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Diaspora Quotes

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Diaspora Quotes

“There was a time when Indians who had been abroad and picked up some simple degree or skill said that they had become displaced and were neither of the East nor West. In this they were absurd and self-dramatizing: they carried India with them, Indian ways of perceiving. Now, with the great migrant rush, little is hard of that displacement. Instead, Indians say that they have become too educated for India. The opposite is usually true: they are not educated enough; they only want to repeat their lessons. The imported skills are rooted in nothing; they are skills separate from principles ... To match technology to the needs of a poor country calls for the highest skills, the clearest vision. Old India, with all its encouragements to the instinctive, non-intellectual life, limits vision.”

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Book:India: A Wounded Civilization
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“Africa! Africa! Africa! Africa my motherland! Africa, your people cries for you! Africans must educate their citizens. Africans must reach out to it's people and empower them to build the nation. Africans you are the only people who can liberated your citizens from poverty through education. Africans must pay the price to rebuild the continent.”

PoliticalPoliticsLife QuotesEducationPovertyAfricaPoliticiansPolitical PhilosophyAfrica QuotesAfrican American AuthorsAfrican AuthorsLifelong LearnerDiasporaLifelong LearningPolitics Of The United StatesLifelong EducationAfrican LiteratureAfricansPoverty AlleviationAfrican LeadersLifelong ExperiencePoverty And PoliticsAfro CaribbeanAfrica PeopleAfrican CitizensAfrican BelievesAfrican My MotherlandDiaspora AestheticsAfro AmericanAfro American RelationsContinent Of AfricaAfrica ContinentPolitics Of AfricaQuotes Of Africa
Author:Lailah Gifty Akita
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“Isn't content also context? I ask him. Your experiences, your circumstances, the time you live in? Consciousness isn't free-floating; it's enmeshed. That is true, he says, but you know, I believe that the modern diaspora--that so many of us find ourselves somewhere else, migrants of some kind--global, multicultural, less rooted, less dependent on our immediate history of family or country to shape ourselves--all of that is preparing us for a looser and freer understanding of ourselves as content whose context can change. Nationalism is on the rise, I say. He nods. That's a throwback. A fear. A refusal of the future. But the future cannot be refused.”

PastFearConsciousnessFutureNationalismArtificial IntelligenceMulticulturalismMigrationMigrantsDiaspora
Book:Frankissstein: A Love Story
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“The Door of No Return - real and metaphoric as some places are, mythic to those of us who are scattered in the Americas today. To have one’s belonging lodged in a metaphor is voluptuous intrigue; to inhabit a trope; to be a kind of fiction. To live in the Black Diaspora I think is to live in a fiction - a creation of empires, and also self-creation. It is to be being living inside and outside herself. It is to apprehend the the sign one makes yet to be unable to escape it except in radiant moments of ordinariness made like art. To be a fiction in search of its most resonant metaphor then is even more intriguing.”

ArtFictionSlaveryDiasporaBlack Diaspora
Book:A Map to the Door of No Return
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“I admired my father not only for his kindness and intelligence, but also for his memory. He could quote long passages of the Talmud and Plato, the Zohar and the Upanishads. He could recall in rich detail his visit to the ghetto in Stanislav, his first skirmish as a partisan, his arrival in Palestine. He envied the character of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, who remembered what he had done in his mother's womb and even in his father's desire. Immersed in his own past and the world’s, my father was nevertheless a man of his times, reacting to all its convulsions. Politics stimulated him, and so did the international situation. Famine in Africa, racial persecution in Indonesia, religious conflict in Ireland and India: What men did to other men they did to him. When someone said that as a Jew he was wrong to care about anything but Israel, he answered angrily, “God did not create other people so we could turn our backs on them.” And yet he loved Israel with all his heart and soul. Why didn't he go back there to end his days? He did not know, and admitted that to me. “Maybe it's cowardice on my part. Maybe in Jerusalem every stone and every cloud would remind me of your mother; I'd be too unhappy.” Another time he told me, “I know it's convenient to love Israel from a distance. It's even a contradiction, but I'm not afraid of contradictions. In creating man in his own image, didn't God contradict Himself? Except that God is alone and free while man, still alone, is never free.”

GodSocial JusticeMemoryIsraelManContradictionJewishDiaspora
Book:The Forgotten
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“I fell in love with the idea that a story could have places of origin and its own lineage, not entirely unlike a person. A fairy tale could move from one region to another, and it would change clothes. It could adopt the customs and beliefs of its new home, and it would still retain much of its core. The notion that a story could adjust to suit a new home was such a hopeful one for an immigrant kid who grew up knowing that he and his parents didn't come from the same places.”

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Author:Trung Le Nguyen
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“The Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world. The Talmud became essential for Jewish survival once the Temple - God's pre-Talmud home - was destroyed, and the Temple practices, those bodily rituals of blood and fire and physical atonement, could no longer be performed. When the Jewish people lost their home (the land of Israel) and God lost His (the Temple), then a new way of being was devised and Jews became the people of the book and not the people of the Temple or the land. They became the people of the book because they had no place else to live. That bodily loss is frequently overlooked, but for me it lies at the heart of the Talmud, for all its plenitude. The Internet, which we are continually told binds us together, nevertheless engenders in me a similar sense of diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a home page?”

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Book:The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds
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“Don't fight it, Tamar. Don't say no just for revenge; no more revenge. No more games. Let's take whatever comes along—the good and the less good alike—simply and in harmony. Despite pain and sorrow, we'll put our trust in what exalts us—my father’s relentless sufferings—and in what thwarts us, too—the ambiguities of life, most of all Jewish life in the diaspora. Will forge new links from which new sparks will rise. Spoken words will become signs, words unspoken will serve as warnings. And we'll invent the rest.”

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Book:The Forgotten
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“Inevitably, though, there will always be a significant part of the past which can neither be burnt nor banished to the soothing limbo of forgetfulness— myself. I was and still am that same ship which carried me to the new shore, the same vessel containing all the memories and dreams of the child in the brick house with the toy tea set. I am the shore I left behind as well as the home I return to every evening. The voyage cannot proceed without me.”

SelfImmigrationVesselPhilippinesFilipinoDiasporaShipVoyageMigrantFlipinoxHouselessLandless
Author:Luisa A. Igloria
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“in my world, two halves do not necessarily belong together. they are complete without ever holding hands. when i think about my mother i never picture her next to my father. in my mind they are worlds apart. planets. the only time they meet is in the orbit of my reflection and even here, they do not hold hands. they exist as separate members, planets. my skin is the gravity keeping them from colliding. | planets.”

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Book:'PRETTY FOR A BLACK GIRL ' IS NOT A COMPLIMENT!
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“What tethers me to my parents is the unspoken dialogue we share about how much of my character is built on the connection I feel to the world they were raised in but that I've only experienced through photos, visits, food. It's not mine and yet, I get it. First-generation kids, I've always thought, are the personification of déjà vu.”

ChildrenCultureFamilyIdentityImmigrationParentsImmigrantsAssimilationDiasporaFirst Generation
Book:Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays
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“It may be that writers in my position,exiles, or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutilated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must do in the knowledge - which gives rise to profound uncertainties- that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind.”

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Author:Salman Rushdie
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“You scour these Chinatowns of the mind, translating them like sutras Xuan Zhang fetched from India, testing ways return might be possible against these homesick inventions, trace the traveller's alien steps across borders, and in between discover how transit has a way of lasting, the way these Chinatowns grew out of not knowing whether to return or to stay, and then became home.”

PoetryHistoryMemoryNostalgiaSingaporeDiasporaChinatown
Book:Clear Brightness
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“And yet—and yet—she enchants me, intrigues me, draws me like sin to hellfire. The infernal regions in the hollow between her breasts, wet and warm, dark and dense, offers delicious emptiness, captivating, overpowering, like the bottom of a well, the abyss beneath a hanging bridge on a dreary, gloomy day when all hope is gone and death is like the serpent in Eden.”

FictionShort StoryPhilippinesFilipinoAmsterdamDiasporaManilaRed Light DistrictThe Last Temptation
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“If you take a seed, [...] and scatter it across the lands, some will end up in marshes, some in rich fertile lands with flowing streams, others in sand, and others among the mountains and rocks. If the seed is tough, it will adapt and survive in all conditions; if it is weak, it will perish. The same seed in one country may yield a baobab but in another an oak. Our race is a potent seed. Whether you are from Ghana or Guyana, you are born of the same seed and you will be of the same fruit. We must recognize our fruition in London, in Paris, in Dakar, in Harare, and in Maputo. Our roots are deep and wide. We must extend our hearts and minds, like bridges, over the swamps of racial injustice, to link us together.”

DiasporaPanafricanismAfrican Diaspora
Book:Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter
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“For about a century, Filipinos have remained subjugated bodies in a market-centered panopticon, dispersed as a 'warm body export' into the fetishized and fetishizing space of international commodity exchange, their memories of the injustice done to them temporarily suspended under the illusionary force of promised freedom and material success which that space imposes. But this amnesia is fast evaporating —E. San Juan. Jr. "Configuring the Filipino Diaspora in the United States”

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Author:E. San Juan Jr
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“There's something that happens to the newly displaced. Whatever power or choice that was stripped away in the process of reluctantly leaving one's homeland is fervently reclaimed in other situations, and honing in on the best spot to sit and enjoy a meal, be it at a restaurant or a lakeside, takes on the utmost importance. . . . If nothing else, we were always prepared for any and all circumstances and with plenty of provisions to see us through.”

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Book:Bottom of the Pot: Persian Recipes and Stories
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“I turned anti-American. I joined the European chorus of disdain for America. And because, like many other Filipinos, including practically every Philippine president from the time of Emilio Aguinaldo, my father was a true disciple of the Great American Dream, I turned against him, too, as I thumbed my nose at the Americanization of the world.”

FictionShort StoryPhilippinesAthensDiasporaManilaPan De Regla
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“I am almost thirty, never been in love, at least not enough to stay in love through the foul moods, the oppressive silences, the subjugation, the acquiescence, the petty fights, the nagging questions, all the other complications that tend to get factored into a relationship once it stews in time, simmering to a boil.”

RomanceFictionShort StoryBerlinLgbtqiaPhilippinesFilipinoDiasporaManilaOn A Sunday In August
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“But Manila was another life. It was another time. It was universes behind me. The woman who lived there, sheltered and shackled and dreaming of another place, such as this, this magical spot under the start-of-autumn sky adorned with brown leaves preparing for their eventual descent to the earth, this quiet side street near the busy, bustling Old Port in old Quebec, was no longer me.”

FictionPhilippinesFilipinoDiasporaQuebecManilaAlmost Romance
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“At night, touching himself, he would imagine her in every carnal detail, always determined he would see her at last, on Erzèbet Square, but always, once he was done, he would be consumed by guilt, which would not replace the fantasy, only dissipate it, and he would decide she was just an itch he could scratch away so easily without harming her or himself.”

FictionShort StoryPhilippinesFilipinoDiasporaManilaFlash Flood
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“It was then that it dawned on my great-great-great-great-grandmother that Avenida in Santa Cruz—with all its dark, dank, dreary alleyways, its patchwork of cheap cement, cheaper wood, and even cheaper corrugated iron that passed for houses, its ground littered with all sorts of scrap, including crumbs of goodies and morsels of meals to which they were never invited, its all-present humidity and intermittent rain, all its mud and flood on rainy days and all its dust on dry days, all its dirt, all its noise, and all the cruelty and fear and abomination and prejudice—was paradise.”

Short StoryPhilippinesFilipinoSpeculative FictionDiasporaManilaThe Nameless
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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“We had everything before us, we had nothing before us, according to Charles Dickens in whose nest of words I grew up, and so, as rain filled the drains, flooded the streets, inundated the city, my great-great-great-great-grandmother and her community were driven skyward, gasping for air from the underworld.”

Short StoryPhilippinesFilipinoSpeculative FictionDiasporaManilaFableThe Nameless
Book:Manila Was A Long Time Ago - Official
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