الفهرس 
Paradoxes of Diaspora: An OverviewOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
El-Haiawy, Mayy Hassan Sayed. Paradoxes of Diaspora in the Poetry of Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney. PhD Thesis. Ain Shams University. Faculty of Al-Alsun. Department of English. 2008-2009.
Living in one place while concurrently remembering or longing for another, trying to assimilate a new culture while keenly preserving an old heritage, and feeling physically connected to a nation while mentally belonging to another are some of the paradoxes of diaspora – the voluntary or forcible movement of people from their homelands into new regions. In an age void of exclusive identities, limited localities or hindering cultural borders, the entire world turns into a diaspora, where the continuous tension between living and longing, coexistence and belonging, exoticism and togetherness obstructs the diasporans’ consciousness of place, time and identity.
Through an ecocritical approach to the paradoxes of homelessness at home, nostalgia for the future and national schizophrenia in the poetry of the two Nobel Laureates, Derek Walcott (1930 - ) and Seamus Heaney (1939- ), the thesis investigates the homologies between nature and diasporans, explores the ways in which the diaspora poetry addresses intersections between racial oppression and exploitation of nature, and reveals how potentially productive tension between an imposed and an inherited culture can create imaginative forms to articulate the diasporans’ cultural in-betweenness.
No matter how far is Walcott’s Caribbean island from Heaney’s Irish family farm, both poets were born into a world shackled with the chains of colonization, tortured with historical burdens, and plagued with sectarian and racial prejudices. Sharing the aim of unwinding origins, the process of decolonising minds, and the strategy of reclaiming a landscape detached from its inhabitants through centuries of violence and oppression, both poets finally accept the incurable divisions inherent in their consciousness as a potential for artistic creation. They introduce a project of universal syncretism wherein diaspora is apprehended as a common fate shared by all human beings rather than a curse befalling ill-fated races.