How can one feel simultaneously at home, yet lost, and far from anything familiar? I find myself constantly thinking about the past, reliving memories. I obsess over mundane moments, small tidbits of everyday life that would be trivial otherwise. This nostalgia I feel can be whittled down to homesickness, a longing for a familiar place. My yearning, rather, is for a past that I didn't even exist in. Wondering about family members that existed long before I was born, needing to match faces to names. As a child of the diaspora, I didn’t grow up on the land my grandparents did. I’m one of many, a large and ongoing story about Puerto Ricans having to leave an archipelago with a failing infrastructure and corruption, with investors and gentrification right on their heels, ready to replace them.
So, what happens when a past is cloudy or unclear? How do you reconnect to a fracture in time where a people's history wasn't deemed worthy of recording? In the case of diasporic peoples, our ancestors were shuffled around, some by choice, others by force. Our collective generational trauma is one that can pull us to the archive, begging us to uncover our family truths and understand the depth of where we came from.
In 2018, Gayatri Gopinath, Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU, published Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora, in which she explores visual culture in conjunction with colonialism and the diaspora. In a particular chapter, Archive, Affect, and the Everyday: Queer Diasporic Re-Visions, she focuses on the archive, and begins by referencing Lose Your Mother: A Journey on the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman. In her memoir, Hartman, an African American scholar, discusses what it’s like to be a descendant of ancestors that were part of the Trans Atlantic Slave trade, and more specifically, ones in which she wasn’t able to track their history. After returning to Ghana, she describes the distance and alienation she feels between herself and others around her. Hartman begins to realize that although her ancestors were from Ghana, she had no other connection to this foreign land ,and felt like more of an outsider than she expected.
In a striking moment in the text Hartman says, “did the rich ones suffer from nostalgia? Did I? Was longing or melancholy what defined the tribe of the Middle Passage?”1 The quote sits heavily, as Hartman isn't only questioning her relation to these strangers, but exploring the financial disparities that exist within the diaspora. In the same way many people aren't able to leave, others simply can't afford to return.
Gopinath talks more about Hartman’s memoir and how during her journey in Ghana, she visited the slaves’ quarters, looking for some resolution, or rather a trace of what was left behind. Hartman writes, “In the dungeon, there were remains but no stories that could resurrect the dead except the stories I invented.”2 After visiting, she had the harsh realization she wouldn’t find the answers she was looking for. There simply wasn't and isn't a magic switch that will make us reconnect. It seemed like for Hartman, the journey to her homeland could have been equally as healing, as finding out that there are no answers was almost better than never knowing at all.
Later in the chapter, Gopinath references Greek author and anthropologist C. Nadia Seremetakis, who focuses on ethnography and cultural studies, along with language and affect. She writes here about the different types of nostalgia, as well as the etymology of the word:
In English, the word nostalgia (in Greek nostalghia) implies trivializing romantic sentimentality. [Nostalghia]…evokes the sensory dimension of memory in exile and estrangement…In this sense, nostalghia is linked to the personal consequences of historicizing sensory experience which is conceived as a painful bodily and emotional journey.3
Seremetaktis brings up an interesting history of the word nostalgia, as its meaning in Greek is centered on it as an experience in which one is actively working through memories that will later affect us. In comparison, the English understanding of the word speaks to one in which the past is finite. This rings true to people of the diaspora, as oftentimes archival work is based on an attempt to understand our history, alongside working through their trauma as either colonized or once enslaved peoples. For some, they might be trying to fill in the blanks on their own families’ history, as opposed to others in which the archive is serving solely to relive old memories. The later iteration of nostalgia could be considered a romantic one, which is more reminiscent of people glamorizing previous decades because of fashion, music, cinema, etc.
Throughout this chapter of Unruly Visions, Gopinath continues to compares the words and experiences of Saidiya Hartman, to those of visual artist Allan deSouza, who grew up in Kenya, a descendant of Goan Indian immigrants. DeSouza, who migrated with his parents to London, and later moved to Los Angeles, tells a familiar but different story, as his identity is frequently shifting between these spaces. He says:
born into a colony, and later living in the colonial mother country, I saw myself outside history since it never seemed to be of my making or made by anyone that seemed to resemble me. I experienced time not as a linear sequence but as fragmented, a compression of lost pasts and disputed presents . .. in attempts to invent possible futures. 4
These fragments that deSouza refers to are seen quite literally within his work. In The Lost Pictures, deSouza digitally altered images of his father and siblings from childhood, set in postcolonial Kenya. Part of the manipulation process involved leaving physical prints in different spaces of his apartment, allowing the debris of each area to overtake the images; liquid, dust, dirt, hair, food, etc. all collecting over time. DeSouza also drew on them, etching the surface, giving them an eerie texture. The images are worn and faded, causing each figure to look like a ghost. Unable to make out their features, their blurry expressions, shapes and color simply become one. His family haunts us, begging us not to forget them.
In the accompanying essay to The Lost Pictures, deSouza pens My Mother, My Sight, in which he discusses his loss of vision from cataracts, after he’s diagnosed at the mere age of 38. He recalls his obsessive image making of his hometown, Nairobi, Kenya, to bring back to show his mother, who was dying of cancer in the hospital, and simultaneously losing her sight — all in an attempt to quote “see for” his mother. Heart wrenching, he writes:
I remember photographs even as other memories fail. It is the photograph-and my enduring faith in its veracity-that I have held onto as proof. And for many years I have had the proof, the many photographs taken by my father, the tangible evidence of our life in Kenya ... And yet the recent return of memories in such physical, bodily ways has accumulated and layered meaning beyond the simply visual. As a result, my faith in the photograph as ultimate repository of memory is, if not shattered, at least shaken. Now, when I look at the two-dimensionality of photographs, I wonder how much else is lost along with that third dimension. Or perhaps I'm merely re- experiencing my earlier disenchantment: the failure of the photograph to match the vividness I have ascribed to it within my memory and imagination.5
I sympathize with deSouza, as someone who is always longing for these pasts, he was able to put his frustration into mark making and transforming old family photos. Through this process, he made himself a part of the archive, inadvertently becoming a part of the history in each photo.
Throughout this Archive, Affect, and the Everyday, Gopinath has done something special, showing us how framing the archive (and inherently the concept of nostalgia) within the lens of the diaspora causes things how things to shift. The process is therapeutic; sometimes sad but necessary. For someone like Hartman, who had an idealized version of her homeland that quickly faded, having a history to refer back to is equally important. It’s her history — one that her mere existence writes daily, one her family made, stories that they passed on, and traditions they had. In the case of deSouza, who was familiar with his homeland, took a difference approach in response to his family’s complication history with colonization. Instead, he inserted himself into his families stories, though manually altering images.
When doing this work, we can create new connections and memories that surround the process of looking at one’s ancestral history, more so than about the history itself. It’s important, even for myself, to recognize that during the search of a deeper ancestral history, we find that those missing pieces can be filled with our own story.