I am obsessed with the idea of homeland. As an immigrant, I write about my own homeland of Taiwan frequently, with a kind of wistful nostalgia that borders on dreaminess. This doesn’t make me unique or even remotely interesting since most of us come from a place, whether domestic or international, and think of it in warm fuzzy overtones. But after talking to Dr. Jumana Bayeh, a senior lecturer at Australia’s Macquarie University in modern history, politics, and international relations and author of The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), I have even more to process.
“The crux of diaspora literature,” Bayeh tells me, “is [that it] always contains a character [who is] not quite at home even though they are at home. They’re feeling like they’re out of place despite the fact that they’ve grown up in this place or lived in this place forever.” And for the genre of Middle Eastern literature, in particular, this is further complicated by the idea that an original homeland. It’s either in existence, or we’re going to make it come into existence, and we need to all return back to that place because that’s the place where we belong. It’s rooted in territory, it has borders.”
