Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (13 page)

Alberto wanted to know if I’d ever considered moving to Canada. I replied that I’d always had a soft spot for Canadians, especially after the way Canadian writers and the Canadian government had championed my father’s cause and spoken out in support of him. I might even have explained that during my first visit to Canada in 1995, when I attended a PEN benefit in honour of my father, I’d had a drunken premonition that I would one day live in Canada. But when Alberto suggested that I consider moving there and told me that the government had a visa program that encouraged writers and artists to come and work in Canada, I recoiled from the idea. I couldn’t imagine upping sticks to a country I barely knew.

Over the course of the next year the idea grew on me. The more I struggled to find my voice, the more
I came to appreciate that a change of scene might help. So I began to reconsider—especially as I kept running into Canada’s growing literary profile. And the more I heard that this was due to Canada’s openness to writers from all over the world, the more attractive the Canadian option became.

I am watching my son sleeping. Somewhere in the corridors of my memory I can hear the words from a television documentary about the lions of the Serengeti.

When the cubs are old enough to fend for themselves
, the stentorian voice of the disembodied narrator is explaining,
their parents will chase them away and into the wild, where the young lions will roam until they are ready to settle down and establish a pride of their own. When it is ready to die, a lion will trek for miles across the parched Serengeti to the exact spot where it was born
.

The memory of these words triggers an old, recurring pang of guilt. My father sent me abroad so that I would return home one day and apply my expensively trained mind to the problems facing our people. But here I am in Canada, as far away from Africa as he could possibly have feared—and this after all the financial and emotional expense of my education, and after my father has been murdered for
trying to protect the idea and sanctity of our home and community. As the familiar feelings of betrayal well up, I find myself reflecting on those lions of the Serengeti. Whenever the past gnaws at my conscience, I try to calm myself with the thought that we are all lions on the Serengeti. Each of us, at some point in his life, has to leave home to establish his pride, to find a place of his own. Which, when you think it through, means that a lion never dies in the same place as its progeny.

I sometimes wonder, as I stare out of this window, at the U-turns, chance meetings, reckless gambles and inspired decisions on which our lives turn. Do we actively make choices or are we passive objects of the choices that fate imposes? Was it really some unconscious desire to return to Africa that sent me on this grand detour? Because of course the irony is that when I am in this room, I actually feel closer to home, to Africa, than I have ever done since I left.

I knew, the minute I set eyes on this room, that I wanted to live in this house. It is a small room, maybe ten by six, an annex of my bedroom. I say “I knew,” but it was as much an unconscious as a conscious decision. So many of the choices we make in life are informed by
our past, and I strongly suspect that my wish to live in this particular house was inspired by summer holidays spent loitering in my father’s study in an annex of
his
bedroom in Nigeria. I would scan the shelves of his library, plucking out any book that caught my wayward fancy, dipping in and out of its pages, reading indiscriminately—Swift, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Flitting from Soyinka to Senghor, between Achebe and Pepper Clarke, I would search for something to help while away the holiday until it was time to return to school in England.

The books on the shelves in here are familiar. I too have accumulated a library featuring Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clarke. I also have two books by the grand old man of African letters, the former Senegalese poet, soldier, priest and president Leopold Sedar Senghor. Monsieur Senghor was my father’s ideal of the Renaissance man,
l’homme engagé
, as Ken Saro-Wiwa liked to envisage himself. I’ve never actually read Senghor, but I bought his books anyway. I am conscious that this room is something of a shrine to my father, that it reflects an unconscious need to belong, to establish a connection with him and with
that
faraway home.

When I look around at the mess in here—the jumble of books, newspapers, passports, compact
discs and photographs—I see a pattern in the rug. I see the outline of my face, I hear the sound of a voice, barely audible, like a faint whisper carried on the wind. Take, for instance, the books on my shelves. They are not arranged in any particular order, but I know instinctively where to find every title. There is a method to this madness, because those books didn’t get where they are by accident. I remember why I bought each one, why and when I placed it, seemingly at random, on the shelves.

When I left England, I had to prune my library. I had far too many books, and I decided to leave behind the ones that had helped construct the identity I was no longer comfortable with. I spent hours trying to decide which books to take and which to leave behind, yet I still ended up shipping a hundred titles over. Books are deceptively heavy and these ones cost me far more than I could afford; but I brought them anyway, because I knew I was moving to a country that encourages you to bring your past with you. Even the books that have been added since I arrived here have a recurring theme: the quest for personal identity against the foreground of politics and the recurring echoes of history. You get a generous baggage allowance when you move to Canada.

There are two books in here that I carry around
with me wherever I travel. They contain a log of all the journeys I have made since 1995. My two passports record some of the places I travelled on my father’s behalf: New Zealand, Canada and the U.S., Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Ireland. I went to all these places in an effort to save his life. Even after he was killed, I carried on travelling, trying to understand what his life and death would mean to me. I went to Burma, to South Africa, back to Canada again, and finally to Nigeria to bury him last year. I still travel a lot—sometimes on his behalf but increasingly on mine. But wherever I roam, all roads lead back to Canada.

My passports also tell another story. In my Nigerian passport I am identified as Kenule Bornale Saro-Wiwa. In my British passport I am listed as Saro Kenule Bornale Wiwa. The official who issued my Nigerian passport last year informed me, somewhat gleefully, that he had to use the name that was on my previous Nigerian passport. So even though I had legally changed my name in 1993, the Saro-Wiwa name lives on in Nigeria. I will soon be eligible for Canadian citizenship and I toy with the notion of reclaiming the name if I apply for a Canadian passport. It’s only a fleeting thought, though, because the short answer to the question “Why Canada?” is that
I came here to discover and define who Ken Wiwa is. Canada, as it promised, has given me the space to reinvent or at least discover myself, and I now have a clearer sense of who this Ken Wiwa is and to whom and what the fellow owes his allegiance. That said, I am also aware that deep down there will always be a Ken Saro-Wiwa in me.

I often shrink from the realization that so much of my writing is self-centred. But I also suffer from the delusion that my experience reflects a wider, more universal, or at least Canadian concern. The world is shrinking so quickly, people are moving around so much, mingling and intermarrying, that we keep being told we now live in a world without frontiers—a global village. But I sometimes wonder whether it won’t be more important than ever to root ourselves in something, to identify with somewhere specific. We still need to fix our values in a coherent system, to believe in something—an idea, a community of shared aspirations perhaps. We have to lay down a default identity that we can turn to and cling to in times of confusion and bewildering events. As James Baldwin once surmised, too much identity is a bad thing, but too little can also be a problem.

I imagine that’s why the only shelf in my library that displays any semblance of order is the one
devoted to my father’s books and letters. My father roots me, reminds me of the place I came from. He is my default template, the clay from which I mould my image. And now that I have defined him, quantified his values and made sense of the questions he once posed to my sense of self, I can begin to look for my own answers. When I am in here, I feel reassured that he is close at hand, that I can reach over and reread his words, look between the lines, talk to him, engage in a debate with him. When I am in here, I am in my father’s study. I am also back in Africa. And I am in Canada. I am at home.

As I sit here typing these words, writing into the future, I am conscious of the folder that sits on the shelf with my father’s books. In that folder is a letter my father sent me from his detention cell. It was one of the last letters he wrote to me, and it contains the most important advice my father ever gave me:

I don’t mind you growing your children outside … you should use the advantages which your British experience has offered you to promote your African/Ogoniness …

Those words have become my mission statement in life. They define and sustain me in my quest to fulfill my obligations to myself, my family, my father and
my community. If Ken Saro-Wiwa had known how things would turn out for his first son, he probably would have substituted
Canadian
for
British
in that letter, because it is here, in Canada, that I found the space from which to express myself and begin the quest to promote my home.

Brian D.
Johnson

FROM THE LIGHTHOUSE

I
NEVER USED TO
think of myself as an immigrant. Not until my wife, who is Canadian-born, played the birthright card during an argument we were having about national unity during the last Quebec referendum. “But of course,” she said, “you’re not
from
here.”

I still have trouble calling myself an immigrant without some irony. We associate immigrants with the colonized and the dispossessed, whereas I came from the so-called Mother Country, home to the colonizers and the self-possessed. My family moved here, not to escape hardship or repression, but because an executive post opened up for my father at the Canadian branch of an English insurance company called the Pearl—the Pearl
Ass
urance Company, which had a more comforting ring than
in
surance. For us, it would always be the Mother Company, mother of pearl, cradle to grave. I’d lived just five years in England before emigrating. But it would take much longer to feel released from the embrace of empire, with all its
cozy intonations of class and race and gender. When we moved to Canada, England moved with us. And I wouldn’t shake myself free of it until my mid-twenties, when I “emigrated” a second time, from English Canada to Quebec. There, in a quicksilver romance with another culture, in the bright shock of difference, I caught a new reflection of myself—at home in my own skin—and finally left England behind.