by Pico Iyer
Toronto’s status as a seasoned veteran of multiculturalism derives in part, of course, from the fact that it belongs to Canada, which has been trying to define itself from birth. And through the kind of happenstance that does not seem coincidence, the city had long been home to a disproportionate number of the thinkers who had advanced farthest in imagining a world without borders. It was in Toronto, famously, that Marshall McLuhan invented the very notion of a global village, and, in his idiosyncratic way (which sometimes stumbled into clairvoyance), said that Canadians were especially “suited to the Third World tone and temper as the Third World takes over the abandoned goals of the First.” And it was in Toronto that McLuhan’s colleague in the English Department, Northrop Frye, had risen above all nationalities—having mastered the literatures of the world—to chart an Olympian map of human consciousness, and explain how all of us participate in a kind of universal imagination, in which our longing for winter and spring corresponds to sighs and rebirth.
After Jane Jacobs completed her definitive autopsy of the modern city, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in New York, it was to Toronto that she decamped, to try to make her theories live (the local government encouraging her in her efforts to devise a downtown of diversity in which supermarket and office block and residence and Russian teahouse would sit side by side, and so preempt the flight to suburbia that had led to what Glenn Gould, another Torontonian, called “1984 Pre-Fab”). And now Toronto’s latest writers were taking the mix into the twenty-first century, and into the soul, like Emerson’s Poet who “stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth.”
Yet as much as Toronto’s identity was formed by being Canadian, it was equally determined by the fact that it wasn’t Quebec. And as its longtime rival and neighbor only five hours away by car had noisily agitated for its own nation, and a state of fortress uniculturalism, Toronto had been pushed even further towards becoming a multiculture of the future (not least because of all the Quebeckers who now migrated there). “Here is peace country for all the world,” an Iranian in Toronto once told me, summarizing the ideal image of Canada’s relation to the world; yet now, 7 million of the country’s 29 million citizens were threatening to withdraw into a different past and to fashion what they called (with typical uncertainty) a “sovereign Quebec inside a united Canada.”
Thus the discussion of how best to matchmake cultures—the terms of separatism and federalism—were on the front pages every day, and every other Canadian, at the breakfast table, seemed to be addressing the issue of whether to make a stew, a salad, or an alphabet soup of the neighborhoods around them. Montreal, the largest city in French Canada, was threatening to secede from the secession, so as to ally itself (for economic reasons) with a country whose language it claimed not to speak, and Francophone immigrants to Quebec were complaining they were being cheated of the chance to learn English. Anglophone newcomers to the French-speaking province found themselves, quite literally, neither here nor there, and First Nation tribes were saying that if Quebec could have a separate territory, so could they. For many recent immigrants, who’d come all the way to Canada to leave civil wars behind them, the global debate here had thrown them into the middle of a struggle more civil, perhaps, but certainly no less divisive.
One day, at lunch with a couple of television executives, pursuing a vision of Toronto as the new World City, I learned that one of them (speaking with an accent I couldn’t begin to place) was an English-speaking refugee from Montreal. He had, moreover, lived in England for a while, and—so we discovered—studied in the same college as I, at almost the same time. England, he told me later over drinks—almost amused, I think, to be saying this—had been his version of the New World, his way of escaping a Canada to which his family had imported far too many memories.
“Growing up,” he said simply, “it was just too hard to bear.” His parents were from Hungary—Jewish—and had come here only because they survived the camps of World War II. “So I had this past,” he said, “which was a giant wound, and with which I didn’t really feel a connection, and my parents were always trying to instill that very identity into me. They sent me to Orthodox Jewish school in Montreal; they talked to me in the very language that had almost been the death of them. So I became an Anglophile: I can still remember, at the age of eleven, reading The Times of London and learning about Oxford. For me, I think it was a way of creating a new identity.”
“But when people ask you where you’re from, what do you say?”
“Oh, the usual hesitations and qualifications.” (He’d learned that much in England, I thought.) “Usually, I don’t say anything at all. It’s like when people ask, ‘Are you happy?’ I’m completely speechless.”
Yet I could tell that he turned these questions around and around in his mind, like the sheets he needed to make himself comfortable in to sleep.
“Sometimes, of course”—he looked up for a kindred spirit—“I just lie.
“But I can still remember, vividly, going to become a Canadian citizen,” he went on. “I was nine, and I had to swear on some book—because we were Jewish, it couldn’t have been a regular Bible.” And then the oppression of an upbringing that belonged to another world—one not just abandoned but destroyed—and his parents, through the press of memory and sorrow, forever lost in the culture that had tried to kill them. “I felt as if I were a living memento mori of some sort,” he said almost helplessly, “in this congregation of blue tattoos.”
His mother had been forced to work for nine months in Auschwitz, he began telling me, as the bare-midriffed girl in the trendy bar around us switched the channels on the TV. His uncle had survived with false papers in Budapest, only to be “liberated” by the Soviets to work in Soviet labor camps. His relatives were exiles two times over by the time they arrived in this land of foreigners.
“My uncle escaped by jumping over a wall and getting on a boat to come to Montreal. But now he’s getting older—he’s in his eighties—and all his dreams are of that time, and how he failed to save his mother and father. When I go to visit him, it’s all he can talk about.”
My new friend had gone to England, he said, to fight free of that prison of memories, though he had found, not surprisingly, that the Old World is not very open to people writing new destinies for themselves, especially if they’re Jewish and coming from the colonies; he’d come back here, and tried to escape again, by moving from Montreal to Toronto.
He looked so much like my image of a classic Canadian that I realized, with a start, all the stories I was missing, and all the pressures that an “invisible minority” suffers in part because they’re not written on his face; few people would extend to him the kind of allowances they might to a newcomer from Kigali or New Delhi.
“I suppose ultimately you’re a cosmopolitan,” I said. “I mean, you don’t really identify yourself with any of the places where you’ve lived.”
“Rootless cosmopolitan,” he said with a trace of bitterness. “That’s the term they used to derogate the Jews. You know, that whole sense that they had no homeland except in money.”
Before he left, though, he said something else, in his searching, slightly melancholy way. “There was only one time I found a home—just once: in a dream.
“I used to keep having this dream of running, running, at nighttime, down a country lane, and being scared. And just this once, I was running down a dusty road, and there were hedgerows on both sides, and then I must have jumped over or something, because I found myself in a deep valley.
“There was a camp there, a tribe of some sort. And I thought—in my dream—This is what it means to be at home. This is what the feeling is.”
• • •
Writers, of course, by their nature, draw upon the past—it is, almost literally, the inner savings account from which they draw their emotional capital. But in Toronto, this force of memory had a particular charge because, for so many of its
newest novelists, the past lay across the globe, and some of them had come here expressly to abandon it, some to play out its sentences in new surroundings. How much you imported of your previous life, how much you left behind—that seemed, in many ways, the central question Toronto raised (and with an intensity even stronger than in America, where so many of our “immigrant” tales, from Amy Tan, say, or Philip Roth, are the work of second-generation foreigners).
A writer like Rohinton Mistry, for example—for me, the sovereign Indian novelist of our times—lived, to all intents and purposes, in the Bombay of twenty-five years ago, even though he spent his nights in a suburb of Toronto. He’d been here for more than half his life now, having migrated to Toronto to work in a bank at the age of twenty-three; and yet, in some fundamental way, this gentle, modest soul had never really unpacked his bags. All his fiction was set in a particular corner of Bombay in the 1970s, and he could see that corner more clearly, no doubt, for not being distracted by the Bombay of the nineties. Some Torontonians doubtless felt that Mistry should not count as a Canadian, though Greg Gatenby, ever the fervent advocate for Canadian identity, told me he’d recently written an outraged letter to The Times of London, after it had referred to “the Indian writer Rohinton Mistry, currently living in Toronto.”
Mistry might not be writing if he hadn’t come to Canada, Gatenby protested patriotically; he’d been given grants by the Canadian government and first been published in Canada. He’d even received his first break, while at night school, in a University of Toronto writing competition—enjoying the New World’s penchant for offering second lives. He’d met his wife (like himself, from the tiny community of Bombay Parsees) in Toronto, and even, by chance, found the suburb where he lived now filling up with tandoori houses.
“There are many Canadian writers who are happy to celebrate and talk about their ethnic backgrounds,” said Gatenby, “but they do so from a Canadian perspective.” A young writer like the Sri Lankan–born Shyam Selvadurai could never, he said, have written about gay life in Colombo if he had stayed there. Canada was his liberating force. Besides, “the immigrants who are still living in the Old Country while they’re here don’t like Mistry or Nino Ricci. These writers will tell you that they get their most welcoming reception from outside their community.”
Ricci, in fact, had just completed a trilogy of novels explicitly describing how the sins of the Old World seep across the blank spaces of the New, like blood across a sheet. The hero of his tale—Vittorio Innocente—is an Italian emigrant whose mother dies while delivering an out-of-wedlock baby on the passage over (the postmodern version of the classic foundling), and so he arrives in Canada an orphan. In the last book of the set, Vittorio (now Victor) finds himself driving around a city of the displaced, in his father’s Oldsmobile, unanchored and slipping ever closer to his half sister, till the shadow of classical incest rears up on bright and secular College Street.
Going back to the sleepy village that his mother had fled under a cloud, he finds that the past can’t be put to rest because it’s been lost in translation, or rewritten by other hands. His life is condemned to a “double foreignness” between the “near-odourless newness” of Toronto and an ancient stench he cannot shake.
Reading Ricci’s haunted novel—Catholic priests suddenly looming up on him like specters from the past—I thought that if the essential question that America asks of every newcomer is, “What will you do with your future?” Canada adds to it the more difficult one: “What will you do with your past? How much will you abandon everything that’s made you what you are, and become a Canadian (whatever that may mean)? How much will you drown your past in a sea of thousands of other pasts?”
The ache of immigrants everywhere—themselves a kind of fiction—was complicated in a place that made the Faustian compact central: give up what makes you special, and you can gain a whole new world.
If you visit Toronto on the printed page, you will soon find that, for many of its “visible minorities,” the city is too much a part of the Commonwealth—too close to Britain and Australia and South Africa—in all the worst ways: so attached to its own white past that it refuses to make room for more colorful ones, or, under a semblance of tolerance, encourages only their exotic elements (“Racism with a smile on its face,” as the black Canadians call it). “Is the warmth I does miss,” says a Trinidadian in Neil Bissoondath’s sharp, sad collection of immigrant tales, mostly set in Toronto, Digging Up the Mountains; another says, “Everybody’s a refugee, everybody’s running from one thing or another,” though in the fiction of V. S. Naipaul’s nephew, almost none of the “wanderlost” from the “urchin nations” ever ends up anywhere. Bharati Mukherjee, in “The Management of Grief,” writes witheringly of “Multiculturalism” experts with “textbooks on grief management” trying to put into boxes the feelings of Indian women recently widowed after the bombing of the Air India plane, and stranded in a country where they’ve never handled money before or (being well brought up) spoken their husbands’ names aloud. (Writing of the insults and indignities she suffered there, Mukherjee fled Toronto, with her partly Canadian husband, for Atlanta, of all places, and then New York and California.)
“Something is very awry in this beautiful country, where the cauldron of race relations is boiling over,” I read in Cecil Foster’s A Place Called Heaven, though I couldn’t help noticing that never once in his 321 pages did the Barbadian novelist acknowledge that the “Canadians” he was so broadly condemning are now often of Indian or Chinese or Peruvian origin (and his attack on multiculturalism was written with the help of Multiculturalism Canada and the Canadian Arts Council). The very “Heaven” he invoked in his title was a reminder that “Heaven” had been a code name for Canada in the Negro spirituals of the nineteenth-century—the “North Star” spoken of by Martin Luther King, the new life waiting for blacks at the end of the Underground Railroad—and it made me wonder if Foster was simply accusing Toronto of not being Utopia.
In the classic works of multicultural beings—those of Rushdie, say—Global Souls are seen as belonging to a kind of migratory tribe, able to see things more clearly than those imprisoned in local concerns can, yet losing their identity often as they fall between the cracks. A Global Soul is a ventriloquist, an impersonator, or an undercover agent: the question that most haunts him is “Who are you today?” But in many of the Toronto novels that are flooding through the literary world now, such visions are placed in a more positive light by being set in the context of a whole city made up of such free agents.
In Anne Michaels’s radiant novel Fugitive Pieces, Toronto is an “active port”—a New World Athens, in which “almost everyone has come from elsewhere … bringing with them their different ways of dying and marrying, their kitchens and songs,” and it is a place where the very words of English allow a survivor of the Holocaust to enter “an alphabet without memory.” As one of her protagonists—a translator, of course—dutifully re-creates his study in Zakynthos, he knows that some of the rooms around him are looking out on Maharashtra, and others are plastered with pictures of St. Lucia. Each, in a sense, is importing his own past, but the whole they are making is a brand-new kind of future. Even the palindrome they flourish like harlequins—English is their new toy as well as their chance for a new identity—looks towards a hope: “Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?”
• • •
My friend from Hungary (who sounded neither Hungarian nor Canadian nor, really, English) had told me that it was important for me, if I was interested in globalism, to make a trip to Honest Ed’s, a landmark in the history of Toronto immigration. It was a block-long superstore that sat in the middle of Bloor Street like a homemade Kmart, pulling in immigrants from around the city with its absurdly inexpensive deals perfectly tailored to an immigrant’s needs (Ed Mirvish had been known to sell a whole island once for $2.19—even less in American dollars—and a cruise for two for $1.99).
When I arrived at the pla
ce, hectic with carnival slogans and handwritten signs all over its exterior—WHITE SLICED BREAD 29¢; 900 GRAM BAG OF WHOLE GREEN PEAS 39¢—its turnstiles were already spinning with customers early on a Sunday morning (sometimes, I’d been told, there were traffic jams at 4:00 a.m. around the discount palace, in honor of one of its all-night sales). Virtually every square inch of window space, on all the walls that looked out onto the street, was plastered with old newspaper clippings and yellowed photographs reciting the legend of “Honest Ed.” Immigrants everywhere are the ones who run stores for other immigrants, in a kind of oral tradition whereby yesterday’s newcomer knows exactly what today’s or tomorrow’s will need (international phone cards, tax advice, pieces of luggage, and tickets home); what Mirvish seemed to be offering was a version of the classic immigrant tale—the American Dream—with Canadian trimmings.
His story played out, therefore, like an old-fashioned movie made by some immigrant to Hollywood, and affirming the power of hard work and dreaming and good old-fashioned chutzpah. The industrious son of a failed encyclopedia salesman from Kiev, Ed Mirvish had begun working in his father’s tiny grocery store when he was nine (I read in the clippings); at fifteen, he’d dropped out of school to take the whole place over. He’d sold his wife’s insurance policy to rent a little space on Bloor Street in 1948—open only one afternoon a week—and he’d worked for twenty hours a day, year after year, to turn his little property into a kind of retail Lourdes of Toronto, where he had been known to hand out dollar bills to the poor and to lease out Lincoln Continentals to people who dreamed of following in his footsteps (buying his first Oldsmobile for ten bucks).
When the Royal Alexandria Theatre had come close to going bankrupt, Honest Ed had charged in to rescue it and restore it to its former glory; buoyed by that success, he’d gone across the water and bought the Old Vic in London, too, over the disapproving murmurs of the Anglo Old Guard (all this was told on the walls of his store). He’d opened six restaurants, big enough to seat 2,600 people and, true to his newcomer’s sense of propriety, had insisted on a dress code in some of them, so that (the legend said) he’d turned away a troupe of Boy Scouts, and denied entrance to some Chinese diplomats, for coming in without a tie. Even now, the septuagenarian millionaire—according to the paper’s twice-told tales—was at his desk every day by 8:00 a.m. and signed every check in his $55 million-a-year empire.
