We are naïve if we assume that immigration ever meant assimilation in the strict sense of discarding identity. New identities never obliterate old ones, and new identities are unlikely to be authentic and strong if they are built on forgetting. Moreover, to ask new Canadians to forget old selves would be to squander their unique contributions to their adopted country. The most useful new Canadians are those who have refused to think of their passage to Canada as a process of discarding.
For example, anyone who has heard the writer and translator Alberto Manguel speak would find it hard to place his accent. This marvellous Canadian writer speaks and writes an English flavoured with Spanish and French, and heaven knows what else besides. One key to his creativity, it would seem, is his refusal to give up anything, his refusal to allow the passage to Canada to repress a single feature of a highly complex, multi-dimensional identity. Anna Porter, a Canadian publisher, a Hungarian New Zealander, has done more than most native-born Canadians to promote the literature of her adopted home, but her residual identities have never been renounced, and indeed have become stronger as she became a Canadian. She remains the Hungarian émigré of the 1956 era, whose Budapest grandfather was a publisher. Her life in Canada represents a keeping of faith with his inspiration.
And after all, as these memoirs assure us, the Canadian immigration myth is sometimes quite accurate. This might be so in the case of the son of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the martyred leader of the Ogoni people of Nigeria. Being the son of a hero and a martyr is to live under a light-obliterating shadow. In Canada, it seems, the son has not so much thrown off the shadow of the father as found the distance to live under it in peace with himself. In other cases, emigration allows newcomers to find identities that were not permitted or not even perceived in the past. For Shyam Selvadurai, coming to Canada created the possibility of finding a sexual identity that had not been possible in Sri Lanka. The message of these memoirs is that migrants love a new country to the degree that it allows them to be free, to keep the identities they cherish and to fashion ones anew.
Nevertheless, it would be a good idea, once and for all, to get a few things clear. Canada means many things to many people—and in the debate about what it means, new voices are as valuable as older ones—but one thing is indisputable: we are a political community that has outlawed the practice or advocacy of violence as an instrument of political expression. We have outlawed it within, and we need to outlaw it without. Just as we have laws against racial incitement or the promulgation of ethnic hatred, in order to protect our new citizens from bigotry, abuse and violence, so we must have laws that allow for the prosecution of anyone in Canada who aids, abets, encourages or incites acts of terror. There may be political causes that justify armed resistance, but there are none that justify the terrorization and murder of civilians. The distinction between freedom fighters and terrorists is not the relativist quagmire we are led to suppose it is. There are laws of war governing armed resistance to oppression, just as there are laws of war governing the conduct of hostilities between states. Those who break these laws are barbarians, whatever the cause they serve. Those who target civilians to cause death and create fear are terrorists, no matter how justified their cause may be. States that use terror against civilians are as culpable as armed insurgents.
Coming to Canada is not the passage from hatred to civility that we innocently suppose it to be. It never has been. Frankly, some hatreds—of oppression, cruelty, racial discrimination—will be wanted on the voyage, and will be kept on our soil. There is nothing Canadian society can or should do about this. But Canada can keep to one simple rule of the road: we are not a political community that aids, abets, harbours or cultivates terror. So it is appropriate to say the following to newcomers: You do not have to embrace all our supposed civilities. You do not have to assimilate to our forms of innocence. You can and should keep the memory of the injustice you have left behind firmly in your heart. But the law is the law. You will have to leave your fantasies of revenge behind.
M.G. Vassanji
CANADA AND ME: FINDING OURSELVES
I FIRST CAME TO CANADA as a postdoctoral fellow at the nuclear laboratory in Chalk River, Ontario. Having come from the United States and lived all my life in urban centres, I was quite under the impression that I had struck out far north into the woods. It was August and, as if to confirm my impression, the leaves were already beginning to turn yellow. On the way in from Montreal, the towns we passed looked small and laid back, and the people, when we had to stop, seemed grimly reserved compared with the Americans I had known. I felt apprehensive but venturesome, with all the cockiness of the city dweller. On my first day at work, when I was asked how I found my new surroundings, I answered that I felt a bit like David Livingstone, meaning, like a foreigner among natives in a far-off jungle place. I don’t know what shocked my hosts more, my estimation of the place or my inversion of the role of the native. It’s not so bad, said one of them, red-faced, a British-born scientist.
And it wasn’t so bad, after all. In my new surroundings I learned to find pleasure in solitude and in the textures and colours of the forest; and although I couldn’t quite get a glow of emotion going at the sight of a flock of migrating geese in the fall and spring, or feel that twinge of hardy satisfaction whenever the minimum temperature had hit the legendary minus forty the previous night, I did learn to appreciate the sky and watch the stars. My neighbour was an amateur astronomer who most evenings took out his telescope into the backyard and turned it skywards. I did my watching by myself though, on dark clear nights, walking along the inky black Ottawa River, wondering about the lights that glowed so enigmatically through the windows of the toylike bungalows on the silent, empty streets, and always aware of the moon, if there was one, making its slow descent on the other side of the water, where lay the province of Quebec. I learned cross-country skiing in a town whose inhabitants sometimes skied ten miles to work, and one of whom actually cycled there in all seasons. During my second time out on the cross-country trails, when I had not slipped and fallen as many times as on the previous occasion, I walked back home with my skis on my shoulders and, tropical boy that I was, removed my hat because I was feeling hot. The result was a crisp glazing of ice on my stinging red ears when I returned to my apartment.
Rents were cheap. Whereas I had lived in single rooms and studios the past eight years as a student, now I had a bright and roomy two-bedroom apartment all my own to walk around in. I read Pascal with my morning coffee. I did not have a television and patiently translated from medieval Gujarati texts during my spare time, and I began my first novel, of which I never finished more than the first two chapters. I suspect that my most recent novel was the final manifestation of that early attempt, which had been too close to my recent personal experiences as a student in the United States.
Deep River, the town where I lived, had a population of 5500 and was actually not more than three hours east on the highway from Ottawa; obviously it was far from the northern outpost I had imagined it to be. To qualify for my luxurious (as it seemed then) furnished apartment, company rules demanded that I be married. I had a fiancée in Boston and we had planned to marry the following year. For the sake of the apartment, my fiancée—who had come with a couple of friends to drop me off at this northern frontier—and I decided it would not be a bad idea to marry, if only formally. So we went knocking at the house of the local Lutheran pastor. As a student I had gained the impression that Lutherans were liberal; their pastor at my university had been a woman. This one was a large, chubby man, and he agreed to marry two non-Christians the next day in church, with our two friends from Boston as witnesses. His wife, though, wore a severe suspicious look right from the moment we stepped out of that small, modern church. We did feel a little guilty, but we also respected the blessing we had received. The real, traditional wedding took place some eight months later.
Civilization for me meant Montreal, where I had some friends, and where my wife would come from B
oston to meet me every few weeks. The bus back from Montreal left at nine P.M. on Sunday night, and I remember being amazed at the tearful partings of passengers who were going only as far as North Bay or Sudbury. The bus would drop me on the highway, in the still of the northern night, and I would walk my lonely way home on the main road into town. Once, I was followed all the way by a fox trotting along a ditch by the road; another time, the local police cruiser gave me a ride. And I recall, too, standing at the side of the highway at two-thirty a.m. waiting for the bus to drop off my beloved, tired and sleepy, but undoubtedly happy.
Two years after my arrival, when my fellowship ended, I departed for Toronto, but not without a touch of sadness. I could not have spent the rest of my life in such a small and faraway place; nevertheless, I would miss this one. I did return to visit it a few times. Once while driving back, we had to stop for a couple of black bears in the middle of Algonquin Park. Now, I had seen elephants in the wild, and the sight of giraffe, zebra, and wildebeeste was routine fare on a road trip between Kenya and Tanzania. Still, those bears and that drive through Algonquin remain memorable. As memorable, and a bit embarrassing, was the occasion when a family of raccoons passed us late one night as we sat by a fire outside a cabin we had rented. We were so frightened, unused to these strange nocturnal animals, that they might well have been a pride of lions in the Serengeti.
Since those first years I have travelled from coast to coast in this country, from sea to shining sea, and by land as well as by air. My family and I have driven to the Maritimes several times, via Quebec City (where, much to our amazement, the Plains of Abraham were not as spectacular as we had expected but where we discovered an Indian restaurant worth making a special trip for), and toured the charming picture-postcard coastlines of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. We have travelled by train to Vancouver, across northwestern Ontario (disappointingly scrubby), the endlessly flat Prairies that could mesmerize, and the simply spectacular Rockies. With Montreal we have a special relationship; it was the first Canadian city I ever saw, when as a student in Boston I bagged a ride to go there just for the heck of it. It was where my wife and I would arrange to meet, where I went to see civilization, as I called it. And so I believe I have seen the country as few Canadians have.
The foregoing is surely a satisfying immigrant story, especially if I conclude it with my subsequent career.
And yet. And yet, something else, someplace else never ceases to beckon, to claim a place in my heart. I am a two-timer.
When I hear the national anthem of Canada or even of the United States, I cannot resist the refrain tugging at my mind of Mungu ibariki Afrika, the first lines of the Tanzanian anthem, “God bless Africa.” This is not an affectation; I do not consciously dredge it up. It is a part of my being. It is a tic, it is unconscious, it is a love. I remain strongly attached to Africa, the continent of my birth; its music, the sight of its grasslands, its red earth, or its mighty Kilimanjaro, stir me to the core. I have happy memories of my childhood there.
Is there something wrong with me? Am I a traitor? A wretched ingrate? Don’t I know that I am privileged to live in “the best country in the world”? Shouldn’t I be thankful for my freedoms, my high standard of living, my relative safety? Have I forgotten how I left my country—by stealth—and that I remained afraid for two decades to visit it? Hasn’t my adopted country Canada lavished generosity and recognition upon me?
There is some risk in what I write; for I have been invited as a Canadian writer to contribute to these pages, Canadian readers expect something from me, and they have a right to. They have been generous and given me a literary home. My work would have been an orphan without this country. But I believe for that very reason it behooves me to be absolutely honest, to bare my heart to them. We live currently in flag-draping times, as I see them, in which the flag is often the resort of the rogue and the huckster, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson. The red-and-white banner is used to sell anything from beer to sports clothing, politicians to news broadcasts, and historical, not to say moral, objectivity is often swept aside by the jingoism it has come to represent. This loud nationalism, like the ready applause of someone who always jumps to his feet at a concert, puts in a difficult position those who would show their appreciation more quietly and perhaps with a more complex mix of feelings. I believe what I want to say is neither dishonest, nor treacherous, nor unpatriotic.
I am not afflicted by nostalgia. I have visited the land of my birth many times and have no illusion that it remains what it was in the past. The population has increased four times or more since I lived there, resulting in large unemployment; my family and a good part of the Indian community within which I grew up have emigrated; there are new ways of thinking, particularly an endemic dependence on foreign “donors,” that are reprehensible to me, brought up as I was on the concepts of self-help and dignity; foreign city-planners without adequate knowledge of my former city’s history or peoples have played havoc with its neighbourhoods. But it is still a place that feels, to some degree, like home. It is possible for me to pass for a local, raising no suspicions of a life overseas. And its pain is to some degree my pain.
A girl from Uganda writes to me (having received the impression from somewhere that I am a big philanthropist): I am eighteen years old, my younger brother and sister and I are orphans, our parents died of AIDS; please send me some money to finish college. Another one writes: My village in northern Uganda was raided, my family was killed and I was abducted. I have managed to reach Kampala and need money to finish high school. There is no easy way to authenticate these stories, even if I could afford to send thousands of dollars.
What does it mean to be a Canadian? What does it mean for me to be anybody in the world? I have often been plagued by these questions of identity. I feel guilty—first, for not being an unequivocal Canadian, and for the impressions I must be passing on to my Toronto-born kids; and second, for living in relative affluence, worrying about material comforts in a land glutted upon them, spoiling those same kids silly, when the land that gave me birth and some of my happiest memories lives in such anguish of war, crime, corruption, deprivation. There are, of course, ways of giving back, of making a contribution. What I am describing, however, is a state of being, the guilt of the one who got away, the guilt of the survivor, if you will.
When I was a teenager, we were taught a lesson in responsibility that I have never been able to forget. One child out of twenty, we were told, had the privilege of reaching high school; and the child who gets to high school and university is like the boy or girl who is fed all the food in a starving village so that he or she can reach the next village to bring back help for all. I was one of those children. And in my absence, further havoc has been wreaked on that village.
Am I doomed to a state of in-betweenness? Is it really a doom? Is it time to stop fooling ourselves and admit that I am a Canadian citizen, with loyalties and attachments in the country, but essentially—because I have attachments elsewhere—a homeless person?
How easy it seems to say that I am a Canadian, that nothing else matters; history began the day I obtained my immigrant status, and the past before that has been totally obliterated. If I say that loud enough I might even be called upon to promote beer. But my affliction is history, memory. It is history and memory that living in Toronto has nurtured to inspire the novels and stories I write. And, ironically, it is a history and memory of a nomad life and constant exile.
I am an East African Canadian of Indian origin. I have also called myself an African Asian Canadian. I was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and brought up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. My mother’s parents were born in India and emigrated to East Africa, at a time when both those regions of the world were part of the British Empire. My paternal grandfather was born in Kenya and therefore I have come to believe, with a certainty that however is not absolute, that his father must have migrated to Africa in the 1880s. My great-grandmother most likely came with him. My own parents never saw India
.
There is an interesting, rather touching story about my father as a restless young man. Apparently he once stowed away on a steamer bound from Mombasa to the ancestral homeland. There were several such ships that went to India, and as children we knew them all by name: SS Kampala, SS Karanja, SS Amra, SS Bombay. But my father, when his ship reached Bombay, wasn’t allowed to disembark because he had no papers. I have always imagined him viewing glittering, legendary Bombay, the city of film stars, through steamer portholes. The story, partly apocryphal perhaps, symbolizes for me the status of my family and of many others like them. It represents the eternal quest for a home, and its constant denial.
My father was a wanderer in East Africa, I’ve learned, until he married my mother and settled down. My mother was born on the island of Zanzibar, then brought to Mombasa, where she grew up. She was married in Nairobi to my somewhat vagabond of a father, an orphan of good family; when he died, my mother took us all to Dar es Salaam, where her family had moved. Later she moved back to Nairobi, and later still to Syracuse, New York, with my younger brother, whence to Calgary, Alberta.
And so wanderlust is a part of my heritage, as is the quest for home. With every departure comes a sense of loss, of something left behind; and if you are a novelist, you find yourself out on that quest for comprehensibility, for the beginning of history and the sources of memory, not just your own and your family’s, but also communal history and memory. History, slipping away like grains of sand through the fingers, becomes obsession. Because, although there is no denying the gains brought about by emigration, with each move—from India to Africa, within Africa, from Africa to North America—we fragmented our stories, lost parts of our history, and carried the broken-up remains like a peddler’s items in a sack.
Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Page 2
