Abstract

The purpose of my research is to investigate how photography informs the ways we perform storytelling and self-reflections of diaspora as a lived experience emerged from wars and contradicting political ideologies. The Egyptian Jewish diaspora was the result of series of wars between Egypt and Israel from 1948 to 1973. Through an ambiguous perspective of diaspora, I am representing my story in diaspora as a Canadian immigrant with Egyptian roots comparing my experience with those of my research participants, two Egyptian-Canadian Jews who fled Egypt during the nationalism wave and after the Suez Canal War in 1956. In a Deleuzian sense of multiplicity, I am examining the ways video-recorded interviews create unfolded images of the narration process that links the narrators’ geographic presence to memories of lived experiences and personal identity, and invite the viewers to become part of the process. Photographed self-portraits are self-representations that are analyzed through understanding the intersectionality of the body, mind, and soul. Our stories highlight shades of relatedness that emphasize cultural hybridity and multiculturalism as a means of understanding the complexity of humans identity and life experiences. I describe a rhizomatic learning experience that brings holistic education into community practice as a method that foregrounds social and cultural transmission and transformation as the process of self-realization and becoming other.