In 1980, Deleuze and Guattari coined important concepts in philosophical studies, namely nomadology, the rhizome, or nomadic rhizome, and deterritorialization. These concepts primarily deal with geographical as well as psychological displacements and are concerned with the nomad’s identity, boundaries, and environment that surround the self, continuity, and points of departure and arrival. Celebrating the removal of power and authority over a territory by its inhabitants, the deployment of these concepts weakens the ties between the displaced and land, between culture and place. These concepts embrace uprootedness and reject points of origin in particular as Oedipalized territorialities. Revisiting displacement does not totally reject Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of a nomadic rhizome; however, it does reject what might be considered its inhuman and unethical character. For the rhizome

has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance. The tree imposes the verb “to be,” but the fabric of the rhizomes the conjunction. “and … and … and.” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.” Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for? These are totally useless questions. Making a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false conception of voyage and movement.

(Deleuze and Guattari: 1992: 25)

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic rhizome, and subsequently of its applicant the nomad, promotes “short-term memory, or antimemory,” rootlessness, and no history; both nomadology and the rhizome “overthrow ontology, do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings” (Ibid: 25; my italics). Furthermore, “nomads have no points, paths, or land” (Ibid: 381). They are directionless, without history, memory free, without homeland or territory, without beginnings and/or starting points, detached and rootless, deterritorialized, and forgetful.

By contrast, this study argues that while the nomadic rhizome resists the organizational structure of the tree-root system which looks for the original source of things, and while multiple identities may seem to be directionless, identities are not without beginnings, nor are they forgetful or without history. This can be illustrated through the voices of black and Asian displaced writers who reflect on their past through memory and whose displacement intensifies and transforms through memory. These displaced writers, unhomely and hyphenated, made it to the metropolitan city of London and brought with them a concept of not only “writing back with vengeance” but also bringing the margin into the center. By doing so, they initiated a process by which the metaphor of “center and periphery” becomes obsolete. Black British writers occupy both center and periphery simultaneously. The displaced black (non-white) British,¹ formerly colonized, intellectual writers discussed here are migrants through whose life London has become a transient location which offers a fertile soil for aesthetic expression, interracial and intercultural mingling, allowing for critical distance; they are the “decentred sons and daughters of the black diaspora … the offspring of Britain’s colonial history” (Bammer: 1994: 156). They are minor, marginalized, displaced writers as exiles: the Caribbean/the West Indian, East African, Middle Eastern, Asian, Indian, and Pakistani. Bhabha calls them the “army of metaphors,” those “wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation” (Bhabha: 2005: 237). Young calls them “tricontinental,” by which he means those who as well as marking a shifting boundary also “suggest an alternative culture, an alternative ‘epistemology’, or system of knowledge.” The Caribbean, Asian, and African (tricontinental) form a postcolonial “global alliance resisting the continuing imperialism of the west.” In fact Young’s alternative term for postcolonialism is tricontinentalism where he emphasizes that the term “postcolonial” involves only those formerly colonized (Young: 2003: 17–18). In Re-routing the Postcolonial, furthermore, there are attempts to expand the subject to involve all those living within the postcolonial era, namely Eastern Europe and China, from Poland to South Africa and Canada in order to take a new route of inquiry. Re-routing the Postcolonial also suggests that to be global is to be postcolonial and to be postcolonial is always already to be global. For “[l]ocality itself has been globalized, its boundaries dilated by the mass migrants” (Wilson et al: 2010: 32). Either term however implies that the new emerging knowledge and the new (hi)story is being written not by the winners in history but those who are dispossessed and marginalized. Those “tricontinental” subjects are here to make sure that we “are looking at the world not from above, but from below” (Young: 2003: 17–20).

Although the displaced writer as migrant to a certain extent escapes the Heim(at)² of the national culture, like Foster in Selvon’s An Island Is A World, or that of Khayyam in Rushdie’s Shame, or even Karim in Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia, the displaced as migrant or exile is not a nomad. For in what Aciman calls the “bipolar mentality” of the displaced person “the idea of home may become too dramatized or sentimentalized,” whereas in the “‘nomadic’ configuration, exile loses its charge” (Aciman: 1999: 58) for the nomad is not expelled from a place and thus the seductive power of the concept of home is nonexistent.

The concept of the rhizome is also too flexible and too adaptable in terms of land and movement. Displacement thus translates and is placed between closed, rigid territories, segregation or what Rushdie calls mental and cultural ghettoization³ and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the nomadic rhizome. Although displacement as it is understood here shares with the nomadic rhizome its conjunctions (and … and … and … ), and thus its discontinuous yet collective currents, botanic multiplicity (becomings), no endings, metamorphosis, and “collective assemblage of enunciation,” the displaced celebrates a beginning which adds to and fertilizes further multiple points of other displacements. The experience of displacement is ambivalent and inconsistent which is why the assertion of beginnings is so vital. The displaced can learn to utilize and thus celebrate the multiplicity of answers and the complicatedness of such questions as “Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you heading for?” which for Deleuze and Guattari “are totally useless questions”: for them “[m]aking a clean slate, starting or beginning again from ground zero, seeking a beginning or a foundation—all imply a false conception of voyage and movement” (Deleuze and Guattari: 1992: 23).

In contrast to Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadism and concept of the rhizome, the argument here is that metamorphosis and translation always require two points: the point of departure and the moment of transition. In order for identity and the cultural understanding of what it means to be “at home” to take a conceptual turn, it has to be located historically and geographically, it has to “begin” some “where.” Going back to the case of the Palestinians, as Edward Said states in his aforementioned conversation with Salman Rushdie, “[t]he further we get away from the Palestine of our past, the more precarious our status, the more disrupted our being, the more intermittent our presence” (Rushdie: 1991: 167).

Deleuze and Guattari state, however, that the “nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence” (Deleuze and Guattari: 1992: 380). Displacement as it is used here considers all units and points of identification as principles as it translates between the here and there without central authority or concluding choices.

“I do not believe,” Kaplan states, “that we are all rootless, existentially adrift, and limitlessly mobile … Nor do I believe that we are all at home, fixed into neat identities, enjoying stable similarities” (Kaplan: 2005; 1994: 26). This point is avidly supported throughout this project. Sam Selvon’s Foster, for example, the protagonist of his most philosophical and Joycean-styled work An Island Is a World (1955), reinforces this idea and states that “[a]n island is a world and everywhere that people live, they create their own worlds.” “But sometimes that world is small,” Foster adds. “Sometimes you feel as if you are at the top of it, and you want more. Your mind is cramped” (Selvon: 1993: 73). Near the end of the novel, Foster realizes, however, that “you can’t belong to the world, because the world won’t have you. The world is made up of different nations, and you’ve got to belong to one of them, and to hell with the others” (Ibid: 107). Selvon’s novel emphasizes the fact that one has to represent a particular experience of a particular place while reflecting on the world—hence the novel’s title. This can be demonstrated through Foster’s imagining of Trinidad as a dot on the globe; Foster transmits thoughts into the universe the way an RKO Radio radiates from a single place while simultaneously broadcasting to the universe. One, according to Selvon’s narrative, cannot free-float or claim no historical specificity and be nomadic and thus claim to be a “citizen of the world.” One is not only and merely a human being who does not belong, or belongs everywhere by virtue of belonging nowhere, because

when you leave the country of your birth, it isn’t like that at all. Other people belong. They are not human beings, they are Englishmen and Frenchmen and Americans, and you’ve got to have something to fall back on too, you can’t just go up and say, “Hello fellow being, I’m new here, and I’m looking for a job.” Or you can’t go to the United Nations and say, “Look, I don’t belong to any country, I have no ties of any sort to any particular nation. Maybe I could help you sort out some of your problems.”

(Selvon: 1993: 106)

The concept of displacement in particular “appears to some critics to be neutral” (Kaplan: 2005: 3), but it is important not to let it slide toward nomadology for this concept promotes a floating belonging to everywhere, to the world, by virtue of belonging nowhere. This is because, as Kaplan points out, belonging everywhere is “another manifestation of imperialism” and so “no one can be fully belonging everywhere because the world is not equally available to be occupied or represented or identified by any subject” (Ibid: 127). Nomadology is thus set against history (Kaplan: 2005; 1994: 89). The nomad’s movement therefore cannot be tracked or linked to a starting point.

R. Singh, Naipaul’s protagonist, celebrates “the absence of responsibility” (Naipaul: 1969: 11). In response, it is best to quote Said on geography and power: “none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography” (Said: 1994a: 6). Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian national poet and exile, reinforces such ideas by reminding us that we, as human beings, are desperately and naturally nostalgic, and that “we are sick with hope, and sentimental!” (Darwish: 2010: 85). To be rootless and not to belong is to an extent being unsentimental, unemotional, and less human. A displaced person therefore is sickly hopeful and sentimentally nostalgic. To be displaced is not to celebrate the absence of responsibility, but to celebrate responsibility toward a beginning, without being locked in its attic.