India and the Diasporic Imagination
| ,Loss, Mourning and Trauma
Voice from Future Past
Texte intégral
’Sahib, I feel I am the nucleus of the postmodern,
postcolonial, poststructuralist dunya.
I am the coolie of nomadology, transnationally rooted and paria.
But this doesn’t mean that I am not specific when I err.
As almost anyone else. A nomad ignores uniformity.
I am my unique jahaji when I meet otherness.
So never drown me among the forgotten algae.
Each coolie has his/her/its way out of slavery,
Even his/her/its India is unique in the Indies.
I will defy those who reify:
My difference is no indifference,
My flux is permanence.
My nomadology is the meeting of territories,
The fragments of my self and my itineraries.
At this overwhelming ebb, I update my memories’.
’Furthermore, Bwana, we unambiguously intellectualize our presence,
Our supposed essence,
Our terrible silence.
Where is homeland, when we moved from village
To depot, from contract to compact spoilage?
My diasporic construction
Is beyond state border and nation,
Even though, I remember your sense of oblivion.
Continuous exchange and more interrogation
Sift sweet ambivalence with ambiguity.
They say you come from one culture,
One tribe, one caste, one imagination.
In my Africa, there are Africas.
In your India, there are Indias.
In your China, there are Chinas.
In your England, there is a master.
Whither the Irish, the Welsh and the Scott nations?
This multiplicity, I would say, highlights
the basic precariousness of diasporic identity-construction, bwana’.
Khal Torabully, Voice from Future Past
© Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2011