Blood and Belonging Page 17

  If so, isn’t there some gain in independence? You are free to speak to a foreign writer like me, have him back in your home. You can say what you want in public without being arrested by the police. Yes, his wife says shyly, “I never thought British people would come to my house.”

  But Vladimir is still dismissive. He’s been on those demonstrations to Kiev. He feels they do no good. “Yes, I can walk down the street crying ‘Down with Kravchuk.’ But nothing has really changed.”

  If independence has made many Ukrainians feel freer, that is not the case with Russians in Ukraine.

  IT IS RAINING. There is no heat in the rooms in the Hotel Ukraine in Donetsk, there hasn’t been hot water for days, the bathrooms are disgusting, and the one light bulb in the room gives off a weak, yellow smear of light. At this stage of the journey, I hate Ukraine. Everything smells of diesel, wet rags, coal, alcohol, cigarette ends, and body odor. The hotel lobby is full of slot machines, and wet teenagers are spending the afternoon there, along with various criminals from various southern regions of the ex-empire doing business, handing each other plastic bags, counting out cash, sucking on cigarettes. There are a lot of languages being spoken fast and I don’t hear any Russian. A burly man carrying a large suitcase enters with bodyguards, approaches the hotel manager. Negotiations ensue, wads of kupons change hands, and the burly man turns to depart, leaving the suitcase behind. I see the hotel cashier open it: chock-full of flesh-colored condoms.

  A small boy, his blond hair wet from the rain, his sandaled feet sopping, comes in and goes to each businessman with his hand out. A few absently drop coins into his hand. I watch him slink out of the lobby and disappear into the night.

  Being a nation means creating your own way of life. What way of life is this? I could be in any hotel in any part of the empire. The dull, inert compulsion of Soviet existence persists. The windows are never cleaned. The potted palms in the lobby get dustier; the sullen old men at the door push the prostitutes back into the street; the stair carpets are holed; the wallpaper is peeling off; the cashier’s office is never open; the gift-shop girl stands, nearly motionless, for hours in front of the little cabinet full of Ukrainian trinkets made of lacquered wood.

  THE YOKE

  In Kiev, a vast steel arch was erected to symbolize the eternal friendship of the Soviet and Ukrainian peoples. On my last morning in the Ukraine I pay a cold visit to the place. Beneath the arch are two gigantic heroes of socialist labor, one Ukrainian, one Russian, striding side by side. Also beneath the statue is a stone figure representing Bogdan Khmelnitsky, Cossack warrior king of the 1650s, who threw the Poles out of western Ukraine and created the first unified Ukrainian Cossack kingdom on both sides of the Dnieper, only to end up putting himself under the suzerainty of the Duchy of Moscow. Khmelnitsky symbolizes all the ambivalence of the Ukrainian tradition, on the one hand fighting against the Polish oppressor, on the other hand submitting to the Moscow yoke. That yoke is still on the Ukrainian people, but not in the manner described by most Ukrainian nationalists, for whom it is a matter now of dependence on Soviet oil, on the ruble zone, on Yeltsin’s machinations within the Commonwealth of Independent States. The yoke they wear but do not talk about is the whole weight of Soviet civilization, which can be measured in its totality only in the details: the lifts that do not work, the buses held together by bits of wire and string, the windows everywhere smeared with dirt, the casual brutality of all officialdom, the constant humiliation of workers in a workers’ state—forcing a woman to earn her living in one hotel I visited by handing out pieces of toilet paper to every man who entered the downstairs hotel toilet.

  You come away from Ukraine believing that all the rhetoric about nationhood, about the return to Europe, is very distant from the quotidian reality, the vast pile of stone and rubble that must be moved out of Ukraine’s past before it can slowly recover a way of life that is really its own. And nobody knows what that life would be, for there is no visible alternative. Everyone alive now has known only the Soviet way of life. Behind them lies only the nostalgic paradise of prerevolutionary peasant Ukraine, a lost world caricatured in the hotel handicraft shops; beyond their borders lies the impossible world of the capitalist West. Impossible, because it is easy to import videocassettes and blue jeans and condoms and food for hard-currency restaurants, but so much more difficult to import Western habits of mind and reconcile them with a Ukrainian way of life, to fuse them with a vision of belonging to the here-and-now. There is a devastating innocence in nationalists’ faith in independence. Freedom itself is never the end of the road—only the beginning.

  CHAPTER 4

  QUEBEC

  THE FRENCHIES

  There were Frenchies hiding in the cemetery; we were sure of that. They were tough Catholic kids and they had slingshots. We all knew they were there, hiding behind the gravestones, waiting to get us. The cemetery was up on the hill above Juliana Road, where we lived, and I knew that I shouldn’t ever go up there on my bike alone. Everyone at school knew that they pulled kids off their bikes and rode away on their wheels. They were bad kids, it was common knowledge.

  Once, we English kids on Juliana got up the courage to lead an expedition into the cemetery. We planned it like a military raid, like General Wolfe sneaking up on the French at Quebec in 1759. We armed ourselves—my pockets were full of the sharp stones the gravel truck dumped on our street—and we fanned out at the base of the cliff leading up to the cemetery, and we advanced from headstone to headstone, right up to the top, just as we had seen it done by the Indians in the U.S. Cavalry movies on television. They were bigger than us, that was all we knew, big ignorant boys who spoke nothing but French and used real ball bearings in their slingshots. You could tell they did, because the ball bearings left neat round indentations on the STOP signs at the crossings on the cemetery road.

  I was eight at the time, and I was excited that the older kids on Juliana had let me join the raid. I made a point of how small I was, and how I could get ahead of them, hide behind the gravestones, and act like a scout. That was what I did. I was the first to reach the top of the cemetery hill. It was so quiet up there, hiding among the gravestones of the Camerons and Frasers, McDonalds and Robertsons, heaved up into crooked positions by the frost, and above my head, the sound of the autumn maples rustling in the wind. The others were some time making it to the top, so I waited for them, crouched behind a gravestone, keeping watch for the Frenchies, who were supposed to be preparing an ambush for us on the other side of the crematorium. I could hear the English boys sneaking up behind me, taking their positions, and I knew they would be asking me where we should move next, to get closer to the Frenchies. And I knew that I was going to have to say, as I felt the stillness and emptiness of the graveyard all around me, that there were no Frenchies there at all. It was obvious. I am not saying they didn’t exist. They were there, all right. It is just that none of us could see them. And we never did.

  IMAGINED COMMUNITY

  You can never know the strangers who make up a nation with you. So you imagine what it is that you have in common, and in this shared imagining, strangers become citizens, that is, people who share both the same rights and the same image of the place they live in. A nation, therefore, is an imagined community. Yet these imaginings never exactly overlap, are never exactly shared. As I look back now at the Canada I thought we had in common, it strikes me that English and French never did imagine it the same way. The myth I grew up believing was that Canada was a partnership between two peoples, two languages, two histories, and two traditions. I believed this, yet I never actually met any Quebecois when I was growing up, although Ottawa, where I lived, is just across the river from Quebec. When I went to Quebec, I went to the English-speaking Eastern Townships, to a house where my Russian grandparents lived.

  The Canada I thought I belonged to was, believe it or not, an example to the rest of the world. We were a binational, bi-ethnic federal community, living proof that different races, differ
ent languages could live together within the framework of a single state. In my imaginings, I turned that dull but intricate contrivance, Canadian federalism, into a moral beacon to the whole benighted world. I had no idea, for example, that what for me was a family romance was, for the other partner, a loveless marriage. As for what came to be known as the First Nations, the native peoples, they didn’t figure in my equation of the country at all.

  It seems extraordinary, in retrospect, that I should have supposed that we—the Quebecois and I—actually knew each other well enough to constitute any kind of community at all. That childhood memory of the cemetery was actually closer to the truth. Yet is it a memory of mine or a fantasy? I had better confess that I didn’t always remember it as I have told it now. For years, I thought I had actually fought the Frenchies. I believed I had seen the big rough French boys, storming down from the heights of the cemetery, chasing us back into Juliana Road with a hail of ball bearings. Now, I am quite sure: we never even saw them. They were phantoms to me, as I was to them, and phantoms they have remained.

  NATIONALISM AND FEDERALISM

  Nationalism is a doctrine which holds (1) that the world’s peoples are divided into nations, (2) that these nations should have the right of self-determination, and (3) that full self-determination requires statehood.

  Federalism is not a political ideology It is just a particular way of sharing political power among different peoples within a state. But it is nationalism’s political antithesis. Those who believe in federalism hold that different peoples do not need states of their own in order to enjoy self-determination. Peoples who share traditions, geography, or common economic space may agree to share a single state, while retaining substantial degrees of self-government over matters essential to their identity as peoples. Federalism is a politics that seeks to reconcile two competing principles: the ethnic principle, according to which people wished to be ruled by their own, with the civic principle, according to which strangers wish to come together to form a community of equals, based not on ethnicity but on citizenship.

  The federal states in the world—Canada, the former Czechoslovakia, the former Yugoslavia, Belgium, India, the former U.S.S.R.—have sought to use federal forms of government to arrive at a balance between the ethnic and the civic principle. I am as much a child of a federalist Canada as Salman Rushdie is a child of the India created at midnight, 1947. In both cases, we grew up imagining that we lived in a political community that had found a way to rise “above” racial and religious tribalism. The Cold War myth that the modern world had moved “beyond” nationalism depended on the viability of these federalist experiments.

  That Cold War landscape “beyond” nationalism is now unrecognizable. Most federal states are in trouble: civil war in Yugoslavia; separatist revolts in India; ethnic warfare in Sri Lanka; the collapse of the federal structure of the U.S.S.R.; the fragmentation of Belgium; and, since 1963, the rise of separatism in Quebec.

  This last began in 1963 when a bomb was left in a letter box in Westmount, the English-speaking quarter of Montreal. For every English-speaking Canadian of my generation, the grainy newsreel of that letter box, with the policemen running toward it, too late, and the dusty blur of the explosion that followed, marks the beginning of the end of a certain idea of Canada. It was an idea encapsulated by the leafy Westmount street itself. In the newsreel, you can see what a normal, average Canadian street it is—the lawns, the maple trees dappling the light on the sidewalks, that letter box. It is the picture of the Canada I grew up in: suburban, dull perhaps, but innocent of bitterness and tragedy. When that letter box detonated and when, by the end of a decade, an elected Canadian politician had been kidnapped, murdered, and his body found in the trunk of a car, the Canada I grew up in began to die. Quebec terrorism was no more typical of Quebec nationalism than IRA terrorism is typical of Irish nationalism. But the idea that there were Quebecois, however few, who hated Canada so much that they would kill in order to destroy it made every English-speaking Canadian come awake from the happy daze of the family romance.

  I came of age, politically, in a Canada that began arguing about whether it could survive and has been arguing about it ever since. At first the argument was in one dimension— between Quebec and the rest of Canada. Soon a second dimension was added, with a renewed alienation of the Western provinces; and the third dimension arrived in the 1970s, with the emergence of aboriginal rights and their claims to self-determination over huge areas of the Canadian northland. Negotiations in one dimension are complicated enough. When three dimensions are involved, the professionals have to take over. The debate about the national future was preempted by the political elite, by the experts in constitutional plumbing, and thirty years of our national life have gone by in an atmosphere of political crisis. The crisis remains unresolved. Members of my generation have spent their entire adult political life wondering whether the country either can or deserves to survive. At this hour, nobody can be exactly sure whether it will.

  Other people besides Canadians should be concerned if Canada dies. If federalism can’t work in my Canada, it probably can’t work anywhere. Canada has the resources to appease the economic resentments that nationalism feeds upon. As a parliamentary democracy, it has a political culture in which nationalist demands can be conciliated by argument rather than repressed by force. Federalism has not failed: the country is still together; but the cost of conciliating nationalism has been a thirty-year stalemate at the heart of the nation’s institutions.

  The nub of the quarrel is simpler than the infinite complexity of the constitutional negotiations makes it seem. Six million French-speaking North Americans—les Québécois—think of themselves not just as a people, with a language, history, and tradition of their own, but as a nation, that is, as a people with a political personality and a right to self-government. They have conceived of themselves in this way, not just since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, but ever since Canadian Confederation, in 1867. The word “nation” has always figured prominently in their public language. In Quebec, for example, unlike any other Canadian province, the provincial assembly is called L’Assemblée Nationale.

  The Canadian federation’s essential problem has always been that Francophone Quebecois identify Quebec as their nation and Canada as their state, while English-speaking Canadians identify Canada both as their nation and as their state. So long as Quebec believed that it needed the rest of Canada for its own survival, this asymmetry did not prove fatal. Since 1960, however, Quebec has used its powers within the federal system to become a state within a state and to develop its own economy. Quebec has never needed Canada as a nation. Now it is asking itself whether it even needs it as a state.

  Age eight, I had scaled cemetery hill in Rockcliffe in search of an enemy who turned out to vanish among the maples. Now, in my forties, I set off into Quebec to come face-to-face, not just with the Quebecois, but with the illusions, the phantoms, that shaped my imagined Canada. I should not have been surprised to discover that they did not imagine Canada as I had done, but I was. The embarrassing truth was that in the twenty years I lived in Canada I never traveled in Francophone Quebec—I had been to Montreal many times, and just as often to the English communities in the Eastern Townships, but I had never been to Trois-Rivières, never to the Quebec northland, never to the heartland of the French reality in North America. This was in every sense not a return but a voyage of discovery.

  STATE AND NATION

  Sixteen hundred kilometers north of Montreal, in a granite cliff face, a large cantilevered metal door, colored bright red, slowly begins to rise. The four-wheel drive enters a long, descending tunnel, cut out of the rock, and the metal door closes, sealing off the tunnel from the arctic air. At the security checkpoint, the guards check the vehicle and wave it past. After a kilometer, dead slow, the vehicle stops at another, much smaller door.

  You are not prepared for what you see when the small door opens. You step into a space as vast as a ca
thedral, only it is underground, and the walls are quarried out of granite, and the ceiling lights stretch away to the vanishing point, and there are low green instrument panels on one wall as far as the eye can see. Somewhere close by, vast turbines are turning. The floor shakes. The air is charged with a steady throbbing hum. Somebody must be in charge here. There must be a control room somewhere. As you walk through, there are signs of men at work—abandoned golf carts and several mobile tool kits on wheels—but you meet nobody. In this echoing, cavernous space, you are alone.

  LG-2 it is called. La Grande Two. The biggest underground powerhouse in the world. Cost: $2.8 billion Canadian. Beneath the floor are ten turbines, driven by the waters of La Grande River. It is seven-fifteen in the evening. In Montreal, kettles are being switched on in ten thousand kitchens, heat is being turned up at a hundred thousand thermostats, and in bedrooms from Westmount to Outremont, girls are running their hair dryers. Peak-load time, the guide says. The water is roaring beneath our feet, the turbines are whirring. There is enough power here to heat and light a city of two million.

  I ask my guide what she feels. “Proud,” she says, blushing slightly. Proud that her people had the know-how to dam the river, build the turbines, cut the powerhouse out of this rock. Proud of Quebec.

  LG-2 has mythic status in the making of modern Quebec. It stands as the happy ending of a nationalist romance that goes something like this: We were a backward society once. The Anglos of Montreal ran everything. The priests were in charge. Our families were too large. We were poor. We were down on the farm. Not anymore. We have come of age. We are proud. We are masters in our own house now, and LG-2 proves it. With cheap electricity, we can build our own economy. We can export power to the Americans. We can pay our way in the world.