How Prodigal the Soul

Kamal Al-Solaylee arrived in Toronto in April 1996, having already left England, where he was educated, Lebanon and Egypt, where he was raised, and Yemen, where he was born. Looking back, twenty-five years later, he describes how he came to “see Toronto (and Canada) as my homeland.” He “revelled” in the city’s kindness and the opportunities it afforded. “I called it my ‘sanctuary,’ a good place to be brown.” And as a gay man in the Golden Horseshoe, Al-Solaylee no longer had to imagine an “unled life,” because, he explains, “I finally had the one I wanted.”

Eventually, though, Al-Solaylee’s comfort with his new-found homeland began to change — especially with the rising belief in the so-called great replacement theory among the far right, with such popular Conservative slogans as “Take Back Canada,” and with the pervasive influence of bigoted rhetoric coming out of Donald Trump’s White House. “In the past five years,” he writes in Return: Why We Go Back to Where...