A Fair Country

The other day, I had an interesting conversation with my son. He was working on a history project about Quebec, and he made – what to me was a startling statement.

He said, “The shops in Montreal have signage in French to preserve Quebec's unique culture and heritage.”

I asked him what he felt about the controversy in Mumbai that all the cabbies should know Marathi.

“That’s wrong,” he replied.

I said I didn’t see any difference in Quebecers’ insistence on French and the chauvinist elements in Mumbai insisting on the blanket usage of Marathi.

I asked him if one is right, how can the other be wrong?

He said that in Quebec it’s the law.

I asked, whether a wrong act become right if it becomes a law?

“I don’t know,” he shrugged.

He lost interest in the conversation because he wanted to play Farmville on facebook.

Che’s 12. A typical response to something that he doesn’t want to get involved with is, “Whatever,” followed by a shrug.

As I read John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country I was reminded of this conversation I had with Che.

In the final chapter of the book A Circle of Fairness, Saul explains Quebec’s concept of interculturalisme. He says, “I am more comfortable using the term interculturalisme than multiculturalism to describe how Canada works. It isn’t quite right, but it comes close.”

He quotes from a report by Gerard Bouchard and Charles Taylor about the ethos of Quebec. “The wisest and most effective method of dealing with cultural differences is not to hide them but to show them.”

“A particular responsibility falls upon the ethno-cultural majority to build relationships with immigrants.”

“And how are immigrants to be dealt with? On the basis of ‘four civic virtues.’ Equite – equity or fairness; welcome, getting to know the other, moderation and wisdom; patience. After all, such great changes of life require time in order to be digested by all sides.”

The book raises several questions that are at the core of Canada’s identity and nationhood. Of course, many of the issues raised would be contentious to most Canadians and don’t have the same resonance to a newcomer.

At one level, I found Saul’s interpretation of the Canadian way an attempt at romanticising the non-Western forms of civilisation and society formation.

Yet his interpretation explains so many present dilemmas of the western world that are (surprisingly) absent in Canada – issues of identity, the existence of the ‘other’ in a society of multiple minorities.

Canadians believe in fairness and inclusion; even if on occasions, Canada seemingly doesn’t.

Check Maher Arar's new venture Prism.

Image: Maher Arar: http://thewe.cc/thewei/images2/aljazeerah_inf_nov2003_images/a30.jpg

Among the Cities

Howard Karel is a rare kind of advertising professional – he’s well read, articulate and a thinking person. There’s not an iota of vacuity in him that generally proliferates in a normal advertising professional. He’s a board member at The Village Terraces, the condominium where I worked as security officer. 

Sometime ago, I was talking to him about my assignment on multiculturalism in Canada and he gave me Jan Morris’s book Among the Cities (Viking 1985, Penguin 1986). “Read the chapter on Toronto,” he said, “It’ll explain many issues you’ve been grappling with.”

Jan Morris is a legendary British (Welsh) writer who is unfortunately better known not for her writing but for her sex reassignment from a male to female.  Morris’s piece on Toronto in Among the Cities is titled Second Prize. She wrote the piece in 1984 when Toronto celebrated its 150th year (its celebrating its 175th year in 2009).

The piece was originally published in Saturday Night and it was titled Canadians are nothing if not fair… 

Morris describes Toronto in many different and varied ways, touching upon issues of multiculturalism, ethnic enclaves, people, places, habits, behaviour and all that is characteristically Torontonian (I’d say to an extent that applies to Canada, too, but I don’t know Canada well enough to make that claim).

I hope you enjoy reading the selection as much as I did compiling it.

• “… (Toronto) is the emblematic immigrant destination of late 20^th century…which is nevertheless one of the most highly disciplined and tightly organized cities in the Western world.”
• “Toronto has come late in life to cosmopolitanism…and as a haven of opportunity it is unassertive. No glorious dowager raises her torch over Lake Ontario, summoning those masses yearning to breathe free…”
• “The promise of Toronto was promise of a more diffuse, tentative, not to say bewildering kind. On a modest building near the harbor-front I happened to notice the names of those entitled to parking space outside: D. Iannuzzi, P. Iannuzzi, H. McDonald, R. Metcalfe and F. Muhammad. ‘What is this place?’ I inquired of people passing by. ‘Multicultural TV,’ they said, backing away nervously. ‘Multi-what TV?’ I said, but they had escaped by then – I had yet to learn that nothing ends a Toronto conversation more quickly than a supplementary question.”
• “Multiculturalism! I had never heard the word before, but I was certainly to hear it again, for it turned out to be the key word, so to speak, to contemporary Toronto. As ooh-la-la is to Paris, and ciao to Rome, and nyet to Moscow, and hey you’re looking great to Manhattan, so multiculturalism is to Toronto. Far more than any other migratory cities, Toronto is all things to all ethnicities. The melting-pot conception never was popular here, and sometimes I came to feel that Canadian nationality itself was no more than a minor social perquisite, like a driving licence or spare pair of glasses. Repeatedly I was invited to try the Malaysian vermicelli at Rasa Sayang, the seafood pierogi at the Ukrainian Caravan, or something Vietnamese in Yorkville, but when I ventured to suggest one day that we might eat Canadian, a kindly anxiety crossed my host’s brow. ‘That might be more difficult,’ he said.
• “…multiculturalism, I discovered, did not mean that Toronto was all brotherly love and folklore. On the contrary, wherever I went I heard talk of internecine rivalries, cross-ethnical vendetta…there turned out to be darkly conspiratorial side to multiculturalism.”
• “…this is not the sort of fulfillment I myself wanted of Toronto. I am not very multicultural, and what I chiefly yearned for in this metropolis was the old grandeur of the North, its size and scale and power, its sense of wasteland majesty…now and then I found it…names such as Etobicoke, Neepawa Avenue, Air Atonabee or the terrifically evocative Department of North.”
• “…the pursuit of happiness is not written into the Canadian constitution…”
• “Toronto seems to me, in time as in emotion, a limbo-city…It looks forward to no millennium, back to no golden age. It is what it is, and the people in its streets, walking with that steady, tireless, infantry-like pace that is particular to this city, seem on the whole resigned, without either bitterness or exhilaration, to being just what they are…”
• “Among the principal cities of the lost British Empire, Toronto has been one of the most casual (rather than the most ruthless) in discarding the physical remnants of its colonial past…Nobody could possibly mistake this for a British city now…one the other hand there is no mistaking this for a city of the United States, either…Torontonians constantly snipe at all things American…(but) it is not a free-and-easy, damn-Yankee sort of city – anything  but…even its accents are oddly muted, made for undertones and surmises rather than certainties and swank.”
• “Toronto is the capital of the unabsolute. Nothing Is utter here, except the winters I suppose, and the marvelous expanse of the lake. Nor much of it crystal clear. To every Toronto generalization there is an exception, a contradiction, or an obfuscation.”
• “Toronto preoccupations can be loftily local…”
• “In many ways Toronto appears…even now…almost preposterously provincial…yet it is not really provincial at all. It is a huge, rich and splendid city, metropolitan in power… (and) why not? Toronto is Toronto and that is enough…it has all the prerequisites of your modern major city…yet by and large it has escaped the plastic blight of contemporary urbanism, and the squalid dangers, too.”
• “If ‘multiculturalism’ does not key you in to Toronto, try ‘traditionalism’…the real achievement of Toronto is to have remained itself…”
• “…if fate really were to make me an immigrant here I might be profoundly unhappy. Not because Toronto would be unkind to me. It would be far kinder than New York, say, or Sidney down under. It would not leave me to starve in the street, or bankrupt me with medical bills, or refuse me admittance to discos because I was black. No, it would be subtler oppression than that – the oppression of reticence. Toronto is the most undemonstrative city I know, and the least inquisitive.”
• “Sometimes I think it is the flatness of the landscape that causes this flattening of the spirit…sometimes I think it must be the climate…could it be the permanent compromise of Toronto, neither quite this or altogether that, capitalist but compassionate, American but royalist, multicultural but traditionalist.”
• “This is a city conducive to self-doubt and introspection. It is hard to feel that Torontonians…share in any grand satisfaction of spirit. I asked immigrants of many nationalities if they liked Toronto, and though at first, out of diplomacy or good manners they nearly all said yes, a few minutes of probing generally found them less than enthusiastic…never because the citizenry has been unkind or because the city is unpleasant: only because, in the course of its 150 years of careful progress, so calculated, so civilized, somewhere along the way Toronto lost, or failed to find, the gift of contact or of merriment.”

Image: Photoshop filters on image taken from:
https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjXlFx9lueKULaf49XwnWHxNQnQCXs3bUFhE_gHw8ZCWvPv3orgicvTI2DHz1Jd-8FnR5Siwt6AF9OAVZmXB1fo5746u3ctGfpq7GKg5J2UPF81TLkQcXUeS6rE0o9UKJ2voBkEiLsxpr8r/s320/Jan+Morris.jpg

Story of Language

It’s been one of the most thrilling weeks of my life in Toronto. 

I’m part of a group that’s working on a project for Joyce Wayne on Canadian literature for our course at Sheridan. 

The group comprises Nelson Alvarado Jourde, Mike Odongkara and Yoko Morgenstern. We had to make a presentation for Joyce, and we decided to make an audio-visual because Mike has this absolutely great Apple laptop that makes everything possible.

We’re all trying to be oh!-so-creative! The problem with being creative is that we are all generally speaking quite undisciplined and it’s taken us longer than the time we were allotted to get the project done. 

Then there have been moments of frayed tempers, when Mike and I fought like little children. Mike’s convinced that I take crack cocaine because of my inexplicably sever bouts of anger. 

Nelson, the sage of the group, tries to make peace and quietly gets everyone back on track. Yoko is the charm of the group and smiles really hard so that we remain civilized. She also gets Chinese food and cranberry pop to make the effort worthwhile.

We couldn’t have ever got together but for the fact that we are in Canada and at Sheridan. This is Canada’s multiculturalism at work. Nelson is from Peru, Mike from Uganda and Yoko’s from Japan and has lived for many years in Germany. English is a second language for all of us, and we speak it with different accents.

The recording we have of our presentation sounds rich because it’s not in the same nasal North American twang that’s so common to people in Greater Toronto Area (of course, Caucasian Canadians prefer to think they are accent-neutral).

What also adds to the charm of audio visual is that the recording is so totally amateurish that a professional podcaster told Nelson that it’s just plain horrible.

While working on the project (part of the result is on the blog Canada The Lost Soul) I often thought of an extremely interesting book – Mario Pei’s The Story of Language. 

Another reason for thinking of the book was a pleasant e-mail I got from Ramesh Purohit, a former colleague who’s seen this blog and wrote back to say how much he liked it. I remember lending him this book to him to read, and he, too, had liked it.

Pei’s book is for the non-academic people who are interested in the different languages of the world. In India, we tend to be rather casual about languages because we have so many of them. That’s not the case here in Canada. 

Here, multi-lingual people get the respect they deserve because they enrich the multicultural mosaic.

Pei’s book introduces the manner in which languages across the world developed, and although Pei was often criticized for ‘dumbing down’ the field of linguistics, he certainly wrote this book with a zeal to reach out to as many people as he could.

I read this short review of the book written by a certain Magellan (Santa Clara, Ca) on the Amazon website, that sort of sums up all there’s to Pei’s book. “There is a lot to learn about the basic structure and nature of language…this includes basic concepts about grammar and the parts of speech, the basic principles of word morphology, phonetics, and phonology, language change and evolution, structural linguistics and de Saussure's important and influential ideas in the area, understanding the major language families and how they differ from each other, and the same for the individual languages in your own language group, and so on.”

Most of the statistics of the book would be completely outdated, unless there’s been a new, updated edition published recently. However, that may not be the case because Pei died in 1978. 

I don’t remember which edition of the book I had read, but I do remember that it was the first time I had experienced what in retrospect was nothing but jingoism and (false) nationalistic pride about the importance Sanskrit has in the schema of world languages. I didn’t know Sanskrit then and I don’t know it now. I'm not proud of that, but I certainly don't associate myself with the nonsense of making Sanskrit the national language in India just as Hebrew is the national language in Israel.

Many years later, after a steady dose of reading, practicing and preaching secularism, I realize how exclusivist my views were at a certain age, and I remain thankful to so many different people who at different times of my life inculcated me with values that are more tolerant of the ‘other’.

Images: Mario Pei: http://www.niaf.org/milestones/year_1923.asp

Story of Language: http://reader2.com/tag/language/?skip=&style=blocks&perpage=90&sort=date