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by Awa Sow and Stephanie Iyala
Participants
Awa Sow
Lavin Ousi
Recording starts
Awa 0:01 Hi, I'm your host, Awa, and this is diaspora diaries. We're here today to speak about diaspora consciousness, and I'm here with my friend, Lavin. So before we start, let's introduce ourselves, since we're talking about diaspora. I'm Senegalese, German, and I grew up in France. I'm a woman.
Lavin 0:21 Hi, I'm Lavin. I am born and raised in London, but ethnically Kurdish, also a woman, also in the same ma as Awa, studying race, ethnicity and post colonial studies.
Awa 0:32 Before we start getting into the depth of the conversation, let's discuss how we understand diasporic consciousness. What does it mean to you?
Lavin 0:40 I think diasporic consciousness, to me, is more of an awareness now at this stage in my life of placing myself in my ethnicity and what that actually means as someone who grew up in London but was not, you know, quintessentially British by the standards in which I was exposed to the most when I was younger. So it's more so my interior navigation of that and everything that falls in between, really, from how I act, how I think, and my internal and external worlds.
Awa 1:17 I can definitely relate to that. What I would add would be like the aspect of belonging. I think this has been something very important to me, like, my whole life, to try and figure out where I belong to, and I think I would also relate that to the notion of what's home to me, because I think there's a lot of places in which I've been and lived where I did not necessarily feel like home. It has always been present in the way in which I perceived myself, in the way I would interact with other people.
Lavin 1:51 Yeah, I understand that.
Awa 1:52 So today we'll speak about that. We'll speak about belonging. We'll speak about awareness, experiences, home, identity, hybridity, also, these are all topics we'll touch upon. And to get into it, we thought of sharing a poem that touches upon these themes. We chose an extract from Morrison Chai poetry collection, bless the daughter raised by a voice in her head from a poem titled home.
Natasha (reading out Home, by Warsan Shire) 2:20 “No one would leave home unless home chased you. It’s not something you ever thought about doing, so when you did, you carried the anthem under your breath, waiting until the airport toilet to tear up the passport and swallow, each mournful mouthful making it clear you would not be going back. I don’t know where I’m going. Where I came from is disappearing. I am unwelcome. My beauty is not beauty here. My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing. I am the sin of memory and the absence of memory. I watch the news and my mouth becomes a sink full of blood. The lines, forms, people at the desks, calling cards, immigration officers, the looks on the street, the cold settling deep into my bones, the English classes at night, the distance I am from home.”
Awa 3:57 What are the first things that come to your mind when reading, or in this case, listening to this poem?
Lavin 4:04 I think for me, the thing that strikes me the most about this poem and Shire's poetry in general, is her preoccupation with process and things being in process, which I think marries really well to my own conception of diasporic identity. The part where she describes being an airport toilet tearing up her passports following it, it's like a very physical manifestation of the internal processings of identity. And I think this poem accesses that cadence in a very striking and obvious way, while still you know, holding a lot of nuance in the poetry itself. What about you? What strikes you the most about the poem?
Awa 4:45 That's interesting. I like your point. I really like that part on the passport, too. I think something else that stuck by me is the part where she says, I quote, "my body is burning with the shame of not belonging. My body is longing." So I feel like this part is so... already just the "shame of not belonging". This part is so powerful. It made me very much think about how we associate our bodies with specific places, specific territories. And, yeah, it just made me reflect upon the concept of home, and what is home, and how do we do we find home? Are we provided with a home? I don't know. It made me think of that, especially in the case of Warsan Shire. If I'm not mistaken, I think she...
Lavin 5:52 ...was a Somali poet born in Kenya, but migrated to Britain very young, and, you know, experienced most of her childhood into adulthood in Britain. So it kind of explores hybridity in that sense, too, from her own background. Yeah, I definitely hear what you say about that. And conceptualizing home in general, I think is a feat of its own. It's its own process of understanding.
Awa 6:16 It really is. How would you define home on a very personal level?
Lavin 6:23 Yeah, I think it's an ongoing definition. I think that definition for me is always in flux for a number of different reasons. But I think to go back to what you were saying before about the word belonging, and trying to understand belonging and how to place yourself in that. I think home as a concept, is the locus of belonging. I think it's the epicenter, or like the center point of that. So I kind of frame understandings of home, both in a physical and internal sense, as a process of belonging, or sometimes unbelonging, like the undoing of one thing, to feel like you can have access to another place or thing or feeling. So yeah, that's kind of the working idea I have of it. I'm not sure how you would frame it for yourself, if it's the same or different.
Awa 7:20 I'd actually like to know more specifically. I liked what you said. But like, more concretely, you grew up in London, right? Your parents are both Kurdish, but you were born and raised in London, in London, yeah. So what would you associate with home? Do you have a very strong sense of home, as in, you have this very specific place and for you, that's home? Or how would you understand that, for you?
Lavin 7:56 Yeah, I think for me, there's two ways to answer that question, I see it as two sides of the same coin. I think there's the physical, the geographical, and then the internal placement of home and conceptualizing home. So I was born in London, northwest London, and raised there, effectively my whole life, maybe like a year out and back in and growing up, I spent a lot of time visiting home - what my dad called going to Syria. But because of the nature of politics there, it would be very scattered visits for long stretches of time, sometimes years at times, sometimes consecutively. So the language of home from being young was always two places for me. Geographically, it was London, home as in, born and raised, and then home as in the language of home and what my family called home being Syria or Turkey. So even as a kid, home had two names, and they were two different places. But where I stayed the most was London, and that version of London was also its own placement internally, because I was surrounded by my Kurdish family, my Kurdish customs, my Kurdish culture in and out, and then my first exposure to any English culture, or even speaking English, was during school, when I think I joined a bit later on, five years old, and then from then, there was an ebb and flow and a change and a constant interaction in my own understanding of home. So geography was two places, also in terms of the language of home, which is something I think I carried with me in different ways as I grew older, and it translates differently now, but that's the most concrete I can get in terms of explaining my relationship with it.
Awa 9:47 That's so interesting. I have a very different perspective on it. I think to me, I've always had a very pragmatic understanding of home. To me, home was the place where I lived, and I lived in southern France, so that was how I defined home, and that's how I always understood home. Now, in terms of belonging, that's where it gets a bit tricky, because I've never felt very French. Neither of my parents were French. I would speak German at home, so I didn't feel very French. And obviously, since I was geographically located in France, I felt like I always had part of me somewhere else. And I would also visit my family in Germany most of the time, Senegal a bit, but mainly Germany. So I feel like my home was very scattered, but I didn't have a specific place I would feel at home. And so I think even when I moved out of home, when I moved out of France, I moved to Germany. Even then, since I was not like close to my family in Germany either, was like in southern Germany, my family's from northern Germany, so I would always feel like I'm I'm trying to find a place that I could call home. And I felt like this would never happen. I don't know, I've moved a lot, and I always tried to visit new places to see if this could be the one. But somehow I could never find it, at least not geographically.
Lavin 11:41 No, I share that sentiment when I answer the question of, oh, what does home mean to you? I think my pragmatism translates in taking a step back and realizing that it's not founded on any concrete ground in terms of, like, even if you're geographically subscribed to a certain place in a certain time, the way in which you feel and digest that, is not something that can make itself a whole necessarily, just because you're geographically bound to that place. For example, saying that London's where I was born and raised. Did I ever feel completely whole and at home when I was in London? Not really. Same for visiting Syria or turkey. Did I ever feel at home and whole in Turkey or Syria, also not really. So it's, it's definitely a sentiment that I share, but I I understand that also that it's if it's always in flux, then is it ever going to be concrete? Are you ever going to find it if it's internal? You know, that's always where I go back to. So geography lends itself to a certain point as a productive way of navigating that, but I think that point definitely has an end, at least in my view.
Awa 12:46 That actually reminds me of a conversation we had a few weeks ago. You told me about home being a space of negotiation. Do you want to tell me a bit more about that?
Lavin 12:58 Might be slightly informed by a lot of readings and marinating I did in my thesis in my undergrad, but spaces of negotiation, preoccupation with the idea of an in between state or a condition of in betweenness, I think, is what I mean when I talk about something being in flux or always changing or never, on quote, unquote stable ground. Because negotiation is kind of the at least for me as it pertains to, you know, being a child of diaspora, how I get through every day, I negotiate the invisible spaces of my identity, as in the place between being a Londoner and being Kurdish, I negotiate the physical spaces between like domestic life home, as in physically where my family is, in a in a building, and the institutions that I engage in, the places I work. And so those negotiations intersect in so many different ways and kind of come together to form the web of how I navigate a sense of belonging, which, as I say, in my view, home is the locus of as a concept. So yeah, negotiation, I think, translates into every facet of how I interact with the spaces around me and how I let that inform my identity, or let my identity inform in the reverse as well. So, yeah, I'm not sure how much sense that makes, off the bat.
Awa 14:31 It does make a lot of sense. I think that's where the intersection between migration and diasporic consciousness comes in, right? Because the way in which we approach, well, life, just like the way in which we've been educated, is very much informed by our parents' education and by the places in which they grew up, which is different from the place in which we were raised.
Lavin 15:04 I mean, yeah, they're called your formative years for a reason, and they help you in figuring out how you want to conduct yourself, not only in academic spheres, in school spheres, social spheres, but also with your own family, because it shapes who you are in every dimension. So when your parents, formative years have been in one place and they've had to come to another and adjust, your adjustment is a lot less, quote, unquote obvious in that sense, because we're not the ones migrating, but we are a product of that migration. I mean, I am born and raised in London, but I very much do not feel like the same person whose moms and dads were born and raised in London, mums and mums and mums and dads were like... ancestrally, you know, stayed in one place for so long. So, yeah, I think how your parents view your education is also its own discussion.
Awa 16:00 It definitely is. A whole other episode, a whole other podcast.
Lavin 16:05 Probably.
Awa 16:08 On the topic of not being the ones that have migrated, but growing up and being raised by parents that have - How would you perceive it in terms of negotiating and building up and understanding your identity? Yeah, especially in regards to again, that's part of consciousness and how you navigate different fields and place yourself in the society in which you are, meaning in this context, for you, in London.
Lavin 16:48 That's very good question. And I think for me, it's about - my parents are the ones who moved and who changed from Homeland, quote, unquote, to Newland. And for them, that, that on paper is linear in terms of a geographical movement from one place to another. So how that translates for me, as someone who was not privy to that experience or not in that part of my family history, but rather in London, is what I want to describe as like a process of untangling that impact and how that impact informed their parenting of me and how I stand within myself as an individual operating outside of that, because you are very much informed by how your parents raise you and what values they raise you with, and those are also often the case, especially with the Kurdish diaspora, very traumatic and difficult experiences, so that untangling is the movement that my mental is always doing with being a child of a diaspora.
Awa 18:14 So would you say this came only later, like, I don't know when you started your adult life quote unque. Or would you say this is something that started very early for you?
Lavin 18:27 I mean, I think that's, yeah, cognitive processing. And when you start to actually realize emotions and thoughts and, like, build bridges between them, I think it happens from very early on. I think we just reflect on them in hindsight all the time as we grow older. So trying to understand like temporality and how time operates in that sense is hard for me to answer directly, but I think my recognition of those things happening is born from how much I'm learning actively now as an adult with the right language to sort of supplement things that have always existed there as feelings and thoughts in a less - rather in a more articulated way. So yeah, that's my piece on it as it stands today. How about you? How does it feel to be a second generation child?
Awa 19:20 I think for me, it has changed along time. I think initially to me, it was very much just a power, because what I associated to it was the fact of growing up bilingual, which has always been very much praised, like in school, in general conversations people are just like "bilingual children" - obviously, it's a good skill to have, so that's what I initially associated it with. And then eventually growing up, it was more about trying to find my people. And to me, it was not even necessarily finding people within my diaspora, but it was rather about finding other racialized people. I think to me, it was a lot about being a black child, so I associated being second generation with being a racialized person in a white space, more than I associated with having a different culture. This is very much also because of the fact that I grew up with my German mum. So obviously, in terms of cultural differences between like France and Germany, I remember, like there were so many different programs as to collaborations between Germany and France. So the main cultural difference I could perceive back then was the language, and I could speak both. So I didn't really have that problem. I could easily bridge from one to the other. And it's only later that I started reflecting upon other things that I had not really noticed about how I had also been raised close to the Senegalese culture, and that this is something I was... I actually wanted to learn more about, and so I started trying to look into it more in my friendships, in my relationships. And this was not necessarily about me getting to know Senegalese people or people from the Senegalese diaspora, but rather, more spread onto people from the West African diaspora, sometimes even people from the African diaspora. I think a lot of it also was about my relationship with Islam, which is something I also related to Senegal. So I think these are all different layers to it, I think, and it has definitely developed throughout my life.
Awa 20:26 So what do we say about cultural identities? How would you conceptualize them? How would you define them?
Lavin 22:06 I mean, I think even in what you just articulated, how you just described all the layers, I think those layers very much inform cultural identity and the points you touched on, on, you know, how everything coincides with each other. Religion is mixed with your perception of where you're from, and that's mixed with your perception of where you are, which is not where you're from, but also where you are from. So you know, culture identity in and of itself, I think, is a place you locate yourself in reflection of how all those layers come together to make you who you are, which I can concretize more with some sense... I mean Stuart Hall speaks about this a lot in his writing, and we spend a lot of time with it in class, this idea of placing yourself in process and undergoing constant transformation, and, you know, kind of being part of a play of history. That's how I begin to look at cultural identity. And then how I frame myself in that, I think, is something we're realizing, as we speak about even now, is something that's always changing or developing or sort of nuancing itself as more time goes by.
Awa 23:15 It's definitely unfixed. It's definitely unstable. I think one thing I particularly liked about Stuart Hall's analysis of it was how cultural identities are also subject to the continuous play of history.
Lavin 23:36 Exactly and ideas of narratives of the past, I think in that I find an answer to what you asked me earlier about what it means to be second generation. I mean, if our parents and our ancestral past is a narrative of the past, and we as second generation are a narrative of the present, then I guess our migration is the internal one of reconciling that history with what it now means in this new place, in this new sort of indeterminate condition of in-betweenness that is concretized by one geography but informed by another. Maybe that's our movement, you know, the less visible one, but still one all the same in everything we explain - cultural identities being desperate children.
Awa 24:19 This reminds me off another point Hall touches upon, which is hybridity and how you can't actually reproduce a people. From the moment on, when the people are displaced, there's new things that come into play. So on one hand, there's the influence of the past, because there's the history of the culture that used to be and then there's the migration, which very often also informs new identities. And then on top of that, there's the new technologies and the new identities, and, the influence of the new place, or of the new people you're surrounded by, and all of that basically shapes the new people, meaning the diaspora. And I think that's what makes up the diasporicconsciousness.
Lavin 25:14 Yeah, I think definitely, I mean, it just becomes a space of dynamic interplay. It becomes a space of where, if the goal is not to reproduce or to sort of copy and paste one way of subscribing to a culture or practicing religion in one place to another, if that's not the goal, if it's not a linear process, then it becomes its own fee. It becomes its own place of interaction, informed by all the change we're constantly surrounded by. We're never in a state of permanence in any capacity, anyway. So that was obviously going to inform every aspect of being a second generation child.
Awa 25:53 To me, that's what makes art that comes from the diaspora so specific and so powerful in itself. I mean, we did start with a poem. The poetry that comes from the diaspora has a very specific touch to itself that merges everything we just spoke about, aspects of belonging, aspects of hybridity, identity construction. How would you see that?
Lavin 26:28 No, definitely. I mean poetry and art... art is, for me, the encryption of the uncertainties that we feel within ourselves and Shire's poem or Warsan Shire's poem, especially this poem "Home" specifically, I think the way she blurs ideas of memory and presence into its own body of self, being a self that is very much aware of being displaced is what makes the poem so clear in Its intention. Even though it's dealing with so much uncertainty. For example, she explains watching the news and the very visceral imagery of her mouth becoming a sink full of blood. And she explains, you know, I'm the sin of memory and the absence of memory. And she articulates it through her art, in a very singular register in terms of the word she's using, but what she's trying to encrypt in it holds magnitudes, and I think that is arts power, and that is its tool, and that reflexivity is what allows you to be able to even access the kind of difficulties we are trying to discuss. You know, memory, in and of itself, is probably again a whole separate podcast, but the role of that in the ideas of collective memory and the ideas of individual memory, and how that informs how we interact with our ancestry and our culture in the present day is also something I think this poem specifically really begins to unpack.
Awa 27:07 I definitely agree. I think art can be a very powerful tool to spread a specific message for certain diasporic groups. It is - we can't actually speak about one voice of the diaspora, right? I think that's - here, it's important to draw on parallels.It's what helps the diaspora to keep together, to strengthen and empower themselves. I mean, just having these conversations with other people that are from very different backgrounds. It's always very interesting in a conversation to draw parallels, but we're definitely not the same. So I think it's very important to also be very sensitive to differences, because there's just as many differences as there's parallels I'd say.
Lavin 27:53 Definitely, because there's the concrete and then there's the inconcrete, and the concrete is, I think Hall, again, speaks about it very specifically. He speaks on like having to recognize that everyone comes from a particular place, they come from a particular history, a particular experience, a particular culture. And I think what - to drive home, the point on art as well is it takes the particular and it gives it the homage that it deserves, and it gives it its moment. And then that particularity is taken to a different place through the sharing of that art and through the exchange of that art, and in that process, the parallels that are drawn is what gives it its strength and its new dimensions, if that makes sense.
Awa 28:38 Definitely. I think that's what he calls us being all ethnically located. Yeah, exactly. And I found that point so interesting because we tend to understand ethnicities as related to nations and race, both, sometimes intertwined, sometimes separate.
Lavin 28:57 And knowing when to draw those distinctions, knowing when to recognise the parts that interlace, or the parts that parallel, and the parts that do not, is what makes the conversation productive, it’s what makes it fruitful, it’s what makes it yield a better understanding of how these things work in tandem with each other, wherever they place themselves, you know, they have their own histories and that’s something that cannot be omitted, or homogenised. So, for sure, I think we’re on the same terms with that. And in general, there’s no way to concretely place yourself in a cultural identity, without that interaction.
Awa 29:38 That’s a great way to finish this podcast. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you Lavin for joining me for this podcast today.
Lavin 29:43 Thank you for having me, it’s been great. Have me again.
Awa 29:50 I will. We’re very happy to know what you think. Please let us know – do you agree, do you have a different perspective, do you want to contribute to the discussion? Just feel free to let us know, and thank you for listening!
Recording ends 30:24 minutes