Remembering ‘the old country’
Back Where I Came From: On Culture, Identity and Home
by Taslim Jaffer and Omar Mouallem (eds.)
Toronto: Book*Hug Press, 2024
$29.95 / 9781771669177
Reviewed by Carol Matthews
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When I was a child, I often listened to my parents and other relatives talking about ‘the old country.’ They spoke of little villages in the Cheshire area and shared many happy and some not-so-happy memories of childhood experiences. I understood that this term referred to England, but then one of my school friends said that she and her family were going to spend a few weeks in ‘the old country’ in the summer. I asked if she would go to London and she said, “No! That’s in England! We’re going to Scotland!” I soon realized that ‘the old country’ referred to a vast tapestry of locations.
Back Where I Came From, Taslim Jaffer and Omar Mouallem’s collection of essays by first- and second-generation Canadian and American writers, offers a view of many of those old countries, providing a smorgasbord of perceptions and images about culture and identity and about what home means to people in places around the planet.
The settings of these essays include Hungary, Portugal, Mongolia, Mombasa, Qatar, Iran, Norway, the Philippines, Italy, Palestine, and several other countries. The reasons for the writers leaving and returning to their homelands are as various as the locations and not always easy to explain. As one writer notes, “Maybe homesickness has infected his body like a cold.”
Each account describes a specific exploration of identity, but the physical distance traveled varies. In “Alive in Alert Bay,” Alison Tedford Seaweed discovers that her ancestral home and her Indigenous roots are only 350 miles across the Salish Sea from the hospital room where she sees a painting of one of her grandfather’s carvings. This finding leads her to travel to Alert Bay where her grandfather went to residential school, where her grandparents first met and where her family carvings still stand. Claimed by a new family, she enters a different cultural context and a new life story.
In “Ah-Ling Ge Lui Fan Lai La! Ah-Ling’s Girl Has Come Home,” Kathryn Gwun-Yeen Lennon describes making a much longer journey to Hong Kong at regular intervals to visit grandparents, where she experiences surprising links between her two worlds: “Ten thousand kilometres of distance and differences were knitted together in an unexpected moment of connection.”

Food often plays an important part in the way the homeland is experienced, either positively or negatively as it signifies national identity. In “The Motherland Knows My Name,” Alexandra C. Yeboah describes markets with an enticing array of goods offered by hawkers extending “prying, frenzied hands.” At her uncle’s dinner table she learns to use her hands to eat deep-fried plantain, red stew, and candied yams, but she questions her Africanness because she doesn’t know how to make fufu and she dislikes the taste of banku.
In “Foreign Body,” June Chuah thinks she fits in when she makes a return trip to Malaysia but is cast as an outsider by an elderly man who tells her that she smells like butter. She reflects on the milky food that has immersed her into Western culture and habits. While in Malaysia she consumes delectable meals of noodle dishes with lemongrass and shallots, but she still finds the thought of mac ’n cheese comforting. In the end, she has to accept that her taste buds have crossed over, that she has “two countries and one body” and that “the milk has solidified.”
It’s not easy to realize one’s identity amidst so many contrasts and contradictions. Is it possible to go back? Some writers suggest that they are always adapting between two countries and that it is difficult to know just where they belong. Angelo Santos, in “Shutter,” finds that no place feels like home and he experiences “a new kind of rootlessness,” feeling that his home is in the middle of the ocean where he will always be “overboard, adrift in the rolling waves.” Other writers also feel “unmoored…divided.” In “Depaysement,” Christina Hoag describes not having a sense of belonging anywhere but instead finds identity and community in being a third-culture kid (TCK), a child who is raised in a third place rather than in their birth country or a culture which is not that of their parents.
Very often it’s the land itself which claims these travellers. “The Motherland Knows My Name” is the title and conclusion of Alexandra C. Yebah’s essay. Ushai Peel writes in “Mother Land” that the land has never left her; occupied and politically charged as it is, it is still her mother country. In “The Land Remembers All of Its Children,” Hannah Zalaa-Uul writes:
The land is a timeless mother, gracious in her patience and yearning for her children to return. Despite the passing years, how far I might have gone, and how much I’ve changed, the land will always remember me when I come home.

There is no one lesson to be learned from these essays. Each story is unique and the experiences are often confusing or contradictory. Perhaps Omar Reyes captures the complexity of these experiences best when, in “Chicken Soup and Tortillas,” he writes
there’s another language that’s just as important—an invisible language of yearning and belonging, composed of memories, pictures, emotions, smells and the intangibility of connectedness to the soil your ancestors walked on. It’s not learned; it’s lived through. It’s the reclaiming of that which was lost and holding it tight.
In this time of mass migration, challenged borders, widespread conflict, and threats of annexation, the essays in Back Where I Came From have much to teach us. Well written, poignant, humorous, and thought-provoking, they challenge us to ask questions about what we call home and what it is to belong. They show us how much that we take for granted is precarious and that the ways in which we define ourselves may shift and change.
This is a book well that is worth reading slowly, thinking about, and reading again.
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Carol Matthews has worked as a social worker, as Executive Director of Nanaimo Family Life, and as instructor and Dean of Human Services and Community Education at Malaspina University-College, now Vancouver Island University (VIU). She has published a collection of short stories (Incidental Music, from Oolichan Books) and four works of non-fiction. Her short stories and reviews have appeared in literary journals such as Room, The New Quarterly, Grain, Prism, Malahat Review, and Event. [Editor’s Note: Carol Matthews has reviewed books by Karen Bakker, Grant Buday, Kasia Van Schaik, Kristjana Gunnars, Susan Juby, and Charles Demers for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster