Who gets to be a part of a diaspora?
It seems appropriate for me to start this blog about diasporas by defining the term, yet I feel stuck doing this. Looking at the word’s history, it seems to originate from the Greek for ‘scattering seeds/ sowing over’; this feels very wholesome to me.
Of course, I could pick up a dictionary and quote what I find, and here I would see the term refers mainly to the dispersion of Jewish people away from their own country to other countries. And this may be the definition that you associate with ‘diaspora’. However, the term goes much wider than this and refers to the movement of people away from their own country. You see, this is where it gets tricky for me to work with such a broad definition. How does one even define ‘own country’?
Reflecting on my own experience, both of my parents are Kurdish from Turkey (unpicking the Kurdish diaspora will have to be a whole blog on its own!) and moved to London in the early 90s which is where they met, and I was born. Does being born in the UK exclude me from being a diaspora or is this ‘inherited’ from my parents to me?
This is a question I recently had to face when applying for my current role at the British Red Cross’s new Diaspora Humanitarian Partnerships Programme. When I looked at the job description, the only essential criterion had been “lived experience of being a member of a or multiple diaspora communities in the UK.” It was so refreshing to see the importance being put on lived experience of diaspora, especially for a programme where the whole aim was to engage with diasporas. However, it left me thinking, do I fit this criterion? Are they looking for someone with ‘more’ lived experience than a 1st generation female who often cannot even classify her own identity?
And it’s not the first time I have faced these questions; I am sure many of you have also felt the same way. Often, I find myself in situations where my answer to ‘where are you from?’ flip flops from being Kurdish to Turkish to British to a North Londoner. Culturally I feel Kurdish and Turkish. My nationality, in documented passports, would be Turkish and British. Biologically I have no British in my DNA (this may change after I do one of those ancestry tests!) and I am told my grandmother’s family descended from Chechnya while my grandfathers from Iran, legend also has it that I have a distant relative who was French. Where am I from?
Now I have started working on the Diaspora Humanitarian Partnerships Programme (DHPP), one of our first tasks was to look into scoping the definition diaspora. To give you a bit of a background, the DHPP is a 2-year programme set to achieve the following objectives:
- Diaspora communities are engaged in the design and implementation of more impactful humanitarian activities
- Diasporas and the international humanitarian community have increased knowledge and understanding of humanitarian action from two-way education and knowledge sharing
- Increased coordination between diaspora responders and the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement in humanitarian action
Our aim is to pilot several different activities that can meet these objectives, learn from them and then share these as case studies across the Red Cross Red Crescent and humanitarian movement. To do this we will be working with different workstreams such as co-production, volunteering, youth, fundraising, and a few others who will be engaging with diasporas as partners to shape and implement these activities.
As we are heading towards finalising our pilot ideas, we are being pushed for an answer to define diasporas. Inevitably the diasporas we work with will be different between each of our pilots, but we would still need to define this before beginning these activities and approaching diaspora.
Maybe I am finding it much tricker to define diaspora because of my own lived experience of not fully being able to define my own identity. Or maybe the definition we use should be one that is more holistic to mitigate risk of exclusion.
I know I had almost not applied for this role because I could not define this myself. Who knew defining a word could lead to such an identity crisis? The important thing to note is that we are asking this question and we are investigating it, and to me that’s where the true learning is.
It’s not up to a handful of us to define the word but rather co-creating a definition with people. In my opinion, it is not just the definition we reach that is important but the way we reach it. And the learning we gather should be shared among other humanitarian actors who are wanting to engage with diasporas. In collaboration with our co-production team, this is now first on our list to complete, so watch this space for opportunities to actively get involved in shaping the programme, whether you feel you are from a diaspora, are a diaspora humanitarian actor, or whether like me, you are just not sure. The golden thread to us succeeding in this programme is to work together and sharing our learnings of not only what we find but how we get there.
