Am I a Canadian Writer?

One is tempted to say it doesn’t matter. Art is art, it needs no label or brand. You write because you must, not to raise a flag or beat a drum. Alone with yourself, you bare your soul, and that’s who you are. To which I answer, But that is simplistic; you need to be read, you need to be seen, or you don’t exist. You are an unseen star in an unseen galaxy; a hypothesis, a possibility.

To elaborate my question, I ask myself, You are a Canadian citizen, a novelist living and recognized in Canada, but are you a Canadian novelist? To which I respond, But what is a Canadian novel?

The answer would have been obvious once—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Margaret Laurence, Robertson Davies would come to mind. Their novels are historically, quintessentially Canadian, produced from the soil where the ground turns white every winter and the leaves turn colour in the fall. And the call from England or Wales or Scotland is audible. In today’s parlance, and with history under revision, these might be called “white Canadian” works now, or Canadian Settler works. Whatever one calls them, their authenticity as Canadian can hardly be questioned. Similarly so, now, for works by Indigenous Canadians and those African Canadians who have lived on this soil for generations. Besides recognizing its neglected peoples and certain ignored facets of its past, the country has also changed in other ways, is changing rapidly all the time, adding more people and more cultures, stirring up a multitude of ideas and interests that are often conflicting. To look for an essence, therefore, a core, a singular notion of Canadian­ness within the maelstrom is surely to try and grasp at an illusion. One is reminded of the fable of the three blind men who encounter an elephant: each man puts his hand on a part of the animal—an ear, a leg, a tusk—and concludes that it defines the whole. Or think of Zeno’s arrow: no sooner have you put your finger on it than it has moved on.

As the nation, so the novel, you would think. There’s no longer an essence or a trait that defines a Canadian novel. And yet some novels are regarded more Canadian than others, which are welcomed into the pantheon more like foreign guests. It is still possible to be told, When will you write a novel about Canada? Or, This novel is your most Canadian. Or even to be asked point­blank, Do you consider yourself a Canadian? Painful questions for the author, but honestly meant, asked by “real” Canadians. I’ve encountered all three during my tours. Not long ago a few literary critics, anxious to defend the purity of Canada’s national literature, came out with their calipers to adjudge the Canadian­ness of foreign­born authors like me who had arrived recently in large numbers and wrote about elsewhere and were receiving attention in the metropolises. And had the temerity to win prizes as Canadian authors.

The cultural world, though liberal and even radical in many ways, is otherwise notably conservative and self­preserving.

However, the question I have posed—Am I a Canadian writer?— is not my plea for inclusion; I ask it—to play the devil’s advocate—of myself.

In those dark moments of self­doubt that come periodically to visit any writer, those of us whose world came apart during their lifetimes—into the past and the future, “here” and “there”— and who consequently often bear the weight of an undesired hyphen or an extra description or label—are sometimes called upon to ask ourselves, Whom do you write for? Who is your audience? Where do you fit in? And even: Who cares?—what do you have to say that is relevant to this nation, to the world raging around you in all its complexity and tumult? You could have become a doctor and saved lives, an engineer and built roads. As you are, you come from the fringes of world affairs and now live in a small country as a so­called minority. Who will read you, after your adieu? What trace will you leave behind? If you’re read at all, where and as what? In a Canada where you sputter out in frustration, I am no more ethnic than you are, I am not a professional multiculturalist, a token, an “of­colour” fulfilling a diversity quota, a tick­mark on forms demonstrating Canada’s liberalism and goodness? Where you assert, I am not an immigrant writer, my writing is not immigrant, it emerges out of my being, my experiences, my knowledge? Where—be honest—a new generation edges you out, ever current with the times and angst­free, for whom there is no “there” but only“ here,” no loss but only gain? Perhaps, you comfort yourself, there will be a corner of recognition for you in the country you left behind, which occupies an indelible place in your heart; but are you any more relevant over there? Who are you now? Where do you belong?

Traditionally, a new Canadian or American—an immigrant— was someone who departed the shores of his native country, set foot on the new soil, and kissed the earth; the old life was behind him, to be forgotten. At least, let’s assume this for the time being (forgetting the special privilege of those who arrived from Western Europe and Great Britain and maintained at least a cultural continuity with their homeland). Succeeding generations of immigrants adapted, spoke the language and idiom, played baseball or hockey or football. We know they were not completely integrated, often living in their own neighbourhoods—for example, Irish, Italian, and Greek—and identified by certain characteristics. They bore the brunt of discrimination, but that was par for the course. This is the traditional model of immigration, as neat as a theorem and as comforting, lending to the sociology of immigration a veneer of mathematical sophistication.

Canadian literature, correspondingly, would be characterized in this traditional picture by something essentially Canadian, revealing the existential nature of this northern nation; you might think of the theme of survival à la Atwood; you might think of nature—the cold, the wilderness, the Prairie, the mountains, the Atlantic; you might think of a certain, privileged kind of colonial inheritance that is manifest, for example, in the celebration of Victoria Day and the presence of the Union Jack as an emblem on provincial flags. There is the Prairie­grandmother novel; the growing­up­in­the­Maritimes novel; the World War I novel; the cool­thirty­something or forty­ something Vancouverite novel. These are all accepted Canadian themes, to which presumably the new Canadians would adapt or add even if it took a generation or two.

Recently in Canada, however, this picture of cultural assimilation has been softened by immigrants arriving from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Near East, and elsewhere. Canada is a self­proclaimed multicultural nation. It has devoted government departments to promote this idea. Undeniably this policy has fostered a national attitude, albeit imperfect and not always uniformly, of cultural and racial tolerance. No longer does a woman wearing a sari feel nervous in the streets; a Sikh can proudly wear his turban and kirpan in public; the halal sign is recognizable and the hijab is just about accepted; it is all right to be heard speaking in your native language. (This does not prevent some nut from attacking you for making yourself so obviously different.) Racism exists, no doubt, but to a much lesser degree and is less overtly threatening.

And yet, isn’t this multicultural space, which we may define as allowing people to be as different or exotic as they wish, simply a waiting post, a holding area for immigrants, a quarantine to hold the alien virus and keep the peace while succeeding generations have time to emerge fully integrated and assimilated? Tolerance aside, what a joy to behold a young Canadian of Asian or African background speaking an accepted Canadian English dialect (which the aficionado might detect as West Coast or Albertan, small­town Ontarian, or Italian or Punjabi Canadian); and how irritating, the contentious parents who claim their version of English is as good, if not better, who follow cricket but not hockey, and disappear to Chandigarh or Porto in the winter. How nice to see Sikhs discussing hockey, an African Canadian playing in the NHL and good at it! And how annoying those Asians who gang together on campuses, oblivious of everyone else. Who belongs to multiculturalism except the new immigrants, those whose mother tongue is not English and who have not quite grasped mainstream idioms and ways and can therefore be only half­formed Canadians?

In the same vein one may interrogate the significance of a novel that is set in India or Africa, for example, and is hailed— for the present—as Canadian and even receives a national prize. Does that novel say anything about Canada? Anything about its history, its politics, its societal concerns, its character and psychology; its landscape? Or does it, after all, belong to that space of the half­formed, in a perpetual winter of discontent? How will future generations of Canadians relate to it?

It is legally correct to say that a novel by a Canadian citizen is a Canadian novel, no argument. A book by a Kenyan writer who has never set foot in Canada is not a Canadian novel. This citizenship test is a safe criterion, it gives us an outer limit, tells us at least what cannot be called Canadian. But are three or five years, after which one stands before a judge, swears loyalty to the Queen (now King), and obtains a piece of paper and a card, enough to automatically produce a Canadian sensibility, a work of literature that can be called Canadian? Can an artistic sensibility be naturalized, given a new passport, in a mere five years?

It can be argued that any work of fiction or poetry produced in Canada is different in spirit from a similarly themed work written elsewhere; say a novel set in Bombay about a family crisis regarding inheritance. But is that difference significant enough or is it slight and incidental? What does it take, how many years of naturalized citizenship, to produce that significant difference, a Canadian trademark? If in the future some critic were to examine Canadian literature of the past, would they consider Rohinton Mistry, whose work is set almost entirely in Bombay, or Harold Sonny Ladoo, whose work is set in Guyana, to take real examples, as Canadian writers? If they trawled through the works of these novelists, would they bring out nuggets or essences of Canadian­ness? Will they think of Ann­Marie Macdonald or Margaret Atwood in the same vein? Don’t we think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as Colombian, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett as Irish? Was Vladimir Nabokov really an American writer? And do we really think of Joseph Conrad as authentically English? The Poles have claimed him wholeheartedly. And so, whom are we fooling with our generous, inclusive definitions of Canadian literature? Are they not merely convenient and all too temporary—while we wait for the one­hundred­percenters, the children of these immigrants to grow up and relate truly Canadian experiences, born from the soil?

A young writer of Chinese descent declared to me once how fed up he was of stories of ghosts and bound feet and Chinatown; he was impatient to tell Canada and the world his own notion of Chinese Canadian­ness—dominating mothers, conflicts between the sexes, pressure to excel, gender politics.

Not long ago, whenever I passed through Toronto’s Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood, pulsating with new life, the mosques, the kabab shops, the supermarkets, the girls in hijab, the boys playing cricket, boys and girls emerging from the schools or cashiering in the supermarket, I would think enviously about the stories hatching there. They would assert a new Canada. Stories such as those told in previous decades by Mordecai Richler, grandson of Jewish immigrants, memorializing St. Urbain Street, Montreal, and Maxine Hong Kingston writing about California. At such moments, watching a new world take shape before my eyes, contemplating the literature that would inevitably emerge from the minds of some of these kids, and realizing more and more that that other world across the ocean that was similarly mine is no longer retrievable, I wonder if I have a home, as I thought I had, as I like to think I have every morning that I wake up.

The boys and girls I watched not long ago in the “immigrant” suburbs have grown up. They write stories inspired by their lives in their modest neighbourhoods of densely packed high­rises or the quiet suburbs of new houses and neat, treeless front lawns. In a recent collection of poetry and fiction called Feel Ways[1], young authors from diverse backgrounds proudly claim a part of Toronto—Scarborough—mainly inhabited by new Canadians and long disdained as “Scarberia” by the downtown cultural snobs. Groomed in writing schools, versed in the new jargon of diversity, self­definition, and antiracism, they operate in a different ethos of collectivity, tied firmly to each other in the world of social media. Not for them the lonely artist agonizing over words and sentences. Message matters, labels matter. Inspired by the protests of Black Lives Matter, encouraged by a sudden epiphany—or guilt—in the white world that ignored their parents, they are ready to overthrow conventions, and turn history on its head. Similarly, a group of young, savvy Chinese Canadians make a claim on the generic Chinatown, its past and future, in the recent anthology Reimagining Chinatown[2].

What of us then, in the face of this new generation of self­ promoting revolutionaries? We had our time and we learned to let time take its inevitable course into today.

For writers of my ilk, I return to the statement I dismissed at the beginning of this chapter—but at a grazing angle this time and with some acquired wisdom. For me to go on writing, it should not matter how I am viewed, where I belong. I cannot pick up the pen or laptop, I cannot honestly call myself a writer of fiction if I consciously strive to demonstrate in my writing my credentials as a Canadian or African, a Muslim, Hindu, or Sikh, or anything in particular. Others can use labels to describe writers such as I am for their own purposes—theses, academic papers, editorials have to be written, after all—but I cannot work under the shadow of a label. It would make me want to scream for my freedom. In my generation there was often pressure—words of advice—to write a “Canadian” work in order to get accepted. Such a work was more immediate to the “Canadians,” whom it moved and validated, and it got attention. But the result of succumbing (not everyone did) to such pressure resulted, I believe, in the disaster of the “multicultural” novel or poem, in which the author strives to show their Canadian­ness, using clichés and propaganda from immigration brochures and cringe­producing words of gratitude to the nation. One imagines the patronizing smiles and the tearful gratitude that greeted them. Today the “diversity” novel or poetry collection catches attention. But surely, doing your honest best is sufficient tribute and contribution? What needs to be said will get said.

What does it matter what you call me, or what posterity will take me for—if it will at all care to read me? This is what I am: I live on such and such a street, in Toronto or Winnipeg or wherever; I have lived before in other places that I could name for you; I have brought up children, I pay my taxes, contribute to a few charities, try to mow my lawn regularly. I clear the snow, though I tend to wait a little in the hope that the sun will come out and do the job for me. Here is what I can write, this is what the inspiration was, where it took me: a street in Dar es Salaam, a fishing village in Ghana, a cane plantation in Guyana, a tenement in Calcutta. And yes, a neighbourhood in Toronto or Surrey or Burnaby in BC, where people from such countries live alongside others born in Canada.

The discussion should end there, and it does for me. But once in a while one likes to play the polemical game and go further, in a way that does not matter to one’s creativity but helps to address questions outside of it.

And so, one asks: Isn’t there any way, then, in which I can be truly Canadian?—not out of the kindness or generosity of other Canadians—which let us admit gratefully has been there— but essentially Canadian, so that a person in Berlin or Tokyo, for example, or Nanaimo or Cornerbrook, two archetypically Canadian places traditionally, would look at one’s work and say, Yes, of course it is Canadian! If so, we have to define a new, adulterated, and more sophisticated essence of Canada.

One might define and truly recognize a category of writing and a phenomenon called the “Canadian Postcolonial.” Those writers like myself whose work could be described by this term emerged mainly from the milieus of the former British and French colonies—places that appear far away and alien; we create and tell the stories of those places and their people—many of whom belong in Canada now—that have not been told before, or did not have a ready reception in the metropolitan cultural centres of the world. We are historians and mythmakers; the witnesses. We are essentially exiles, yet our home is Canada, because home is the past and the present, as also the future. We belong to several worlds and Canada has given us a home, an audience, a hospitality, and sometimes even a warm embrace. We get a category all to ourselves because there are enough of us. But we might go further and say that not only are there so many of us from other parts of the world, there are entire coherent communities that have settled here, possessing a common heritage and history; and we are telling their stories. They came with their clothes, and sometimes with their spices and pots and pans, and gave the writers among them the responsibility of bringing along and telling their stories. These stories are not for their nostalgia; they are their history, their myths. They validate and heal, and they anchor their lives in this new land. And the stories are for their future generations as well. I have often been stopped and thanked by people, young and old, for telling their stories. (Once, though this was in Nairobi, after my reading at the national museum, a man came over to me, visibly in tears. “Who tells our stories?” he asked. “We are the forgotten people.”) Through their stories newer Canadians make connections to other Canadians, for they are human stories, after all. And that puts a whole new dimension or shade to the question of who we really are as authors.

If we are telling the stories of Canadians of so many diverse backgrounds, aren’t we then telling the stories of Canada as well? What kind of Canada? A Canada not only of the Mounties and hockey, the North and Newfoundland, the corny beer commercials, into which newcomers vainly try to assimilate; but a Canada that also constantly adjusts and redefines itself. It is a Canada that is as much urban as it is the North. If eighty percent of a nation resides in its cities, then cities deserve to be recognized as emblematic of the nation, defining it as do the Rockies, the Prairies, and the Atlantic.

This idea is, naturally, anathema to many people—those whose Canada of the mind, of their memory and history, was imbibed in childhood and jars with the multiracial, multilingual kaleidoscopic reality churning outside their windows. Neighbourhoods and cities no longer look the same. Has the sense of our national self disappeared? they anxiously wonder. Where has our Canada gone? We are tolerant and law­abiding, they say, we will admit that a Canadian is anyone who is a citizen. But there must be a limit. There are strong emotions involved in the idea of a changing Canada. This is not only the gripe of the folk who hark back to the Canadian Dominion or of the white supremacists who fear for their race. There is also the more sophisticated lament that goes around, that Canada, unlike America, has not created a powerful mythology, a dominant sense of itself as an entity in the world; instead, we have had to accept the notions of the wimpy underdog, the self­deprecating or numbskull but consistent and dogged Canadian, a cheerful denizen of the northern latitudes with a meagre imagination. Just when the country had woken up from American cultural dominance and begun to assert itself with its sense of itself and its literature, here came people who wrote about alien places and different histories, who polluted good old Canadian English with Swahili and Hindi idioms, making halal a Canadian word.

The idea I am putting forward here, against this mode of thinking, is that the story of Canada must be the story of all its peoples; and that story gets augmented and changes. The self­ image of the nation evolves. Canada’s past is embedded in the land itself and the stories of its Indigenous Peoples; but it also undeniably includes the stories, and indeed histories, brought by the immigrant settlers from Britain, France, and the rest of Europe, histories and thoughts that go back to the Bible and Classical Greece and Rome; to this sense of origins and the past, I claim, must be added what has been brought over from Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. Canadians with roots in Europe fought in the two world wars, and that involvement and its stories are a part of the nation’s history; but many new Canadians and their forebears have been veterans and heroes of those world wars too, and yet others have struggled heroically in other conflicts, in wars of liberation in Africa, Asia, and South America; surely these struggles must now be a part of Canada’s history. Our children, however much they insist in the manner of all youth that the past does not matter, also demand this acknowledgement, that their history and ancestry belong to this land. The stories of the Jewish Holocaust, the holocaust in Rwanda, the Partition of India, the trauma of Apartheid, the Atlantic slave trade, and the massacres in Kenya and Cambodia are Canadian stories. A hundred thousand and more new Canadians come to these shores every year; few people will say that this country has turned for the worse because of that. To remain viable as a country, we have no choice but to allow our population to grow by 0.5 to 1 percent every year. There was a time not long ago when the Rockies and the Prairies, the quaint small town and the waters and the wilds were Canada; no more—the reality has evolved. Canada now includes Don Mills, Brampton, Mississauga, Surrey, and Burnaby, all proudly vibrant with urban life, new and exciting, and full of possibilities.

In this kind of convex reality, in which the world comes in, gets refracted and reimagined through Canadian writing, there is perhaps a place for writers such as I, who will always wash upon these shores, with stories to tell.