Return is viewed as going back to one's home country or country of origin; a homecoming or returning to the roots where one started from (King and Christou ‘Cultural Geographies of Counter-Diasporic Migration’; Markowitz ‘The Home(s) of Homecomings’; Vasey ‘Place-Making, Provisional Return, and Well-Being’), while home is believed to be a place of comfort, stability and security, ‘a hearth’ and ‘an anchoring point’ (Blunt and Dowling Home: 11). Hence return becomes not only desirable and normal but also to be taken for granted; the ‘final act of closing the migration cycle’ and reuniting with one's family (Capo ‘The World is My Oyster’: 5). Because of the (presumably) strong ties people have with their homeland, with which they share ethnicity, culture and identity, return is also believed to be natural (Gage North of Ithaka; Kalfopoulou Broken Greek). These, together with the pull of the familiar, it is argued, give the returnee a sense of belonging and being home, thereby making return a ‘journey of therapeutic self-fulfilment’ whereby the returnee finds or becomes his complete self by ‘rejoining the pieces of his life together’ (Gage: 14), or uniting his fragmented or incomplete identity.

So it is that Baako, the protagonist of Ayi Kwei Armah's Fragments, after his five-year sojourn in the US where he had gone to receive his education (by which fact he is now seen as a ‘been-to’ or ‘Americanah’, to borrow Adichie's term in her volume of the same name), returns naturally to his homeland. But his returning is connected with angst as he wonders how he can help build his country as well as satisfy the stated expectations of his family that his status as a been-to yields in Ghana. This does not simply mean honouring family obligations or laying his skills at the service of his nation, but implies jettisoning his ideals and moral integrity and participating in the corruption and crass materialism that have taken hold of the people. Consequently, Baako is unable to rise to the occasion. The result is that he is disoriented, alienated and rejected by his people (both family and larger society). He suffers a nervous breakdown and is placed in a mental asylum by his family who declare him mad.