Arrivals and Departures: Mapping Diasporic Identities

Chae-Pyong Song, Ph.D.Associate Professor of English

Marygrove College

Baekdo Island, Yeosu, Korea

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow—even today I am still arriving.

Look deeply: every second I am arrivingto be a bud on a Spring branch,to be a tiny bird, with still-fragile wings,learning to sing in my new nest,to be a caterpillar in the heart of a flower,to be a jewel hiding itself in a stone.

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,to fear and to hope.The rhythm of my heart is the birth and deathof all that is alive.

(Thich Nhat Hanh, “Please Call Me by My True Names”)

In order to arrive at what you do not knowYou must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.In order to possess what you do not possessYou must go by the way of dispossession.In order to arrive at what you are notYou must go through the way in which you are not.

(T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets")

in High School Uniform

Jacques Lacan (1901 – 1981)

The biggest separation is the separation from the intimate union we experience with our mothers when we are babies. This separation constitutes our most important experience of loss, and it is one that will haunt us all our lives. All of our subsequent desires and needs derive from this place of loss. We will seek substitutes great and small for that lost union with our mother.

Salman Rushdie describes this exilic condition “an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking backward” (The Satanic Verses 205).

Korean Presbyterian Church of Metro Detroit

A Korean Poet, Jung Ji-yong’s “Nostalgia” (1923)

This is the placewhere, toward the eastern end of that vast field,the small brook that babbles old stories turns around,and the brindled cowcries sadly and slowly in golden glowHow could you forget this place even in a dream?

This is the placewhere, when ashes in the clay stove get cold,the sound of the night wind on the empty field runs like a horse,and the old Father overcome with shallow sleepinesslays himself down, propped up by a straw pillowHow could you forget this place even in a dream?

This is the placewhere, longing for the blue light of the sky,my heart has grown in this soil–it would drench itself in the grassy dewin search of the arrows I shot at randomHow could you forget this place even in a dream?

This is the placewhere the young sister would run, her hair flying behind her ears,like the night waves that dance upon the legendary sea,and the ordinary-looking wife,with her feet bare in the field for all four seasons,would glean through what remains with the hot sunlight on her backHow could you forget this place even in a dream?

This is the placewhere the stars sparsely dot the skyand shuffle their footsteps toward the unknown sand castle,the frosty crows pass by the poor rooftop, howling,and family sits around the faint light to talk together softlyHow could you forget this place even in a dream?

Bound for the South by Koh Jung-hee ( 남도행 /고정희 )

When the moon is full in mid-July, envisioning home,I run down the road to Haenam, the place that I miss–the road I take to watch the evening glow below Mother’s grave,the road the typhoons Thelma, Alex, Vernon, and Win swept over,the road that the floods ravaged and devilish waters shredded.

The end of the peninsula, the clouds of solitary spray.Giving my heart to the South, to the South,I suddenly want to bow, putting my two hands together.Passing the Honam Plain, I want to bow.

The rice stalks that sway vibrantlyare like the veins of Father hunching over the field.The horseweed flowers that bloom wildlyare like Mother’s attentive care that lingersaround the mountains and streams of my home.

The Mudeung Mountain that rises up purely,the white-naped crane that hops,the white poplar tree that dazzles–today these do not look ordinary,and I want to bow to the picturesque landscape.I want to kneel down and kiss the land of the South.

Homi Bhabha (1949 - )

The “unhomed” subjects dwell in a border zone, “as though in parenthesis” (The Location of Culture 9).

Edward Said (1935 – 2003)

Displaced people “exist in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old, beset with half-involvements and half-detachments, nostalgic and sentimental on one level, and adept mimic or a secret outcast on another” (Representations of the Intellectual 49).

Salman Rushdie says, “Our identity is at once plural and partial. Sometimes we feel that we straddle two cultures; at other times, that we fall between two stools. But however ambiguous and shifting this ground may be, it is not an infertile territory . . . to occupy” (Imaginary Homelands 15).

James Clifford says, “diaspora consciousness lives loss and hope as a defining tension” (“Diasporas” 312).

Salman Rushdie (1947 - )

“The word 'translation' comes, etymologically, from the Latin for 'bearing across'. Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately to the notion that something can also be gained” (Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands 17).