I think my favorite thing to read/watch this week was the poem “diaspora” from Bodymaps. It sounds like a poetic version of the definition of “diaspora” (from my understanding). What stood out to me was the theme of always “looking back and over your shoulder”, worried that the next place you are headed to will never let you return to the last. Many of the definitions of diaspora that we read included the longing of returning to a homeland, even though it wasn’t always quite certain where exactly “home” was.

A similar/common theme I saw in many of our texts/videos was the tension felt by these queer authors between their identity as South Asian and their queer identity. They are made to feel as though queer sexualities are a western import and separate from who they really are (or maybe, who they are expected to be).  One example of this was in “Trans/Generation” when Alok Vaid-Menon says that “rather than call his grandmother transphobic,  [he] will join her in not smiling in the family photo”. I read this as there being a part of him that wants to resist the way his grandmother marks him as “different”, but there also being another part of him that wants to stand in solidarity with the oppressive experiences she has had. However, it is difficult to articulate having a multicultural identity by saying that there are “parts” of you, because this leaves you wondering if you can ever be “whole”. What do the “parts” of a multicultural identity add up to? Perhaps diaspora is about feeling as though you are “parts”, rather than a “whole”.