Passages: Welcome Home to Canada

by Michael Ignatieff

  A few years ago, at a gathering in film director Deepa Mehta’s house in Toronto, I met a rather dapperly dressed man with the surname Fancy. I was pleasantly surprised to encounter him. We had never met before, but I had heard of his family. The Fancys were a prominent family of Pakistan known by name even in East Africa. I told Mr. Fancy that my mother said we were related on my father’s side to the Fancys. As a child I had not paid much attention to such stories; who were the Fancys of Pakistan to us in Dar? This Mr. Fancy, though, said yes, he knew we were related. He had apparently heard of me. He told me that my grandfather, who had died young, had had two brothers. One of them went to live in Mwanza, a town on the shore of Lake Victoria. There, he happened to be in court once, wearing a suit and hat, and drew the attention of the British judge, who commended him on his fancy attire. He immediately adopted the name Fancy. He later went to Pakistan, and was the grandfather of the friendly gentleman before me, my distant cousin.

  And so, reacquaintance with a lost branch of the family, a story from the past, even an acquaintance with a clan name (which he told me was Bhimani) that we had lost due to my father’s early death and the subsequent loss of contact with his side of the family.

  As a young man at university I searched anxiously and deeply for my real identity, some essence that defined me. Was I Indian or African? Both identities were under threat by my presence in North America. Although I had come to the United States to attend university, the trend was for young people like me not to return. Still, Africa, Tanzania, meant a lot to me. In Boston, whenever some Indian student would accost me (this was not unusual at the time) with, Are you from India? I would proudly say I was from Tanzania. Some of the Indians would then persist: Yes, but originally from where?

  Of course they were right. I was also in some way an Indian. But in what way? I painstakingly studied Indian culture, history and philosophy, struggling in vain to find my exact place in that vast, incomprehensible matrix whence I had emerged. I came across moments of self-discovery in the films of Satyajit Ray, in the Bengali language I did not understand, that astounded me. I also studied with fascination the history of East Africa, devoured accounts written by the European explorers and administrators, their descriptions of the Indian traders they came across, among whom were my Gujarati ancestors.

  At the same time that I was consumed by this search for identity, my stay in the United States was altering me, westernizing me in indelible ways. For one thing, although I had been brought up in a very religious community, no longer could I define myself solely by religious faith, which for me had become a matter of personal philosophy and belief. This fact is brought home to me every time I travel east.

  I now have realized that what I am is simply the sum of what has gone into me. I am happy to live with several identities and with the contradictions that that implies; in fact I thrive on them, they feed my creativity. The ultimate wisdom, the secret of my life, is that there is no resolution, no real, single essence of me. This sounds a bit like Zen self-discovery perhaps, and trivial maybe, but it is of profound consequence for me personally. The difference from that other kind of enlightenment is that it produces no calm ocean of wisdom in my mind, no unifying tranquility, but instead a field of felt tensions that defines me.

  I even realized recently that my sin of heresy—equivocation—my claim to many identities may have deeper roots. The migration of my family, that itch in the foot, did not start with the generation that left a drought-ridden western India taking to the dhows to cross the Indian Ocean for the greener pastures of Zanzibar and East Africa. There also was an earlier, and incomplete, migration of the psyche. That migration was the conversion of my people from a Hindu sect into a sect of Islam. We were a syncretistic community, sometimes considered heretical, who saw nothing wrong and felt no qualms in subscribing to beliefs from both faiths. We couldn’t, did not want to, let go.

  Africa is my history and my memory. It is inside me. And so is India, in its way, though I do not wish to bring in that further complication here.

  One is sometimes taunted, Then why did you come here? The question is both naïve and presumptuous. A serious, existential question about the here and now is not answered by, Then why did you come? The undeniable fact is, I have come and here I am. Three hundred thousand immigrants come to Canada every year, to keep this nation viable. The world has changed. Population growth statistics for the Western countries indicate that they can continue to thrive only with the influx of immigrants. The populations of African and Asian countries, on the other hand, are exploding. It takes no clever guessing to tell where some of these extra populations will end up. And it is important for this to be the case if our planet is to keep conflicts between rich and poor to a minimum. Surely the nature of the world’s developed nations, especially those that must depend on immigrants, must change.

  I recall how, in the 1960s, when Kenyan Asians with British passports started going to England to claim their residency rights there, they were faced with vicious public protests. Enoch Powell, eminent classical scholar and Conservative politician, announced famously, by way of protest, that England is fish and chips, not rice and curry. Forty years later now, rice and curry is precisely one of the items Britain promotes in its self-image. And only recently it allocated permits to Indian teachers to go there and teach. What was unthinkable once sounds natural now.

  It is cometimes argued that Canada needs a strong identity, a sense of its essential self and destiny, such as the United States possesses. An American does not feel two ways about being American. If immigrants are allowed to live in Canada without coelescing or assimilating into an unequivocal national identity, goes this argument, they will only contribute further to this country’s character as a confused, hapless nonentity on the world stage.

  But America is the wrong model. It is an older, more established, more populous country, which came into being with a strong founding mythology and began with a war of revolution. American identity is a religion; in that it is surely unique. Watching the American flag ceremony at an event such as the Super Bowl, pitched with emotion and fervor, is as wonderful and mysterious and awesome as seeing a few thousand Muslims kneeling in solemn prayer, turned towards Mecca, or conservative Jews at the Wailing Wall.

  Canada is where the Loyalists came. It was part of the British Empire, which is why people from the former British colonies found it easier to come to it. With a larger percentage of new immigrants, it presents a lesser inertia to change. It welcomes and accommodates the world, and as a result it reflects global diversity in a peaceful mode. That should surely be its strength and its identity, its uniqueness—not its source of insecurity.

  The destruction of the World Trade Center brought home dramatically, to many of us in Canada, how tenuous is the concept of a narrow, inflexible national identity. In the days and weeks that followed September 11, there were many cries of, “We are all Americans.” Canada ran out of American flags. The rallying cry had always been, “We are different from Americans.” The more nationalist-minded Canadians used to bristle with anti-Americanism. The difference between the two nations was something which many immigrants, who had seen Canada as merely an extension of America from afar, had to learn, much to their embarrassment and the consternation of those who reminded them of this.

  So what happened? September 11 showed that there are ties that are impossible to forget or break. They may be historic, they may be racial, tribal or geographic, but they are there in the mind. And when the world, among commentators and analysts, began to be divided among “us” and “them,” or the “Roman Empire” and the “Barbarians,” or clashing civilizations, then, however we interpret these concepts (and they are fundamentally contestable), it was clear that the time of narrow nationalism was over in more ways than one.

  And if we were all Americans at that particular crisis moment, and perhaps are still if we view the crisis as long-term and global, then is it asking too much for us to be Africans too
, when that continent is in crisis? Or Indians or Chinese, if the occasion demands? Is it so morally reprehensible or unpatriotic to be aware of all one’s origins and therefore care about a larger world, to care especially about the poorer segments of the globe, whence one has come, and to which one has not repaid any debt?

  That, ultimately, is my defence, my plea for redemption. I have justified my equivocation, my heresy, by saying that it is natural and inevitable in the modern world, which is so interconnected and so fraught with dangers that arise from differences among peoples. The justification is what I have arrived at, but the sin is a matter of the heart, is what I am.

  Alberto Manguel

  DESTINATION ITHACA

  THE TROGLODYTES WHO, along with the mammoth and the sabre-toothed tiger, wandered into Russia across the Bering Strait; the ancient South Americans who (according to Thor Heyerdahl) arrived on the rocks of Easter Island and mysteriously erected the colossal faces of their abandoned gods; the Italian boy from Edmundo d’Amici’s Cuore who travelled from the Apennines to the Andes in search of his long-lost mother; the Jews who crossed the desert, following a column of dust by day and a column of fire by night; Aeneas who, with his father on his back, blindly sought to found the birthplace of the poet who would one day make him immortal; General Lavalle’s soldiers, who carried the rotting corpse of their heroic leader from the mountainous North to the plains of Buenos Aires, during the Wars of Independence; Nemo, who bore his anger twenty thousand leagues beneath the seven seas; Candide on his long peregrinations whose goal (he doesn’t know this) is a garden; Monkey, Horse and Pig, who walked westwards to India in search of the sacred books; Eric the Red, who discovered America too early for the constraints of history; the brother and sister who left their house to find the elusive Blue Bird—all my childhood long, I was haunted by wanderers and their migrations. My books were full of them.

  They fascinated me, these departures, partly because every excursion promised a flight from the confines of my days, and partly because the outcome of the adventure was somehow still in the future, where everything was possible. It seemed to me that no arrival was the true end of the story: Gulliver set off again after having returned from his travels, and Alice, after waking, passed her dream on to her sister, whose dreamer she had become. Something in the very roundness of the world suggests that every journey is always to be continued.

  Even though I grew up travelling, the wisdom around me told me that I should stand still in one place. “Kosmopolitt!” spat out my grandmother, to insult a distant cousin who had never sprung roots in any of the cities in which he had lived. “A Man Should Only Eat Bread from Wheat Grown on His Native Land” was the title of one of the texts in my grade four reading book (this in Argentina, a country made up of immigrants). And our national epic, the Martín Fierro, gave as advice to its readers: “Stick to the little corner / Where you first came to this earth. / A cow that keeps changing pastures / Will be late in giving birth.” But what was that corner where I first came to this earth? My passport said “Buenos Aires”; in my dreams I was not so certain.

  My earliest memories are of a wild park of sandy dunes where bushes of pink and white flowers gave off a sickly smell, and where giant tortoises made their slow way to the hot sea beyond. Also: a garden with four tall palm trees carrying bunches of deep yellow nuts; a cool, dark basement nursery with stuffed animals and many books; a large white kitchen where the cook would give me chunks of cheese and baking chocolate.

  My memories are memories of memories; repetition has sorted them out, chronologically, and dusted off the cobwebs. Now I remember an excursion to the salt mines of Sodom, where the walls looked like the inside of an icebox dripping frozen tears; a huge canvas depicting a sea battle on the wall of a Venice palazzo that reeked of honeyed wax; the donkey ride in the Luxembourg Gardens, while loud birds sang in the trees; a train stopping at a small German station and a gift of tiny wooden animals painted in fierce bright colours; a walk up a mountain path following the Stations of the Cross and being told the story of Christ as if it were another of my gory fairy tales. Images of Buenos Aires are from much later, and lack the same intensity in colour, smell and sound; they begin when I was seven and my family had returned to the city. But by then I was conscious of remembering.

  In order to migrate to a certain place, you must leave another. This truism is not as simple as it seems. Nothing tells you at what precise point departure ends and arrival begins; what goodbyes are forever, what street signs you are seeing for the last time, what doors you have locked behind you and will never open again. Once your back is turned, the landscape shifts, objects lose their shape, people take on other voices and other faces. In your presence, all change is gradual, almost imperceptible, as the minutes gnaw at the hours; the colours fade, the sounds grow fainter, so that the transformation itself becomes a familiar process. But in your absence, change is vertiginous. You believe you hold a place in your memory, fast and immutable, like those miniature scenes under a plastic dome where nothing but the weather changes with a brisk shake of your hand; but the very instant the place is out of your sight it is no longer yours, the way you knew it. The place you think you remember melts and shimmers in your mind’s eye, like the ruins of a city on the bottom of a lake; while back where you left it the place grows, flourishes, sprouts feathers or tentacles, becomes unrecognizable. So while you think, with more or less certainty, that you are leaving a place, the place is leaving you too, receding into itself, drifting away from you, irretrievably, decisively, unfaithful at the very moment of farewell, long before you have admitted to yourself that this time, maybe, it is forever. You have not quite left, but you are no longer there where you once were, in that place you thought of as home. The place itself is now another.

  I remember the shock of realizing, when I returned for a short spell to Buenos Aires a few years after leaving in the late sixties, that the house to which we had moved when I was seven, in which I had grown up while attending school for eleven years, where I had spent my entire adolescence and had celebrated my twentieth birthday, that this house had been torn down and nothing, not a trace of it remained. The cobbled street along which the soda-water vendor would rattle his horse-drawn cart, laden with blue and green glass siphons that glittered like ornaments on a Christmas tree, had been covered with smooth asphalt; the corner building, which was the signpost signalling arrival after the long bus ride home, had been turned into bleak offices; the pharmacy across from us, where a gargantuan nurse once stitched my knee after a nasty fall, had disappeared; the small bookstore down the way which sold the novels of Jules Verne in bright yellow covers, and notebooks in which I once wrote grandiose epic poems and tragic plays, was no longer there. I had been gone for only three or four years, barely long enough to wonder if I would ever return, and already everything was different, alien, meaningless, so that the question of coming back became irrelevant, since there was nothing familiar left to which to return.

  There was little to be done but accept: I too would wander, like those characters I had envied in my storybooks. There would be new faces, new foods, new vistas at the end of new streets, new words in languages other than those of my childhood, new references to histories that were not mine. I had wished for novelty, change and adventure. Saint Teresa warns us against fulfilled wishes, Blake against nursing unacted desires. Both are right.

  In a certain sense, I was already prepared for a nomadic existence. For the Jews, accustomed to a life of expulsions and re-establishments, the immutable centre is the Bible, which is fixed in time, not in space, and which means (we are told) not “the Book” but “the books,” in the plural. Books were for me too a home, a safe place to which I could return no matter where I was taken. In strange bedrooms in Cyprus, Rome or Montevideo, when voices I had not heard before spoke in whispers outside the window and odd scents and curious lights drifted across the newly painted ceilings, my books (from which I would not be parted) would fall open on the fa
miliar pages that told the story of the Seven Swans, of Till Eulenspiegel, of the clever Odysseus, of the Wishing Chair, of Gerda and Kay, of Sindbad and of Mowgli. My eyes followed the words but I knew the texts by heart, even though, from time to time, a new line would appear as if by magic, an unexpected detail would reveal itself in the memorized illustrations, as if (like my body in the mirror) my books grew with me from night to night, faintly but surely, faithful to my end.

  A story I enjoyed as a child was that of Puss in the seven-league boots, which allowed the creature to wander the earth regardless of seas or borders. Looking back, my journey (like that of the booted cat) seems surprisingly clear, step after seven-league step.

  After Buenos Aires came Spain, because the ship (the cheapest way of transport in those days) stopped in Algeciras; an invitation by a stranger who had (he told me) known Kafka, led me to Paris; from Paris, London seemed like the obvious next stop; austere immigration officials forced me to leave London and return to Paris; a translation of a Borges story into English prompted an invitation from an Italian publisher to come and work for him in Milan; the opening of a bookstore in France took me back once more to Paris; a client buying books for the Tahitian branch of Hachette offered me the chance to leave Europe and settle in the South Seas as a publisher of travel books; the closure of the company, many years later, forced me to decide between setting up in Japan (where a printer had offered me a job), San Francisco (where the Tahitian company was planning to reopen) and Canada (where for aleatory reasons a book of mine had been published). Since I no longer wanted to work in an office but longed instead to try and make my living as a writer, I chose Canada. I was thirty-four years old.