To The Diaspora

Diaspora means “dispersal” or “scattering,” particularly of a culture or specific racial or ethnic group. There are many diasporas, including the Jewish Diaspora, the scattering of Jewish people from their ancestral lands by antisemitic violence and voluntary migration. The African Diaspora, which Brooks references in the title of “To the Diaspora,” is the scattering of African people through voluntary migration and involuntary migration, particularly as a result of the transatlantic slave trade.

While the original context of the poem “To the Diaspora” is appreciation of and encouragement to Dudley Randall, the 1981 version of the poem occurs in a different historical moment. By the late 1970s, Brooks and others who were veterans of the heady 1960s were aware that the political struggles of Black Americans had not borne the fruit they hoped. In fact, if one only looked within the borders of the United States, then on the cusp of gutting social support programs and affirmative action under both Republican and Democratic presidents, there was a general sense of despair.

The speaker in the poem staves off that despair by noting, “Here is some sun. Some” (Line 19). That line acknowledges several key developments in how people—including Brooks—conceived of Black American identity during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1977, Stephen Bantu Biko, a South African activist, died after security forces beat him to death. He had opposed apartheid, the political, economic, and social system of segregation that advantaged white South Africans and disadvantaged all other groups, sometimes through brutal repression. Brooks memorializes him in “Music for Martyrs,” one of the poems included alongside “To the Diaspora” in To Disembark.

In 1977, South African students in Soweto, South Africa, walked out of primary and secondary schools en masse to protest the requirement that they learn Afrikaans, the language that found a home in the African continent after white, Dutch sellers colonized what became South Africa. The violent response of South African security forces accelerated the movement to isolate South Africa by disinvesting in its economy and cultural institutions.

In 1979, the Reverend Jess Jackson, who worked alongside the late Martin Luther King, Jr. during the United States Civil Rights Movement, visited South Africa. What he and his peers in the United States saw was a Black revolutionary struggle the likes of which they had not seen since the 1960s (if ever). The case they made to Black Americans back home was that the struggle in South Africa was one that demanded action by all people of African descent.

The basis for their appeal was the notion that all Black people, regardless of national borders, share a common history, including the struggle for freedom. What Jackson and others were positing was that this connection wasn’t simply a shared past. Those connections throughout the African Diaspora were important in the then-contemporary moment and on into the future. When Brooks has her speaker state, “Your work, that was done, to be done to be done to be done” (Line 23), it is a call to all Black people, even those jaded by the 1970s, to recognize that they are still African and that they are not alone.