carries on the

venerable tradition of Abraham, Jeremiah and Job though the

object of his irony is the Bible as well, not least the

visionary fervour of the prophets” (xii).

The pain and the suffering which he underwent all his life made

his an Anti- Jew in his faith and in his belief in the tradition

and the past of the Jews. He is the inheritor of the unfortunate

and the suffering Jews who lost their identity and is struggling

for decades for a sense of belonging. His poems reflect their

pain and the agony that their race had to undergo. His mental and

psychical trauma contrasts with the Biblical promises which make

him further Anti-religious. In his poem A Luxury he writes,

“Grandfather, Grandfather, cheif rabbi of my life,

Sell my pains the way you used to sell

Khametz on Passover eve: so that they stay in me and

even go on hurting

but won’t be mine. Won’t belong to me”(55).

Amichai shows how the religion has become irrelevant to him and

meaningless as a whole that they fail to recognize the true

meaning of the term and what it once conveyed. The trauma and the

anxiety suffered by the Jewish diaspora is expressed through the

literary expressions, written by such poets like Yehuda Amichai

and other such writers. For them these expressions are not mere

letters but drops of blood, each of which has their own story

engraved to it.

Chapter 3

“In general four- sometimes inter-weaving- migrations

are emphasized. Each of these currents has had its own

specific background, characteristics and conditions. Some of

which caused variations in the way migrants reproduced the

Indian culture abroad and how they were received by the host

societies.” (Oonk 10).

Writers of the Indian diaspora migrate to other nations and

replant themselves in other cultures because of the socio

economic situations. The diasporic community suffers from the

anxiety of belonging to an alien soil. The isolation and fear

which they are forced to undergo makes them retreat to intense

nostalgia and to memories which are associated to their homeland.

They try to exert their identity and strive to create the

ambience of their homeland as a part of their insulation from the

isolation of the host land and to preserve the indigenous

memories associated with the homeland as well. Within the

academic of the ‘Indian Diasporic literature’, the reproduction

of the homeland in an alien soil and the relation to the homeland

can be considered as the major concepts of diaspora. The South

Asian migrants transcended the borders based on various migration

patterns.

“There is a distinction to be made between the old and

new diasporas. This distinction is between, on the one hand,

the semi-voluntary fight of indentured peasants to non-

metropolitan plantation colonies such as Fiji, Trinidad,

Mauritius, South Africa, Malaysia, Surinam and Guyana

roughly between the years 1830 and 1917; and on the other

hand, the late capital or post modern dispersal of all

classes to thriving metropolitan centers such as Australia,

the United States, Canada and Britain.” (Mishra, Sudesh 276)

The trans- nationalization of capitalism can still be part

of the diasporic experience. The term ‘trans’ refers to

transcending the limits of nation. The foundation or in Marxian

terms, the base structure of all the concepts and problems of the

South Asian Indian diaspora is primarily economy. The other

concepts of race, culture and aesthetic are superstructures which

emerge from this base structure of economics. The Socio economic

manacles drag the people from their homeland to a completely

alien and an isolating society. The economic problems associated

to the diaspora occur primarily when we choose to go. Economic

reasons associated with the migration further divides the people

of the diaspora into two; the forced and the self- imposed

diaspora. The forced diaspora can be considered with a certain

degree of sanity and justification as they were forced to move

out of their home for their sustenance. The diaspora of the Jews,

Armenians and the plantation workers come under this form of

diaspora. They are the people who need to go out of their country

for a living. The self- imposed diaspora is the result of man’s

unquenching desires for more money, and therefore they do not

have any room to complain about diaspora because it is a self

chosen one. The problem of the diaspora is actually the problem

of the mindscape. The connection between landscape and mindscape

is very important. We should not look for perforations or

fractures in your lives, instead we should strive to achieve

wholesomeness through this fracture.

“…barred by the feudal system from owning the land; and by

the guilds from taking part in industry; shut up within congested

ghettoes and narrowing and narrowing pursuits, mobbed by the

people and robbed by the kings;…” (Spinoza 146).

The idea of being ‘ghettoed’ is another argument which needs

to be dealt with. It is suffocation and a form of

claustrophobia. The most important thing is, whether a place of

residence a landscape or a mindscape? The resilience of the Jews

and the diaspora is the element which needs to be celebrated.

They make the place they settle their home and at the same time

yearn for their home land also. Another important argument is

whether the constricting ‘ghetto’ a physical space or a mental

construct? The diaspora springs from the concept of landscape or

mindscape. The term diaspora has lost its value today as it is

substituted by the concepts like trans nationalism and

multiculturalism, where it is possible for a human consciousness

to hold multiple cultural memories at the same time without

having any problems of belonging. We are not worried today with

the fluidity of an entity. Diaspora had to be discussed as a

condition and as a problem. Today, Diaspora as a problem has

become old fashioned. Diaspora as a problem has become

anachronistic but diaspora as a condition prevails. Diaspora

deals with both the physical and the mental landscapes and it

will be an eternal entity that the diaspora will have to deal

with.

I lie on the grass and listen.

To the river inside me. It

Pulses and churns, surges up

Against the clenched rock.

Of my heart

Until finally it spurts from my head

In a dark jt. Behind

The clouds swoop and dive

On paper wings…( Divakaruni, Chitra).

Chitra Divakaruni Banerjee, recent star in the diasporic

sky, delves into the darker dreams and nightmares of ‘womanscape’

and as an appreciative readership among feminists. But her woman

characters are mainly Indo- American there is a tendency to see

them not as individuals but as the representatives of the

diaspora. She also says that, “an attempt is made to perpetuate

the negative stereotypes that the average north- American reader

has of Indian life and culture.” (Divakaruni, Chitra). Diaspora

literature has also developed the title as immigrant literature

and any immigrant literature for that matter will have the

problem of diaspora- the person is an outsider in the host

country. But for the Jews who has underwent a series of

marginalization and suppression the diasporic is an existing

condition.

Though diaspora is a living condition among the Jews, they

developed a firm resilience which enabled them to adapt to any

new cultures to which they are rooted and shifted to. The problem

of diaspora mainly arrives when the consciousness is divided into

‘here’ and ‘us' and ‘there’ and ‘other’, where we become the

other. The transcendence from one nation to the other changes the

configuration of the host and of the diaspora. The role played by

the publishing industry in the genre of diaspora is very crucial.

In a journal or a book devoted to diaspora they do not promote

the ‘happy stories’ but it should deal with culture problems,

culture identities and so on. But the self imposed diaspora

cannot be a problem as it is a self chosen one. Here again we are

reminded of Joyce’s words were she explains about nets being cast

on to a child when he is born; nets of memories and cultures.

Joyce talks about transcendence, from the homeland to the host

land, which enables the person to carry the memories associated

to the homeland. After transcending the limits of the nation, if

we return in search of the roots, a sense of alienation replaces

a sense of belonging. Thus if you are an alien in your own

country, you are experiencing diaspora as well. Joyce wants the

diaspora to remove the nets so that they would not have to go

through the sense of alienation because, it hamper the flight.

Instead he suggests the people to fly with their nets.

Dr. R. Radhakrishna theorizes diaspora when he asked

questions based on its roots and origins; they are,

1. Is ethnicity a mere flavor, an ancient smell to be relived

as nostalgia?

2. Is it a kind of superficial blanket to be worn over a

substantive U.S identity?

3. Or is ‘Indian’ness being advocated as a basic immutable form

of being that triumphs over changes, travels and

dislocations?

Basically he asks a question that- Is ‘Indian’ness an entity that

will never change at all. He also asks if we’ll be able to carry

the ‘Indian’ness of the identity wherever we go. It is impossible

since ethnicity is more of consciousness. The self imposed

diaspora primarily tackles with the transformation and

transcendence from the homeland to an alien soil. As they

transcend, they integrate their consciousness and tune themselves

in such a way that they receive new culture and attack it along

with their indigenous memories. This argument of the

transformation further raises a question by Dr. R. Radhakrishna,

Does this transformation suggest that identities and ethnicities

are not a matter of fixed and stable selves but rather the

results and products of fortuitous travels and

recontextualizations? According to the later phase of diaspora,

where it is treated more like a condition, identity is formed

when the diasporic community is contextualized and integrated

into an alien soil and thus it attains a fluidity of cultures and

achieves a form of multiculturalism. Ethnicity and identity would

be altered repeatedly as they are introduced to new soil. This is

the resilience which the Jews developed among themselves, to

appreciate, accept and tolerate the pros and cones of every

culture so that we can experience a fluidity of all the cultures.

Our identity expressed in itself is related to a shifting

equilibrium where there is no specific identity present.

According to Dr. R. Radhakrishnan, The ethnic identity is

analyzed as a strategic response to a shifting sense of time and

place. As they migrate to the host community they try to assert

their cultural memory and identity on that alien soil as a part

of reclaiming their memories about their homeland and as a part

of positing their ethnic identity on the basis of a natural and

native self. Here, identity is used as a strategic response to

the sense of belongingness.

“There are at least two different ways of thinking

about ‘cultural identity’. the first position defines

‘cultural identity’ in terms of one shared culture, a sort

of collective ‘one true self,’ hiding inside the many other,

more superficial or artificially imposed ‘selves’, which

people with shared history and ancestry hold in common.[...]

Cultural identity, in the second sense is a matter of

‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’. It belongs to the future

as much as to the past. It is not something already exists,

transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural

identities come from somewhere, have histories. But like

everything which is historical they undergo constant

transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some

essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous

‘play’ of history, culture and power.” (Hall 223-225)

When the ethnic selfhood becomes an end in itself then diaspora

becomes a problem. A post ethnic phase is also a possibility when

the diasporic community accepts and gets in tune with the alien

soil. The diaspora in the context of people is both a private

experience and also a totally contrasting public experience. Dr.

Radhakrishna has also mentioned another concept of ‘Double life’

which can be analyzed in tune with the ethnic selfhood and with

the post ethnic phase. The traits of ethnicity and the cultural

conditioning moulds one to be the ideal progeny of the motherland

whereas, his domains of works forces him to display the qualities

of the host society. Therefore, he is forced to have ‘The ethnic

private life’ and ‘The altered public life’. When you take

youngsters in diaspora, they do not experience the idea of

diaspora. For them the diasporic struggle occurs when the parents

try to condition them according to their native culture. The idea

of generation gap or generation struggle is another issue that we

see in diaspora. Maxine Hong Kingston in her work The Woman

Warrior says, “both the home country and the country of residence

could become more ghostly locations and the result can only be a

double depoliticization”(). When you get depoliticized, you will

not belong to any country. The home country which was very real

earlier will not be real anymore and the present home will be

materially real but will be unreal because you suffer from

diaspora. The severity of the diaspora depends of the age in

which the person is uprooted to the host society. Children and

young adults cope up with the new environment easily than the

elders. Acclimatization is a very important phenomenon to

tackle the problem of diaspora. It is important and a necessity

to use the mask of the host society by wearing their dress and

speaking their lingo.

“It is the nature of a racist, capitalist society to isolate

and privatize the individual and to foster the myth of the equal

and free individual encumbered by either a sense of community or

a critical sense of the past… the theme of individual success is

a poisoned candy manufactured by the capitalist greed in active

complicity with the racist disregard for history”(…). The major

problem of diaspora is stereotyping. As a part of homogenizing

the society, they categorize and thereby, remove the

individuality from the people. The personal identities are

neglected and marginalized to give way to the collective identity

of the nation which is stereotyped. Jews were also thus

stereotyped and Hitler took up that strand and argued against the

Jews and tried to eliminate them. He eliminated and persecuted

their consciousness through the tortures that he gave through

their body. According to Steve Biko, “The most potent weapon in

the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.”

(Stubbs, Aelred, I write what I like). Diaspora is a condition to

which people and either pushed into or to which people leap and

unless we ourselves decipher ways to overcome it, like overcoming

the perforated sheet, diaspora would still remain to be a problem

haunting the generations in the past as well as in the present.

Chapter 4

“The story of the Jews since the dispersion is one of

the epics of European history. Driven from their natural

home by the Roman capture of Jerusalem and scattered by

flight and trade among all the nations and to all the

continents; persecuted and decimated by the adherents of the

great religions- Christianity and Mohammedanism- which had

been born of their scriptures and memories; barred by the

feudal system from owning land, and by the guilds from

taking part in industry; shut up within congested ghettoes

and narrowing pursuits, mobbed by the people and robbed by

the kings;” (Spinoza 146).

Diaspora literature is a genre in itself where the voice of

the voiceless is raised. It deals with the themes like nostalgia

for a home which exists only in their memories, destroyed dreams,

trampled hopes, identity crisis and a quest for the long lost

self. They express their torments and the ripples of their memory

through the literary work they give birth to. They create a space

for themselves in the society through the literary works they

produce. Their poems mainly deal with the themes of identity,

culture, hybridity, nationality, home and homelessness.

“...it isn’t patriotic in the ordinary sense of the word, it

doesn’t cry death to the enemy, and it offers no simple

consolation for killing and dying.”

“Amichai holds tightly to whatever he has lost. ‘What I’ll

never see again I must love forever’ is his first article of

faith” (Bloch, Chana xii). The poems of Amichai also speak with

the same cultural and psychological vigour of its author. “I do

not know if history repeats itself” is one of his poems, which

discusses the author’s perspective of the Jewish community and

the concept of diaspora. The poem begins with a clichéd

sentenced, “I don’t know if history repeats itself/ But I do know

that you don’t ...” (Amichai ). Here there is a beautiful

juxtaposition of the political and the personal. In the diasporic

literature, the basic thing is that the personal is political or

the personal assumes the form of the political. When we say

political we take history as a process, then we talk about

history as a chronology and then history as a pattern. “I

remember that the city was divided/ not only between Jews and

Arabs/ But between me and you” (Amichai ). Here the personal

clearly becomes the political when the gap between them becomes

the matter of races; Arabs and Jews. Here we could see the trauma

like in all the other diasporas. Here it deals with the theme of

displacement as well. The city was divided not only between the

Jews and the Arabs but also between ‘me’ and ‘you’. When a

problem of division like this is created, the basic problem will

be the ‘sense of belonging’. When one is always looked down upon

with suspicion naturally the sense of belonging will not be

there. They were together in the earlier days but an invisible

wall came in between them. “We made ourselves a womb of dangers/

we built ourselves a house of deadening wars” (Amichai ). Any

historical process will only begin with individual incidents.

Here we are almost reminded of Iago’s statement “foul womb of

time”. (Shakespeare ). One simple incident might have ignited the

war over nations and the separation of the countries. He also

deliberately uses the term ‘house’ and not ‘home’ because when we

use the term ‘home’ there are warm and happy memories associated

to it. Here the poets have nothing else to share but the cries of

woe.

“Like men of far north/ who built themselves a safe warm

house of deadening ice” (Amichai ). These lines are so

paradoxical when it juxtaposes the words ‘warm’ and ‘ice’. They

build themselves a house of ice, to escape from the cold. The

deadening ice also suggests the dangerous, cold and isolated

atmosphere of the diaspora. Here the poet brings in the idea of

‘space’. The physical space has been so important in the context

of diaspora. The space what you belong to ultimately makes you

what you are and any shift in the space can lead to a crisis. The

poet first says that “I don’t know if history repeats itself” but

now he says that “But now I know/That history doesn’t repeat

itself,/As I always knew that you wouldn’t” (Amichai ). The

importance of the poem lies in the theme of displacement. When he

uses the term ‘city’ which is one composite form of space, it

obviously becomes a representative of a common space. Another

important theme is the theme of memory. It is ‘re’membering,

putting things together in order for some cohesion. The form of

diaspora which Amichai discusses about is a peculiar form of

diaspora, were they are experiencing diaspora in their own land.

The same form of diaspora and trauma is discussed in the poems of

the Srilankan poet Cheran. In his poem, “A letter to a Sinhala

friend” he discusses the same plight of being separated and

mentions the concept of ‘space’ as well. Here, Jews and Arabs are

identities and the problem of diaspora occurs mainly because of

the problem of identity. When one is a minority then you are in

state of crisis; there will be a wall even if there is physical

proximity. That place could deliver terrible things in the name

of crisis and all of this would be in the name of belonging. The

metaphor of the ‘deadening ice’ brings in the conflict of life

and death. When the poet says that they are building warm houses

of deadening ice, a sense of fragility is also interwoven as

well. It is a union as a result of political choice but there the

peace is only apparent. What was mental distance there has also

become physical distance in the poem. This happens to the Jews

when they were ghettoed. The poem mainly discusses two poems,

which are, diaspora is mainly connected to the idea of ‘space’

and that it is connected to not only physical displacement but

also mental displacement which is described in terms of space.

Even if the political remains the same the personal gets altered.

Visits of condolence is all we get from them./ They squat at

the Holocaust memorial./ They put on grave faces at the wailing

wall” (Amichai, “Tourists”). The title of the poem “Tourists”

itself suggests the idea of belonging. In spatial terms, the idea

of the term ‘visitor’ shows that it is an outsider and in the

temporal terms it is a very transient state. They sit at the

memorials of their ancestors listening to the tales of woe or to

use the expression of Venkari Mathai, “The litany of woes”. The

Jews always had a problem of belonging from the time of Exodus,

now they have a space but still they are more like ‘the citizens

of the world’. When the diaspora listen to each other groan, the

exploiters, behind heavy curtains, in the hotels. For them, the

holocaust memorial is a place of visit because they are the

tourist. For a Jew, the holocaust memorial is of utmost

consequence as it remembers many things. For the Tourists, the

pictures that they take are nothing but preserving for posterity

places where the Jews were persecuted. They don’t have the pang

associated to the death of the people. By taking a photograph

with the famous dead they become famous. The poet gives a list of

names associated with the holocaust like “Rachel’s tomb”,

“Henrzl’s tomb” and the “Ammunition hill”.

“They weep over our sweet boys

And lust after our tough girls

And hang up their underwear

To dry quickly

In cool, blue bathrooms” (Amichai “Tourists”).

They poet brings in the distance between the tourists and

the native Jews when he brings in the terms “they” and “our”. The

poet questions the sense of sympathy which the tourists display

when he juxtaposes the attitude of the tourists to the dead boys

and towards the tough girls.

“I said to myself: redemption will come only if their

guide tells them,

You see that arch from the Roman period? It’s not

important: but next to it,

Left and down a bit, there sits a man who’s bought

fruit and vegetables for his family”.

(Amichai Tourists)

The poet here gives the purpose of literature and history

and poetry which is to deal with the important aspects of

history. It is a criticism of the historians because they do not

give the real phase of history. The poet tries to convey through

the poem that history now should convey the personal. It is not a

tale of woes but recognition of a common man; otherwise he would

become a relic for the tourists.

Amichai is an accommodating poet who adapts the various and

unique ambiences for the terrain of his poem. His poetry gives a

picaresque detail of the Jewish diaspora and the controversies

and the atrocities that they have to undergo. In his poem “A

Luxury” he has used the graveyard as a metaphor, and by using

this he says how his ancestors are scattered at different parts

of the world. He reveals their lack of space and their lack of a

‘homeland’ thorough the opening lines of a poem which is,

“My uncle is buried at Sheikh Badr, my other uncle

Is scattered in Carpathias, my father is buried in

Sanhedria

My grandmother on the Mount of olives, and all their

fore fathers

Are buried in a half-destroyed Jewish graveyard

Among the villages of Lower Franconia

Near rivers and forests that are not Jeruslem” (Amichai

“A Luxury” 55, 56)

Living in different parts of the world can be both positive and

negative but the basic question is the question of home; which is

the basic question that the Jewish diaspora faces. Graveyard

becomes a metaphor for the Jewish life and the scattering of the

bodies shows their diasporic consciousness and their need for a

‘home’ and ‘space’ for their own. They had a distant past in

which they had a ‘home’ and the mention of the rivers and forests

also suggests life and vivacity which was associated to their

lives but it is not Jerusalem. There was regularity in their life

and they belonged there. The poet gives a picture of his

grandfather and the pastoral life they enjoyed. The poet conveys

that he not only inherited the Jewish identity from his

grandfather but the regularity as well. The poet then compares

the regularity of his grandfather to his regularity. The poet’s

regularity in waking up every morning was not because of the

pastures but because of nightmares. This also shows how the poet

has lost the sense of belonging which is replaced by nightmares.

The idea of ‘my’ in Jew’s life in the concept of diaspora is

always a problem because they never had a sense of ‘belonging’.

For the Jews even the sufferings cannot be considered as theirs.

“So many tombstones are scattered in the past of my

life,/engraved names like the names of stations/ where the train

doesn’t stop any more.” (Amichai “The Luxury” 56). Here the past

not only refers to his own past but the past of the Jews as a

whole where they were persecuted by the Pharaoh in Exodus and in

the later phase- the Nazis. The poet gives a marvellous metaphor

when he compares the tombstones to the stations where the train

never stops. It shows the identity of the Jews which is not

recognized and empty. The poet considers it as a luxury to

connect to all the empty and empty railway stations, which are

the tombstones of his ancestors, and accepts that he cannot

afford it. This further shows how the poet remains disconnected

and ‘rootless’ just like the other Jews in the diasporic

community. The poet here clearly brings in the idea of diaspora

which is the dispersion of seeds, even though the dispersion

occurs contrary to the botanical sense of the term.

“It has the trace of a veil.

A little balsam,

And a taste of the honey

Of lies” (Langer “The Poem”)

The image of ‘the veil’ is the most important part in the

poem “The Poem”. A veil hides, it disrupts vision. It does not

provide with the basic facts. If art is supposed to present with

the real, in majority of the cases, it gives a veiled vision. It

shows how the history has hidden the truth regarding the Jews and

their tortures. It can refer to their days in the holocaust and

their spatio-temporal isolation as well. “Honey of lies” here

means to make the bitter hard truths of life palatable and you

indulge in a kind of construction. Untruths will become truth.

There will be a falsification of the real. The poem that I have

chosen for you is a veil.

“There is also

The coming end of summer

When heat searches the meadow

And the quick waters

Of the river

Cease to flow” (Langer “The Poem”).

Here quick water stands for vitality, life and

vivaciousness, they all are completely dried up; “they cease to

flow”. Here we can see a kind of stagnation. The poet says that,

the poem which is the taste of the honey of lies may present a

reality which is actually not true; the truth is that the sun

scorches the meadow and dries up all the meadows. The song should

actually deal with the stagnation but it deals with the flow when

there is actually no flow at all.

The poem “The Jew” by Isaac Rosenberg traces itself back to

the shepherd himself. All Jews in one sense can connect

themselves with Moses. The poet juxtaposes the changeless laws of

God and the changing men in the lines, “ten immutable rules a

moon/ For mutable lampless men” (Rosenberg “The Jew”). The moon

though it might point to insubstantiality, the light component is

more than the heat component and we need light and a sense of

direction. The term “heaving blood” suggests the kind of energy

that you see associated to the tide. The Jews are the waves which

heave to the moon which is Moses. “...Then why do they sneer at

me?” (Rosenberg “The Jew”) Even though they have so many vital

qualifications they are being sneered at. The poet questions this

attitude if the people towards the Jews. Instead of celebrating

the fact of being a Jew, they are being sneered at. The poet here

gives a peculiar point that, even though the Jews communed with

God and though Jesus Christ himself was a Jew, they are not given

any importance.

“While these poems expressed an utterly contemporary

sensibility, it was their rare diction and archaic cadences

distilled from the most ancient layer of the ancient biblical

Hebrew, that made readers marvel” (Blonch, Chana Introduction).

Dehlia Ravikovitch is one of the most famous Jewish poets, whose

poems have integrated to all the phases of the Israeli public

life. “Like Rachel” is one of her poems in which she narrates the

experience of a Jewish diaspora and their unstable living

condition. Death is the ultimate solution for them in the poem.

“To die like Rachel

When the soul shudders like a bird,

Wants to break free.

Behind the tent, in a fear and dread,

Jacob and Joseph speak of her,

A tremble.” (Ravikovitch “Like Rachel 29)

Death for them is more welcoming. The tent here refers to the

ghettoes and the dreadful concentration camps where the Jews were

tortured. Her whole life is spent in the context of the ghettoes.

The metaphor of the child birth is used to show the soul’s urge

to be free from the tortures of the world and here is where the

phrase ‘Hovering at a low altitude gains significance’, she is in

a state between life and death. She is talking about her whole

life which was like a baby who wishes to be born but not born.

The poet shows the claustrophobic atmosphere of the Jews in the

concentration camps. The baby that wishes to be born is liberty

and all through her life she lived with that labour. Rachel here

also becomes an archetypical Jew who all through her life wishes

to be free but will never be free.

The deeply engraved diasporic consciousness and the

political reality of the diaspora is displayed through the poems

of all these diasporic writers. Diaspora is more a condition than

a political reality and the term diaspora which is a botanical

term is now being associated to a political reality and now we

deal with it as a literary condition and a problem of

consciousness.

Chapter 5

“What drama could rival the grandeur of these sufferings,

the variety of these scenes, and the glory and justice of this

fulfilment? What fiction could match the romance of this

reality?” (Spinoza 146).Diaspora is an often used term in

contemporary literature, however, the meaning of which is not

traced form its roots and the grandeur of its branches is not

groomed as well. It is a genre of literature which is still in

its youth and have miles to go before it sleeps.

It is impossible to place the phenomenon of diaspora

restricted to a particular period of time in history because it

is a phenomenon which has a contemporary significance as well.

From the Biblical reference of Exodus till the self imposed form

of diaspora can be classified under the umbrella term of

‘diaspora’. Diaspora deals mainly with the concepts of homeland,

identity and culture shock which is associated to the memories

and socio cultural conditioning.

When we trace the Diaspora we can trace it from the Book of

Exodus and the migration of the Jews from Misreim to the Promised

Land. As we move on through history, we can trace the phases of

diaspora which are the classical phase, which consist of the

forced dispersion of the Jews and Armenians, The Pre-modern

phase, which consist of the Girmits or the plantation slaves who

were forced to migrate from their homeland to the plantations and

The Post-modern phase which consist of both forced and self

imposed diaspora.

The diaspora in the late modern or the post modern phase

mainly deals with the self imposed form of diaspora where the

people migrate to other countries based on their own desires and

will. They accept the host culture like their own culture and

coagulate the host blood into their own. They also carry with

them memories of their homeland which they try to relive in the

host country. Here we face a question about the ‘Native’ness

being transported to the host soil.

“Despite the joy of liberation from stifling cultural mores,

assimilation into the adopted culture, and reclamation of the

‘lost self’, diasporic literature is obsessed with the stories of

homelessness and exilic state of mind” (Stephen, 78). The

publishing industry has stereotyped the diasporic literature as

the ‘tales of woe’ and therefore any diasporic literature should

be associated to culture shock, identity crisis, lack of ‘space’

and about the deprivation of a ‘home’. Poems of Yehuda Amichai

and Dehlia Ravikovitch deal with the themes of identity and

spatio- temporal crisis but they are not the tales of woe but

powerful poems which raises and alternative voice against the

world who look down upon them and isolate them.

James Joyce in, The Portrait of an Artist as a young man

says that the society casts nets of memories and culture on

everyone which pulls them back to their homeland. We should break

free from the forces that pin us down and fly up carrying the net

along with us. Unless we educate ourselves to see the

chronological and geographical continuum we will see only through

a perforated sheet, in fragments.