Diaspora is a single word doing an unreasonable amount of work. It is asked to cover forced displacement and voluntary migration, first arrivals and fourth generations, people who left and people who were never asked. We spoke to eleven people across four continents about what the word does and does not describe.
The Hyphen Is Not the Problem
A recurring frustration was the assumption of internal conflict—that a hyphenated identity must be experienced as a tension requiring resolution. Most participants described it instead as ordinary, unremarkable, and only made difficult by other people’s insistence on a choice.
The conflict, several noted, tends to be introduced by institutions rather than felt by individuals: forms, categories, and interviewers asking which one they feel more.
I stopped trying to be from somewhere. I am from the route.
— Interview participant, Lisbon
Language and What It Carries
Language loss surfaced in nearly every conversation, and rarely as nostalgia. The concrete grief was relational—being unable to speak to a grandparent, or being addressed with an intimacy one cannot return.
Several described deliberate reacquisition in adulthood: slow, humbling, and undertaken specifically to hold a conversation with a particular person before it became impossible.
Return, and Its Complications
Return visits produced the most ambivalent testimony. Participants described being read instantly as foreign in the country they had been raised to consider home—by accent, gait, or spending.
Nobody described this as disillusionment. Most described it as clarifying: a recognition that belonging is negotiated in both directions and rarely settles anywhere completely.
What the eleven conversations shared was not a common experience but a common irritation—with a vocabulary too small for the thing it names, and with an audience that keeps asking which half is real.
