Diaspora

Diaspora describes the heterogeneous articulations and diverse experiences of populations that have been displaced from their homelands and dispersed throughout the world. It is concerned with questions of identity, difference, memory, and survival. The subjects of diaspora have lived through conquest, colonization, the Middle Passage, racial slavery, genocide, famine, wars, dispossession from their land, and labor exploitation. They have moved through the realms of loss, hurt, unspeakable violence, suffering, sorrow, and creativity—straddling through multiple dimensions of space and time; striving to reverse the irreversible directions of their long journeys; traveling and returning; and struggling to reconcile the nearness of a homeland and the sense of incompleteness. Such a mnemonic exercise involves recognition that the past is flitting and that the attainment of a unitary identity is impossible. Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), one of the most important Black revolutionaries of the second half of the twentieth century, explained in Ready for Revolution that the subjects of diaspora are peoples of dispersal, but “dispersal only begins the process, it does not end it.” It begins the process of survival and sets in motion ceaseless struggles toward freedom. To think, to dream, to theorize, and to live with and through diaspora is to do the most difficult double task of explanatory construction. That is to discursively explore the roots of identity and routes of identity formation and, as Carmichael noted, “stay ready” (rather than get ready) to revolutionalize existing ontological categories governed by liberal individualism and capitalism to live and struggle for a committed human life.

Yuichiro Onishi, originally published in XCP no 15/16 (2005)

XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics

cross cultural poetics, diaspora, XCP, Yuichiro Onishi

May 24, 2010

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Micropoetries

Ephemera, doggerel, fragments, “weird English” (props to Evelyn Ch’ien), graffiti, community and individual survival — écriture brute, folk letters, textile patterns; naive lettrism (as well as belletrisme and lettrisme brute); wise oraliture, gnomic thought-bytes and lyrical bullets, clairaudient visitations with a hermeneutic spin — the marriage of esotericism and exotericism, banality and exoticism. Embedded in contextual specificity but deracinated — the historic exile, the monadic nomad, the centrifugal community that lets fly its auratic verbal detritus. These are poetries that fly beneath the radar of accepted poetic practice, that is not practice but object — these are processes rather than object/products. I’ve explained the term elsewhere as originating in Mark Slobin’s term “micromusics” (in Tenement Songs: Micromusics of the West) by which he means fragments, lullabies, tunes, extremely localized bits of expressive culture carried from the Eastern Europe pale of settlement to New York in the great migrations 1880-1940; individual shtetlach (villages), families, locales had unique musics that made the journey and morphed, somehow surviving. This is also the resonance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s anecdote in “Of the Sorrow Songs,” wherein he tells of his grandfather’s grandmother bringing a song with her which traveled not only spatially across the Middle Passage but temporally down the generations to have been sung to him when he was a small child. He prints the music, the transliteration of the syllables he doesn’t understand, and from that archaeological fragment constructs a theory of cultural transmission. The presence of fire in resonant landscapes — resonant for those bigeared ones.

Maria Damon, originally published in XCP no 15/16 (2005)

XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics

cross cultural poetics, Maria Damon, micropoetries, XCP

May 23, 2010

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