Though I have lived far from home, spoken a language I had to learn, eaten strange food, missed my family, I have never been forced to leave my homeland never to return, yet for many people, it has happened more than once, and it continues to be the their “pan de cada día” or their everyday experience. Diaspora is about the scattering of a people, a forced exile, a leaving behind, a tragedy, a disaster. Diaspora has many causes–wars, revolutions, racial cleansing, religious unity, human cruelty, the settling of old scores, scapegoating–but any is as good as none at all if you don’t need one. The cruelty of the diaspora experience is not necessarily about change, but about loss–of tradition, of customs, of language, of an enduring mental landscape that has been left behind. The cruelty of nostalgia resides in the persistence of memory, of families, of lives, of art, of songs, of celebrations. Diaspora is about a separation from what is comfortable, what is expected, happiness, joy, friends, births, weddings, deaths. As a group of people fan out to find new homes, they meet the challenge of finding all the rest of the world already occupied, and if they have been forced to leave one place, they will probably be less than welcome wherever they go. Those who suffer diaspora, forced to leave their homes again and again, will eventually become errant and drifting, unwilling to call anywhere home. Eventually, after being rejected enough, you have an entire group of people with nothing to lose, wandering the world in search of a home. All people want a place to call their home. This is a basic human desire, to have a family and a job and a roof over our heads and not have to move every few years. Diaspora breaks up families, history and tradition are forgotten, identity becomes variable, languages are both forgotten and learned, The dead are left behind, forgotten in unattended graves. Possessions, the relics of tradition, must be packed and transported or left behind. Wealth and land are left behind, lost forever. Perhaps new beginnings in new places can be a good thing as it has been for immigrants around the world, but the nostalgia for what has been lost is an ethos that has come to be emblematic of the human condition. In many ways, diaspora is the human condition.