Passages: Welcome Home to Canada

by Michael Ignatieff

  Because I didn’t board at Upper Canada, I was spared the habitual canings and pedophile intrigues that were the price of living on the grounds. But unlike other “day boys,” many of whom lived nearby in opulent Forest Hill, I commuted ten miles each day from Etobicoke, and that fostered a split personality of sorts. My life contained two distinct worlds: a private school of ties and blazers and Anglican hymns, and a suburb of Popsicles, bikes and creeks. Torn between school and suburb, I felt like an imposter in both, never rich or cool enough to fit into cliquish Upper Canada, and a stranger to the ordinary life of suburban kids who wore jeans and knew girls. Between these two worlds was my father’s car radio, tuned to early rock’n’roll exactly half the time (he was scrupulously fair). This was the sound of America, pre-Beatles, and for my brother and me it was the first thing that felt truly ours. Elvis separated us from our parents, and from England, unequivocally. My mother was no square—she always liked “a good beat” and loved to dance—but she couldn’t stand the grease or the sneer. Elvis was the Spanish City.

  Meanwhile, another kind of rift had opened in my psyche. Soon after arriving in Canada, I remember playing with some neighbourhood kids in the dirt of a cinder-block foundation and being teased about my English accent. From then on I worked to eliminate it. At home, however, I maintained my cover. The crucial test came around words like “pyjama” and “banana,” with vowels that couldn’t be fudged. It’s not that my parents enforced the accent; they were always tolerant and eager to adapt. But at the time, speaking “Canadian” felt oddly sinful. Our family was never religious. God, like sex, was a subject not raised in polite company. The only thing resembling religion was our Englishness, an unspoken creed that prized a modest sense of superiority. It was good to have money, but not to flaunt it. Politeness was proof of good breeding. And excess of any kind was suspicious; sweets must not be too sweet or meat too well done, and large California strawberries were a reminder that fruit and vegetables had more taste “back home.”

  Food, of course, is central to any culture, and my mother’s cooking provided the most tangible link to the place that she and my father still called “home” two decades after emigrating. English cooking gets a bad rap for being tasteless and overcooked, but I have only good memories of my mother’s cuisine: steak-and-kidney pie with a hard-boiled egg, Atlantic-white flakes of milk-poached fin-and-haddie, roast-beef gravy poured into crispy towers of Yorkshire pudding. This was comfort food, and pudding was the operative word. Mother’s desserts shaped my sybaritic nature from an early age. I was forever spoiled by her un-American apple pie, sugared just past the edge of tartness. And so many puddings—steamed pudding in rivers of warm custard, bread pudding milk-sweet and soft, rice pudding with its tawny skin, the meringue loft of Queen’s pudding layered with raspberry jam, the pillowy depths of blancmange, the infamous Christmas trifle booby-trapped with liquor—not to mention the family-heirloom fruitcake, which was called Georgian Margaret for reasons no one can recall.

  For all its comforts, however, in cultural terms an English upbringing was a restricted diet. Other races were, at best, a curiosity. And Upper Canada College was then almost exclusively WASP, male and affluent. Our principal reminded us at every opportunity that we were being groomed to be “leaders.” What gave us this privilege was never explained. But one of the things about living among the sons of the ruling class is that you become immune to its charms. The really rich kids were often the most moronic. So I developed a casual contempt for money. By working as journalist, and for several years as a musician, I managed to avoid the wealth I had been trained to expect with noblesse oblige. And to this day, although I’ve developed a desire for money, I remain unimpressed by it.

  Attending Upper Canada College was like being the citizen of a small, privileged principality, a city state utterly aloof from the world outside the grounds. And the culture shock of leaving UCC was profound. At the University of Toronto, I enrolled at University College, where the majority of students were Jewish. At the time I’m not sure I knew what it meant to be Jewish, because the more noticeable difference in my environment was that, after ten years, I was finally among female students—girls sitting right next to me. I couldn’t believe it. Everyone else seemed to take it for granted.

  It was the late sixties. I would discover Jews, sex, drugs, rock’n’roll and communism. All at once: listening to Jim Morrison sing “Break on Through to the Other Side” while I made out on the grass of Varsity Stadium, on grass, with Barbara, a Jew who found it amusing that I wasn’t Jewish—Barbara who selected me, moved in with me, taught me the beauty of constant fucking, and left me six months later after I went home for Christmas without her. She’d said she didn’t mind not coming with me and, like an idiot, I’d believed her.

  Christmas was always sacred. But otherwise I lost track of England. In the righteous carnival of radical politics, I turned against my upbringing, my class background and—regrettably—my family. Our generation didn’t need a heritage; we were inventing our own. Bastard children of Marx and Freud, we imagined a world ungoverned by family or state, and found a place in the sun of psychedelic drugs, believing in nothing so much as the inarguable beauty of our youth.

  Still, one had to work. And for me, like my father, an accident of employment set my destiny. In 1971, after I’d apprenticed as a summer reporter at the Toronto Telegram, the newspaper folded. The city editor took me and a few of his young proteges to the Gazette in Montreal. I thought I was just getting a job, but in moving to Quebec, I became an immigrant once again, rubbing up against a culture that felt thrillingly foreign yet warm and welcoming. In Toronto, I had never once felt foreign; I’d melted into English Canada like a snowflake hitting warm pavement. But in Montreal, the difference was tangible. Embedded in the city’s geography, the two solitudes gave explicit form to my own sense of divided identity, which until then had felt internal, more of a dissociated mental state than a cultural condition. In Montreal there was clear demarcation between English and French, or as I saw it at the time, between outside and inside. Here was an opportunity to become truly déraciné. Like those English madmen searching out the heat of the noonday sun, I would fling myself into the world until I was as far from home as possible. But in Quebec, I would also feel my first real affection for a national culture, the first kiss of collectivity. I would adopt Quebec as a surrogate mother country, in the secret belief that Quebec had adopted me.

  I arrived as a radical journalist incubated by the New Left. After several years of campus politics, supporting struggles that were always happening elsewhere, it was like going into the field. With the most radicalized labour movement on the continent, Quebec was becoming a test tube of class war, a combustible mix of socialism and separatism. And I was infatuated, an Anglo yearning to go native. Everything sounded better in French, especially politics. The language of European Marxism, with words like débordement and petite bourgeoisie, had the harpsichord ring of high science. And I developed an ear for the funky slur of joual, the no-nonsense voice of our much-vaunted classe ouvrière.

  Learning a language as an adult turns you back into a child at the grown-ups’ table. Struggling to decipher conversation above the din of a bar, you look for openings. You rely on innocence and charm to get by, hoping that your blunders will be amusing. Rock-hopping from one familiar piece of vocabulary to the next, you learn to say what you can, not what you want, uttering whatever words come to mind until they form sentences. Now I speak French quite well, but I still find I’m a different person when I do so, someone younger and more naïve—more intuitive, even though French is considered a more rational tongue than English.

  The first time I really got French—that is, felt the language originate from inside of me—was listening to singer Robert Charlebois, Quebec’s original rock star. There’s something about music that lets you in. You process the words with a different part of the brain. And at the concerts of Charlebois, Pauline Julien and Louise Forestier, I
could melt into the embrace of this foreign culture until there was no line left between it and me. I’d felt the energy of a crowd at plenty of rock concerts, but this was different. There was a sense of articulate collectivity—perhaps not far removed from the parish harmony of a Catholic peasantry. Yet there was nothing provincial about it. It wasn’t about anthems or flags. The music was inflected with a transcendent whimsy. Charlebois, who fused rock’n’roll with the Latin rhythms of joual, was Quebec’s Dylan, Elvis and Jagger all in one. But he invested his “I’m a frog” status as a beau/laid icon with enough irony to deflect facile nationalism. When he sang of trois Amériques en unison, you imagined a kind of stratospheric parfait, something far more exotic than the club sandwich of sovereignty-association proposed by the PQ.

  To be in Quebec in the early seventies was like being in on the continent’s best-kept secret. Patronized by France and misunderstood by English North America, it was a unique culture, freshly awoken from generations of Catholic repression by the Quiet Revolution. It was a world of art, music and politics that combined the sophistication of Europe with the energy of America, and the only place you could appreciate it was from the inside, in French. So my infatuation with Quebec culture wasn’t groundless. At the same time, however, it was part of a romance with the Other.

  In Montreal, whatever double identity I’d developed as an English immigrant in Canada became wildly exaggerated. I lived between two worlds. At The Gazette, I became the labour reporter. (That quaint job description has since disappeared, absorbed by the rubric of “business” reporting. But at the time, after a general strike in the public sector, the jailing of the province’s top union leaders, and a wave of illegal walkouts and occupations, labour militancy had become the major threat to political stability in Quebec, and the best story in town.) While dutifully reporting on the class war for Anglo Montreal’s establishment paper, I also worked, anonymously, with a band of Marxist revolutionaries (nothing involving terrorism, in case anyone from CSIS is listening). I saw myself as a kind of spy, commuting back and forth across class lines. And I developed an irresistible urge to declare my true allegiance, to go over to the other side. I meant that in every sense—not just to quit the “bourgeois press,” but to go from being observer to actor, and embrace la patrie imaginaire of a country not yet invented.

  In other words, I was a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. A fault line was opening up in my psyche, which ultimately cracked under the pressure of a political crisis. It’s a complicated story, and I was an unreliable witness, so I’ll spare you the details. Let’s just say that I staged my resignation from The Gazette at a press conference. I went quite mad, and fled to Europe, where my lunacy burnt itself out in the volcanic islands of southern Italy. Back in Montreal, I became enchanted with an African drum group led by a Québécois and a Haitian. Whatever inhibiting mechanism in the brain prevents people from succumbing to outlandish desires seemed to have dissolved in mine. I studied voodoo drumming from the Haitian, dropped out of journalism, and returned to Toronto to join a band led by a singer who had just stolen my girlfriend.

  I realize this resumé is getting a little wacky, and I won’t take you through our Spinal Tap adventures on the road to ever-elusive rock stardom. Suffice it to say that eventually the band broke up, and I re-entered journalism. But touring as a musician involved another kind of emigration. Those years of playing small-town bars—working with my hands—were as close as I’d ever come to the working class I’d spent so much time talking about. Finally, I was déclassé; I had calluses. We played Up North and Down East, drinking all night with strangers in corners of Canada I would never have set foot in otherwise. Doing drugs with odd names. Playing a biker bar and hearing the crack of a pool cue across someone’s head above the din of the band.

  It was a dubious career, and one that couldn’t last. But at the time, playing music seemed the most honest way imaginable to make a living. Playing music is the essence of being inside. And making art is the ultimate repatriation of self. So even now, when I write about performance as a critic—a professional observer—I try to remind myself what it’s like to be on the inside looking out. The immigrant is someone who, by definition, is on the outside looking in, someone whose trip really begins after he arrives. And perhaps, through this circuitous passage—immigrating from one Canada to another and back—I had finally landed.

  In writing down the circumstances of a life, trying to connect the dots, you wonder what any of it has to do with anything. You want a life to add up, like a work of fiction. But what I’ve realized in trying to relate my rite of passage is that it’s ongoing—and that may say something about the nature of this place. Canada is elusive. It’s a shape-shifting country, a trickster nation that keeps forcing us to look inward to understand who we are. Yet for a long time I persisted in looking for answers elsewhere, anywhere but here.

  I have no family in Canada aside from my mother, wife and son. My brother lives in Oslo. My mother lives alone in the house where I grew up. There, the faces of my father’s ancestors adorn the dining-room wall, as a gallery of gilt-framed miniatures dating back to a certain Edward Johnson in 1694. Photocopied evidence of my mother’s Danish heritage recently arrived in the mail, sent by her brother. I learned that my great-uncle, Odin Rosenvinge, made his living painting Cunard ocean liners for postcards—ships that were the forerunners of the one that brought me to Canada. The documents also included a chart from the Yearbook of Danish Nobility, which traces my mother’s family back to royal roots in Denmark. My heritage, which I have tried so hard to escape, is beginning to look more exotic. Maybe I’m not English after all. For a moment I entertained the notion that I could be related to Hamlet, which might explain the touch of madness.

  On some level, we all emigrate in search of who we are. With or without a ship. Even if we never leave the country, we leave the family to create our own world. Then, at a certain point, when our past begins to loom as mysterious and undiscovered as any place on earth, we try to find our way back before it’s too late.

  Ying Chen

  ON THE VERGE OF DISAPPEARANCE (END OF THE CHINESE LETTERS)

  DEAR FRIEND,

  Your letter, coming from so far away, and after such a long silence, first brought me joy, then troubled me, even more so because I’m in the habit of granting the greatest attention to your feelings and opinions.

  I’m glad that even while successfully managing your affairs, you have found the time to read and reread the words of Kong Zi. The two activities should be very complementary, the link between them being so fragile.

  You believe that those who don’t read Kong Zi are not real Chinese. You seem to be worrying yourself about the moral education of my children, who weren’t born in the land of their ancestors. You imagine them in the company of robots, efficient but without souls. I remember, in times past, you weren’t preoccupied with moral questions. But now you treat us differently because we’re in the West and we run the risk, more than you, of sinking into decadence. I don’t know what to say about this. I have the exact same feeling of powerlessness each time a Westerner comments loud and clear about continental China’s political system. I don’t think a foreign country should be judged according to second-hand information. We can’t form a sensible opinion as long as a country and its people are strangers to us, when we don’t deign to learn their language, and when we haven’t shed sweat and tears on their land.

  Don’t worry: my descendants born into this land won’t be particularly demoralized. I admit that my children won’t read the words of Kong Zi (who is here called Confucius) right away. They don’t have to learn the science of governing or the necessity of obeying at their young age. They also don’t know the Bible yet, which has caused so many torrents of blood to flow. But already they can recite many ancient Chinese poems, and they watch the film The Little Prince every day. The Little Prince is an excellent moral lesson, accessible to the children and also to me. It portrays the principle o
f Love, as in all the holy books, but this work has a tenderness and sensitivity without equal, it teaches nothing but the art of living, it questions without resolving. It pleases me because a child is at the centre of the story, and not a sovereign.

  You regret the fact that after the Cultural Revolution a new elite left China. You consider this departure one more betrayal of the great tradition. You compare this gesture to the May Fourth Movement at the beginning of the century; you judge them both to be ill-omened. You don’t even distinguish the escape and disenchantment of the eighties from the madness of the sixties. You don’t untangle the causes from the effects. You prefer the fighters to the escapees. “Once gone,” you say, “this elite is quickly Westernized.” As you aren’t very objective in matters concerning me, it seems, you didn’t know to exclude me from this elite. And no one is unaware of the profoundly derogative meaning of the term “Westernized,” and the haughty tone of anyone who pronounces it. I left, therefore I’m Westernized, eliminated, lost, disappeared, finished. This is the fate reserved for traitors throughout history.

  To save myself from this situation, to elevate myself a bit, you have proposed a solution. You want me to be a double ambassador. You’re sure I’m not really a citizen of any place, so you wouldn’t hesitate to condemn me to eternal comings and goings. What I am on the inside is of little importance to you. The individual doesn’t count in Kong Zi’s book. You think my role is to represent. You want me to live for something bigger than myself. You don’t want me as an individual to exist.

  Many Westerners would agree with you: a “Westernized” Oriental doesn’t have the same charm or value. The West, just like the Orient, can at most tolerate the Other, but has no use for the transformed, the horrific by-products of globalization. (The subject is very hot right now, as though globalization were an event, as though it hasn’t been, since the dawn of time, a natural law, an inevitable process in the world’s evolution.) The linguistically transformed are sometimes the exception in a given political context. The “politically correct” is only “politically expedient.” It creates discontent without changing reality. And political correctness certainly doesn’t improve the fate of those in my condition. The sparks and flames of our vestigial selves, which in the end the “politically incorrect” can’t put out, will be finished off by the “politically correct” making them banal and ridiculous. The work of xenophobia is often completed by tolerance.