A Diaspora Journal
by Joshua Ellison · 11/01/06
Diaspora means feeling proximity across distance, but it’s usually a solitary path.
Because everyone experiences it differently, the biggest challenge of thinking and talking about Diaspora is to define it–to give solidity to an emptiness that can reach into every part of the planet and take on a million peculiar variations.
Exile and loss are core symptoms. Those sensations are real, often acute. For many, the experience begins with treacherous passage from old worlds to new ones. It can mean endless seeking and precarious survival. Sometimes, the tumult is life-long and relentless. Or a primal wound that reopens itself incessantly in the mind. These are the shapeless contours of absence and longing.
Diaspora and exile are not the same thing, though they nurture one another. Diaspora can be a response to exile’s deprivations. It is a way of reclaiming what has been lost–a claim to dignity and value that defies a person’s lived reality. Immigrant, refugee, minority: These lives can feel invisible, disconnected, dominated by the small insults of daily endurance. By attaching to a larger group–crossing borders and time–one can make a stake in eternity, play a part in a drama of historic and cosmic importance.
If Diaspora were just a means of coping with trauma, just a form of psychic displacement or delusion, then understanding it would be simple. We’d have nothing but a diagnosis, and no humane response but to look for a cure.
But there are other ways to experience it too; versions that are not connected to tragic biographies. Diaspora feelings, we know, can exist for those who live integrated and privileged lives. In today’s Jewish world–the starting point for this magazine–most lessons of dislocation are received as part of an inherited history. The first requirement for Jewish fellowship is the empathetic leap of the Passover Seder: to feel as if you, yourself, were a slave in Egypt, delivered into freedom. Even still, the assumed past is not a closed or complete process. Next year in Jerusalem, we say. At the last moment, the story takes a turn back to the beginning. The final redemption is put on hold.
So is there anything that connects these very different sensibilities? If it includes both those who are thrust into it and those who take it on by choice, can we even talk of a single phenomenon called Diaspora?
I think we can, because all kinds begin with the same act of imagination. Any time a person binds him or herself to a larger group, even if it seems as natural as birth itself, a creative process has taken place.
When I see myself as part of an abstract community, I have fit myself into a shared paradigm: How else could I, sitting at home in New York or Jerusalem, feel that my fate is tied to people in other places who don’t speak my language, know my personal story, or play an active role in my daily life? Whether I take it on to ease some private pain or to make a spiritual claim to a collective body–or both–a step has been taken beyond biology and geography. I have decided that my immediate surroundings don’t express everything I want to say about who I am, or where I want to go.
We form ourselves into the mould of our Diaspora community, and then we tailor the group experience to fulfill our own needs. That’s why every voice you read in these pages will sound different. Not simply a representation of some group or other, each is the product of a distinctive encounter with place and past. The function of this journal is to create a repository for all the individual routes to belonging.
