(Taking a slightly different route here ... This is adapted from an Endowment Lecture I delivered recently.)
Sometime ago, I went through the titles of
over 500 books on diaspora – I encountered books that highlighted different
sides to the diaspora question - identity, nationalism, women, gender, queer
studies, race, Islam, Jewishness – or in other words, books that include every
aspect of a diasporic existence, except for how such an existence affects the
child. Today, we live in a world where we are all diasporic, to a certain extent, even if we have never left the city in which we were born. A child is as much part of the diaspora as is the adult but there seems
to be very little research on how children adapt to leaving the homeland,
living away from the familiar, living in the borderlands between home and
homeland, the culture of the hegemonic society and the culture of the hegemonic
family. This is in spite of the fact that the ideal of childhood is based on
residence, family, community and society.
The decision to migrate and settle down in a
land that is not the homeland is, in cases of voluntary migration, almost
always taken by the adult. The child has
no say in whether to migrate, when to migrate and where to migrate to. Marianne
Hirsch in her essay, “Pictures of a displaced girlhood” recounts how she
unwillingly boarded the plane from Vienna to USA and wept loudly all through
the flight to register her grief and her reluctance to migrate. Issues of child
migration or diasporic children don’t receive much attention especially in
developing or third world countries, where the child is seen as a ‘passive
mover’- migrating only because their families have chosen to or have been
forced to. for instance, the literature
on Partition offers us very few stories of
child refugees. In fact, the exemplary work of Kamla Bhasin, Urvashi Butalia
and Veena Das reveals that far from being seen as victims of Partition or a
diasporic life, the state and the community victimized the children further by
setting up orphanages for children born of forced sexual encounters during
Partition and worse, at a time when abortion was illegal in India, the state
arranged clandestine mass abortions of such pregnancies. The state was also
confounded by the issue of citizenship of these children. Where did they
belong? To the father’s nation or the mother’s nation? What about the
predicament of the child who was rejected by both parents?
Since childhood is almost everywhere
associated with innocence, play and happiness, the figure of the child migrant,
who might have faced war, hunger, violence and brutality and who might now face
sexual exploitation, becomes a “threat to “our ideas – and ideals – of what it
means to be a child and, in turn, the values and responsibilities that we hold
as adults”. (Heaven Crawley). It reminds the adult viewer that they have failed
to provide for the kind of childhood that is considered idyllic, that their
notion of childhood, based on an othering of adulthood is a mere construct, and
so raises the question of the falsity of the self. And so, afraid, fearful and
guilty, we invisibilize the child and her unique predicament from all discourse.
The nostalgia felt by parents could be alien
to the child for whom the host country is home, and the physical home which the
parents have immersed in memories of the mystical homeland becomes alien and a
borderland. “Questions of home and belonging can be complex for adults who
migrate from their place of birth, but even more so for their children” and
grandchildren. For those who were born or raised in the diaspora, the ties they
have to their country of citizenship and their country of origin are not the
same as that of their parents, and often are far more complex and even
ambiguous. In The Namesake, Calcutta
holds a certain bittersweet nostalgia for Ashima, which her children Gogol and
Sonia do not feel. Children of diaspora are caught in a double
bind and experience double displacement. The differing worldviews, values and
social mores of the family and the host country become a source of conflict,
trauma and identity crises.
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