This paper examines how different types of memory affect immigrants’ identity in diasporas, the research looks at how traumatic events impact diasporic subjects' identities in a host country. The Origin of Waves, a 1997 novel by Barbados-born Canadian novelist Austin Clarke, which the author closely examines, demonstrates the significance of homeland experience for the development of immigrant identity as life in a new setting plays out against the memory of a previous environment. When the experience is traumatised, it complicates and makes integration into a new place more challenging