Passages: Welcome Home to Canada

by Michael Ignatieff

  My mother, on the other end of the telephone, breaks into my reverie. “Then there was the Lodge.”

  The Lodge. Or to give it its full name, the Ibis Safari Lodge.

  My father was a man who took his great loves and turned them into money. Even before I was born, he abandoned the steady climb up the corporate ladder that his schooling and family background ensured. He had played Davis Cup for Sri Lanka and had been the national tennis champion, and he decided to go to Australia and qualify as a tennis coach. His other great passion was wildlife, and in the early seventies he became the first person in Sri Lanka to offer safaris. So successful was this venture that he built a hotel—the Lodge—to house his tourists.

  How I used to love going to the Lodge, beginning with the journey in the open Jeep. Our route took us first through the lush foliage and rivers of the wet zone of Sri Lanka, then the road emerged onto the coastline and we would travel past miles and miles of white beach, turquoise water. The change of scenery, as it always is in Sri Lanka, was dramatic. We always stopped at Tangalle Bay for a picnic lunch, which we children would eat quietly, hoarse by now from screaming out jokes and mild obscenities at the village children we had passed.

  Within an hour from Tangalle the landscape completely changed again. We entered the dry zone. The hazy, moisture-laden yellow light of the wet zone gave way to brilliant clear whiteness (the same quality of light as a dazzling February day in Toronto). The trees on the sides of the road were stunted, with few leaves, yet filled with brilliant red and orange flowers. Vast arid plains stretched into the distance, a smell of dried clay pervading the air.

  To get to the Lodge, our Jeep would then leave the main road and go along a narrow jungle path. So close were the trees that we had to sit on the floor of the Jeep to escape the thorny branches which banged and rattled against the sides. When we were in the clear, we rose quickly to our feet, and there it was. The Lodge. A long wooden building, it boasted an extensive deck with pillars at regular intervals supporting the low-slung roof. Doors led off the deck into the bedrooms. The building was raised eight feet off the ground, for in the rainy season the Wirawilla lake lapped at the base of the Lodge, with flamingos, painted storks, peacocks, buffalo, and deer, even an occasional elephant, along its distant banks. In the dry season all this animal life receded to the centre, around a water hole.

  What adventures we children had at the Lodge. If the tank was full, there was fishing and bathing. The tank had man-eating crocodiles in it, though, so we always stayed in the shallows, one of us keeping an eye out for the deceptive logs. In the dry season we would play cricket or badminton on the parched floor of the tank, and make treks to the water hole to see the wildlife. We would go into the jungle, my brother leading the way with his air rifle, and thrill with terror when we came upon fresh elephant dung.

  While the Lodge is, in my mind, associated with all that was best about my childhood and adolescence, it is also linked indelibly with the beginning of the end.

  The Lodge was in the deep south of Sri Lanka, and my father was from the minority Tamil community. For a Tamil, the Sri Lankan south has the same implications as the American south for an African-American. Friends of my father had advised against his building the Lodge. Yet my father loved the south. This was his country, and he would go wherever he wanted in it.

  In 1977, for the first time in my life, ethnic conflict broke out between the Sinhalese and Tamils. For people who, like us, lived in the capital, Colombo, this conflict could seem removed, as it was confined mainly to the south and other regions of the country. And so it might have seemed for us too, if it weren’t for the Lodge: my brother was there, on vacation. For a few days we did not know if he was alive or dead. All I remember of that time was the way the world seemed to slow down. My mother told us to keep busy, to pray. But I remember lying on my bed, conscious of the hours dragging on. Finally the telephone call came to say that he was safe. The mob had indeed come to the Lodge demanding him, but the staff had spirited him away into the jungle. If the mob had found him, they would have butchered him with the sharp scythes they brought with them or, worse, put a tire around his neck, poured kerosene over him and set him on fire. He was only fourteen years old.

  The mob burnt the Lodge, right down to its foundation. Somebody else might have backed off, given up, but when my father saw the charred, broken remains of the this thing he had loved, a determination was sealed in him. My mother pleaded against it, but he went back and rebuilt the Lodge. In an act of solidarity a Sinhalese friend, a building contractor, provided all the materials and labour for free. Yet in the end the new Lodge was a diminished version of what had been. For one thing, my father felt compelled to build it out of bricks and cement, for obvious reasons. In the years that followed, the signboard directing travellers to the Lodge was frequently pulled down, vandalized, defecated on. After the scare with my brother, my parents rarely took us with them, and when we did go, we stayed close to the Lodge. In our treks into the jungle we had always been aware of the dangers—the poisonous snakes, the wild buffalo, the wild boar—but they had not kept us from exploring. However, none of these was as terrifying as the savagery of men.

  In 1981, rioting broke out again, and the Lodge was destroyed. My father learned the news on the afternoon of his birthday. It was too late to cancel the party. That evening, as our garden filled with guests, resembled a funeral. Among the guests was a Canadian, a Jewish emigrant from Nazi Germany. He told my father that what was happening in Sri Lanka reminded him of those dreadful times, and he advised my father to leave. My father vacillated, said he would think about it later. I remember being furious with him for not taking us away, feeling frightened and sad at how our lives were falling apart. Now that I am in my thirties, I understand why my father could not go. He loved the country, had invested himself in it and made a life for himself there.

  The fear, the terror of this ethnic conflict was like a beast circling ever closer. It finally did strike us, in 1983, when the rioting spilled over into Colombo. Mobs of Sinhalese went on a rampage, destroying Tamil houses, dragging families out of hiding and butchering them. They were in possession of electoral lists which they used to single out the Tamil homes. They also destroyed Tamil-owned shops and offices. Our personal experience of it is too painful to narrate here. We lost everything. My parents applied to Canada under a program of accelerated immigration that was being offered to Tamils wishing to leave. Our papers came through and we left for Canada in 1984.

  Nine years after my parents had decided to forego an affluent lifestyle in the West in order to live out their passions and their commitment to the country of their birth, they found themselves forced to leave, to come here and start over with nothing.

  I am on the telephone to my mother again. I want to know if she has any regrets about not going to America all those years ago. She is silent for a while. In the background I can hear the grandchildren, some loud game in progress. She is about to speak when one of them interrupts to ask her something. As she talks to him, I can imagine her hand resting against the side of his head. By the time she comes back to the telephone, I already know here answer. Yet she surprises me as she elaborates on it.

  “America is too dynamic. Everything there is hire-and-fire. Here things are more low-key, one is allowed to develop at one’s own pace. Canada is a more accommodating society.” Again she is silent. “But darling, it was hard.” How laden her voice is as she draws out the “hard.”

  My mind slips back to our first year here.

  It is that day in October when you know that the world around you has turned irreversibly towards winter. All last night the wind clattered against our windows, torn at the sides of the house, the rain a battering of angry fists. Now a weak sun sheds its light on shorn trees, their naked branches like arms stretched upwards in hunger, the newly fallen leaves blackened clots on the grass.

  My mother returns home, trembling with humiliation. At an office where she has temporary
work, there was a party at lunchtime. She had brought something, expecting to share in the potluck meal. Yet just before the lunch hour her supervisor came to her. “You can go on break now. We’re having a party.”

  As my mother sits at the dining table telling us this story, a helpless rage takes hold of me, a rage I see reflected in the face of my father and siblings. Even before we arrived in this country, my mother had already accepted that she would never be able to practise medicine here. Unlike in America, where she would have had only to sit an exam, here she would have to do an internship as well, and there are a mere handful of internships for all the foreign doctors applying. The bar is set unfairly high. My mother has also realized that to say she is a doctor on her resumé intimidates people who might hire her. She has “doctored” it down, first to a Bachelor of Science and finally to housewife.

  I look at my mother this day as if seeing her after a long absence. She is of that first generation of modern Sri Lankan women, imbued with a sense of confidence that her gender will not hold her back, living out the fruits of the struggles of the women before her. As a Sri Lankan woman, she could stand tall. But here in Canada she is learning to be small, subservient, docile, to fit the society’s expectations of an Asian woman. In the few months we have been here, she has not so much aged physically as withered inside, developed a stoop of her shoulders.

  As if my mother has sensed my thoughts over the phone, she says, “But this country has been good to us, you children in particular. All of you have done well. As for the medicine”—she has read my thoughts—“I might not have pursued it anyway. Your sister was only thirteen when we came here. If I was preoccupied with my career, who knows what trouble she might have got up to.”

  Yet my parents now go back to Sri Lanka for half the year, have bought a house there. They have returned to their first love. I wonder if my mother’s answers would be different if they had been unable to re-establish a partial life there, if they lived only with the raw nerve-endings-cut-off longing for it.

  After I put down the phone, I drift towards the kitchen, out through the patio doors and into the garden. My cat follows as we both go, trail-trail, through the grass. What I am trying so hard to remember are my first impressions of Canada. The truth of the matter is that when I think of myself as I was then, it is like looking at a person with one’s glasses off; there is a blurring of outlines, a smudge of features. It will be some time before I come back into my focus in my memory.

  I bend down to move aside a broken branch, the cat seizing the opportunity to run up rub herself against my hand, when suddenly, with a small “oh,” something rises in my mind.

  It is our second week in Canada. We are staying with my uncle in Richmond Hill. So far I have not ventured further than the nearby Hillcrest Mall. This will be my first trip downtown. My uncle is carefully going over the instructions he has written down. I struggle to pay attention. My hands in my pockets are slick with sweat; I can feel a coldness down the back of my neck. I am terrified that my uncle, my family, will ask where I am going, terrified that my voice will crack as I deliver the carefully practised lie. But everyone is too preoccupied with their own adjustments to this new country.

  When I finally leave my uncle’s house, I feel as if I am escaping a stifling room. I breathe deeply as I walk up the road to the bus stop. Part of me wants to turn back, to be released from this commitment, but a far sterner part keeps me going. I have waited too long to turn back.

  My adolescence in Sri Lanka was darkened by a shadow—a failure, I thought, within myself. While other boys would sit around bragging about their conquests with girls and fantasizing, I sat with them in silence, trying not to stare at the curve of their necks, the way their thighs flexed and strained against the thin cotton of their pants. The word “ponnaya” was dispensed with an upward curl of the lips, a fiery contempt in one’s eyes. I slowly came to realize that this word applied to a person like myself.

  Over the years of hiding these feelings, I gleaned enough knowledge to be aware that in the West things were a little better for someone like me. Coming to Canada held the promise of a great meeting with the one to whom I could say who I was. I don’t know why I thought of it as one person rather than a group.

  Now, for the first time, I am on a journey to look for him.

  My destination is the Royal Alexandra Theatre. A play called Torch Song Trilogy is running there. The waves this play is making in North America had reached me in Sri Lanka through Time magazine. It is an explicitly gay-themed work, where homosexuality is presented without apology, without obfuscation. I am sure I will find others like myself there, that somehow a connection will be made.

  Standing in the garden, I remember myself with sudden clarity, coming out of St. Andrew subway station, pausing in front of the glass-fronted Sun Life building, looking at myself for the first time through somebody else’s desire. I am wearing a pair of beige pants pleated in front, a brown belt and a red jersey shirt, tucked inside. Yes, there I stand, so terrified at what the future holds for me, yet my body, my very being, is transformed by the possibility of someone else’s love. I see myself as I walk along King Street, across University Avenue, past the Roy Thomson Hall, towards my destiny.

  Alas for my poor post-adolescent self, newly arrived in this country, I was going to attend a Wednesday matinee. The only people there were seniors, busloads of them brought in from I don’t know where for an afternoon on the town. I sat through the play in a haze of disappointment as the audience around me tittered and twittered and belched and fell asleep and ate candy. On the way back to Richmond Hill, I got lost, took the subway in the wrong direction, to the end of the line at Wilson station. Then I had to take it all the way back around the loop. I sat there looking at the image of myself flashing by in the window, lit from the fluorescent tube above, my features flattened out, my skin a washed out grey.

  I feel a great tenderness for this younger self. He is so painfully thin, the way his neck rises out of his shirt like a lily stalk, his hair so out of style, his very best clothes so shabby in comparison with those of the people around him. Yet at the same time I want to place my hand firmly on his arm. I want to say that this thing he seeks will be an entry not just into himself but also into this country. I want to tell him that the friends he will make through coming out will be the ones who will last; they will be the ones from whom he will learn the norms, the standards, the culture and the history of this country. With them he will attend protest marches, organize to demand the same rights as other Canadians, start to have an investment in this new land. They will be the first people he will tell about Sri Lanka, and thereby he will begin the long process of healing those wounds.

  A slight breeze has picked up in the garden now, the leaves of the elm tree shift and sigh, the cat chases after a butterfly, something my mother said returns to me. Before I put down the telephone, her last words were, “Never forget that Canada gave us the enormous privilege of being able to sleep through the night.” As I look around at the life I have built in this country, I touch my forehead briefly in salutation.

  May that always be so.

  Anna Porter

  A CANADIAN EDUCATION

  THERE ARE SO MANY other lives I might have lived. Sometimes I feel that I have merely borrowed this one. One day I may have to return it.

  There is the life I left behind in Hungary. It’s not a terrible life, though there are aspects of it I am glad I have avoided. My aunt Edie, for example, spent ten years in jail because she was judged guilty of taking part in the ’56 Revolution. Edie had helped the British embassy staff escape to London after their ill-advised assistance to students. She may also have taken part in the attack on the national radio station.

  She’s had a hard life, my aunt. Her sons were raised in state-run institutions while she tried to appeal her fate. Her younger son, who is my age, spends most of his time training peregrine falcons. I think he must have watched the birds from his grated window at t
he orphanage. He is still unsure whether to forgive his mother for missing his childhood.

  My mother believed I would have been in that jail too, had we stayed in Budapest after the revolution was lost. A childhood acquaintance was kept there until he was eighteen. Then he was executed.

  During my childhood I imagined I was a great Hungarian patriot. The stories I knew were all Hungarian stories. The thought that I would one day live somewhere else, speak another language, would never have occurred to me. I was, most of the time, in the company of my grandfather, a fantastic man who told riveting tales about our history, loved magic, played cheater chess, fought duels with brass-hilted swords, had hundreds of friends all over Budapest, and knew every street corner, every bridge, the remnants of every castle wherever we roamed. My world was circumscribed by the stories he shared with me.

  My grandfather had been a book and magazine publisher before the war, but above all, he loved poetry. Poets, he believed, could see the world more clearly than other people. He would recite long narrative poems while he shaved and I waited for our walk to one of his favourite coffee houses, where clandestine writers, revolutionary poets, former journalists, and other enemies of the Communist regime gathered and talked.

  Because he was my hero, I wrote poems. Many of them were long, with galloping rhythms and very predictable rhymes. When I finished a poem, I would present it to my grandfather and he would read it, nodding in appreciation. Sometimes he read out loud, slipping around the rhymes, letting the rhythm take care of itself. I think, had we stayed in Hungary, I would have tried to be a poet—perhaps not a particularly good one, but I would have persevered. Hungarians are famous for persevering. That’s how their language has survived in a sea of Germans and Slavs.