Passages: Welcome Home to Canada (4 page)

When I was a teenager, we were taught a lesson in responsibility that I have never been able to forget. One child out of twenty, we were told, had the privilege of reaching high school; and the child who gets to high school and university is like the boy or girl who is fed all the food in a starving village so that he
or she can reach the next village to bring back help for all. I was one of those children. And in my absence, further havoc has been wreaked on that village.

Am I doomed to a state of in-betweenness? Is it really a doom? Is it time to stop fooling ourselves and admit that I am a Canadian citizen, with loyalties and attachments in the country, but essentially—because I have attachments elsewhere—a homeless person?

How easy it seems to say that I am a Canadian, that nothing else matters; history began the day I obtained my immigrant status, and the past before that has been totally obliterated. If I say that loud enough I might even be called upon to promote beer. But my affliction is history, memory. It is history and memory that living in Toronto has nurtured to inspire the novels and stories I write. And, ironically, it is a history and memory of a nomad life and constant exile.

I am an East African Canadian of Indian origin. I have also called myself an African Asian Canadian. I was born in Nairobi, Kenya, and brought up in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. My mother’s parents were born in India and emigrated to East Africa, at a time when both those regions of the world were part of the British Empire. My paternal grandfather was born in
Kenya and therefore I have come to believe, with a certainty that however is not absolute, that his father must have migrated to Africa in the 1880s. My great-grandmother most likely came with him. My own parents never saw India.

There is an interesting, rather touching story about my father as a restless young man. Apparently he once stowed away on a steamer bound from Mombasa to the ancestral homeland. There were several such ships that went to India, and as children we knew them all by name: SS
Kampala
, SS
Karanja
, SS
Amra
, SS
Bombay
. But my father, when his ship reached Bombay, wasn’t allowed to disembark because he had no papers. I have always imagined him viewing glittering, legendary Bombay, the city of film stars, through steamer portholes. The story, partly apocryphal perhaps, symbolizes for me the status of my family and of many others like them. It represents the eternal quest for a home, and its constant denial.

My father was a wanderer in East Africa, I’ve learned, until he married my mother and settled down. My mother was born on the island of Zanzibar, then brought to Mombasa, where she grew up. She was married in Nairobi to my somewhat vagabond of a father, an orphan of good family; when he died, my mother took us all to Dar es Salaam, where her family
had moved. Later she moved back to Nairobi, and later still to Syracuse, New York, with my younger brother, whence to Calgary, Alberta.

And so wanderlust is a part of my heritage, as is the quest for home. With every departure comes a sense of loss, of something left behind; and if you are a novelist, you find yourself out on that quest for comprehensibility, for the beginning of history and the sources of memory, not just your own and your family’s, but also communal history and memory. History, slipping away like grains of sand through the fingers, becomes obsession. Because, although there is no denying the gains brought about by emigration, with each move—from India to Africa, within Africa, from Africa to North America—we fragmented our stories, lost parts of our history, and carried the broken-up remains like a peddler’s items in a sack.

A few years ago, at a gathering in film director Deepa Mehta’s house in Toronto, I met a rather dapperly dressed man with the surname Fancy. I was pleasantly surprised to encounter him. We had never met before, but I had heard of his family. The Fancys were a prominent family of Pakistan known by name even in East Africa. I told Mr. Fancy that my mother said we were related on my father’s side to the Fancys. As a child I had not paid much attention to such stories;
who were the Fancys of Pakistan to us in Dar? This Mr. Fancy, though, said yes, he knew we were related. He had apparently heard of me. He told me that my grandfather, who had died young, had had two brothers. One of them went to live in Mwanza, a town on the shore of Lake Victoria. There, he happened to be in court once, wearing a suit and hat, and drew the attention of the British judge, who commended him on his fancy attire. He immediately adopted the name Fancy. He later went to Pakistan, and was the grandfather of the friendly gentleman before me, my distant cousin.

And so, reacquaintance with a lost branch of the family, a story from the past, even an acquaintance with a clan name (which he told me was Bhimani) that we had lost due to my father’s early death and the subsequent loss of contact with his side of the family.

As a young man at university I searched anxiously and deeply for my real identity, some essence that defined me. Was I Indian or African? Both identities were under threat by my presence in North America. Although I had come to the United States to attend university, the trend was for young people like me not to return. Still, Africa, Tanzania, meant a lot to me. In Boston, whenever some Indian student would accost me (this was not unusual at the time) with, Are you from India? I would proudly say I was from Tanzania.
Some of the Indians would then persist: Yes, but originally from where?

Of course they were right. I was also in some way an Indian. But in what way? I painstakingly studied Indian culture, history and philosophy, struggling in vain to find my exact place in that vast, incomprehensible matrix whence I had emerged. I came across moments of self-discovery in the films of Satyajit Ray, in the Bengali language I did not understand, that astounded me. I also studied with fascination the history of East Africa, devoured accounts written by the European explorers and administrators, their descriptions of the Indian traders they came across, among whom were my Gujarati ancestors.

At the same time that I was consumed by this search for identity, my stay in the United States was altering me, westernizing me in indelible ways. For one thing, although I had been brought up in a very religious community, no longer could I define myself solely by religious faith, which for me had become a matter of personal philosophy and belief. This fact is brought home to me every time I travel east.

I now have realized that what I am is simply the sum of what has gone into me. I am happy to live with several identities and with the contradictions that that implies; in fact I thrive on them, they feed
my creativity. The ultimate wisdom, the secret of my life, is that there is no resolution, no real, single essence of me. This sounds a bit like Zen self-discovery perhaps, and trivial maybe, but it is of profound consequence for me personally. The difference from that other kind of enlightenment is that it produces no calm ocean of wisdom in my mind, no unifying tranquility, but instead a field of felt tensions that defines me.

I even realized recently that my sin of heresy—equivocation—my claim to many identities may have deeper roots. The migration of my family, that itch in the foot, did not start with the generation that left a drought-ridden western India taking to the dhows to cross the Indian Ocean for the greener pastures of Zanzibar and East Africa. There also was an earlier, and incomplete, migration of the psyche. That migration was the conversion of my people from a Hindu sect into a sect of Islam. We were a syncretistic community, sometimes considered heretical, who saw nothing wrong and felt no qualms in subscribing to beliefs from both faiths. We couldn’t, did not want to, let go.

Africa is my history and my memory. It is inside me. And so is India, in its way, though I do not wish to bring in that further complication here.

One is sometimes taunted, Then why did you come here? The question is both naïve and presumptuous. A serious, existential question about the here and now is not answered by, Then why did you come? The undeniable fact is, I have come and here I am. Three hundred thousand immigrants come to Canada every year, to keep this nation viable. The world has changed. Population growth statistics for the Western countries indicate that they can continue to thrive only with the influx of immigrants. The populations of African and Asian countries, on the other hand, are exploding. It takes no clever guessing to tell where some of these extra populations will end up. And it is important for this to be the case if our planet is to keep conflicts between rich and poor to a minimum. Surely the nature of the world’s developed nations, especially those that must depend on immigrants, must change.

I recall how, in the 1960s, when Kenyan Asians with British passports started going to England to claim their residency rights there, they were faced with vicious public protests. Enoch Powell, eminent classical scholar and Conservative politician, announced famously, by way of protest, that England is fish and chips, not rice and curry. Forty years later now, rice and curry is precisely one of the items Britain
promotes in its self-image. And only recently it allocated permits to Indian teachers to go there and teach. What was unthinkable once sounds natural now.

It is cometimes argued that Canada needs a strong identity, a sense of its essential self and destiny, such as the United States possesses. An American does not feel two ways about being American. If immigrants are allowed to live in Canada without coelescing or assimilating into an unequivocal national identity, goes this argument, they will only contribute further to this country’s character as a confused, hapless nonentity on the world stage.

But America is the wrong model. It is an older, more established, more populous country, which came into being with a strong founding mythology and began with a war of revolution. American identity is a religion; in that it is surely unique. Watching the American flag ceremony at an event such as the Super Bowl, pitched with emotion and fervor, is as wonderful and mysterious and awesome as seeing a few thousand Muslims kneeling in solemn prayer, turned towards Mecca, or conservative Jews at the Wailing Wall.

Canada is where the Loyalists came. It was part of the British Empire, which is why people from the former British colonies found it easier to come to it.
With a larger percentage of new immigrants, it presents a lesser inertia to change. It welcomes and accommodates the world, and as a result it reflects global diversity in a peaceful mode. That should surely be its strength and its identity, its uniqueness—not its source of insecurity.

The destruction of the World Trade Center brought home dramatically, to many of us in Canada, how tenuous is the concept of a narrow, inflexible national identity. In the days and weeks that followed September 11, there were many cries of, “We are all Americans.” Canada ran out of American flags. The rallying cry had always been, “We are
different
from Americans.” The more nationalist-minded Canadians used to bristle with anti-Americanism. The difference between the two nations was something which many immigrants, who had seen Canada as merely an extension of America from afar, had to learn, much to their embarrassment and the consternation of those who reminded them of this.

So what happened? September 11 showed that there are ties that are impossible to forget or break. They may be historic, they may be racial, tribal or geographic, but they are there in the mind. And when the world, among commentators and analysts, began to be divided among “us” and “them,” or the
“Roman Empire” and the “Barbarians,” or clashing civilizations, then, however we interpret these concepts (and they are fundamentally contestable), it was clear that the time of narrow nationalism was over in more ways than one.

And if we were all Americans at that particular crisis moment, and perhaps are still if we view the crisis as long-term and global, then is it asking too much for us to be Africans too, when that continent is in crisis? Or Indians or Chinese, if the occasion demands? Is it so morally reprehensible or unpatriotic to be aware of all one’s origins and therefore care about a larger world, to care especially about the poorer segments of the globe, whence one has come, and to which one has not repaid any debt?

That, ultimately, is my defence, my plea for redemption. I have justified my equivocation, my heresy, by saying that it is natural and inevitable in the modern world, which is so interconnected and so fraught with dangers that arise from differences among peoples. The justification is what I have arrived at, but the sin is a matter of the heart, is what I am.

Alberto
Manguel