Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Read online

  Canada existed nowhere in my imagination before I got here. Canada had drifted, faint and unpretentious, through some of my reading: an Atwood story, an essay by Northrop Frye, a chapter by Saul Bellow, or even more clearly and yet still unobtrusively in the Jalna saga that delighted my aunts or the biography of Graham Bell that sat in my father’s library. But unlike England or Polynesia, Japan or France, Canada had failed to conjure up a solid landscape in my dreams. Like one of those places whose existence we assume from a name on a sign above a platform, glimpsed as our train stops and then rushes on, the word “Canada” awoke no echoes, inspired no images, lent no meaning to my port of destination. Canada was the place in which my publisher had her office—nothing more.

  I arrived with my family at Pearson Airport on the twenty-second day of October of the year 1982. My son had been born six weeks earlier. As if to rid himself of any small past he might have carried inside him and to begin afresh in this new world, his first act upon landing was to vomit on the carpet outside the immigration bureau.

  Our first apartment in Toronto was on George Street, off Queen Street East, opposite a garage that a few months later suddenly burst into flames. It was a tiny place on the second floor of a narrow house, with a cabin kitchen, a small living room, a single bedroom in which the three children slept together, and a minuscule mezzanine that doubled as a second bedroom and my office. Through the children’s window they could see the blue M of the Bank of Montreal Tower lit up at night so as to lend my eldest daughter the illusion that our family initial was emblazoned against the Toronto sky.

  Slowly we began to claim the city’s geography: the seedy yet welcoming second-hand stores on Queen Street, the (to us) impressive shoppers’ mosque of the Eaton Centre, the tree-lined streets of the Annex (which reminded me of my own street in Buenos Aires), the wonders of Harbourfront and the islands, and Riverdale Park with its inner-city farm full of cows and chickens who would, a couple of years later, become our neighbours, once we had moved to Geneva Avenue, a few steps away from the ravine.

  The city in which you grow up grows with you: the height of doors and windows changes as you change, and through the years you continue to know, even if you no longer see them, the cracks and patches of colour that were once at the level of your eyes. There is one system of measures for the room in which you stepped out of your shorts and into your long trousers, where you graduated from games on the floor to games on the desk, where you were promoted from early bed-hours and allowed at long last to stay awake and have dinner with the grown-ups—and a different one for that other room which you enter fully formed, past all true transformation, an adult in a world of adults. (When I managed to buy the house in Cabbagetown, after signing the papers and holding in my hand the document that apparently proved that the place was truly mine, I stood for a long moment in the living room, as if seeing my books and pictures and bits of furniture for the first time, feeling that they were, like myself, strangers in a strange land. Then, somewhat self-consciously, I crouched down to the eye level of a child and looked around me, after which I lay down on the wooden floor and looked up at the empty ceiling, and remembered how many times, when I was four or five, I had done exactly that, in order to see my room upside down with nothing in it, a blank to fill with whatever I wanted, whatever I loved or whatever held my fancy.)

  We all took to the city (and to Canada) in different ways. My daughters, who had spent their first years in Tahiti, scuttling barefoot along the beach with packs of other children, would stubbornly kick off their unaccustomed shoes in a snowstorm, and still, from time to time, wear flowers behind their ears. My son, however, when he was old enough, took almost immediately to baseball in the summer and, in the winter, to making snow angels or riding down the ravine slope on a large plastic disc, and later, of course, to hockey. I missed the café life I had known in Argentina and in Europe, the political discussions, the adventurous uncertainty of the economy (which in those days, in Argentina, produced an inflation rate of 200 percent), the late dinners and loud streets. Perhaps I did not really miss these things. Perhaps every newcomer senses the need to feel nostalgic, to lay before himself a photo album of that which he believes he has left behind. The faces may be hazy, the names only vaguely remembered, the voices dim, but he still thinks: “Things are not as good as they were under the reign of Cynara.”

  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

  SIX YEARS OLD AND running free in the fields in Virginia.

  Seven years old and sitting two weeks in a moving van as we drive across the United States.

  Seven years old and standing on the ferry to Victoria, my hair blowing into my eyes, watching the vast ocean, the many islands, my brother standing beside me, the solid presence of Canada all around.

  I step on the boat an American. I walk off the boat a Canadian landed immigrant.

  It’s funny how I want my memory to work a certain way. I want it to be like those history classes I took in high school, chronological and ordered, completely straightforward. Dates combined with facts create a moment in time. But memory doesn’t work that way. It’s not a connected line; instead it’s a series of images flashing on my consciousness, images that are connected only by a thread of thought. It’s a chain reaction. Tip over one domino and the rest will fall down.

  In the middle of June 1975 my family packed up a U-Haul moving van, the biggest on the lot. We also packed up our little car. We put everything we had into these two vehicles (cat, toys, dishes, furniture, bedding, clothes) and left our small house in Stony Point, Virginia, for a two-week adventure through the United States. We were the Beverly Hillbillies. We were cowboys. We were pioneers in our stagecoaches and we were the settlers. My brother was nine. I was seven. I had just played the role of Betsy Ross in my grade
one end-of-year school play. I remember some complicated manoeuvre the teacher taught me where, as I pretended to sew a blank piece of white cloth, I would turn my hand slightly and push the American flag up through the cloth. From plain white to red, white and blue. It was my first and last magic trick.

  Americans have been coming to Canada for a good long time and for all sorts of reasons. During the Civil War in the 1860s, Americans dodged the draft and many settled in New Brunswick in a place referred to as Skedaddle Ridge. (During World War I it was the opposite, America providing a safe refuge for those Canadians who didn’t want to enlist to fight overseas.) In the late 1950s, U.S. academics started moving to Canada when Canada was expanding its universities and founding new ones. About 125,000 Americans came to Canada between 1964 and 1977 as draft dodgers of the Vietnam War. Half of them stayed.

  Back and forth. The borders touch. It’s one big mass of land. There’s no getting around it.

  My father had taken a job at the University of Victoria as an English professor. On our glass coffee table, before we left, he laid out a map of the United States and Canada and my brother and I kneeled down to trace the route we would take: through Pennsylvania, through the Midwest to Chicago, through Iowa and the Badlands and Wyoming or Montana (nobody’s sure any more), through Idaho to Washington state, where we would take the Anacortes ferry to Victoria and touch down (all of us—our toys, the U-Haul, the poor carsick cat) on Canadian soil. My father told us about Victoria. He told us about living on an island. He told us about the Queen and my seven-year-old mind pictured a Disney-style monarch with a Cinderella past—both suffering and noble. He showed us how big Canada was. When he told us about the vastness of Canada, we saw the huge expanse of colours on the map, hardly any of it covered in writing. Somehow I understood that the journey would be a big one, and that the line my father traced across the country was not really an armspan long but stretched for miles and miles and miles.