Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (6 page)

Both for myself and for my family, everything was unknown. My siblings in Buenos Aires had the same everyday references as their sons and daughters: they belonged to the same soccer club and read the same comic strips, sang the same nursery rhymes and told the same jokes. I had to learn at the same time as my children about Zambonis and first bases, doughnuts and Slurpees, about the dangers of licking a frozen metal pole and of jaywalking, about Mr. Dressup and Wayne Gretzky, as well as the names of our prime ministers and of the Canadian provinces
a mari usque ad mare
.

My children had little with which to compare the experience, my eldest daughter being only six when we arrived. I, however, felt constantly astounded by the relentless newness of it all. At the end of the Book of Deuteronomy, it is told that God led Moses from the Moabite plains to the mountaintops, and from there showed him the Promised Land that would one day belong to his children but that Moses himself would never possess. There will always be some aspect, some occurrence, some word or event in this country I now call mine that suddenly pulls me back, forces me outside, if only for a moment, to see it once more with the eyes of a foreigner: a view from the land of Moab. This does not happen often, but it happens. For someone who has lived in the chaotic worlds of Argentina, France, Italy, Spain and French Polynesia, with all their ordinary mad behaviour, the civil awareness and tidy obedience of the Canadian citizen appears as a different and far more astounding madness. During my first few years in Canada there were moments that seemed utterly unreal.

Shortly after my arrival in Toronto, I was riding a streetcar down Queen Street in a blizzard. At one of the stops a young man got on and showed his transfer ticket. The
driver told him it was no longer valid and asked him to pay a new fare. The man refused. The driver insisted. At last the man ripped off a handful of transfers from in front of the driver and stormed off into the snow. The driver got up, told us he’d only be a minute and followed the man down the street. We waited quietly
.

Presently, they came back accompanied by a policeman. The driver climbed back into his seat, and the policeman, turning the young man to face us, said to him in a stern but polite tone, “Now you apologize to these good people.” And to my amazement, the young man did
.

Friends of mine had a small daughter and, because both of them worked full time, decided to employ a Mexican
au pair.
Canadians are, by and large, terribly ill at ease with “domestic help.” They are uncertain of what role to play as employers, how to behave, what to say. My friends decided that, in order not to show any class distinctions, they would treat the young woman as one of the family. They shared their meals with her, invited her to watch television with them in the evenings, asked her to join them when they went out with friends
.

One day my mother, who had come over for a visit and had been kindly invited by my friends to lunch, followed the
au pair
into the kitchen and chatted away to
her in Spanish. Suddenly the young woman asked if she could beg a favour
.

“Of course,” said my mother
.

“Please
, señora,
don’t think I’m ungrateful. They are nice, they want me to eat with them, watch TV with them, go out with them after my work. But
señora,
I’m so tired. Could you please tell them to leave me alone?”

For a while I tried writing scripts for the CBC. One got produced, an episode in a series of stories on immigration, and I was asked to write another one. I suggested a story set among the Haitian taxi drivers in Montreal. My producer liked the idea but remarked that, since the theme was Haitian and I clearly was not, it might be best to work with a writer from that country. I needed the money, so I accepted, and was lucky enough to be paired with Dany Laferrière. The plot involved the racist owner of a taxi company and required that he blurt out a number of racist remarks
.

When we presented the first draft, the producer was horrified. “You can’t use the word
nigger
on television!”

“But the character is a racist,” we argued. “That’s what he would say.”

“Well, you can’t use it. Why don’t you find something else, less offensive?”

“Like what?” we asked
.

“Oh, like ‘coloured person,’ ” suggested the producer
.

Dany’s eyes sparkled. “OK,” he said with a dangerous grin
.

And in the episode, the racist boss, furious at his black employee, seems to choke on the words before he splutters, “You … you … you …
coloured person!”
The comic effect was stupendous
.

In fact, these astonishing episodes should not have astonished me. Civil manners irrespective of the occasion, utmost consideration for what the Germans laconically call
Gastarbeiter
or “guest workers,” officially instituted care not to offend another’s sensibilities: all these things that should be taken for granted in any society that dares call itself civilized surprised me in Canada because I had not encountered them elsewhere except by chance, in certain individuals, and not as the accepted social code of an entire nation. When many years later my son attended high school in England, he was amazed at the prejudice that manifested itself daily through comments on race, religion, sexuality and class. Not that such things were unknown to him in Canada, but, though the bleak prospect appears on the horizon from time
to time (the dark clouds of Ralph Klein, of Mike Harris, of Stockwell Day for instance), at least until now it has never been the official, generalized rule, a fact of everyday life.

Even more astonishing to me was the seemingly endless generosity of this country. Long ago, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, after a chance encounter at the Canadian stand, Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson had said to me, “Come to Canada someday.” I did not realize how sincere the invitation was until I arrived and enjoyed their help and friendship. Louise Dennys and Ric Young opened the doors of their house to us and let us live there until we found our own place. Geoff Hancock, then editor of
Canadian Fiction Magazine
, unselfishly introduced me to poets and editors. Jack Kapica asked me to write for
The Globe and Mail
merely on the strength of a positive review of my
Dictionary of Imaginary Places
. Damiano Pietropaolo invited me to produce a program for
Ideas
, which began a long relationship with the CBC. Renée Pellerin, with more confidence in my critical abilities than I had myself, gave me my first opportunity on television. Marq de Villiers offered to publish my translation of a Borges story in
Toronto Life
. John Krizanc, in a fit of absent-mindedness, suggested that I write for the theatre, which led
Richard Rose to workshop my
Kipling Play
twice: first with a wonderful cast that included Maggie Huculak, Tanja Jacobs and Stewart Arnott, and then again at the Stratford Festival. Bernadette Sulgit commissioned my first piece for
Saturday Night
where, later, Barbara Moon with uncompromising tenacity tried to teach me how to write journalism that was not pure fiction. Karen Mulhallen called me up and told me she’d like me to write for
Descant
. John Robert Colombo instructed me on the secret history of Canada. (Since I was familiar with none it, Canada’s entire history was of course secret to me.) Geraldine Sherman had me review theatre on her CBC arts show. Michael Creal asked me to teach a course on fantastic literature at York University. And all this in the first couple of years! Never before, in any of the other countries in which I had lived, had I received such a constant, unquestioning outpouring of friendly assistance and encouragement to try something new.

Novelty, opportunity, order, generosity define for me this vast country. But perhaps of all its aspects it is the illusion of democracy that attracts me most to Canada. I say “illusion” because we believe in it but are not quite there yet, and perhaps never will be. When our so-called Liberal government
pepper-sprays Canadian citizens to defend the interests of a foreign despot, when it builds a wall around the ancient city of Quebec to protect a group of politicians from the anger of the people, when episodes such as the stoning at Oka still take place, when Canada Customs retains the right to ban books, telling us what we can and can’t read, then the definition of
democracy
as applied to Canada must be questioned.

And yet, and yet … In spite of such infirmities, nowhere else have I had the sense of truly being a citizen, of feeling truly at home. The Greeks believed that a citizen was he who could claim that his ancestors had shed their blood on the city’s soil. Canada makes no such demands. It requires nothing but the contribution of one’s own experience. Its virtue (or its magic) lies in this, that it both assimilates and hands back the dowry of its newcomers, so that they can both expend and preserve whatever it is they bring to this country. Perhaps this is possible only because Canada has chosen to keep a low political profile (as reflected in the scarcity of Canadian news in the international press), a vision of cold vast spaces (apparent in the publicity of its tourist board), and a modest and open identity (which excluded it from my earlier imagination), so that in some sense Canada illustrates
the Second Law of Thermodynamics as applied to nationalities.

Why do I call Canada my home? After seemingly endless trials and adventures, Ulysses reaches Ithaca, the home he left so long ago that he barely remembers it. Is that old woman his wife? Is that young man his son? Is that toothless dog his dog? What proof does he have that this is not another of Circe’s spells, the vision of an imagining, a dream that no longer has the vagueness of a dream? How does he know that the place he now calls home is a place he has come back to? Can a traveller not come upon a foreign shore, to a city in which he has never set foot, and feel a pang of recognition, of acquaintance, suddenly able to guess what lies beyond that distant building and around that farthest corner? Can he not experience the joy of homecoming even if he is returning to a place in which he has never before set foot?

Now, when I think of homeland, I think of Canada. Nowhere else have I been persuaded of sharing in the
res publica
, the “public thing” that has to do with customs and language and landscape, with assumptions and open questions and something like faith in the prevalence of our better qualities. Nowhere else have I wanted to pledge allegiance to a
nation, to something beyond the individual, beyond a particular face or name. Nowhere else have I felt the need or the desire to claim myself part of a society whose brand new Constitution still declares its belief in what (in another of my constant childhood books) Robert Louis Stevenson once called “an ultimate decency of things.”

Michelle
Berry

BETWEEN TWO THANKSGIVINGS

S
IX YEARS OLD AND
running free in the fields in Virginia.