Diasporas

At the heart of my family's genealogy are many diasporas. Diasporas refer simultaneously to closeness and distance. Diasporic communities are close, by blood, by memory, by a history of geographic proximity. Through exile, diasporas become measures for distance: treks across land and sea. Diasporas are a distanced diffusion of closeness. This is best represented by the oft-used word play in diaspora studies of root/route. James Clifford writes:

"It involves dwelling, maintaining communities, having collective homes away from home…Diaspora discourse articulates, or bends together, both roots and routes to construct what Gilroy describes as alternate public spheres (1987), forms of community consciousness and solidarity that maintain identifications outside the national time/ space in order to live inside, with a difference" (Clifford 1994:308).

Diasporas are only possible through both mobility and fixity. Distance through mobility, but the shared fixity of a crystallized moment in a distant time/place. My family has at its core, the liniment that continues, can continue in a narrative of constant disruption, the closeness/distance evoked through diasporas.

I will tell the stories as I know them, there are many gaps, in which I fill things in as I imagine they were. The stories seemed to me always to be in black and white, like old movies. I am just realizing that wasn’t the case.

My Opa (Stefan Torau) was born in Pennsylvania, U.S.A October 19, 1918. He was born into a growing US-German Diaspora. My great-Oma (Katharina Bauer) and great-Opa (Stefan Torau) met in Pennsylvania. Katharina had been taken there as a young woman, with her brother, by her parents. This is how the story goes… One day, my great-uncle (great-Oma’s young brother), who was only nineteen, looked up at the sky and said, “what a beautiful day”. (At this point, I am training myself to imagine colour, blues and whites and yellows). That night he went to a dance, collapsed and died. My great-great-Oma was devastated. So devastated, she couldn’t stay in the U.S. She returned to Kapetanovo. Great-Oma, as dutiful daughter returned shortly after, beckoned by letters from her mother. (This is another story. This is a story of mobility/fixity and gender; Great-Oma is anchored by her duties as a daughter, Great-great Oma, paralyzed by her attachment as a mother). Great-Opa and little Opa returned too. However, Great-Opa liked working in the States. He returned to work and send home remittances. After a few trips, he didn’t return home to Kapetannovo again.

The distances can not be measured in latitudes and longitudes. The spaces in-between which make a diaspora, are not just physical. The distances are virtual: "real without being actual, ideal without being abstract" (Proust in Shields 2003: 2).

This following story is written in history textbooks. This story is complicated and involves Czars and Princes. My grandparents spoke German, and were from Yugoslavia, but were German? It was the enigma of my childhood. This enigma is revealed in my Great-Oma’s Bible. In her eighties, she had written a family history in the inside covers and blank pages. She begins, “I am writing this so my descendents will know from where they came.” She continues to detail how our family came to Yugoslavia from Germany to settle some of the region.Young teachers would come from Germany once in a while to teach the kids of Kapetanovo games and songs. It was a welcomed diaspora, or an intentional diaspora at least.

Finally, there is the last exile: May 1944, when Kapetanovo packed up and moved out. It took several months to travel from their corner of now Croatia, through Hungary to Austria. In Austria, over the next few years, many continued to Canada, U.S, Brazil, Germany. My Aunt Inge was born in those months of exile. My Uncle Stefan died at 3 in Austria, shortly after. It is this trek that is crystallized in the imaginary. These are the stories I always ask for.

William Safran defines diasporas as fulfilling the following criteria:

"‘expatriate minority communities’, dispersed from an original center to at least two peripheral places; that maintain a ‘memory, vision, or myth about their original homeland’; that ‘believe that they are not—and perhaps cannot be— fully accepted by their host country’; that see the ancestral home as a place of eventual return, when the time is right; that are committed to the maintenance or restoration of this homeland; and of which the group’s consciousness and solidarity are ‘importantly defined’ by this continuing relationship with the homeland" (Safran in Clifford 1994: 304-305).

Safran’s definition of diasporas situates diasporas within the virtual. Between the centre and the periphery are the intangibles; imaginary returns, memories, myths, visions. Diasporas, communities dispersed over space, yet connected through an intangible connection to another time and place, are actualized through texts. Diasporas are an effect of “cultures of circulation” (Lee and LiPuma 2002). Gaonnkar and Povinelli (2003) define ‘cultures of circulation’ as “a growing recognition of the importance of circulation as the enabling matrix within which social forms, both textual and topical, emerge and are recognizable when they emerge” (388). Diasporas, as simultaneous mobility and fixity, closeness and distance, only exist through circulation. Roger Rousse (1991) argues that communities emerge over separate places “through the continuous circulation of people, money, goods, and information” (14). While Rousse acknowledges the materialities of diasporas, there is another level of circulation. There is a circulation in the virtual of the intangibles of dispersed communities. Beyond maps, there are body memories, feeling the positions of houses and gardens (see citizen noplace). A virtual place is in circulation through a translation through generations, of memories.

 

I have heard that it is impossible to dream in colour. Maybe, it is similarly impossible to have virtual, translated memories in colour. I was never in Kapetanovo, in the 1940s. In translation, something is lost through distances of space and time. Something else remains.

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In-between Places

This is a story about places, virtualities, bodies and time. For Thomas Gieryn, a place is composed of: space, the materiality and the discursive. For Gieryn: “a place is a unique spot in the universe” (464), “has physicality” and is invested with meaning (465). A place is, therefore, a confluence of geography, things and meanings.

A virtual place defies these definitions of place. This place exists in Deleuze’s “striated space”, its materiality emerges sometimes when the place becomes actualized. A virtual place is performed as memories are worked up and stories are conjured. Elizabeth St. Pierre (2000) writes "as one's past becomes a place (Dainotto, 1996: 496), it is no longer an absent, out-of-date, or empty space (Serres and Latour 1995/1990: 48) but a very present, up-to-date, and busy site of agency, a productive location from which to practice Butler's (1994/ 1995) 'suvbversive citation' " (260).

This project is situated at the crux of three geographies: Kapetanovo today, Leamington, Ontario (location of part of the Kapetanovo diaspora) today, and Kapetanovo of the 1940s. Two of these geographies exist in materiality today, while Kapetanovo 1940s has become a virtual place. Rob Shields (2003) writes that "virtual worlds become important when they diverge from the actual, or when the actual is ignored in favour of the virtual" (4). In this project I am interested in how the virtual place of Kapetanovo 1940s becomes the principle place of significance.

 

 

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In my specialization exam research, I will explore what remains and what is lost in the translation of memory. Specifically I will explore how translated memories become materialized and circulated. Hardt writes that "virtualities are always real (in the past, in memories) and may become actualized in the present" (in Shields 2003: 25). I have collected some materializations of this virtual place. This is the outline of my original plan for 'my virtural homeland'. Polyvocal, open and transparent, the virtual homeland is a space becoming. For this reason, raw texts are exposed- adolescent doodlings, my website plans.

In all of these materializations, a central focus is the relationship between place, memory, and bodies. De Certeau writes:

"places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded, but like stories held in reserve, remaining in an enigmatic state, symbolizations encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body" (1984: 108).

Stephanie Davidson, in writing the justification for her Kapetanovo architecture project writes, “the land that was taken from them is irreplaceable. Like a lost puzzle piece this place is a gap in the lives of the people who lived there, and carries through like a hereditary bruise, into younger generations”. What remains for my grandfather a gaping wound is reconciled through generations. This website is an attempt to, in some ways, make visible the bruise.

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Asides

"The space of the aside is a place, a pause in textual space" (Tuan in St. Pierre 2000: 273).

St. Pierre, writing about her research on 'going home' writes,

"So a tremendous simultaneity of pasts and presents and futures that will have been produced a different ontological status for this ethnographer, a position that has kept her plunging through time at breakneck speed, so that a place, the field, has simply become a pause in time (Tuan 1977:161), some time, any time. The ethnographic present, a welcome simulacra, has become a time to catch my breath and rest a bit before the bottom drops out of the field again" (263).

This project was difficult to begin and will be impossible to finish. While Kapetanovo 1940s had become my field of study, the crystallized moment or pause, the routes to this space are too multiple and tangential. Photographs and phantoms, maps, trauma: all these texts and discourses help to capture the virtual place. But, what i am also trying to capture is the affect of the translation of memories. This is impossible without slipping into the solipsism of my own memories. I can not write stories of Katharina Bauer (my great-Oma), without remembering ninety-year old hands and kerchiefs and the awe of being young and knowing someone that old. I need asides to pause, find an ethnographic present in which to negotiate the multiple times and places that this project entails.

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Works Cited and Potential Bibliography

 

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Clifford, James. 1994. "Diasporas." Cultural Anthropology 9:302-338.
De Certeau, M. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fortier, Anne-Marie. 1999. "Re-Membering Places and the Performance of Belonging(s)." Theory, Culture and Society 16:41-64.
Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli. 2003. "Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition." Public Culture 15:385-397.
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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: North Western University Press.
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—. 2004. "Visualicity- on urban visibility and invisibility." Visual Culture in Britain.
St. Pierre, Elizabeth. 2000. "Nomadic Inquiry in the Smooth Space of the Field." in Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education, edited by E. S. P. a. W. Pillow. London: Routledge.
Van Loon, Joost. 2002. "Social Spatialization and Everyday LIfe." Space and Culture 5:88-95.