Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From
Mar 5, 2025 — 1 p.m. to 2 p.m.
Description:
Kamal Al-Solaylee takes his audience on a journey around the world to explore one of the most natural yet frequently misunderstood human experiences: our desire to return to a place of origin, the homeland. Why do many immigrants and refugees leave their adopted home countries to seek a connection with a place they or their parents — and in some cases ancestors — left behind willingly or by force? How do we define belonging or identity in a world where the line between the “here” and the “over there,” our “now” and our “back then” is becoming harder to separate. The idea of return as an integral part of the movement of people and our understanding of global migration has received little attention from writers and scholars. Drawing on insights from his book Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From (2021), Al-Solaylee explores the many meanings and stories of return through historical analysis, storytelling and on-the-ground reporting from places as far apart as Jamaica, Spain, Northern Ireland, Ghana, Taiwan, Israel and the West Bank. Along the way, he examines his own utterly irrational obsession with returning to his homeland of Yemen, a country in a state of war for more than seven years now. Behind the geopolitics, he illuminates and shares with his audience a subculture of returnees whose stories are inspiring, funny, surprising and, for the most, never-ending.
Kamal Al-Solaylee
Journalist and writer
Kamal Al-Solaylee is the author of the bestseller Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes, winner of the 2013 Toronto Book Award and a finalist for the CBC’s Canada Reads and the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction. His second book, Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone) won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing and was finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards for Nonfiction. His third book of nonfiction, Return: Why We Go Back to Where We Come From, was published in 2021 and was named Book of the Year by the Globe and Mail and CBC Books. More recently, he wrote and produced two documentaries for CBC’s IDEAS on subjects as diverse as the Queen of Sheba and nineteenth-century English writer Wilkie Collins. He holds a PhD in English and is the director of the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.