I am becoming my mother: (post)diaspora, local entanglements and entangled locals

ABSTRACT

Drawing on the sensory, self-shifting approach of Lorna Goodison’s 1986 poem ‘I am becoming my mother’, and on quantum theory for brief insights into entanglement, this article gazes into the still visualities of family photographs of my own Birmingham childhood (my mother died that same year) to push towards a more entangled conception of (post)diaspora. I use this highly personal entanglement to take issue with three troublingly disentangled ways in which postdiaspora has been imagined in recent academic literature: as the culmination of a teleological movement from migrant to diaspora to post-diaspora; as the slowly weakening pull of diasporic responsibilities and remittances; and as a means to archaise and de-link from ties to a forgetful and irresponsible diaspora. Ultimately, the article pushes towards a more deeply materially and personally entangled version of (post)diaspora.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-diaspora
• entanglement
• Lorna Goodison
• family photographs

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 If we compare the poem ‘I am becoming my mother’ with Goodison’s imaginative memoir From Harvey River: a Memoir of my Mother and her Island we can see that the poem entangles together aspects of Goodison’s mother Doris and her aunt Cleodine: in the memoir it is Cleodine who ‘raises rare blooms’, African violets ‘so strongly coloured you could stain your fingers by touching one of the petals’ (Goodison [2007] 2009, 120). Equally, it is when Goodison’s mother Doris is watering her own mother’s ‘special plants with cold tea left over from breakfast’ (114) – a feature that comes to define her mother in the poem – that the man who will be Goodison’s father first sees her. Such a comparison is productive, but of course has to be approached with care. Although the poem and the memoir are not the same kind of imaginative work, both are works of Goodison’s imagination: the memoir, for example, is based on conversations Goodison had with her mother when she was alive and also on conversations she had with her in dreams after she died (Goodison [2007] 2009, 2). Nonetheless, we can also see both the poem and the memoir as telling us something about mother/daughter entanglements, as well as about Goodison’s actual mother and about the rest of her family. See also Anim-Addo on the importance of ‘inventive spaces’ in writing black women’s histories (2013, 184).

2 The phrase ‘to pull shame out of her eyes’ is explicitly explained in From Harvey River: a Memoir of my Mother and her Island: ‘that is, to put on a small show if visitors came’ (Goodison [2007] 2009, 187). The memoir tells us that Doris had servants when she was first married, so cooking was a choice and she could dress in fine silks (Goodison [2007] 2009, 151). But when the family moved to Kingston, there were no more servants and there were nine children, so the lace and damask tablecloths were not all that was stored away: ‘Little by little she put away the fabulous Doris … she never worried much about those things again’ (187).

3 In Harvey River, Goodison ([2007] 2009) tells us that her mother cooked food every day, not only for her family but also for others, in ‘Doris’s bottomless cooking pot’ (234). A feature of her cooking process was rubbing garlic and onion into the meat with her own hands: as a consequence ‘You could ‘smell her hand’, as her father once said, ‘from the moment you turned into the gate’ (235).

4 My very brief excursion into quantum physics may seem rather cursory, but my aim here is really to embed a very particular routing for the concepts of matter and entanglement into the discussion. My earlier work on materiality devotes more space to this complex area (see Noxolo and Preziuso 2012).

5 The Windrush scandal broke in 2018, when it became clear that the UK government was deporting people who had come to the UK from the Caribbean as part of the so-called Windrush generation (named after the Empire Windrush, which brought migrants to Tilbury Docks in 1948). Commonwealth heads of government, who were meeting in London that year, reinforced the extensive campaigning of UK-based MPs, charities and in particular the Guardian newspaper (see Gentleman 2018) to bring the issue to a head.

6 Research was already clear about the deleterious effects of airborne lead in the inner city areas of Birmingham, particularly for children (see Day, Hart, and Robinson 1975; Waldron 1975; Grubert 1997). It took until 2000 for leaded petrol to be banned under EU law (Culmer 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number AH/P007163/1].