The Pressure to 'Go Back' — and Why It's Complicated
Every diaspora African and Caribbean person knows the expectation: you build your life here, but eventually you go back. The myth of the return. What actually happens when people try. Why you shouldn't have to choose.
Someone at every family gathering asks the question. Your aunt in Lagos. Your grandmother in Kingston. The uncle who never left, sitting across from you at Christmas, watching you speak with an accent that has shifted slightly from his: *so when are you coming back?*
It is not always a question. Sometimes it is a statement of fact delivered as a question. The assumption underneath it is solid: that this — wherever you are now, this city in England or Canada or the United States — is temporary. That you are waiting to accumulate enough to return. That home is fixed, that it is there, and that your presence here is a detour rather than a life.
Most diaspora people carry this expectation in their bodies. Some internalize it as plan. Some resist it quietly. Some build entire identities around disproving it, then feel guilty about that too.
## The Guilt of Staying
The guilt does not require any single precipitating event. It accumulates. You watch your parents age from a distance and cannot be there for the small things — the doctor's appointment, the bad week, the moment they needed someone in the house. You watch your cousins' children grow up without knowing you. You miss funerals. You miss weddings. You are present for the highlights and absent for the texture, and the texture is where a life actually happens.
The guilt is compounded by the awareness of what staying has given you. Security, often. Opportunity, often. A quality of life that your parents sacrificed their own proximity to make possible. This is the trap: the very thing you are guilty about is the thing their sacrifice was designed to produce. You feel guilty for succeeding at what they sent you to do.
And then there is the other layer — the layer that diaspora communities don't always discuss openly. The guilt of enjoying it here. Of building friendships and community and a life that has meaning. Of discovering that home is not only where you were born. That you are, in fact, capable of belonging somewhere else. This feels like a kind of betrayal, even when you know intellectually that it isn't.
## The Myth of the Return
The idea of returning home is beautiful in the abstract. You go back. You bring what you've accumulated — money, skills, perspective — and you contribute to building the place you came from. You raise your children where your grandparents are. You eat the food without the logistics. You are no longer explaining yourself in every room you walk into.
The reality is more complicated.
People who return after a long time abroad often describe a disorientation they didn't expect. They thought returning would feel like coming home, and it does — partially, intermittently, in flashes. The smell of the market. The sound of the language spoken fast. The food, the warmth, the specific humor that travels poorly in translation. Those things are real and they matter.
But so is this: you have changed. The country has changed. You do not fit as smoothly as memory promised. You are too foreign in your mannerisms, your expectations, your frustration with what you perceive as inefficiencies. People who stayed notice. They may say it warmly or say it sharply, but they say it: *you've become one of them a bit.*
And you — who spent years in the diaspora being told you were too African, too Caribbean, too foreign, not assimilated enough — are now being told you are not local enough. You are between. You are from everywhere and nowhere at once. You are the hyphen without either side fully claiming you.
## What Actually Happens When People Go Back
Some people go back and it works. There are real communities of returnees in Accra and Lagos and Kingston and Port of Spain who have built meaningful lives and made genuine contributions. Ghana's Year of Return and the Beyond the Return movement produced real results — diaspora people who reconnected with land and community and found something they had been missing. This is not a myth. It happens.
But it does not happen easily, and it does not happen for everyone. The returnee's experience often involves a negotiation that never fully resolves: you are always slightly the person who left, no matter how long you stay after coming back. The community knows. You know. The question is whether you can build something real within that complexity, rather than waiting for it to resolve into a simple homecoming.
Some people go back and leave again. Some discover that what they were missing wasn't the place but the people, and the people have also scattered. Some find that the economic reality they romanticized from abroad is hard in ways they had filtered out of their memory. Some thrive. The range of outcomes is the full range of human experience. The idea that return is always the right answer, or that it is always the wrong one, is equally wrong.
## The In-Between
What diaspora people rarely get to say — in the presence of family who have strong feelings about it — is this: *I do not know if I am going back, and I am not sure the question is framed correctly.*
The framing assumes that home is singular, fixed, and waiting. That belonging is something you either have or don't in a given place. That the choice between here and there is a choice you eventually make and stick to.
But many diaspora people live in the in-between and build something real in that space. They maintain active connections to multiple places. They raise children who hold dual citizenship not as bureaucratic convenience but as genuine identity. They find community not in the country of origin or the country of residence but in the diaspora itself — in rooms where everyone else also knows what it means to be from two places at once.
This is not a failure of belonging. It is a different kind of belonging.
## Why Resilience House Exists
Resilience House exists because you should not have to choose.
You should not have to perform enough homesickness to satisfy family who stayed, or perform enough assimilation to belong in the country where you live. You should not have to answer the return question on anyone else's timeline. You should not have to carry the in-between identity alone, as if it is a burden rather than a specific, hard-won, valuable way of being in the world.
This platform is for people who are from more than one place. Who carry more than one culture. Who are building a life that the categories available to them don't quite fit. There is a community of people who understand that experience from the inside — who are not explaining themselves, not defending their choices, not performing belonging for an audience.
You do not have to go back. You do not have to stay away. You do not have to resolve the question on anyone else's terms.
You just have to find your people. We're here.