Listen 🎧: What does "diaspora" mean?

Ep. 2 of Beyond Hyphenation: A Deep History of Diasporas

I am shocked I was able to find this super old photo from when I crossed the Strait of Gibraltar as a college student.

If you prefer to listen instead of reading this week’s episode, click the play button at the top! Enjoy listening (and the additional commentary in the voice note)

I saw where the Mediterranean Sea and Atlantic Ocean meets many years ago as I was crossing the Strait of Gibraltar on a ferry. This journey from Africa to Europe is usually a perilous one if you don’t have the privilege of a passport from the western hemisphere, money, resources, etc. As a student at an elite American university on a study abroad excursion, I had the privilege of walking around the deck and peaking over to see the different currents of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean brushing against each other forming an invisible line in the water. It felt like two worlds colliding. Not just the Atlantic and Mediterranean, but the African and the European, the west and the east, the global north and the global south.

Historically speaking, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar under the conditions that I did would have impossible 200 years ago for a black woman.

This far away memory came to mind as I was drifting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Lagos recently. I signed up for a special boat tour, so I could see firsthand the ongoing impact of climate change on the coastal line.

I arrived at the docks bright and early. My tour guide was a middle-aged man with a little pep in his step. One of those “I’m just happy to be here” types. Next to him was a petite woman, also a tour guide, holding a bunch of life jackets for us. I’m a morning person. There’s nothing like the crack of dawn to put me in a bright mood.

Yet, I think I met my match because my tour guide greeted us each of us with the most chipper good morning I’ve heard in a while. He’s probably done this tour hundreds of times at this point and yet his excitement was as if it was his first time doing it. Once everyone who signed up for the tour arrived, he whipped out his phone to start the check-in process. He did a roll call by last name.

Growing up Nigerian in America, roll call used to be the most cringe worthy part of a new school year. There were two kinds of teachers who roll called. There was the teacher who took a deep breath and did theatrics before trying to pronounce your last name—inevitably wrong. Then there were the teachers who desperately wanted to pronounce your name right and asked for a impromptu lesson on, for example, Yoruba phonetics and pronunciation.

However, my last name is quite unique. Throughout my travels, I have heard a variety of pronunciations and I’m always curious what my name sounds like in different tongues. So when the tour guide called my last name, I simply flashed a smile and raised my hand. He smiled back. Then we were off.

I was silent for most of the ride. I think mostly because I was mesmerized by the breadth and color of the ocean, but also contemplative of the erosion and signs of decay due to climate change. Once we were far enough out in the Atlantic Ocean we waded in the water for a while. Then I heard the tour guide’s lowered, yet curiosity-tinged voice directed towards me.

“de onde você é?”

I was floating off the coast of Lagos, Portugal not Lagos, Nigeria.

Until now, the small petite woman had been guiding us in English and the man in Portuguese. I asked the woman what he had said.

“where are you from?”

I later found out that he thought I was Brazilian so that’s why he spoke to me in Portuguese. Plausible given the histories we’re going to explore in this series.

“where are you from?”

It’s a question that many of us have contemplated. For some, it’s as easy as stating the nationality on their passport. For others, the question isn’t “where are you from?”, but

De onde vocě veio? Where did you come from?

It’s a matter of time. At what point in history, would you like to begin the narrative of where you came from. It’s a question of what and who sent you to where you find yourself now. It’s the type of question that can yield a variety of answers. Hopefully, we can begin to explore at least one of them in this series!

Welcome to “Beyond Hyphenation: A Deep History of Diasporas,” a series that explores the history of how people living in the diaspora, past and present, have found and created meaning for themselves beyond the hyphenation of two nationalities. If you missed the first episode, you can find it here:

In this episode, we’re going to be exploring the meaning of the word diaspora.

textbook definition

Oxford dictionary defines diaspora (n.) as

“Any group of people who have spread or become dispersed beyond their traditional homeland or point of origin.”

I like this definition because it implicitly acknowledges that the creation of a diaspora is not always a choice. Stuart Hall, a British-Jamaican sociologist and cultural historian, acknowledges modern creations of diasporas when he says “Poverty, underdevelopment, the lack of opportunities—the legacies of empire everywhere— may force people to migrate, bringing about the scattering: the dispersal.”¹

In addition to this, historically, enslavement, wars, climate catastrophes, imperialism, colonialism, etc. have created the conditions for the mass movement of people and with them their cultures, histories, and traditions.

origins of the word

I did some more digging on where the word “diaspora” itself came from. The word diaspora is derived from two ancient Greek words, “dia” and “speiro” which means to sow over.

I get a sort of agricultural image in my head when I read this. It’s like a hand picking up seeds from a singular origin and scattering them amongst soil. Each seed is like a person. Each type of soil like a place around the world. The hand being the forces of history – kingdoms, empires, economies, climates, etc.

Stuart Hall, quoting the novelist Salman Rushdie, said this:

“hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs” is “how newness enters the world.”²

What both Stuart Hall and Rushdie are suggesting here is that diasporic communities are the source of innovation in our world. Throughout history, people have wanted to keep people separate, defined, legible, pure, etc. Migration and the mass movement of people unsettles the very notion of neat ways of categorizing people. Culture and history do not unfold in a vacuum. No, it is series of mini, every day interactions, for better or worse, that have shaped where we are today.

The beautiful thing about a seed is that when buried underground, it doesn’t just sit there as a seed forever. With the right amount of water, sun, and nutrients–it grows. It changes. It evolves. Diasporas are not stagnant. They grow, evolve, and respond to the environments around them. That is the meaning of diaspora.

I’m looking forward to digging deeper in next week’s episode!

Stay tuned,

1. Stuart Hall, Thinking the Diaspora: Home-Thoughts From Abroad, 212.

2. ibid, 213.