Exiled Place in Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home

The chapter focuses on Sisonke Msimang’s memoir Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017), which is read in terms of the relationship between exile and place. Msimang’s parents leave South Africa due to political reasons, raising their children in multiple places and national contexts. The author’s experience as the child of ANC activists, who fled first to Zambia and later made careers in Kenya and Canada and then back in Kenya again before returning to South Africa, is one of both privilege and discrimination. The memoir builds on the contradictions and complications of the local and the global, as Msimang’s parents move the family from country to country to which the title refers. South Africa is presented as a location of complexity to which no easy relationship is possible, muddling the meaning of home and of origins. This is exemplified in Msimang’s writing in multiple ways through her experiences as an expatriate.