The Diaspora Experience: misplaced, displaced and redefining identity

By Vicky Nyanga

Poet Vicky Nyanga, diversity, equality, anti-racism advocate and community builder, shares powerful poems about the plight of people within the diaspora communities. She shares insight from the lives of people that must live away from home and who, in their day-day-day lives, experience how race and class ar

• Language: English
• Publisher: Conscious Dreams Publishing
• Release date: Jun 5, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913674588

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Introduction

In my previous book, The Prism of Her Thoughts: an insight into Black motherhood and Black womanhood, I wrote about the hardships of Black motherhood and Black womanhood in the form of verse One of the poems in that book upon which I often reflect is called ‘An abandoned wife’s rant’, I talk about an African family that experiences betrayal by the head of their family – the father. In a country where the family encounters racism, the father abandons his family to marry a white woman to get his papers because the system is set up in such a way that he has to do this, marry a British citizen, to gain legality. I had hoped to express the way in which the system was somehow designed to keep families separate on their journeys to becoming legal in a country. Whilst the family experienced integration issues, he sold out to take the easy route. The wife was angry and betrayed by both her husband and the system.

In this book, I depict the underworld of ‘illegal immigrants’, ‘asylum seekers’, and some of what they experience, feel, and endure, all of which is not apparent within the sphere of what we dub ‘normal life’. The inspiration is drawn from themes of hardship in both of my grandfathers’ experiences as young people being exploited by the system that was present in the time. Both of my grandparents migrated from place to unfamiliar place where they had to live amongst strangers and try to get along with outsiders despite their cultural and/or religious differences. Often, when I reflect on their lives, I can never get past wondering what it must had been like for my paternal grandfather to work for white missionaries at the tender age of eight (or younger). I can’t help it, but poverty, exploitation, abuse, and desperation flood my mind. These experiences run parallel to the diaspora experience with which I am familiar through my own lived experiences and what I had observed during my travels in various parts of the world. It also includes what I had seen in the media or what I had learned through the opportunities I had when I met with and listened to fellow Africans, who, like myself and many of my family members, have come from faraway places and tried to integrate for a better life.

There is always a story behind undocumented immigrants and people seeking asylum in this country or anywhere else in the world. Some migrants experience misfortune even before they leave their original countries. They experience misfortune trying to get here and even once they have arrived at their destinations. We read about people being sold off into slavery to pay their debts. The other day, on the news, there were stories of people, families, and children drowning in the sea whist attempting to reach a better land for a so-called better life. When they arrive, they encounter ill-treatment at the hands of people they know or trust, or those entrusted to care for