Dis/Connected in Diaspora An Autoethnographic Account of Translating within Language and Relating across Nation-States

Abstract

Reflecting on the nature of my ethnographic research comprising open-ended biographical narrative interviews and participant observation, this article explores what transpires between people who are socialized in broadly similar postcolonial, multilingual, and multireligious environments yet meet for the first time away from “home.” What do they share; what divides them? Where do their paths converge; where do they fork? How do they connect to each other; wherein lies the disconnect? “Home,” in this case, is the Indian subcontinent—India for me and Sri Lanka for my interlocutors—and the new location abroad is Germany. In the context of academic research, both my research subjects and I detected several commonalities and differences, some overt and unwittingly acknowledged, but most covert and left unsaid. I argue that the dissimilarities, the distance perceived, and the disjunct between the life-worlds, real or imagined, enabled my connection to different women from Sri Lanka. Aged between twenty and sixty, they had arrived through various modes as refugees, tourists, or marriage migrants from the 1980s onwards. Subsequently, they settled in Germany and saw themselves as a refugee community connected with fellow exiles across continents. Viewing the narratives and reflections of Tamil women refugees in terms of their diasporic memories and transnational citizenship, a distinction emerges between concrete, transient, and symbolic sites of memory with their own varying shades of gendering. This article takes up encounters with different
interlocutors and illustrates the wide-ranging connections that materialized in the diaspora context. For the sake of narrative brevity, I shall focus on, firstly, the shared language, Tamil, with different vocabularies, secondly, the insights as a translator and facilitator, and thirdly, the nature of diasporic connections and memories across nation-states.