Return Read online

  I had flown into Muscat, capital of the Sultanate of Oman, for a break after interviewing South Asian construction workers in Dubai for about ten days, during which I barely uttered a word of Arabic. The workers I’d encountered were mostly foreign labourers who spoke other languages (Urdu, Hindi, Tagalog) and used English as a lingua franca. I’d assumed Oman would be the same. But in restaurants, street markets and even some parts of the international airport in Muscat, locals spoke poor English or none at all, forcing me to resort to my dwindling Arabic.

  I could tell that what came out of my mouth must have sounded like broken Arabic to Ameen and others who often looked a lot like me. I was asked if I were an Arab Israeli or a Pakistani—the former with suspicion, the latter dismissively. I felt like a stranger, an interloper among my tribe. I dared not tell anyone I was born in Yemen, the country that shares a western border with Oman. When asked, I said I was of Egyptian “background,” since that country’s Arabic was (and still is) the dialect I understand and speak best.

  My dereliction of Arabic was a conscious move and part of a journey of reinvention I embarked on in my late teens. The Quran, the holy book of the Muslim faith, is written in Arabic. As I was coming out as a gay man in the early 1980s and reading up on sexual liberation, I needed distance from both the religion and its official text, which, I felt, vilified my desires. English became more than a second language; it drew a personalized road map to freedom, dignity and sex.

  I didn’t see being gay as an experience that could unfold in Arabic. The language lacked the vocabulary and the textual resources to help me find out who I was, who I chose to love or sleep with. If anything, it mobilized hate and discrimination against homosexuality, which was portrayed in literature and popular arts as a sin or a Western affliction. The only Arabic words for it while I was growing up were shaz, which meant abnormal, and looty, a reference to Abraham’s nephew Lot, of Sodom and Gomorrah.

  English, on the other hand, had it all figured out. What could be lovelier than the word “gay” to describe how I felt about myself? Happiness and a joie de vivre lie at its roots. And what was more aspirational than the gay liberation movement, by then more than a decade in progress? Not even the emergence of AIDS at around the same time could dull my interest in English as a gay language. As journalists began to write about the connection between gay men and what was then a deadly disease, I gained access to more reading material about homosexuality than I ever could have dreamed of in Cairo of the early to mid-1980s. A decade later, several LGBTQ rights activists in the Middle East would point out that their work in AIDS prevention had given them an opportunity to broach issues like sexual rights and support for the queer community. The more neutral-sounding word methly, meaning “same” and used to refer to gay men in particular, grew out of this new health-focused context.

  When I was about nineteen, I made it a point to stop reading or listening to Arabic, to speak it only when necessary and to upgrade English from second to first language—a process that became more immersive when I moved to England at twenty-four to study literature and eventually earn a PhD in Victorian fiction. Such was my complete adoption of English that I turned down suggestions from potential doctoral supervisors that I work on “colonial” fiction—Richard Burton’s translation of Arabian Nights or Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, among others—and instead pursued such authors as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who, I thought, were more “purely” English. Arabic words and settings meant contamination, a corruption of my resolve to exile myself from my native tongue and homeland.

  All along, I picked up, quite naturally and through exposure to mostly native speakers, a refined English accent, which made me sound if not posh, then at least educated and middle class in a country defined by class politics and resentments. (I still don’t know what to think of the comparison a former professor once made to Eliza Doolittle’s transformation from a cockney flower girl to a refined society lady.) With each graduate seminar, dinner party or visit to a gay club, I drifted further away from the world of my mother, an illiterate shepherdess, and my father, a self-made businessman and Anglophile whose own command of English had deteriorated once he stopped using it for work. His fate would not be mine.

  I rewired my brain to think, speak and write in English, burying Arabic deep in the recesses of my brain. I thought of my plans not as an artifice or a makeover, but as a means of countervailing my birth identity and establishing a real, new self. This was the me I deserved. There could be no sexual liberation if the language that oppressed me still lived within me and came out of my mouth. I took classes in German and Spanish to further suppress my native tongue. “Languages become a home,” Canadian author Jessica J. Lee writes in Two Trees Make a Forest, a memoir of her own return journey to Taiwan. My home was English.

  Two more decades in Canada followed, and before I realized it, my Arabic had deteriorated to the point where talking to my own siblings about anything beyond their general welfare became a trial. Before every call, I’d brace myself for the awkwardness that inevitably followed. I tried—I always do—but my vocabulary couldn’t sustain a deep conversation about their emotional well-being, their frustrations, dreams, sorrows. I never shared any of mine.

  When the war in Yemen began in 2015—forcing us to discuss such subjects as staying alive, claiming refugee status in Egypt, sheltering from airstrikes or selling family assets to survive financially—my damaged Arabic probably made things worse. Who needs a tortured phone conversation with a sibling living in Canada when there’s so much suffering in their immediate world?

  I abandoned my family physically by studying in England and then immigrating to Canada, and psychologically by willing away the native tongue that once bound us. When they speak of it, my siblings view my transition into English as a combination of self-loathing and a rebellion that has outlasted my younger years. My sister Hoda reads the Quran several times a year, a ritual she has maintained for almost two decades now. Imagine her disappointment when I told her I didn’t have a copy in my Toronto apartment and probably couldn’t read it even if I did. (She said she’d pray for me.)

  Linguists refer to the phenomenon of losing native tongues as first language attrition (FLA). It’s a process that happens when people are isolated from other speakers of their native language or when another language dominates. The term “mother tongue” has always implied an umbilical connection to the language you first learn at home—a fixed identity based on what you heard the most as an infant. In a world where nearly 272 million people do not live in their country of birth and mostly function in a second language, studies of FLA are testing what we know about how we acquire, use and lose what is most native to us.

  This body of research offers a valuable frame of reference for those of us experiencing FLA. There’s a sense of relief in learning that our “condition” has a name—that what I’d come to regard as a personal and private shift is being studied by linguists and psychologists. But it offers little comfort to my troubled soul and does little to diminish my sense of loss. In my mind, my language dilemma has always been a drama in which I was a leading man and my siblings the supporting cast. But it feels more and more like a one-person show, a one-sided expression of longing and memory. For me, there can be no physical return without a linguistic one.

  * * *

  For the past four years, I’ve been working toward an understanding of what return—to a homeland, to a native tongue, to one’s roots—means, to me and to others.

  The following pages represent my attempt to locate my longing for home in the context of return stories taking place around the world. My goal is to witness, record and demystify this desire. The stories are set in the present but draw on decades—centuries, even—of migration, mobility and dislocation. Every place I visited revealed a return narrative uniquely influenced by larger historical movements such as imperialism, slavery, fascism, sectarian violence and ethno-nationalism. Sometimes a return spans continents; at others it traverses a much shorter distance.

  The people I talked to made me feel nostalgic, envious, relieved and conflicted about what a return can or should be. I asked questions. I looked for signs. I waited for a revelation. I wanted to know what it felt like not just to return home, but to leave behind a place that had been a safe haven for so long. I kept thinking about my own attachment to Toronto and Canada, strained as it may be at times. How much will I miss these places? Will my longing for my life in Canada undermine my homeward-bound dreams? I craved words of encouragement to guide me, even when I knew that as a gay man returning to the Arab world, I might have to confront a legacy of violence and homophobia—and even the prospect of death. There’s something deeply rational and inherently irrational about returns, and their essence lies in that friction between the two.

  I wanted to know what’s it like to “go home,” or as the late cultural critic Stuart Hall put it, to experience “the endless desire to return to ‘lost origins,’ to be one again with the mother, to go back to the beginning.” That desire burned within me even when the people and places I visited suggested that a homeland return marked not the end of a journey but the start of a new and complex one.

  In Jamaica, deportees face a stigma when they are sent back to their homeland from the United Kingdom or the United States, whether for visa violations or more serious crimes. To be sent home means they haven’t been financially successful in their adopted countries. At the same time, voluntary returnees from the same places who dream of retirement on the island after decades of work are often targeted, and sometimes killed, for the very wealth they’re perceived to bring with them.

  A generation of Taiwanese born or raised in the United States and Canada are leaving behind their relatively sheltered family homes in suburban Montreal or Minneapolis to return to the land their parents left behind, always with the express goal of creating a better life for their offspring. Young men in particular see Taipei as a land of opportunity, a wild, wild East in a world that was still recovering from the Great Recession when it started to feel the economic rupture of the COVID-19 pandemic. This coming-home story unfolds even as mainland China continues to regard the entire island (officially known as the Republic of China) as a breakaway province that will be returned to the motherland, by force if necessary.

  Businesses, politicians and government bodies in Belfast work hard to facilitate a physical and emotional connection between millions of Irish Americans and a city that not long ago was the setting of massacres and bloody confrontations over the fate of Northern Ireland. The businesspeople are arriving, but will peace depart? Brexit brought its share of troubles to Belfast homeland returns, as the possibility of a hard border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland threatened to derail more than two decades of peaceful crossings and the free flow of people and goods.

  In the Basque region of Spain, the terrorist organization ETA may have given up its arms and campaigns of violence, but the centuries-long dream of an independent homeland remains both alive and elusive. Fuelled by the return of people with ancestral ties and threatened by the arrival of thousands of immigrants from North Africa and beyond (and the inevitable ethno-nationalist backlash), this dream offers overlapping insights into the return of diasporic communities and the exclusion of newer racialized ones.

  In Ghana, return is part marketing scheme, part continuation of a postcolonial, pan-African vision. The successful Year of Return campaign in 2019 marked the four hundredth anniversary of the first slave ship to reach North America by encouraging global Black citizens to “return” to Africa through Ghana. Some of the Canadian and American Black men and women I spoke to returned to Ghana because they had direct ancestral ties to the country. Others saw Africa at large as their long-lost motherland, and Ghana as a gateway to a deeper exploration of their roots—a “back to Africa” dream that has been kept alive for more than two centuries through the stories of returning freed slaves and then as part of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

  In the Middle East, Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their home villages and towns clashes with what Israel now sees mostly as the homeland of the Jewish people. Official policies such as the Israeli Law of Return and the religious duty to make aliyah, or immigrate to Israel from the diaspora, are the foundations on which the country is built. Israelis and Palestinians share the same land but two competing notions of return.

  The forced and voluntary returns of people and lands, the repatriation and resettlement of the young and old, the erasure and resurgence of languages—all charted different courses but often offered one startling point of departure: for some to feel at home, others have to return to theirs. Returns reveal the realities of the homelands we go back to and the countries we leave behind.

  Tucked among all these stories, you’ll find fragments of mine. My story can’t live apart from them. It lives naturally next to some and in opposition to others. But it’s just one of the many return journeys taking place in the world today.

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  The Age of Return. Maybe

  In February 2020, Global Affairs Canada warned Canadians living or vacationing abroad that flight cancellations and local restrictions might leave them stranded for longer than they had initially anticipated or budgeted for. When the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on March 11, Canadians received a more urgent message from Global Affairs: “Find out what commercial options are still available to return to Canada. Consider returning to Canada earlier than planned if these options are becoming more limited.”

  And so began the largest repatriation effort in modern Canadian history. Between March 14 and 20, about 959,000 Canadian citizens and 43,890 permanent residents returned to Canada after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau “made a public plea for their quick return,” the Toronto Star reported, citing figures provided by the Canada Border Services Agency. Of those, an estimated 449,000 crossed the Canada–US border by land and about 553,000 flew home.

  Almost every employee of Global Affairs Canada turned into a travel agent with one task in mind: bring Canadians home. “Staffers who used to write ministerial briefing notes are now booking hotels, buses and flights,” a CBC report from March suggested. Global Affairs doesn’t break down travellers by category, but a look at news reports and social media posts from the period paints a picture of those who found themselves stranded. Some were stuck abroad while on vacation or visiting family. Snowbirds were spending the winter in sunny climates and holiday spots. Many had been working abroad, while others divided their time between two homelands.

  The largest number of repatriated Canadians came from India, which shut down its airspace on March 22. Stories of Canadians trying to come home from South Korea, Lebanon, Somalia and the Philippines, among other places, also made headlines. Many others gave up trying to catch one of the government’s repatriation flights and decided to wait for travel restrictions to lift in host countries. In a statement in late March, a Global Affairs spokesperson acknowledged that “it will not be possible to ensure the return of all Canadians who wish to come home.” Some countries offered Canadians seats on their national carriers, while Qatar Airways and Ethiopian Airlines shuttled Canadians from different airports in South Asia and Africa, respectively.

  To its credit, the Liberal government made no distinction between racialized Canadians who had returned to their home countries and their compatriots who were temporarily working or living abroad (think of the mostly white English teachers in South Korea, Taiwan or the United Arab Emirates, for example). Contrast this with the grudging effort of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to repatriate Canadians of Lebanese origin following the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006. At an estimated cost of $85 million, the operation brought home about fifteen thousand Lebanese Canadians out of roughly fifty thousand citizens living in the country. The operation gave rise to the term “Canadians of convenience,” coined by Conservative MP Garth Turner, and even some Liberal MPs talked about the burden to taxpayers.

  While many other countries called their citizens back in early 2020, perhaps the most dramatic illustration of a mass homecoming took place not across international borders but within a single country. When India announced its lockdown on March 24, thousands of daily-wage migrant workers who had left their villages to seek opportunities in the country’s booming urban economies found themselves abandoned by their employers and the country at large. The lockdown affected factories, offices, schools and domestic and international travel routes. Work dried up instantly. Trains and buses were cancelled. The World Bank estimates that at least 40 million of India’s 130 million migrant labourers experienced the worst of the pandemic’s economic impact in its first few weeks.

  The vast majority of those workers began the long walk home, covering hundreds and thousands of miles—many with children and spouses in tow. Some died on the road. Others arrived at their destinations traumatized, only to discover that remote villages aren’t immune to the coronavirus. Thousands more travelled on emergency trains provided by the government. Dubbed the Shramik Specials (after the Indian word for “labourers”), these trains became contagion zones and spread the virus to different parts of the country. Despite government promises to screen passengers before boarding, few were tested. According to a report in the New York Times in late 2020, the trains “disgorged passengers into distant villages, in regions that before had few if any coronavirus cases.” India is, as I write this, home to the second-largest number of coronavirus cases after the United States.

  This home-return journey became the biggest mass movement in India probably since Partition in 1947, when the former jewel in the British Crown was divided into a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. More than one in ten of the country’s 1.3 billion people are believed to be migrant workers earning, on average, just six US dollars a day. Those who survive the virus may opt to stay away from Delhi or Mumbai, putting their own livelihoods and India’s economic recovery on the line.