Monique Nair

Diaspora Dreaming

Let’s start with the waters of another lifetime.

1. The undulating ocean past the marshlands that my father could see from his childhood home—a site of wonders, play, the edge between Mumbai and the world.
2. The rushing Murray River that was an extension of my mother’s childhood Boeill Creek farmhouse backyard: the severing connector between Victoria and New South Wales, a site of beauty, and the forger of floods.
3. The deep blue waters twisting around my grandfather’s port city of Trieste, resplendent in the northern Italian sun. 

I keep writing about an intangible collection of ancestral bodies of water—all the seas and waters that marked my parents’, grandparents’, and great-grandparents’ lives. I am haunted by my ancestral waters that I have never seen, never felt, never swam in. 

1. Instead, I visit Mumbai and see warm, crowded sunsets on Marine Drive. We snap photos, gaze at the murky ocean. I ache at the sight of all the pollution and contemplate yelling at the man who drops a stash of paper tickets into the water without a care. In Andheri, high rises cover the view of the beach from my dad’s old house. 
2. Instead, my family picnics on the busy public lawns lining the Murray River in Mildura. We visit the Boeill Creek house but don’t see the section of the river my mother experienced growing up.
3. Instead, I scan the internet for images of glistening Trieste waters lapping the edges of a city filled with majestic Austrian-Hungarian style buildings. I see the TikToks of hoards of jellyfish languidly floating close to the surface of the sea. I gaze at my mum’s cousin’s black and white Facebook profile picture: his mother (my grandfather’s sister) and father on a little boat, smiling softly as they voyage into Trieste waters. 

I keep writing. I keep dreaming. I sometimes feel like a cliché: like those TikToks making fun of second generation creators talking about mangos and coconuts and the smell of their grandparents’ food inspiring them to write poetry, design clothes, cook food, tell stories that recreate their family’s memories from the “homeland”. 

Sometimes cliché is resonance is truth. Not everyone is striving for literary merit and that’s okay. Diaspora narratives tend to repeat arcs of returning to or imagining the “homeland”, identity struggles, cultural reclamation, and connecting to family. While these journeys may seem cliché today, they are honest and common parts of the experience and a way to make sense of migration and feeling inextricably tied to our past. 

In this way, I also keep returning to the term ABCD.

I was a child when I first heard this term, and the weight of the C hadn’t fully hit me yet. Initially explained by my dad, ABCD is the Indian rendition of ABC—American Born Chinese. Add a D, change the C and you have American Born Confused Desi. Bring it home and we have Australian Born Confused Desi. 

It’s a tired, Americanised and contested term, but there is something true here in the Confusion. The child-of-migrant/third culture kid identity dilemmas—another cliché? Or just a truth? I considered swapping Desi for Diaspora to make a stereotyped catch-all for people of all migrant backgrounds, or something that could cover me as a mixed race person. I’m not only Indian, after all, but Italian and Polish too—sliced in halves and quarters. 

Australian Born Confused Diaspora is reductive, however. Many people are very sure of their plural identities and have been raised with a strong sense of their cultural roots, or have discovered it later in life, or feel no need to connect with their roots. It’s all valid. Confusion is common, but not inherent. And perhaps more often than confusion, it’s a sense of loss and disconnection we feel. 

For those holding several layers of migration: how many homelands are we really growing up away from? How tenuous are the links to our ancestors’ homes, how many faltering languages are dormant beneath our tongues, how many cities and towns and waters have informed our being that we will never understand like our parents, our grandparents, our ancestors? 

Instead, we only carry glimpses of these places in stories, in holidays, in guesses through old photographs, in Wikipedia reads, in TikToks. 

I’ve met Mumbai four times—the city of dreams that shaped my dad until his mid twenties. Dig further back to my dad’s origins, to the south of India where his parents grew up. I have never reached Tamil Nadu but I had one brief encounter with Kerala as a twelve-year-old — a one week family trip driving through lush rolling mountains and the tranquil picturesque Kerala backwaters. Growing up I frequented my mum’s hometown on family trips to Mildura in country Victoria, but only experienced a drive through Boeill Creek, her first and primary childhood town. 

My mum has never reached her father’s Italian Trieste roots, her mother’s roots in Ansbach, Germany, and then my maternal grandparents’ home cities— Lwow and Równe. These cities were formerly Polish, until they were Soviet occupied thenNazi occupied in horror stories I’ll never fully grasp. Now, the cities Lviv (Lwow) and Rivne (Równe) fall under Ukrainian borders and are at the mercy of Russia’s occupation. A few months before writing this, both Lviv and Rivne suffered damaging drone attacks by the Russian military. It has been less than a year since I learned I have a personal history with these cities. The knowledge is still fresh and searing.

My mother received her AncestryDNA results a few months ago. Despite believing she was half-Italian and her father having grown up in Italy, the estimate claims she’s only 14% Italian. Forget my one-quarter, my mum isn’t even ethnically one-eighth Italian! According to AncestryDNA, she’s 52% Eastern European and Russian, 22% Germanic European, 14% Northern Italian, 7% Baltic and 5% Swedish and Danish.

I’m assuming Eastern European doesn’t really mean Russian, rather Polish, but who knows if I’m also mixed Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian? And I can only speculate as to why there’s so much Eastern European blood from my Italian grandfather. 

I imagine a great-grandmother a few generations ago in Italy: she falls in love with a dashing Slovenian merchant slipping through Trieste when it was a beaming cultural centre in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. He stays, returns her love, settles into the groove of Italian life.

A fantasy, perhaps, but not impossible. 

At the northeastern tip of Italy, bordering Slovenia, Trieste has always been a cosmopolitan melting pot of a port city—cuisine, culture, and architecture—a blend of Italian, Slovenian, Austrian, and Hungarian influences. It is a city so mingled and bustling that diversity and hybridity are natural, normal. And Lwow, my maternal great-grandfather’s Polish (now Ukrainian) city, was a vibrant multi-ethnic and multi-religious cultural hub of Eastern Europe—layering my heritage generations ago. 

It is disorienting to know that I am composed heavily and so unknowingly of Eastern European heritage. While Indian and Italian culture resonate to a degree, I never felt an inkling of home in Poland. There is much to learn about the beauty of Polish culture but all I ever knew of Poland growing up was what I studied in school about World War I and II. If I wanted to trace my maternal grandmother’s roots, I would have to go to Ukraine which is impossible amidst a raging war. 

In my case, the Confusion in ABCD was spurred through the unknowing, the mixedness: the unbalanced, cracked cultural disposition distorted through hidden histories, people and places conflated, more gaps than answers. 

But perhaps it’s okay to not completely feel like your DNA. We are not bound to it. It’s only an estimate, and culture is also feeling, place, people, and community. Often it is a choice, what we choose to carry with us, who we choose to be. Perhaps we unknowingly carry some remnants of our family’s past experiences, traumas and cultural values. Or perhaps we live separately from the past and avoid resonance.

Sometimes, separating ourselves from the past is a valid survival mechanism: a trauma too hard to bear, a crime, a betrayal too callous to recall, a culture clashing with one’s personal values, pressures to assimilate. Sometimes, the labour of learning cultural knowledge not passed down is too daunting. But simultaneously, being uprooted in the abyss of unknowing is also unsettling. The Confusion in ABCD is not an end in itself. Confusion can propel; confusion can shape-shift into curiosity and learning. 

Despite my separation from these places, there is part of me aching for the loss and pain these places harbour. There is a part of me aching to unite with all these cities. I feel a deep hunger to touch the ground, to meet the surrounding waters and oceans, taste the food and stroll the streets of my ancestors: to imagine a life I’ll never fully know, may never call home, but will forever try to understand. 

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Monique Nair is a Naarm/Melbourne based writer of Indian-Italian-Polish heritage. She is a screenwriter for My Melbourne, an upcoming anthology film produced by Mind Blowing Films and supported by VicScreen and Screen Australia. She co-edited Mascara Literary Review’s debut anthology, Resilience (2022), published with Ultimo Press, and she is an alumni of the West Writers program with Footscray Community Arts. Her writing has been published in Kill Your Darlings, Mascara Literary Review, Voiceworks, Peril and The Indian Weekly. She has performed or presented at Emerging Writers’ Festival and National Young Writers’ Festival.