I was 27 years old when I took my first and only trip to Ghana. My grandmother was old – rumoured to be 103 – and in fact she died the following year. I visited the noisy markets of Accra and the clean, palm-treed avenues of the national university; I visited the slave forts of Cape Coast and Elmina, desolate with their old horrors; I visited my mother’s birth city of Kumasi, with its cluttered, numberless streets; and I visited the miracle of Anomabo beach, where I was chased away by fishermen who did not want to be photographed.

I also met my grandmother: ancient in her white robes, frail, her eyes whitened by cataracts and glaucoma.

It was a life-changing encounter. We had no common language, yet we sang together and cried together, touched by all that was immediately familiar between us. At the same time, and for all the power of those shared moments, I understood that her world ultimately held no place for me.

Truth be told, I had always found my parents’ nostalgia for their homeland a little disingenuous. For all their desire to revisit Ghana, they had many complaints about it, and it was presumably these grievances that had forced them out into the greater world.

Esi Edugyan at home in Victoria, British Columbia. Photograph: Canadian Press/Rex/Shutterstock

Yet despite their exasperation with it – or perhaps because of it – I found myself drawn into their happy narratives. Ghana was a country where people possessed little but loved much, a place of endless sunlight and white-sand beaches and casual gatherings that went on long into the night. Although I had little sense of its history at the time, and virtually no relationship with my extensive group of relatives there, I began to feel it was there I belonged – that my life in Calgary, with its rodeos and stetsons and blond wheat-fields, was an accident of fate.

The idea of “living between two worlds” has become the worn-out narrative of our age. There is something romantic in the notion, even as we speak of it as a sort of purgatorial state, as an unsettling restlessness. In going to Ghana, I had thought I would find my home in the world. I came away feeling less Ghanaian than ever. But what truly changed for me on that trip was the narrative of belonging itself.

I had grown up in a family where children were expected to be silent – to accept what was told to them and ask no questions, to venture no opinions. A voicelessness settled in, which, in retrospect, was really a newer, more insidious kind of rootlessness. It was the cutting away of one’s agency to define for oneself where one belonged. And it was more damaging, I think, than the actual experience of unbelonging, because it cast shame on the choice.

This is the danger of inherited narratives. Being able to separate myself from my parents’ rejection of the past and the present was like a clearing of the fog.

Belonging is to some extent a personal construction, and it is work done across a lifetime. I sometimes feel part of the culture, I sometimes don’t: both are legitimate. What is gone now is the anxiety accompanying these shifting states, the feeling that being anything but myself, at times blissfully comfortable in my own skin, is somehow a transgression.

Washington Black by Esi Edugyan was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize 2018 and won the Scotiabank Giller prize 2018