Migrant Myths and Memories

What constitutes diasporic memory? And how can memory reveal insights into diasporic lives? These are issues addressed, in varying ways, by the four books reviewed here. For three of them, the focus is on the African Caribbean diaspora; the fourth examines the Asian experience.

It is surprising that the Caribbean does not figure more prominently in the new literatures of diaspora, in particular of the African diaspora. Emanating principally from the United States, studies of the African diaspora have an almost parochial concern with African Americans.¹ Yet the Caribbean's long migratory history – not only to, but from, the region – should place it in the vanguard of the African diaspora and diasporic ways of thinking. African peoples may have been dispersed to the Caribbean, but West Indians migrated from it as soon as they could, taking with them distinctive creole ways of philosophizing and behaving. It was, for instance, Caribbean intellectuals and activists in the twentieth century – Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore amongst others, migrants all – who set the scene for Pan-Africanism (which became, for some, the spiritual home of the African diaspora) in its various historic and contemporary guises. It was Caribbean migrant workers, men and women, who established complex transnational networks of families which became critical to the Caribbean and its members living 'in foreign' and which could herald new understandings of contemporary, global families.² And it was Caribbean activists abroad from the First World War onwards who conceived of an alternative model of nationhood: an organically federated region whose borders, like the family, were emotional rather than geographic, and where citizenship was contingent on a diasporic imperative. 'We will see the birth of an (sic) new nationality', ran an article in The West Indian American in 1927, 'based neither on language, religion nor occupation of any specific geographical area, but on the fellow feeling of a common racial heritage.'³

The terms 'diaspora' and 'migration' are often interchanged when applied to any large movement of peoples but although a diaspora involves migration, migration does not necessarily involve diaspora.⁴ There is something distinctive about diaspora – a forced exodus, a dispersed people, a recognition of historically shared trauma and/or homeland – which sets the African and Jewish diasporas apart from, say, the Irish or Italian, the Cornish or the Asian 'diasporas'. However traumatic it may be for migrants to leave their home countries – especially if driven out by poverty or war – the ruptures involved in the Jewish exodus or the African slave trade (which in every way went beyond other experiences of forced migration) signal a qualitative difference in the migration experience, characterized, arguably, through a certain form of memory or post-memory of place or trauma. In the Jewish case, 'place' could be located in the Promised Land which from the nineteenth century materialized in Palestine (or the United States). 'Return' became a possibility. In the African case, 'place' was a space of shame and forgetting until the spectre of slavery was confronted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (by, amongst others, Edward Blyden and Marcus Garvey) and a positive reappraisal of, and identification with Africa became possible. In some ways, 'return' had already been a prospect: two African states – Liberia and Sierra Leone – had been founded to accommodate the former enslaved. But Pan-Africanism – like Zionism – caught the mood of nineteenth and early twentieth-century romantic nationalism, and for Africans as well as Jews in diaspora, return became an aspiration. The support given, for instance, to Marcus Garvey's Black...