Metaphors, concepts, genealogies and images
Seeds, roots, rhizomes and
epiphytes: botany and diaspora
By Robin Cohen
The study of diasporas is interleaved with botanical comparisons
and metaphors. I alluded to this myself in the first edition of Global
Diasporas where I provided a table titled ‘The good gardener’s
guide to diasporas’ (Cohen 1997). I pointed out that weeding,
which refers to the uprooting and casting out of undesired plants,
has an equivalent in ‘victim diasporas’ being subject to expulsion,
deportation, genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’. When favoured plants
are sown by scattering seed, that act closely corresponds to the
original Greek origins of the notion of diaspora. Transplanting
involves digging up and replanting. This has a high rate of failure,
depending on the original condition, the journey and the new site and
echoes the idea of ‘labour diasporas’. (On the ships taking ‘coolies’ to
the Caribbean 18 per cent died. Another 25 per cent returned to India
at the end of their indenture.) I included various other comments on
layering, cross-pollinating, dividing, grafting and mulching.
I decided to discard this line of analysis in the second edition of
Global Diasporas (Cohen 2008), thinking it was both too cute and
too fanciful. Again, to be truthful, I did not know that much about
gardening, other than cutting the lawn. However, I now want a
second bite at the cherry, particularly since I have familiarised myself
with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Édouard Glissant, and in
recognition of Judith Misrahi-Barak’s intervention. I follow the words
of my title in sequence.
Seeds
This is not a mere metaphor. Seeds are integral to the etymology of the
From Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging, edited by N. Sigona, A. Gamlen,
G. Liberatore and H. Neveu Kringelbach, Oxford Diasporas Programme, Oxford, 2015
Metaphors, concepts, genealogies and images
Figure 1. Logo, Leverhulme-financed Oxford Diasporas Programme, 2011–15
Figure 2. Book jacket, Robin Cohen, Global diasporas: an introduction,
2008. 2nd ed, London: Routledge
Figure 3. Logo, Arts and Humanities Research Council research
programme, 2005–10
Figure 4. Banner of the diaspora* social network, with one million accounts
in 2014. Original image ©Horia Varlan
From Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging, edited by N. Sigona, A. Gamlen,
G. Liberatore and H. Neveu Kringelbach, Oxford Diasporas Programme, Oxford, 2015
Metaphors, concepts, genealogies and images
Figure 5. Book jacket, Alex Haley, Roots: the saga of an American family,
1976. Artwork ©Peter Newark American Pictures/Bridgeman Art Library.
Reproduced by arrangement with The Random House Group Ltd.
Figure 6. Book jacket, Howard Jacobson, Roots schmoots: journeys among
Jews, 1993. The Overlook Press
Figure 7. Illustration in Llull’s Arbor Scientiae, 1295–6
Figure 8. Masthead, online journal, Rhizomes. First image ©Todd Childers
From Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging, edited by N. Sigona, A. Gamlen,
G. Liberatore and H. Neveu Kringelbach, Oxford Diasporas Programme, Oxford, 2015
Metaphors, concepts, genealogies and images
word diaspora (the Greek speirein meant to sow or scatter). Indeed
the ‘spr’, sometimes with intermediate letters, is found in a number
of cognate words – think of spore, disperse, sperm, sprout, sprawl,
sprinkle, spread or spray. However, we need to go beyond etymology
alone and think of how seeds are distributed. A farmer throwing
out handfuls of seeds is one way; bird excrement and wind dispersal
are others. The last is the most commonly evoked representation of
diaspora, with the image of a dandelion used particularly frequently
(see Figures 1–4). This may signify the lack of materiality associated
with a postmodern lightness of being (no bird shit, no peasants) or,
more likely, a lack of imagination on the part of designers, or those
who brief them.
Roots
Roots, or more strictly the search for roots, is a frequent leitmotif in
diasporic life. It is more pronounced in those groups that suffered
violent uprooting. For example, one can cite the sentiments of the
prominent New World leader of the ‘Back to Africa’ movement,
Marcus Garvey: ‘A people without the knowledge of their past
history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.’ Many African
Americans undertook a painful emotional journey to connect with
their past. Alex Haley’s famous book Roots (Haley 1976) involved an
elaborate hunt for his family’s origins using fragmentary linguistic
clues and oral history (Figure 5). The three subsequent TV series and
movie based on the book not only told a story which resonated with
African Americans, it connected with a much more general interest
in ethnic origins and genealogy (family trees). A generally weak, but
occasionally funny, parody of the movement to discover one’s roots is
Howard Jacobson’s Roots Schmoots (Jacobson 1993) (Figure 6).
Rhizomes
In direct contrast to the preoccupation with rootedness, indeed in
contestation with it, is rhizomatic thinking, closely associated with
Deleuze and later with him and Guattari, in particular with their joint
book A thousand plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). Both were
philosophers, and theirs is essentially an epistemological intervention.
They were reacting against the pervasive idea of ‘trees of knowledge’
From Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging, edited by N. Sigona, A. Gamlen,
G. Liberatore and H. Neveu Kringelbach, Oxford Diasporas Programme, Oxford, 2015
Metaphors, concepts, genealogies and images
Figure 9. Book jacket, Judith Misrahi-Barak and Claudine Raynaud
(eds.) Diasporas, cultures of mobilities, ‘race’, 2014. Cover image ©Judith
Misrahi-Barak; cover design ©Presses universitaires de la Méditeranée
derived from Aristotelean and biblical thought. One influential
example was Ramon Llull’s tree of science (Arbor Scientiae) (Llull
1295–6) written in Rome in the thirteenth century, which depicted
16 branches of science together with 18 roots, including wisdom and
logic (Figure 7). Instead of roots and trees, Deleuze and Guattari saw
knowledge as a reiterative multiplicity of loose connections being
made between meaning, social relations and power, without definite
origin or teleology. Like the shoots of rhizomes, they argued that
knowledge has a nomadic character, growing from near random
wanderings, rather than from a single rootstock. An online journal,
From Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging, edited by N. Sigona, A. Gamlen,
G. Liberatore and H. Neveu Kringelbach, Oxford Diasporas Programme, Oxford, 2015
Metaphors, concepts, genealogies and images
Rhizomes, has been published since 2000 in tribute to their work
(Figure 8). The diasporic connection is hinted at by the evocation
of ‘nomadism’, but it was the Caribbean critic and cultural theorist
Glissant who make the most explicit link. Glissant was reacting
against what he saw as the central weakness of the theory of creolité,
which celebrated the amalgamation of diasporas into one fused
culture. This outcome was too static for Glissant, who turned to
the Deleuzo-Guattarian rhizome to develop his Poetics of Relation
(Glissant 1990), Relation being grandly capitalised as a core concept
signifying the constant making and remaking of the Self–Other
dialectic, an explicitly unstable form of creolization.
Epiphytes
Rhizomes usefully conflate roots and shoots, but they have one
analogical deficiency, that is they spread subterraneously, suggesting
some sort of covert and unpredictable fertility which, in the social
imaginary, easily plays into anti-immigrant rhetoric. How much
better then is an epiphyte, which my deep research on Wikipedia tells
me is affixed to another plant, but is not a parasite and draws nutrients
from air, rain and debris? The photograph of one such epiphyte,
Tillandsia, on the cover of a recent collection is attributed to one of
the editors, Judith Misrahi-Barak (Misrahi-Barak and Raynaud 2014)
(Figure 9). Given the restrictions inherent in choosing an image for
one’s book cover, other than her tantalising illustration and a few lines
of description, she does not have the opportunity to elaborate on the
reasons behind its choice. What is particularly attractive about this
botanical comparison is that epiphytes need the support of a tree, just
as diasporas may need the support of a country, and do not harm it.
On the contrary, epiphytes provide a welcoming shelter for other
organisms and are often very beautiful.
I conclude by making the obvious point that botanical comparisons
cannot substitute for social scientific understandings of diasporas, but
they are suggestive and vivid conceptual tools and may be particularly
helpful in pedagogy.
From Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging, edited by N. Sigona, A. Gamlen,
G. Liberatore and H. Neveu Kringelbach, Oxford Diasporas Programme, Oxford, 2015
References
Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: an introduction. 1st ed. London: UCL Press.
Cohen, R. (2008) Global Diasporas: an introduction. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Glissant, E. (1990) Poétique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard. [Poetics of Relation, trans.
B. Wing (1997). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.]
Haley, A. (1976) Roots: the story of an American family. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Jacobson, H. (1993) Roots schmoots: journeys among Jews. London: Viking.
Llull, R. (1295–6). Arbor Scientiae. Rome.
Misrahi-Barak, J., and Raynaud, C. (eds.) (2014) Diasporas, cultures of mobilities,
‘race’. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée.
From Diasporas Reimagined: Spaces, Practices and Belonging, edited by N. Sigona, A. Gamlen,
G. Liberatore and H. Neveu Kringelbach, Oxford Diasporas Programme, Oxford, 2015