In Search of a Mother Tongue: Locating Home in Diaspora

Abstract

Place for me takes the form of memory and language. --Ilan Stavan, Other Voice The locus of truth is always extraterritorial; its diffusion is made clandestine by the barbed wire and watch-towers of national dogma. --George Steiner, Our Homeland, The Text Colonialism and the Holocaust have jointly conspired to create a legacy of global displacement, in which people are robbed of their homeland and the language in which their culture has been formed. Disparate diasporic communities are now faced with the shared struggle of articulating a cultural identity in which history and home reside in language, rather than nation, and in which language itself must be recreated so as to bespeak the specificity of cultural experience. The situations of Jewish and Caribbean writers seem a particularly useful source of comparison, in that the Jewish-originated term diaspora becomes a significant one for understanding Caribbean experiences, and the Caribbean idea of language as home becomes reciprocally edifying with respect to Jewish American writing. Both Caribbean and Jewish American communities strive to mold English into a language which can become a home within diaspora. For Caribbean women writers the task is doubly challenging: not only must they struggle to subvert aspects of the language which are culturally alien, but they are further left to grapple with the patriarchal assumptions in which English is rooted. Jewish American writers confront a different form of double alienation in the form of a double diaspora: first from the symbolic and biblical homeland of Palestine, and then again after the Holocaust and the death of both German-Jewish and Yiddish culture. The term diaspora was originally coined to describe the circumstances of the Jews who lived outside of Palestine after the Babylonian exile. Since then, its application has been enlarged to include any group who has been scattered far from its homeland, particularly with reference to the descendants of Africans who torn from their native continent and brought to the New World as slaves beginning in the seventeenth century. The linguistic yoking of diasporic Jews and Blacks is indicative of the common problems they face in trying to create a sense of identity and cultural continuity in diaspora. Writers from both groups themselves openly acknowledge the similarity of the problem that they face. Among Caribbean women writers, Michelle Cliff seems to feel particularly keenly the parallels between the plight of the Jews and that of Caribbean peoples. In The Land of Look Behind, she begins the poem A Visit to the Secret Annex with a comparison between the horrors of the Holocaust and those inflicted by colonialism in the Caribbean, which results in a particular sense of resonance between herself and Anne Frank: I was born later / not into this world. / The trees not the same / The horrors not exact--but similar (104). In Abeng as well, the narrator approaches her own Caribbean history through learning about the Holocaust. For her, Anne Frank becomes a symbol of both a voice which survived, in writing, the cultural annihilation of the Holocaust, and also of a female voice strong enough to contest the white, male version of history Cliff has been handed by her father. Jewish parallels resonate for Michelle Cliff not only in terms of the Holocaust but also in terms of the dilemmas posed by the ability to pass as white. In The Land of Look Behind, Cliff mentions the Maranos, the Jews in fifteenth century Spain who forced to pretend they had converted to Christianity. In the same text, she writes of light-skinned Jamaicans like herself who were able to pass into the white American world--saving their blackness for other Jamaicans or for trips home; in some cases, forgetting it altogether (60). The danger of succumbing to the pressure to pass, both culturally and physically, and as a result forgetting, is what gives the urgency to Cliff's project of writing herself back into her history and culture. …