ABSTRACT
Standing in a small crowded café in Wiesbaden, Germany on 5 February 1993 I was waiting to meet the two Caritas truck drivers 1 who were supposed to arrive from the Bosnian city of Mostar and bring me the video tape I was to take back to Perth, Western Australia. The cold early twilight of the late afternoon could not penetrate the windowless space, thick with cigarette smoke and the air of sadness. Had it not been for the German advertisements for numerous brands of beer hanging side by side with the Croatian coat of arms, Croatian flag and enlarged photographs of the Croatian cities of Dubrovnik and Zagreb, this café could have been in any country or even on any planet in the universe. It existed as the space where ‘people in the diaspora’ Those ‘lonely gatherings of scattered people’, bring their myths, fantasies and experiences. 2
Bhabha (1984, 1990a) also points out that times and places of gatherings (like this café) exist everywhere because hybridity of the colonised and the diasporic is not a state of comfortable multicultural pluralism or gradual synthesis, but is marked by asymmetry and by the edgy coexistence of incommensurable experiences and often by the unpredictable incursion of the uncanny. Bhabha knows this well because:
I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and émigrés and refugees; gatherings on the edge of ‘foreign cultures’; gatherings at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafés of city centres; gatherings in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another’s language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance, degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retrospectively; gathering the past in ritual and revival; gathering the present.
