Passages: Welcome Home to Canada Read online

  I had already read his And No Birds Sang. In 1942, when Farley was barely out of his teens, his regiment fought through the blood-soaked mountains of Italy. There was no time to bury the dead. His war made my revolution look like child’s play.

  It was Farley who insisted I would never know Canada until I had been to the Arctic.

  When Matt Cohen entered my life, I was beginning to feel settled in Toronto. He handed me his manuscript for Johnny Crackle Sings, and was stunned that I loved it. He was a gawky young man, around my own age, painfully shy, uncertain of his talent but sure he was already a writer. We drank wine at the Inn on the Park and debated God and Maimonides, German determinism, discussed George Grant’s Lament for a Nation, Camus, Sartre and his circle of sycophants, and what was the reason for literature. When, at his request, I edited The Disinherited, I felt as if I had lived in southern Ontario forever; all his people seemed to be kin.

  Later, when I drove through the area north of Kingston, hardscrabble farming land, I recognized Matt’s landscape. I thought I saw Richard Thomas striding from an old stone barn towards the gabled farmhouse, and maybe Erik and Brian and, in the distance, running towards the town, Kitty Malone.

  I met Al Purdy in front of his house in Ameliasburg. It was early evening, the day turning orange around the trees. I had been sitting in the back of Jack McClelland’s Mustang convertible, my knees scrunched under my chin, leaning forward to hear Jack and Harold Town planning how to approach Purdy with the proposition for a new book of love poetry to be illustrated by Harold. Harold was one of Canada’s most celebrated and outspoken artists, and Jack’s close friend. My role was to be a kind of peacemaker, someone who could bridge the gap between the poet and the artist. It’s good to have an outsider for this, Jack suggested; both men have giant egos, both are irascible, but if they can agree to work together, the book will be brilliant. Irving Layton’s Love Where the Nights are Long had been such a critical success that another such book, this time by Purdy, could not fail.

  Al poured drinks—vodka for Jack, Scotch for Harold—and we headed towards the lake. It was a pleasant Ontario fall day, birds getting ready to fly south. The cool air would help us think, or somesuch. Jack wore an Irish knit pullover, Harold had a big batwing cloak he whipped around his shoulders, and Eurithe (Al’s very quiet wife) gave me a soft, embroidered shawl. I remember sitting on a tree stump for what seemed like hours while the battle raged between Harold and Al about the relative merits of their contributions to such a book, Harold pacing about in the succulent mud near the lake, Al leaning back on his heels, big hands fisted, like a fighter. Jack swore. I said little.

  The argument festered as we marched back to the house. I slept in the loft overlooking the red lantern by whose light they were still arguing, and in the morning, insanely early, we headed off, in silence, to Toronto.

  “He is not,” Harold asserted when Jack dropped him off at his house near Castle Frank subway station, “a romantic poet.”

  I disagreed.

  “Why in hell didn’t you say so earlier?” Jack asked. “Not much sense in your having a point of view now, is there?”

  There wasn’t. But I hadn’t yet acquired the confidence to join in arguments about Canadian poetry.

  Al’s book was published a couple of years later: Love in a Burning Building, some of the most moving love poetry in the world. The book had no drawings by Harold.

  My first sight of the Rocky Mountains was on the way to Banff from Calgary. I asked the driver to stop, and walked alongside the car so I could watch the mountains grow, slowly, as we approached. Sure, there had been the Tatras in northern Hungary, and Mount Cook on the South Island of New Zealand; but I had never seen mountains till the Rockies hove into view and grew to their monstrous height around me. They make you understand how insignificant you are. They put your life in perspective. They were also the perfect setting for W.O. Mitchell.

  I had read and loved his books during my early marathon tour through Canadian literature. He was now holding court for a small group of creative-writing students in the cafeteria of the Banff School of Fine Arts. He talked as if he had always known them, comfortable, expansive, leaning back long-legged in the too small armchair, telling them about writing in Canada. I thought I had seen most of the country by then, so I decided I’d tell him I had seen it all.

  All? He started laughing. You haven’t stood on the prairie and known you were the tallest thing for hundreds of miles around, hell, you could pull the whole damn sky down over your head—that’s when you know where you belong. When I saw the Prairies, I knew what he meant.

  Then I met Margaret Laurence. I think it may have been around the time of her collection of essays called Heart of a Stranger. She was warm, hospitable, friendly and intense, wanting to know all about where I had been and what had brought me to Canada. She talked about Africa and about living in isolation both there and in England. She knew how it felt to be out of sync with the world around you, to be a stranger, to try different ways of fitting in. Although she had written eloquently about Africa, she was not of there, wasn’t even sure exactly where “there” was. Africa is so vast, so harsh and accepting at the same time. In England she had felt lonely, a stranger, but now, back in Canada, she was not sure of her roots.

  We were sitting at her kitchen table. She reached across and put her hand on mine where I had been stubbing out my cigarettes. She said I smoked too much, that I should give myself leave to relax and settle; that Canada was even more accepting than Africa, if you allowed it to be.

  She had been working on a novel she wasn’t sure she would ever be able to finish. Later, when The Diviners was published, I escorted her around the grounds near the Science Centre, as we both played our parts in one of Jack McClelland’s nuttier promotion efforts. There was a real water diviner, Margaret with her own divining branch, and myself with a mickey of gin, trying vainly to return the favour and keep her spirits up.

  Has anyone ever had such an education in becoming a citizen?

  I am not sure exactly when I knew I belonged, but I remember hearing a woman at a cocktail party in Vancouver say that Canada had produced no writers of international quality. (She may have said “world-class,” though I think that horrendous phrase hadn’t yet made its way into the language.) I was so outraged, I yelled at her and the assembled group who had been listening to her nonsense. I told her she wouldn’t know quality if she tripped over it, and later I called Jack and asked him whether, being Hungarian, a New Zealander and British, I could join his Committee for an Independent Canada.

  When my first, all-Canadian daughter was born, Earle Birney wrote her a poem that starts “Welcome, welcome, Catherine Porter …” And as she grew, I began to tell her the stories I had learnt along my journey. Who knows, one day she may even go to Hungary alone, or with her sister, and check the galleries for those grim-faced ancestors, visit Kula in Bácska, where my great-grandfather’s and great-great-grandfather’s graves are marked by a white stone cross in an ancient cemetery, and maybe drive to the remote village of Tövis in Transylvania and seek out where the journey began.

  Ken Wiwa

  AN INVENTORY OF BELONGING

  I WAS TEN YEARS OLD when I first felt the anxious thrill of moving to another country. My father had decided to send me to school in England. As I took my seat in the aircraft at Lagos airport in Nigeria, I had no idea that I was swapping the security of an idyllic African childhood for the uncertainties of adolescence abroad. I remember staring at my new name in my passport. I’d always been known as Junior, and it wasn’t until my father informed me that he was sending me to England that I found out my real name was Kenule. As I took in my “new” name, Kenule Bornale Saro-Wiwa, it looked and felt as flat and lifeless as the page it was printed on. I had no idea that that name would turn out to be a multi-dimensional puzzle that would trouble me, stalking my emerging sense of self so that I would spend the next twenty years of my life trying, consciously and unconsciously
, to make an accommodation with this name that my father had given me.

  I am an Ogoni, one of the 500,000 people who live on a gently sloping, fertile and oil-rich land. The canvas of our story is Ogoni, the 404 square-mile plateau of the Niger River’s flood plains in southern Nigeria. This is where my ancestors have lived since time began, according to one of our many creation myths. The history of the Ogoni people is rich in event, but it wasn’t until 1958, when oil was discovered on our lands, that Ogoni was plugged into the global economy. Until then we were mainly subsistence farmers and fishermen who had minimal contact with the outside world. With the advent of the oil companies, however, things changed. For the worse. A resource that should have made Ogoni as rich as a small Gulf state turned out to be a curse.

  Gas flared twenty-four hours a day, pumping noxious fumes into the atmosphere and poisoning the rain. Hundreds of miles of rusting pipeline, laid without community consultation, often over farmland, spilled oil into the soil and the water table, compromising the community’s ability to farm and fish our traditional lands and waters. An estimated 900 million barrels of oil worth some $30 billion has been pumped out of Ogoni, and yet the people there have no pipe-borne water, no electricity, no telephone service, very few tarred roads, no hospital worthy of the name and very little in the form of education. In this land of plenty, 70 percent of Ogoni graduates are unemployed.

  Our people suffer not only from the predations of international business but from the ethnic chauvinism and discrimination that is rampant in Nigeria. As a minority in a nation of 250 ethnic groups, we were seen by Nigeria’s often unelected leaders as dispensable; our people could be displaced and our resources stolen without consultation. They assumed we were too small, that we lacked a coherent and concerted voice with which to speak out against our treatment.

  Until 1993, that is. In January of that year, 300,000 Ogonis came out to protest against the discrimination they faced at the hands of Nigeria’s government and Shell Oil. That three out of five Ogonis had participated in a peaceful demonstration alarmed both Shell and the military regime, who feared the prospect of such concerted grassroots action spreading among the many oil-bearing communities in the Niger Delta. The government and Shell resolved to intimidate the Ogoni and its leaders into silence.

  That so many people had turned out to protest was thanks to MOSOP (Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People). My father had founded the movement in 1990, and sent its activists out into the community to educate and mobilize grassroots opinion. After a year of arrests and detentions, my father was jailed for what proved to be the final time on April 23, 1994. He was tried on trumped-up murder charges and, despite an international campaign and protests, was hanged on November 10, 1995.

  My father’s life and death left me to face an ever-present question about the home he had lived and died to protect. It left me thinking: How much do I claim from it and how much does it claim of me?

  My father was an anglophile, a passion he developed as a teenager at his secondary school in southern Nigeria. This love of things English has been bred into my family’s genes. My great-grandfather started it; he was the one who brought English missionaries to our village. I suspect it was also the reason why his son, my grandfather, Jim Wiwa, has an English name. My father was the first one in the family to receive a formal English education. Through a government scholarship he went “abroad” to Umuahia, a town 125 kilometres from home, where he was one of a handful of Ogoni students. It was at Umuahia that Ken Saro-Wiwa fell in love with all things English. Modelled on an English boarding school, Umuahia was run by expatriate teachers in the colonial service. By the time Ken Saro-Wiwa’s first son was ready for secondary school, Nigeria had long since been independent from the British, and the school system we inherited from our former masters had been abused by the ruinous politics of the country. Which was why my father sent me to school in England.

  The shock of being yanked out of the security of my African childhood and thrust into adolescence in Europe exerted a profound influence on my emerging identity. Faced with the self-confidence and assumptions of my peers, I began to reinvent my identity to fit my new environment. So Kenule became Ken and I began to speak with the same accent as my English friends, subconsciously absorbing the world view that had enabled a small island nation to exert a disproportionate influence on the world. I floated between the certainties of my childhood in Africa and the twilight world of adolescence in England; as much as I wanted to be like my friends, I knew deep down that I was not one of them. I remember the resentment I felt whenever I watched Tarzan. I hated the way the Africans were always shown as faceless, voiceless extras to Johnny Weismuller’s tall, blond muscular master of the jungle. I resented the premise of films like Zulu with their implicit message of African subservience to the white man. But I also knew that, like Tarzan, I had to be like the natives to survive in the jungle of an English private school.

  Twenty years in England moulded my identity. My accent, my values, my world view—so much about me became anglicized. It wasn’t until I was twenty-six that I began to question that identity. Until then there had always been this vague, unexplored, uncomfortable and unspeakable feeling of betrayal, a sense of shame at my identification more with European values than with African ones. And so, when my father’s political activities in Nigeria demanded that I repay the faith he had invested in me, I obliged him as any dutiful son would, but I was aware that my involvement in my father’s politics would have long-term consequences for my identity.

  The deeper I was drawn into his world, the more resentful I became that so many of my choices in life had been motivated by a desire to escape his influence rather than by what I actually wanted for myself. After he was murdered, those feelings intensified. I was torn between my now politicized identity as Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son and the apolitical, anglicized identity I had had in England. I was hovering between a country I had tried to leave behind and now wanted to forget, and a country that was trying to shoehorn me into an identity that no longer fitted me. By the time I was twenty-nine, I had no idea who I was or what I wanted to be. I had no clear concept of where home was or to whom or what I owed my allegiance. I was deracinated, adrift in the world.

  Because I was schooled in England, my life was divided between Africa and Europe, and I floated between two worlds, following the course that had been mapped out by my father’s love of all things English and his simultaneous fierce commitment to our home. While England was fashioning me into an Englishman, an identity I never felt entirely comfortable with, I was even less at home with my father’s increasingly passionate crusade to preserve the cultural identity of our people in Africa. At school I was English by default; at home I was a reluctant Nigerian. The two parts of me were mutually exclusive, but it was my relationship with Father that exercised the strongest influence on my emerging identity. As his first son and namesake I became increasingly aware of the need to make a name for myself, a name that was distinct from the one I shared with him—Ken Saro-Wiwa. So it was perhaps inevitable that I would reject Africa, if only as a declaration of my independence from him.

  In September 1997, I determined to resolve, once and for all, the competing claims to my identity.

  I’d known Mark Johnston from the time we worked together on the campaign to try to save my father’s life. Mark had returned to Toronto after my father was murdered, and when I confided to him that I was thinking of writing a book, he put me in touch with Alberto Manguel.

  I dashed off a couple of chapters and sent them to Alberto. He was living in London at the time, where he had edited an issue of Index on Censorship magazine featuring one of my father’s short stories.

  “Would you like me to be gentle or tough?” Alberto asked after reading my sample chapters.

  “Be tough,” I braved.

  “Well, this is bullshit,” he duly obliged. “When I hear you talk about your father,” Alberto explained, “it makes the hairs on the back of my nec
k stand on end. These chapters don’t do that for me,” he said, thumbing the manuscript with a fastidious frown on his face.

  I went away and had another go, writing and rewriting, trying to pour my anxieties onto the page. I went back to Alberto, and he pointedly put the manuscript aside as he patiently listened to me describe my dilemmas again. When I had finished, he leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard.

  “Hmm,” he purred. “You haven’t found your voice,” he mused in his gentle lilting accent.

  He suggested I write a letter to my dead father, and I left to look for my voice. In a sense life is all about this struggle to find a distinctive voice to call our own. In our various voices we hear our influences: our parents, our role models, our communities. My problem, in September 1997, was that I just couldn’t decide what my authentic voice sounded like. Was I a Nigerian who had been educated in England? Or an Englishman who was born in Nigeria? Was my essence revealed in the middle-class accent and values I had picked up at my boarding schools, or the Nigerian accent and values that spoke up instinctively when I was in the company of my African friends and family? What was my default accent?

  I experimented, trying out my different voices, switching personas, chopping and changing, torturing and confusing the poor manuscript. During yet another anguished confession Alberto asked if I liked living in England. I told him I had nothing against the place, but I was concerned that in England my identity was fixed as Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son, so people now had preconceptions of who I was or ought to be. And once you are pigeonholed in England, it is tough to convince anyone that you have anything else to offer. I didn’t particularly relish the prospect of spending the rest of my life being introduced as Ken Saro-Wiwa’s son—especially as I was by then a father myself.