ABSTRACT
In a pivotal passage in The Atlantic Sound, Caryl Phillips is confronted with the historically charged question, “Where are you from?” The question, fi red by Phillips’s traveling companion on a plane headed to the West Coast of Africa, inevitably triggers refl ections on home and belonging. Phillips writes: “Does he mean, who I am? Does he mean, do I belong? Why does this man not understand the complexity of his question? I make the familiar fl ustered attempt to answer the question. He listens and then spoils it all. ‘So my friend, you are going home, to Africa. To Ghana.’ I say nothing. No, I am not going home.”1
