Return

"No matter where we come from, we all find ourselves at some point in our lives with an innate drive to return. We may have grown up in a country, or in a culture, or as descendants of a culture from outside of our now native country, but we all find our lives painted with the colours of our past, of our ancestry, of our culture. Even if someone has escaped a refugee camp in the land they have long called home and has found great fortune in a new, promised land, the longing to return always aches deeply within. 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 (for Everyone), yearns to return to his homeland of Yemen, now wrought by civil war, starvation, and daily violence, to be with his family. Yemen, as well as Cairo, another childhood home, call to him, even though he has found peace and prosperity on the calm shores of Toronto, Canada. He knows, despite his wish, that he can never return, as a gay man returning to a country with unfavourable views of his sexual orientation. But that does not stop him from battling within for the meaning of who he is and where he belongs. In Return, Al-Solaylee interviews dozens of people who have chosen to or who long to return, from the Basque who find themselves trapped as a culture within a culture; to the Irish who once fled to the world in great numbers and are now returning home; to Taiwanese who grew up speaking English and work as immigrant aliens in their own cultural homeland; to the Jamaicans of the Wind Rush generation, who forged a life in the United Kingdom over many decades only to be rewarded with flights back to a homeland that survives only in their imaginations; and Ghanaians who reverse the journey of the slave ships and find themselves entirely at home. Al-Solaylee does make a return of sorts himself, to the Middle East, visiting Israel and Lebanon and also Cairo to meet up with his sister, but finds his Arabic stilted and his mannerisms foreign, and the English language and western customs now his only cultural currency. Al-Solaylee shines in the pages of Return as he shares the intimate stories of others in his trademark fashion, expertly interviewing and relating to those caught up in a diaspora often not of their doing, longing for a home that may never be theirs again."--