Our question is, can you really ever go home again? Will you find what you left behind? Or was Alphonse Karr correct when he suggested “the more things change, the more they stay the same”? Is home as it ever was — even after a revolution, an occupation, a climate disaster or a personal calamity? How has the returning refugee or immigrant changed?
In his novella Returning to Haifa, Ghassan Kanafani writes of Palestinians returning to their lost homeland years later, only to realize they don’t like what they find. Elias Canetti, author of the classic novel Auto-de-Fé and winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, believed that, “For those who have left it, the city of childhood and adolescence becomes a mythical place.” Haunted by memories of his late father and brother, Salar Abdoh’s Issa in A Nearby Country Called Love returns home from New York to Tehran, to find that nothing is quite as it was. And Percival Everett in his new novel, James, writes of the return: “If one knows hell as home, then is returning to hell a homecoming?”
In this 50th issue of The Markaz Review, RETURNING HOME is a compelling theme in both creative nonfiction and fiction. In “A Kashmiri in Cashmere,” Nafeesa Syeed hopes she’ll feel at home in a small Washington town east of Seattle, named after her native region, caught between India and Pakistan. In “Return to Ramallah,” a brief excerpt from playwright Betty Shamieh’s debut novel Too Soon, the narrator Arabella reflects on going home to the city her Palestinian American parents fled during the Nakba. The complete list of contributors includes Salar Abdoh, Batoul Ahmad, Yasmine Al Awa, Myriam Cohenca, Sophia Didinova, Karina El Helou, Lara Kassem, Ati Metwaly, Mai Al-Nakib, Raha Nik-Andish, Gabriel Polley, Sama Alshaibi, Betty Shamieh, Nafeesa Syeed and Abdallah Taïa.
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