ABSTRACT
Ayeen referred to himself as 'more Irish than the Irish themselves', which is a phrase used in Irish historiography to describe a phenomenon of cultural assimilation in late medieval, Norman Ireland. Haneef, a twenty-five-year-old professional who grew up in a working-class Pakistani family in Boston, told me that he 'always kept a very Pakistani culture'. One explanation for why Nadeem struggled while living in Ireland is his desire to return to the 'homeland'. Ahmed was acutely aware that he was not white, ethnically 'Irish", or Catholic – all defining features in his understanding of Irish identity. The only way that Ahmed would ever return 'home' is if Pakistan embraced cultural and religious pluralism. The word 'diaspora' conjures up metaphors of travel and of identities in a process of transition, with second-generation members of the 'Pakistani community' in Boston and Dublin engaged as 'cross cultural navigators' (Parekh, 2000) or translators translating identities and cultures across contrasting settings in time and space.
