You slowly replace the line on your cell phone with one that will keep you connected in your new destination. It seems a simple and mechanical exercise…but you are absorbed in multiple thoughts and beings that accompany you in that insignificant operation. Perhaps it would be simpler, you think, if your old Motorola had two inputs, then you would save yourself that monotonous gesture of exchanging one chip for another, which for you is the harsh reality of moving from one place to another. A gesture that forces you to recognize that your existence starts being mediated by a telephone chip in another language, and whether you want it or not, you make a lot or little effort to be close to your loved ones through an occasional screen or a voice message, you definitely are faraway…and you have no exact idea how much that distance implies.
Along with the strength to make you start on the road, comes her voice, of your dear old grandma, clearly saying: “And when are you coming back, my son?” That is when you become speechless, the slight stuttering of your childhood appears, you make excuses, pretexts, your eyes is lost on the ground, wanting it to open up and swallow you. She maintains her inquisitive and sweet gaze, to repeat calmly and with the greatest tenderness: “My son, and when are you coming back?” This is one of the immigrant’s dramas, the feeling of no return; the complex dialectics of understanding and that those you love understand that a not-being is worthwhile, which, in dramatic, extreme circumstances, can become a no return.
How do you explain to your octogenarian grandmother that it’s essential to leave to reinvent your life in a diffuse horizon, if all she wants is having you by her side and that you comfort her with a word of encouragement? Or running your hand down a back sore from ailments and years carrying the weight of a family? How do you explain to her that you take on the challenge of being a foreigner, although you will never lack her love and that of many others to save your soul from exile, from a lacerating exile, from the danger of a metamorphosis that dilutes and leaves you empty? With what words do you convince her that you will be there…in that essential moment of reunion when the end of her existence arrives?
That is why your strategy is to value your dreams in her eyes, it’s a biased tactical movement of hypocrisy and premeditation, because you know that your dreams are her dreams, that your happiness is her happiness. You make an effort, your eyes shine, animated, and she also gives up animated with you. Deep down you know that any achievement, dream, aspiration, will be truncated, limited by the anguish of no return to what you love and those you love.
At that point, you tell yourself sternly that it’s not time for ceremonies…life goes on. It’s the innate force, at times rough and insensitive, which he is about to undertake, risk, go faraway to approach the incognito, which does not stop deeply ripping him apart. It should not be this way in the case of a human activity as natural and secular as immigrating, moving, being a diasporic, cross-border being, who changes, moves, chooses to live abroad and can always return to the one he loves.
But you know that the metaphor of the pleasures of exile, enunciated by Barbadian writer George Lamming,1 is misleading; it has nuances and carries with it monumental and diverse dramas. Exile is a universal figure, “…we had to leave with the hope that a change in climate would lead to a change of fortune…,” Lamming affirms. However, for the Caribbean poet the condition of exile is also somewhat that of the colonized. It implies greater privileges, which are not only the pleasures of better housing and more comforts. The colonized must learn these privileges if he is to show that he deserved them, because there is always someone else waiting to get them, which generates deep dichotomies.
For Palestinian intellectual Edward Said,2 exile is not a matter of choice:
“Exile is a curiously compelling thing to think about, but terrifying to experience. It’s the impossible to heal rift imposed between a human being and his birthplace, between the self and his true home: his essential sadness can never be overcome.”
Partir is Aimé Césaire’s first word in the poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; being a Jewish man is the new condition assumed by the departing and returning poet. In Benedict Anderson’s perspective, nations are imagined communities, which is why Stuart Hall3 argues that there is a central issue in the nation where there is an “imagined subject” always at stake. This subject in the condition of diaspora acquires multiple identities.
Stuart, one of the representatives of British cultural studies, asks himself: how does the diaspora experience modify our models of cultural identity? How should we conceptualize or imagine identity, difference and the sense of belonging together in the same conceptual space after the diaspora? And he (Hall) does not refer only to the fact that people immigrate, but how these same people construct discourses, construct metalanguages, construct symbologies based on their own differences, even beyond a diasporic concept and purely restricted to that moment of immigration.
And it’s that complexity that at times scares you, that condition of being ambiguous, a being-nothing, a being-nobody, a being-unintelligible, trying to understand a world that is not your own. Your ethereal Cubanness with no land to cling to, which will occasionally be put to the test by someone asking you to sing to a Buena Vista music…, another wanting a Mojito or an inspired third needing that you to talk about places that you have not even visited. Which Cuban will you be in that exile? You will be the Cuban from Fidel’s Cuba, from Miami’s Cuba, from socialist Cuba, from Celia Cruz’s Cuba, from the doctors’ Cuba, from the remittance Cuba. The Cuba of El Floridita and Varadero, that of glamorous Havana…how many Cubas do you carry with you?
That is why you prefer to take and let yourself be accompanied by your deep Cuba, the black Cuba, the one of the neighborhood, the peripheral, the unknown, the invisible, the one that lulls you and gives you strength, the one that does not fit in the sugar bowl, the one where Fela, Lourdes, Roxi, Maikiel and Ledis are. It’s because of that Cuba that you leave and return every day, you enter and leave your diasporic non-place, with the tenderness and strength of those millions of your ancestors who blur the map of a Black Atlantic. You know that you now have the privilege of being free, that they accompany you and protect the religiosities and spiritualities of those who were and those who are. So go with them, go ahead, fulfill your diasporic destiny, and be prime for you and yours, which you will also be so for Cuba.
***
Notes:
1 LAMMING, George. Los placeres del exilio. Havana: Casa de las Américas Editorial Fund, 2007.
2 SAID, Edward W. Reflexiones sobre el exilio. Debate, Barcelona, 2005, p. 179.
3 HALL, Stuart. Da diáspora: Identidades e mediações culturais. Belo Horizonte: UFMG publishers; Brasilia: UNESCO representation in Brazil, 2003.
