Can a Diaspora Ever Be Sated?: Ruminations with Glissant on the Hungers of Diasporic Being
By Gwendalynn Roebke
How many of your dead does the land have to hold before it becomes a “homeland”?
When does a diaspora cease to be “diasporic?” How many generations, oceans, and stories away does it take to become something else entirely? And what does a diaspora crave to be, to become, as a collective? These are the kinds of questions that sit on my mind as a scholar whose work revolves around understanding colonial un-rooting, and how it flings people far from their “originary” selves into new ways of being. These are the kinds of questions that become all the more pressing when trying to evaluate claims to land and return, particularly when these entitlements are presented through the barrel of a gun.
So, what does it means to be diasporic and what kinds of “hungers” (longings and impulses) possess diasporic peoples? This possession by hunger, this haunting by longing, as seen through the impulse for return and the yearning for authenticity, is something I will suggest quickly pulls people into violent paths of dubious “reclamation.”
[Christopher Cozier, “Mirror Images,” 1999]
I will name now that this is as much a piece about diasporic hunger in the Americas as it is a commentary on the unfolding genocide in Palestine. My impetus to work through Édouard Glissant is in part due to his own juxtaposition of the diasporas of Afro-descendant peoples in the Americas and the diasporas of Jewish peoples in the occidental world.
There will be three main inquiries I will aim to interrogate:
What constitutes a diaspora, and how do they operate?
What does diasporic hunger look like, what does it do, and what does a diaspora look like when sated?
What is a diaspora entitled to by way of origins? When are these “entitlements” myth more than reality, and what makes them that way?
While this piece is framed through a series of questions, it is important to know that I am not providing many answers. The only “answers” I will be committed to, is that we must all insist that the diasporic hunger of the kind that currently has us all bearing witness to the genocide of Palestinians must be vehemently, unwaveringly, denounced. And, that any state, diasporic in origin or not, is to be disavowed if its hunger leads to genocide and settler colonialism. Let us call a spade a spade.
Recollecting Glissant’s Thoughts on Dispossession and the Constitutions of Different Diasporas
In the first chapter of Caribbean Discourse, Glissant grapples with the nuances of dispossession in relation to diasporas and offers two key dichotomies. The first, mentioned fleetingly, is the dichotomy of exile and dispersion, or the difference in how people are transplanted into a land. Dispersion would seem to map to those violently flung from origin through a process of unrooting that aims to eliminate connection, while exile is the coerced movement of a people from a place of origin with greater access to the cultural knowledge of the place from which they’re removed.
The second, is the more central dichotomy of reversion and diversion. Reversion is presented as the “obsession with a single origin” (16), and the impulse to maintain a sense of the place/past that was as well as the attempt to return there (meant openly here). Whereas diversion is the habitual embodiment of dynamic modes of survival (of unsystematized refusal), a transformation of the dispossessed which allows for possible action against domination.
Now, what I think these dichotomies from Glissant can offer us to this conversation of diasporic hunger, comes out in his own discussion of the differences in the impulse to return in the African and Jewish diasporas. Processing the cases of Liberia and Israel, Glissant writes in his chapter, “The Known, The Uncertain,” the following:
What to make of the fate of those who return to Africa, helped and encouraged by the calculating philanthropy of their masters, but who are no longer African? The fulfilment of this impulse at this point (it is already too late for it) is not satisfactory. It is possible that the state formed in this way (a convenient palliative) would not become a nation. Might one hazard a guess, on the other hand, that the existence of the nation-state of Israel may ultimately dry up Judaism, by exhausting progressively the impulse towards return (the demand for true origins)? (17: Italics partially my own).
Both Israel and Liberia represent peculiar cases where dispersion and reversion result in a craving for return. Both also result in violent settler colonial states (neither one will find an apology in this piece). [1, 2] Importantly, the “peculiarity” of Liberia and Israel as settler colonial states, arises from the inkling many might have to justify their creation as a solution to a sort of “original sin” inflicted upon both Jewish and enslaved African groups. With these two states, we encounter the problem of diasporic entitlement. For people who have long since been removed and/or never truly known the land they are (encouraged) to seek, what legitimate claims can be established from their connections?
Moreover, what is Glissant implying through this language of “drying up” and “impulse”? It is here I want to further locate the worry of a hungry diaspora. Namely, that they all hunger. In other words, the desire, longing, and impulse towards origins defines diasporas. However, diasporas may also be differentiated by how each tries to satisfy their appetite. Here, let me also sneak in the presupposition that a diaspora contains necessarily a fullness of longing and impulse to move towards origin; this is the basis for all diasporic hunger. The dangerous diasporic hunger is one that in its dispersion and reversion craves a “home” to which they have never owned a key.
Cravings for a Simulacra of “Home”
In the pursuit of “the home that once was”, diasporic groups bent on a pursuit of reversion find their hunger ungratified. This is primarily because the home that once was is typically non-existent, their past is irrecuperable, or more tragic still, that there was no such home to begin with. [3] As much as people want to pretend that stories and traditions can be held without any influence of the places they are forced to flee to, people are not in hermetically sealed environments. We change and have our surroundings flow into us and our practices. The recollections of “home” both in its reproduction and authenticity are now no more than a string of bedtime stories.
This is all a part of the tragedy for the reversionists. The building tragedy of pursuing an inaccessible or plainly mythic past. The diaspora who craves the “truest” of reversions, exalting the “home that once was,” and seeking to materialize it in the place they claim as originary this is a diaspora whose hunger can only lead to violence. Under the guise of righting wrongs, it seeks a correction of the past through dispersing current inhabitants from one’s “origins.” However, as these hungry reversionists encounter and disperse the contemporary inhabitants from the land they seek to claim as originary, their narratives around their origins face disruption. The vicious hunger of a reversionist diaspora only dreams of empty lands, and when it comes to them full of other people and their stories, it seeks to empty it to legitimate their own claims and stories.
The vicious diasporic hunger is again the one that seeks out to materialize a full reversion, a complete return, to an “authentic” origin that never was. To that end, I want to pry and leave open the questions of diasporic entitlements. While I will take the hunger of all diasporas as pre-established, there is still a need to examine further the different kinds of hungers and the various degrees of longing and impulse within diasporas. The different degrees of longing and impulse, of possession, translate to how entitled a group may think they are in their materialized return, specifically to land; but the looming ontological problem of entitlement through and in dwelling will remain open for the reader. Importantly, one can critically ask whether entitlement can only be satisfied by possession, namely the method of violent dispersion. How do you right the wound torn open by dispossession? Is reversionist hunger ever justified, and satisfied, in its quest for return?
Concluding Thoughts: What Does a Sated Diaspora Look Like?
In the incomplete sketch I’ve offered, we could conclude two things about what forms “full” diasporas could take on. We could infer that in Glissant’s picture, a sated diaspora falls into the diversionist grouping as it is transformed and catches enough of the open trickster moments to rebel. Still cognizant of their African origins but engaging a process of “becoming,” or entanglement, in the Americas, these creolized populations seek and acknowledge their origins in language, dance, and life without being reduced to an obsessive state in which they only seek survival in a singular past that must be returned to. [4]
We could also say that in the case of overly possessive reversionist diasporas, there's a hunger that will only be sated by blood. That, for the viciously hungry diaspora there is no room to imagine different possibilities to recover from past atrocities, only room to beget new ones in their own name.
But these are still deeply unsatisfying answers. I leave this piece with the titular question still open, it too, hungry for an answer.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Deb Thomas, her class, "Race, Nation, Empire", fed this thought alongside many others.
Notes
[1] The cases of Israel and Liberia warrant further historical contextualization. The state of Israel, in its contemporary configuration, was established through the mass and violent expulsion of Palestinian people from their territories under a banner of establishing a Jewish “homeland” after the Holocaust. The first push for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their territories to make way for the “return” of Jewish people , took place in 1948, during the first Nakba (catastrophe). However, the attempt to establish the state of Israel began much earlier. The 1917 Balfour Declaration marks the first official claims by (British) Zionists that the lands of Palestine were to be internationally recognized as Jewish homelands that were to be repopulated with Jewish people (namely, and most obviously, Jewish peoples from western European countries). The justification for the establishment of a separate nation for and of exclusively Jewish people can be said to have two origins. The first, is simply to have a land in which Jewish people will no longer suffer antisemitic persecution. The second, and more contentious tracing of the impulse to “return” Jewish peoples to the land of Palestine, was to expand the western sphere of (colonial/neo imperialist) influence in the Middle East while simultaneously easing religious tensions in supposedly multicultural western nations. Zionism became a means to assert and forge a “homeland” for a historically assailed minority, with the colonial interests of their initial assailants also being met. See Abd al-Wahhāb Kayyālī. Palestine: A Modern History. London: Routledge, 1978.
[2] The state of Liberia, like the state of Israel, began with a desire to “repatriate” people to a territory they hold dubious connections to in a bid to breed further coherence in western nation states through their absence. In the case of Liberia, as more formerly enslaved African descended people gained their freedom and developed influence, people discontented with the rise of free Black people’s status in the United States began looking at the “solution” of “returning” Black people to their “native” lands. The American Colonization Society (ACS) initially provided funding and transport to a small group of free Black people to go to west Africa and develop a settlement of their own. With time, and further funding from interested parties in the United States, the Americo-Liberian colonizing population would push out indigenous peoples from their settled territories, and declare their independence in 1847. The Americo-Liberian settlers would go on to hold disproportionate power and influence in the region, maintaining close ties to the United States until the 1990s. These settlers would not (and perhaps, could not) integrate with the native peoples whom they dispossessed in a bid for the recognition of their own liberation and return, and in fact maintained (unsurprisingly) a distinct and separate identity that reflected their American roots. See Franka Vaughan and Sarah Maddison. “Thinking through the history of Liberia’s formation with settler colonial theory.” Settler Colonial Studies (2025): 1-22.
[3] The element of tragedy I am gesturing to maps to an ontological question in play which is: when does claim to origin become too thin? From this question spawns the other pressing question of: how much time and how much space can be put between a people and their origin before they are outside of being diasporic? In the language of tragedy and the open anxiety of the eventual dissipation of diasporic being, I am trying to suggest that diasporas (reversionist or diversionist) have a teleology where the ultimate state is of dissolution and new creation.
[4] See Stuart Hall. “Creolité and the Process of Creolization.” In Creolizing Europe: Legacies and Transformations. Eds. Encarnación Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Shirley Anne Tate. Liverpool, UK: Liverpool University Press, 2015, 12-25.
References
Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
Gwendalynn Roebke is an interdisciplinary Philosophy PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. Their interests include social psychology and affect, neuroscience, agency, identity formation and coloniality. They conduct their work within Caribbean philosophical, Latin American philosophical, Indigenous studies, and Critical Black studies traditions. In one of Gwendalynn's current projects, they look at the centrality of coherence, as composed of mindedness, agency, identity, and narrativity, to the survival of colonial ruptures brought on by dispossession.