Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (3 page)

Coming to Canada is not the passage from hatred to civility that we innocently suppose it to be. It never has been. Frankly, some hatreds—of oppression, cruelty, racial discrimination—will be wanted on the voyage, and will be kept on our soil. There is nothing Canadian society can or should do about this. But Canada can keep to one simple rule of the road: we are not a political community that aids, abets, harbours or cultivates terror. So it is appropriate to say the following to newcomers: You do not
have to embrace all our supposed civilities. You do not have to assimilate to our forms of innocence. You can and should keep the memory of the injustice you have left behind firmly in your heart. But the law is the law. You will have to leave your fantasies of revenge behind.

M.G.
Vassanji

CANADA AND ME: FINDING OURSELVES

I
FIRST CAME TO
C
ANADA
as a postdoctoral fellow at the nuclear laboratory in Chalk River, Ontario. Having come from the United States and lived all my life in urban centres, I was quite under the impression that I had struck out far north into the woods. It was August and, as if to confirm my impression, the leaves were already beginning to turn yellow. On the way in from Montreal, the towns we passed looked small and laid back, and the people, when we had to stop, seemed grimly reserved compared with the Americans I had known. I felt apprehensive but venturesome, with all the cockiness of the city dweller. On my first day at work, when I was asked how I found my new surroundings, I answered that I felt a bit like David Livingstone, meaning, like a foreigner among natives in a far-off jungle place. I don’t know what shocked my hosts more, my estimation of the place or my inversion of the role of the native. It’s not so bad,
said one of them, red-faced, a British-born scientist.

And it wasn’t so bad, after all. In my new surroundings I learned to find pleasure in solitude and in the textures and colours of the forest; and although I couldn’t quite get a glow of emotion going at the sight of a flock of migrating geese in the fall and spring, or feel that twinge of hardy satisfaction whenever the minimum temperature had hit the legendary minus forty the previous night, I did learn to appreciate the sky and watch the stars. My neighbour was an amateur astronomer who most evenings took out his telescope into the backyard and turned it skywards. I did my watching by myself though, on dark clear nights, walking along the inky black Ottawa River, wondering about the lights that glowed so enigmatically through the windows of the toylike bungalows on the silent, empty streets, and always aware of the moon, if there was one, making its slow descent on the other side of the water, where lay the province of Quebec. I learned cross-country skiing in a town whose inhabitants sometimes skied ten miles to work, and one of whom actually cycled there in all seasons. During my second time out on the cross-country trails, when I had not slipped and fallen as many times as on the previous occasion, I walked back home with my skis on my shoulders
and, tropical boy that I was, removed my hat because I was feeling hot. The result was a crisp glazing of ice on my stinging red ears when I returned to my apartment.

Rents were cheap. Whereas I had lived in single rooms and studios the past eight years as a student, now I had a bright and roomy two-bedroom apartment all my own to walk around in. I read Pascal with my morning coffee. I did not have a television and patiently translated from medieval Gujarati texts during my spare time, and I began my first novel, of which I never finished more than the first two chapters. I suspect that my most recent novel was the final manifestation of that early attempt, which had been too close to my recent personal experiences as a student in the United States.

Deep River, the town where I lived, had a population of 5500 and was actually not more than three hours east on the highway from Ottawa; obviously it was far from the northern outpost I had imagined it to be. To qualify for my luxurious (as it seemed then) furnished apartment, company rules demanded that I be married. I had a fiancée in Boston and we had planned to marry the following year. For the sake of the apartment, my fiancée—who had come with a couple of friends to drop me off at this northern
frontier—and I decided it would not be a bad idea to marry, if only formally. So we went knocking at the house of the local Lutheran pastor. As a student I had gained the impression that Lutherans were liberal; their pastor at my university had been a woman. This one was a large, chubby man, and he agreed to marry two non-Christians the next day in church, with our two friends from Boston as witnesses. His wife, though, wore a severe suspicious look right from the moment we stepped out of that small, modern church. We did feel a little guilty, but we also respected the blessing we had received. The real, traditional wedding took place some eight months later.

Civilization for me meant Montreal, where I had some friends, and where my wife would come from Boston to meet me every few weeks. The bus back from Montreal left at nine
P.M.
on Sunday night, and I remember being amazed at the tearful partings of passengers who were going only as far as North Bay or Sudbury. The bus would drop me on the highway, in the still of the northern night, and I would walk my lonely way home on the main road into town. Once, I was followed all the way by a fox trotting along a ditch by the road; another time, the local police cruiser gave me a ride. And I recall, too, standing at the side of the highway at two-thirty a.m.
waiting for the bus to drop off my beloved, tired and sleepy, but undoubtedly happy.

Two years after my arrival, when my fellowship ended, I departed for Toronto, but not without a touch of sadness. I could not have spent the rest of my life in such a small and faraway place; nevertheless, I would miss this one. I did return to visit it a few times. Once while driving back, we had to stop for a couple of black bears in the middle of Algonquin Park. Now, I had seen elephants in the wild, and the sight of giraffe, zebra, and wildebeeste was routine fare on a road trip between Kenya and Tanzania. Still, those bears and that drive through Algonquin remain memorable. As memorable, and a bit embarrassing, was the occasion when a family of raccoons passed us late one night as we sat by a fire outside a cabin we had rented. We were so frightened, unused to these strange nocturnal animals, that they might well have been a pride of lions in the Serengeti.

Since those first years I have travelled from coast to coast in this country, from sea to shining sea, and by land as well as by air. My family and I have driven to the Maritimes several times, via Quebec City (where, much to our amazement, the Plains of Abraham were not as spectacular as we had expected but where we discovered an Indian restaurant worth making a special trip for),
and toured the charming picture-postcard coastlines of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. We have travelled by train to Vancouver, across northwestern Ontario (disappointingly scrubby), the endlessly flat Prairies that could mesmerize, and the simply spectacular Rockies. With Montreal we have a special relationship; it was the first Canadian city I ever saw, when as a student in Boston I bagged a ride to go there just for the heck of it. It was where my wife and I would arrange to meet, where I went to see civilization, as I called it. And so I believe I have seen the country as few Canadians have.

The foregoing is surely a satisfying immigrant story, especially if I conclude it with my subsequent career.

And yet. And yet, something else, someplace else never ceases to beckon, to claim a place in my heart. I am a two-timer.

When I hear the national anthem of Canada or even of the United States, I cannot resist the refrain tugging at my mind of
Mungu ibariki Afrika
, the first lines of the Tanzanian anthem, “God bless Africa.” This is not an affectation; I do not consciously dredge it up. It is a part of my being. It is a tic, it is unconscious, it is a love. I remain strongly attached to Africa, the continent of my birth; its music, the sight of its grasslands,
its red earth, or its mighty Kilimanjaro, stir me to the core. I have happy memories of my childhood there.

Is there something wrong with me? Am I a traitor? A wretched ingrate? Don’t I know that I am privileged to live in “the best country in the world”? Shouldn’t I be thankful for my freedoms, my high standard of living, my relative safety? Have I forgotten how I left my country—by stealth—and that I remained afraid for two decades to visit it? Hasn’t my adopted country Canada lavished generosity and recognition upon me?

There is some risk in what I write; for I have been invited as a Canadian writer to contribute to these pages, Canadian readers expect something from me, and they have a right to. They have been generous and given me a literary home. My work would have been an orphan without this country. But I believe for that very reason it behooves me to be absolutely honest, to bare my heart to them. We live currently in flag-draping times, as I see them, in which the flag is often the resort of the rogue and the huckster, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson. The red-and-white banner is used to sell anything from beer to sports clothing, politicians to news broadcasts, and historical, not to say moral, objectivity is often swept aside by the jingoism it has come to represent. This loud nationalism, like the ready applause of someone who always jumps to his feet at a concert, puts in a
difficult position those who would show their appreciation more quietly and perhaps with a more complex mix of feelings. I believe what I want to say is neither dishonest, nor treacherous, nor unpatriotic.

I am not afflicted by nostalgia. I have visited the land of my birth many times and have no illusion that it remains what it was in the past. The population has increased four times or more since I lived there, resulting in large unemployment; my family and a good part of the Indian community within which I grew up have emigrated; there are new ways of thinking, particularly an endemic dependence on foreign “donors,” that are reprehensible to me, brought up as I was on the concepts of self-help and dignity; foreign city-planners without adequate knowledge of my former city’s history or peoples have played havoc with its neighbourhoods. But it is still a place that feels, to some degree, like home. It is possible for me to pass for a local, raising no suspicions of a life overseas. And its pain is to some degree my pain.

A girl from Uganda writes to me (having received the impression from somewhere that I am a big philanthropist): I am eighteen years old, my younger brother and sister and I are orphans, our parents died of AIDS; please send me some money to finish college. Another one writes: My village in northern Uganda was raided,
my family was killed and I was abducted. I have managed to reach Kampala and need money to finish high school. There is no easy way to authenticate these stories, even if I could afford to send thousands of dollars.

What does it mean to be a Canadian? What does it mean for me to be anybody in the world? I have often been plagued by these questions of identity. I feel guilty—first, for not being an unequivocal Canadian, and for the impressions I must be passing on to my Toronto-born kids; and second, for living in relative affluence, worrying about material comforts in a land glutted upon them, spoiling those same kids silly, when the land that gave me birth and some of my happiest memories lives in such anguish of war, crime, corruption, deprivation. There are, of course, ways of giving back, of making a contribution. What I am describing, however, is a state of being, the guilt of the one who got away, the guilt of the survivor, if you will.