Return

Why We Go Back to Where We Come From

By: Kamal Al-Solaylee

Narrated by: Fajer Al-Kaisi

A Globe and Mail, Hill Times and CBC Best Book of the Year

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to return to your roots?

Drawing on astute political analysis and extensive reporting from around the world, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From illuminates a personal quest. Kamal Al-Solaylee, author of the bestselling and award-winning Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes and Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone), yearns to return to his homeland of Yemen, now wracked by war, starvation and daily violence, to reconnect with his family. Yemen, as well as Egypt, another childhood home, call to him, even though he ran away from them in his youth and found peace and prosperity in Canada.

In Return, Al-Solaylee interviews dozens of people who have chosen to or long to return to their homelands, from Basques to Irish to Taiwanese. He does make a return of sorts himself, to the Middle East, visiting Israel and the West Bank, as well as Egypt. A chronicle of love and loss, of global reach and personal desires, Return is a book for anyone who has ever wondered what it would be like to return to their roots.

Thoughtful Reflections on Returning to Home Countries

The shelves have been filling up in recent years with books about why people immigrate to developed states and what that means for those states, but little has been written about why people leave them in journeys back home. Yet, talk with any immigrant about their new homes and they are likely to fill your ears with their inner turmoil around staying. Few are as happy with their new homes as their hosts might like to think, and most return to their home countries at least once a year. But many also feel like a deep void has opened up inside themselves and they long to go back to from where they came.

This book is a thoughtful meditation on why people return and what happens when they make it back home. But it is not simply about, say, Ghanaians who have come to live in England, for instance. These tend to complain about the weather and lack of community, by the way—as do most immigrants to England. It is also about the way identity changes in the places in between. It is about the constructed identities of Jews and African-Americans wanting to return to from where their people initially came. And finally, it is about the troubles that are encountered when people who never really had a place in their home societies attempt to make one for themselves.

All in all, it is a well written book that will deepen your sense of empathy and broaden the debate on immigration. It is a nice mix of personal stories and information. And it is a highly reflective account, which uses the author’s own experience of returning in order to delve deeper into the motivations of others.

~ Theo Horesh, author of Convergence: The Globalization of Mind