Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (2 page)

INTRODUCTION

W
E TEND TO THINK
of immigration to Canada as a story of flight from persecution followed by the laying to rest of ancient hatreds. In this scenario, the new land becomes a haven in a heartless world, offering victims escape from mortal danger.
There
was ethnic strife, prejudice and open warfare.
Here
is acceptance.
There
history was a nightmare.
Here
history is a dream of civility.
There
victims endure their history.
Here
victims awaken and begin their history anew. This myth implies that the new land suffers from a deficiency of exciting history. But what native Canadians may live as dullness, our newcomers experience as a welcome deliverance.

This myth of escape has been a pleasant tale to tell, since it presents our country as an island of reason in a sea of fanaticism. This myth also flatters the newcomers, enabling them to present expatriation as an awakening from murderous irrationality.

But was this story ever quite true? Were we ever as welcoming as it makes us out to be? Now that old-world terror has struck at the very heart of the new world, are we quite sure that newcomers are leaving their hatreds behind?

Myths never take hold of the collective imagination if they are pure fantasy. This myth of welcome, together with the myth of hatreds left behind, has just enough truth to be believable. But the writers who’ve written up their passage to Canada both confirm and challenge these myths. In her account of emigrating from China, Ying Chen tells us that she did indeed find sanctuary here; but she would have us think hard about why Canada, the country of Bethune, should employ officials at its borders who could so frighten and intimidate one of its own citizens. Moses Znaimer, now an irrepressible leader in Canadian broadcasting, escaped the hatreds of his native Europe, but his memoir suggests that no one ever survives hatred unscathed; some people get to safety too late ever to feel quite safe again. He remembers the joylessness and caution of his parents, in their new home in Montreal, and now regards these features as the scars of survival.

The newcomers who here recount their stories are discreet and uncomplaining about the difficulties
of becoming a Canadian, but they do suggest that we—Canadians already here—might pay more attention to our myths of welcome. What actually happens in those holding pens in our airports as we sail through the lines reserved for citizens? As a grandson of immigrants myself, I often wonder whether my own people would be able to secure admittance to their grandson’s country. In my mind’s eye, I see the moment when their miserable sheaf of papers, presented to the government official, comes up short. We have a lot invested in our complacent myths of welcome. Perhaps we should care a little about whether they are still true, or ever were.

Shyam Selvadurai’s memoir, with its evocation of the murderous attacks on Tamils in the Sri Lanka of the 1980s, brings into focus the issue of hatred. What happens to inherited hatreds when you pass into exile and emigration? Do they, as our myths would have us believe, wither away in the fresh northern air? There is no hatred in Shyam’s memoir—indeed the opposite—but the fact is, there is surpassing hatred in some sections of the Tamil community in Canada.

I remember mourning, in 1999, the passing of Neelan Tiruchelvan, a moderate Tamil friend, who
was blown to pieces by a car bomb in Colombo by an extremist Tamil group. His offence? Seeking a peaceful solution to the Sri Lankan catastrophe through negotiations with the Singhala government. After I went to Colombo to mourn his passing and to denounce the act of terror that had claimed his life, I began receiving literature justifying his murder. Well-produced, articulate monthly magazines argued that anyone from the Tamil community who sought non-violent solutions to political problems was either a stooge or a fool, or a little of both. The rhetoric employed was a version of what the French call
la politique du pire:
endorsing strategies to make things worse so that they cannot possibly get better. These Tamil magazines did not actively endorse my friend’s death—he was dead already—but they were astonishingly indifferent to it, as if the undoubted sufferings of the Tamil people justified the abrogation of the simplest expressions of human pity. His body, after all, had been cut to pieces, and his life, a monument to political reason, had been cut short. I left off reading these documents with the sense that I had nothing to say to the people who had written them. The point of this story is that these magazines had been sent to me from a Canadian city. They had actually been printed and published on my native soil.

The episode made me rethink our myth about the passage to Canada as being from hatred to civility. Was it true now? Was it ever true? As I recalled my Canadian history, I began to question this myth that the passage to Canada was a gentle forgetting of inherited political anger. The Irish carried their hatreds among their meagre belongings on the emigrant ships of the 1840s, and the visceral dislike of Orangeman for Fenian was a defining feature of Ontario politics from then until the 1890s. The vast Slavic and southern European migrations of Laurier’s Canada also transported their political grievances here. Emigrants from the Balkans did not forget or forgive the oppression that had caused them to flee. Did Canadian Serbs rejoice at the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914? It’s hard to imagine that most did not, since this act of terror was held to herald the liberation of Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule. Yet Serbs and non-Serbs alike quickly learned that terror can have consequences as catastrophic as they are unforeseen—in this case, a world war that would last four years and claim some 20 million lives.

In the next great wave of Canadian immigration, beginning after World War II, migrants from
Czechoslovakia, Poland, the Baltic States and other territories under Soviet tyranny came to this country with all their hatreds intact. Let us not suppose that hatred is necessarily a bad thing: sometimes it is good to hate oppression, and the Canadians who, whenever the Bolshoi Ballet toured Canada, held up signs outside the theatre protesting Soviet tyranny now seem more prescient and morally aware than those, and they included myself, who thought it was time to acquiesce to the facts of life, i.e. the permanent Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. In particular, the Baltic families who maintained their opposition to Soviet tyranny while in Canada throughout the long Cold War then lived to see their sons and daughters return, after 1991, to a free Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Here, political hatred—or at least loathing of despotism—was sustained, not forgotten, in the passage to Canada, and since in this case hatred did not also incubate or support acts of terror, it seems to have been a positive thing. It is not always right for exile and emigration to be accompanied by political forgetting. Remembering a conquered or oppressed home is one of the duties of those who escape to a better life.

The problem is that exile can freeze memory and conviction at the moment of departure. Once abroad,
groups often fail to evolve or change their thinking. And when they return, once their country is free, they speak and behave as if it were still 1945. A case in point would be Croatian exiles who fled to Canada in the 1940s to escape Tito’s imposition of Communist rule over Yugoslavia. In exile, they remained more nationalistic than would have been allowed in Tito’s postwar Croatia. Preserving a nation’s pride is one thing; allowing it to congeal in forgetful myth is another. It is difficult enough for any people to face the historical truth about their country, and this becomes almost impossible when they also lose that country. Such might have been the dilemma for young Canadian Croatians who went into exile after 1945. Having lost their country, how could they bear to admit that Ante Pavelic’s wartime regime had been responsible for atrocities against Jews, Serbs, Roma and other minorities? Facing up to the reality of Pavelic’s regime could not have been easy in Zagreb. It turned out to be just as difficult in Toronto. Indeed, it was often said in Zagreb that the chief support for the most intransigent and aggressive nationalism in Croatia after independence in 1991 was to be found not in Zagreb, but in Toronto.

Canadians born here tend to be indifferent to or ignorant of the dual political allegiances of many of
their fellow citizens from diasporic communities. Yet these diasporas may be loyal to Canadian institutions and at the same time be in violent opposition to the political system they have left behind. These dual allegiances are complex: a recently minted citizen who would not think of assassinating a fellow Canadian from some oppressor group does not hesitate to fund assassinations of the same group in another country. Sometimes emigration is accompanied by guilt, and this can make diasporic groups more violent and extreme than those who live in the country where the oppression is taking place. The difficult truth—which makes diasporic nationalism a dangerous phenomenon—is that it is easier to hate from a distance. You don’t have to live with the consequences—or the reprisals.

Canadians, new and old, need to think about what role their diasporas play in fanning and financing the violent hatreds of the outside world. Our comfortable myth is that our country serves as a refuge for people seeking to escape hatred. The more disturbing reality is that some of our diasporas actively support and encourage violence. Are we so sure that acts of terror in Kashmir do not originate in apparently innocent donations to charitable and philanthropic appeals in Canadian cities? Are we certain that the
financing of a car bomb in Jerusalem did not begin in a Canadian community? Do we know that when people die in Colombo—or for that matter in Jaffna—there is not a Canadian connection?

I do not have answers to these questions, and it would be fatuous, not to mention inflammatory, to point fingers without evidence. My point is not to make allegations but to ask us to rethink our myths of immigration, particularly that innocent one that portrays us as a haven from a heartless world, a refuge from hatred. It is clear to me that this was never entirely true: many of the immigrant groups who have made their lives here began not by extinguishing but by fanning the hatreds they brought with them. If it has always been true that most immigrant groups arrive in this country with some considered detestation of the oppressors who drove them out of their homeland in the first place, it would be invidious and inconsistent to single out any particular group arriving now for particular condemnation or investigation.

We are naïve if we assume that immigration ever meant assimilation in the strict sense of discarding identity. New identities never obliterate old ones, and new identities are unlikely to be authentic and strong if they are built on forgetting. Moreover, to ask new
Canadians to forget old selves would be to squander their unique contributions to their adopted country. The most useful new Canadians are those who have refused to think of their passage to Canada as a process of discarding.

For example, anyone who has heard the writer and translator Alberto Manguel speak would find it hard to place his accent. This marvellous Canadian writer speaks and writes an English flavoured with Spanish and French, and heaven knows what else besides. One key to his creativity, it would seem, is his refusal to give up anything, his refusal to allow the passage to Canada to repress a single feature of a highly complex, multi-dimensional identity. Anna Porter, a Canadian publisher, a Hungarian New Zealander, has done more than most native-born Canadians to promote the literature of her adopted home, but her residual identities have never been renounced, and indeed have become stronger as she became a Canadian. She remains the Hungarian émigré of the 1956 era, whose Budapest grandfather was a publisher. Her life in Canada represents a keeping of faith with his inspiration.

And after all, as these memoirs assure us, the Canadian immigration myth is sometimes quite accurate. This might be so in the case of the son of
Ken Saro-Wiwa, the martyred leader of the Ogoni people of Nigeria. Being the son of a hero and a martyr is to live under a light-obliterating shadow. In Canada, it seems, the son has not so much thrown off the shadow of the father as found the distance to live under it in peace with himself. In other cases, emigration allows newcomers to find identities that were not permitted or not even perceived in the past. For Shyam Selvadurai, coming to Canada created the possibility of finding a sexual identity that had not been possible in Sri Lanka. The message of these memoirs is that migrants love a new country to the degree that it allows them to be free, to keep the identities they cherish and to fashion ones anew.

Nevertheless, it would be a good idea, once and for all, to get a few things clear. Canada means many things to many people—and in the debate about what it means, new voices are as valuable as older ones—but one thing is indisputable: we are a political community that has outlawed the practice or advocacy of violence as an instrument of political expression. We have outlawed it within, and we need to outlaw it without. Just as we have laws against racial incitement or the promulgation of ethnic hatred, in order to protect our new citizens from
bigotry, abuse and violence, so we must have laws that allow for the prosecution of anyone in Canada who aids, abets, encourages or incites acts of terror. There may be political causes that justify armed resistance, but there are none that justify the terrorization and murder of civilians. The distinction between freedom fighters and terrorists is not the relativist quagmire we are led to suppose it is. There are laws of war governing armed resistance to oppression, just as there are laws of war governing the conduct of hostilities between states. Those who break these laws are barbarians, whatever the cause they serve. Those who target civilians to cause death and create fear are terrorists, no matter how justified their cause may be. States that use terror against civilians are as culpable as armed insurgents.