ROOTLESSNESS AND COMMUNITY IN CONTEXTS OF DIASPORA

Margaret Aymer

Rootlessness wanders through Christian imagination today as it has for thousands of years. Even today, hymns proclaiming “this world is not my home,” and “I am a poor pilgrim of sorrow, I’m lost in this wide world alone,” are sung by women and men whose families can trace their ancestry on any given land mass back multiple generations. Often, the Hebrew Scriptures are credited as the origin of themes of rootlessness, wandering, pilgrimage, and dispersion. However, the New Testament also contains themes of rootlessness and of the creation of community in times of diaspora.

Perhaps it takes an uprooted soul to notice these themes, this ongoing trope in the New Testament. Perhaps it takes the eyes of a woman between cultures, not fully American, and unquestionably not Caribbean—except when I unquestionably am—who emigrated as a child and has functioned as an interpreter of cultures for both my home and host cultures. Some Asian Americans call this the phenomenon of being “the 1.5 generation,” the generation that stands between the deep memory of the first-generation immigrant who grew to adulthood in the country of origin and the deep acculturation of the second generation, born in the country of migration. As 1.5-generation people, we stand between homelands, always on a journey, negotiating when possible, turning away when endangered, forging a third way when necessary, and always being in the midst of creating and re-creating culture in ways that are at once rooted in the old, transplanted into a strange land, and bearing hybrid, sometimes nourishing fruit that may at times be unrecognizable as the result of transplantation.

I often read the New Testament with 1.5-generation eyes, eyes not only of an immigrant but also of an immigrant of color. And when I do, I notice that many of these New Testament texts bear marks of migration: evidence of negotiating one’s way between home and host cultures, and of the work of forging culture and making meaning in the midst of displacement.