What non-white immigrant has not heard this? It’s a demand easily and frequently made, a remark of ignorance, bigotry, racism and monopolism, in Canada, America, UK, France, Europe, and elsewhere!
I first heard it in BG (Guyana) in 1961, when a PNC militant advocated that all Indians should return to India, and leave the country to the “rightful” owners, the Afro-Guianese. I said then, “I’ll go, when you go, and the other aliens go, and return the country to the natives.” I said the same when I heard it in Canada. No First Nation person has ever said this. All other North Americans are migrants;

chances are you’ll hear it from a white immigrant, here just a generation or two, sheltering his/her bigotry under discredited 19th century racial theories, now extensively and hatefully promoted by American President Trump; his grandfather was exiled from Germany for draft-dodging, and among other things engaged in prostitution in the west; his father was a KKK member; he seems to believe the “pure race” assumptions of Adolph Hitler, following the century-old speculation by German academic Gustav Kossinna on a North German origin of the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European language and people that spread east, south and west. He was likely repeating the ideas of Max Müller, another German, who had invented a race called “Aryans” that populated the region and invaded India. However, Vaidic records, religious accounts of ancient ancestors, and modern data from archaeology and DNA studies debunk Kossinna and Müller. The “Aryan hypothesis” was vigorously promoted by the British and is still taught to many despite its falsehood. It seems instead that northern Europeans comprise several migrant groups who came, after the last Ice age, mainly from the Russian-Ukrainian steppes (Yamnaya of Mesolithic times and its successors), African hunter-gathers, Anatolian and Middle-east and Central Asian farmers, and a minute residue of pre-ice age Neanderthals. White superiority theorists need to rethink their racial biases and realise that there is no “pure” or immobile race.
It’s ironic that current bigots like Trump, Theresa May, Boris Johnson etc. should want to expel migrants when they are the children of migrants, however remote, and by their global aggressions and depredations had caused most of the people displacements of the last centuries. May illegally expelled 83 English citizens of the SS Windrush generation, whose West Indian parents had come to Britain after WWII to help its rebuilding. Now 70 years later, thousands, from the retired to schoolchildren, are persecuted purely by colour, abused, and deprived of rights. These folk were from birth, citizens of the “United Kingdom,” so returning them to non-existent colonies is rather stupid. Similarly the UK is trying to expel Chagossians from Britain where they were granted asylum after years of hardship in Mauritius and Seychelles where the British had crudely dumped them so that the USA can have their idyllic Diego Garcia island home for yet another naval base (they have over forty worldwide)!
So where is “back home”? asked the North American, white, black and in-between!
Home is where you were born, or maybe your parents or grandparents.
Scanning the surnames of over a hundred names of people known to me suggested their origin from nearly forty countries or peoples, from native Americans to the most recent refugees from Syria, of all shades of colour. So when Trump inveighs against coloured people, he targets a majority of Blacks who have been Americans long before him, like many other national types, white and non-white, most of superior pedigree.
Trump is a second generation American. When he excludes Whites from his “go home” order, he is automatically revealing his racism. His ilk instantly accepts whites who may have come only yesterday, but hesitates barely for First Nations peoples. He should mind how he evicts East and South Asians who include a high percentage of professionals and businessmen who have helped to “make America great”; he should re-assess his yearning for the well-educated and cultured white person, as all supremacists imagine, once mentioning Norwegians; by this, he and those who concur, are merely showing a pervasive, colossal and impenetrable ignorance.
Trump and Brits should remember that those who divide a society and sell them an alien “democracy” (e.g. Western model in a Muslim sharia state) must be prepared to accept an influx of those who swallowed the message heedlessly, and find themselves on the losing side in their own country, e.g. Algerians in France, Vietnamese in USA, who find themselves unacceptable aliens in the USA and unwelcome back home.
Over the last weekend, 22 people in El Paso, Texas, and 9 in Dayton (Trump called it Toledo!), Ohio have been murdered and 53 injured by two white supremacists spouting automatic weapons, and language used by Trump in his tirades against immigrants and his four young coloured female critics in Congress. Meanwhile, a gun control law passed by the House is held up by pro-NRA Senate filibuster!

The closest we came to a rollercoaster ride as cousins growing up back home was in the rapid rise followed by a breakneck descent in a hammock. We played a game: all the cousins piled into the hammock, a hand sticking out here, a someone’s pointy toes there, with the strongest among us delegated to stand behind, take a running start while pushing the entire mass of our intertwined arms and legs, our bodies cramped and uncomfortable, as far up, and as close to the rafters as was possible, letting go and scampering out of the way.

Do this a few times with our giggling, squirming bodies, the youngest among us clinging for dear life to someone’s hair, and the momentum launched us not to the rafters and back like a massive, heaving pendulum, but sent us spinning way past the moon into the far reaches of the Milky Way.
No household was without a hammock when I was growing up back home. It was a fixture in each porch, which we called a gallery, and as important a piece of furniture as a bed, the dining table, and its long benches to seat the entire family during dinner time. Usually made from crocus bags stitched together, it was secured with a firm knot on the four corners by ropes that looped up to a joist in the rafter, or it was attached to a hook drilled into a post.
I do not recall the houses where I grew up having a crib, or a cradle to rock a baby to sleep. It was the humble hammock that nestled all newborns, and the generations before. I am not mistaken with the assertion the generations before me, in my time, and perhaps for a short while afterwards, did not know the security of swaying in a mother’s arms first, and secondly, right after we were dozing off, being deposited securely into a hammock, and then sailing smoothly off to restful sleep on an untroubled sea.
I recall it was the hammock where the adults turned to for solace in times of trouble. For Ma, here was the place where she came to rest for contemplation of the many worries that assailed her during the day. Ma worried about everything, and one episode was always when an uncle took off to the crossroad junction, there to spend many an idle evening with his friends, either good or bad.
Ma would take to the hammock to contemplate all the worst scenarios, swinging slowly and sighing heavily while casting her short-sighted eyes down the graveled road, waiting for my uncle’s figure to materialise around the corner by the towering Sandbox tree. As it grew dark, she stopped her swinging, hovering motionless with her tiny feet off the ground, anticipating the crickets stopping their welcoming song, or the frogs ending their plaintive calls to apathetic females, the music of the evening interrupted by her wayward son stumbling on his way home.
When all was well in the world, it was to the hammock that Ma turned for quietude. After her long day of laboring, and her evening bath, it was here she sat to towel-dry her long, gray hair. At her feet, within reach, was her many-toothed combs and a rum-bottle holding homemade coconut oil. A few of the larger combs had teeth missing, the loss a consequence of the evening ceremony where she manhandled her ropy bundles of tresses, “bussing the knots” in her words, and contentedly balling the extracted hair for disposal.
It was in the hammock, while adrift on a peaceful sea of swinging, where Ma oiled her hair, small hands massaging the coconut oil deep into her scalp, while using her fingers like large teeth on a comb. As she luxuriated in the quiet space of pampering her salt-and-pepper luxuriance, Ma remained in motion, occasionally kicking her feet off the ground so the hammock retained its gentle motion. It was a picture of contentment, her moments of serenity, the world fading, and the hammock rising and falling.
But hammocks were also sites of trauma. For the strangest of reasons, hammocks always seemed to wear out at its point closest to the ground, and as time erodes the tallest mountain top, so did this instrument of peace and mobility lose its material in the opposite location.
If the wear was chronic enough, it meant the lowest of the cousins in the pecking order of the family was put to occupy this area of most vulnerability. So it was, during an episode of reaching for the stars, when the hammock was thrust to the rafters, this cousin had to be constantly vigilant on the downswing, and lift that vulnerable body part high so it would not graze on the coarse floor at the bottom of the descent.
A few times the rope broke, tumbling us to the ground. We sang the rhyme we were being taught at school as we extricated arms and limbs, “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall! Humpty Dumpty had a great fall!”
Then, life had its ups and downs!

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