-T _hroughout her work, Jamaica Kincaid mourns the loss of not only individuals close to her but also larger, more abstract entities such as "home" and "the places in which something good, something you cannot forget, happened to you." Mourning the homeland is one way for the diaspora writer to maintain a connection with it, this mode of connectivity, I will argue, represents less nostalgia than an inherently political style of transcultural association. The diaspora writer remains distinct from the exile writer in that her diasporic status stems from migration patterns that characterize whole populations, often as a result of colonization. Since dislocation is a topic central to diaspora narratives, those narratives require that cross-cultural connections be made. Mourning functions as one strategy for mak-