Caught In The In-between Of Diaspora

Words by Cileme Venkateswar (she/her)




To be a diasporan is to uproot half the self-referential landmarks of cultural identity and exist without a map to navigate your own sense of self. 

It doesn’t help that for all the prancing around, waving banners about diversity and multiculturalism, life in countries like Aotearoa is extraordinarily Eurocentric, university included. In my three and a half years of majoring in English Lit, I had never once been assigned a text by an Indian writer. So when the opportunity for an honours research thesis rolled around, I jumped at the chance to rectify that. It also became my way of using a ten-month 10000-word research project to figure out my own messy identity.

Did it work?

Thing is, you can’t just get your hands on somebody else’s map of identity and find your way ‘home,’ because the journey is always different. The two novels I chose (The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh and The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri) each talked about different diasporic experiences, but I didn’t find myself echoed completely in their pages. Though delving into the nuances of my own cultural identity was the whole point of this project, I kept my own experiences out of my thesis, ashamed that I wasn’t enough. But one paragraph I wrote just stuck in the back of my head, and revolved around my biggest insecurity about being Indian. 

When I visited India as a child, I’d immediately have three languages whirling around me like a hurricane: Tamil, Bengali, and Hindi. Not being able to understand, let alone speak, any of them always made me feel miles away from my cultural identity.

In Shadow Lines and Namesake, language is an important indication of how the characters see themselves as diasporans. Namely, Bengali is translated in-text in Namesake while Shadow Lines incorporates Bengali without translation or glossary. But here’s what stuck with me. Shadow Lines is split into two parts: “Going Away” and “Coming Home,” referencing a family joke that their matriarch, Th’amma, doesn’t know the difference between ‘coming’ and ‘going.’ The joke originates from a Bengali linguistic conundrum where colloquially, the word for “going away” is actually “coming.” When departing a place, one would say “Ami aaschi,” which is to say, “I’ll see you later” or “I’ll be back.” There is no permanence in bidding farewell; in Bengali, a departure is always weighted with the assumption of a return. Th’amma slips up because there is no word for her leaving a place and never returning. I realised that both for Th’amma and for myself, there was no language for us to describe our experience of diaspora. Funnily enough, I never would’ve figured this out: I only speak English. I offhandedly mentioned the titles of the two parts to my mother, who explained the connection between the words in Bangla. The cultural imposter syndrome still gets me, even six months after submitting the thesis.

Namesake offered me a similar existential conundrum about diaspora. Remembering a family trip to the beach, the protagonist Gogol recalls walking with his father to the very end of the shore. Before they turn around, Gogol’s father says, “Remember that you and I made this journey, that we went together to a place where there was nowhere left to go.” Being a diasporan means you can both return to where your family hailed or move forward to somewhere new. But no matter where you’re physically located, you are always existing in the in-between, where there is “nowhere left to go.” 

I ricocheted back and forth across the globe for most of my life. Going to preschool in Nepal for a while. Summers and the last four months of year two in Calcutta. Six months of year seven in Portugal. Visits to family in New York and London. Every time, there’d be a part of me that wavered at the thought of going home because home felt like everywhere and nowhere at the same time. 

Words didn’t exist for the sense of belonging—or lack thereof—that I felt. I always seemed to be caught in an in-between everywhere I went. 

Since moving for uni, I’ve put down more roots here in Pōneke than I have anywhere, ever. With my final year of study now hurtling by at an alarming speed and plans to move overseas looming in the not-so-distant-future, what it means to call somewhere home is rattling around my head more and more. So what if I spent ten months writing about the liminal spaces of diasporic identity? What the hell am I meant to do with that? Just ~vibe~ in that in-between? It’s one thing to finally move past naïve teenage thinking that a lack of cultural connection meant I was ‘basically white.’ It’s another thing to be 24 years-old and want that connection so badly, but have no idea where to find it in a way that feels comfortable and authentic. The closest I’ve gotten is lighting diyas, splurging on sweets, and inviting friends round to celebrate Diwali with me. 

Maybe one day I’ll pronounce my name correctly when I introduce myself to people. Maybe I’ll have gone to an Indian wedding by then, maybe I’ll have kurtas—or even saris—in my wardrobe. Maybe I’ll be able to reconcile being an atheist with my Hindu heritage. Maybe I’ll even know Tamil. I just don’t know how to get there yet.