Emigrating Home

THE BOOK

9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’ made some Arabs living in the West go home. So did the 1956 Suez Crisis. For those brought up in the Middle East it was relatively easy, but what about those who weren't? more ..

THE AUTHOR

I was older then, I'm younger than that now!

Yasseen was born in Jamaica, a British colony at the time, of medical parents and for a long time thought his nationality was "parasitologist".

Things turned out to be a jolly sight more complicated for him than that, as his book, 'Emigrating Home', tells. more....

ONE OF THOSE KIDS

If you're wondering why I wrote this book, you've got to imagine you're an immigrant. You may even be an immigrant who applied for the nationality of your new country and they gave it to you. So, technically, you're not abroad. You're in a new home.  Isn't it possible, though, that one day you might have to return to your original country? Why? Who knows what may happen? And you're scared for your children because they don't know your mother tongue. Imagine, for an instant, you are one of those children and you are thinking about this problem. more ...


A TANGLE OF IDENTITIES

This  review appeared on amazon.co.uk

Emigrating Home is a powerful book, deeply serious under a finely constructed and often very funny veneer of anecdote and memory. It deals with the tangle of identities that a young man finds himself in in the early 1950s as he wrestles with the implications of  a family which brings together Egypt and Jamaica, and a culture that mixes the serious and devoted Englishness of the Caribbean with the distant magnetism of the Near East. more ....

SOUTHAMPTON (chapter for free download)

Yasseen embarks for Port Said

 I had at last reached the head of the queue. A pale man in a cream raincoat took my passport. I was about to  board the P and O's SS Chusan, sailing from Southampton for Port Said, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong and Yokohama. 

 I was getting off at the first port of call and then going on to Cairo: Home.
 December 18th, 1957 had, as far as I was concerned, nothing to recommend it. A light mist prevailed in the departures shed. A Gothic mist hanging from the steel rafters, or swirling up from the floor, would have suited my mood better. more ...
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