Joy Kogawa was invited to be part of an anthology collected and edited by Irvin Studin.
What Is A Canadian? : Forty-Three Thought-Provoking Responses (Hardcover)
by Studin (Author)
In a year following the release of CBC TV's The Greatest Canadian" and CBC Radio's "BC Almanac's Greatest British Columbians" there is a book titled: "What is a Canadian? 43 Thought -Provoking Responses. Each of these essays begins with the words “A Canadian is . . .”. Each one is very different, producing a fascinating book for all thinking Canadians.
Here is Joy Kogawa's response...
For the other 42 responses including ones by Alan Fotheringham, Thomas Homer-Dixon, Roch Carrier, Jake MacDonald, George Elliott Clarke, Margaret MacMillan, Thomas Franck, Rosemarie Kuptana, Gérald A. Beaudoin, Peter W. Hogg, George Bowering, Christian Dufour, Paul Heinbecker, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, John C. Crosbie, Audrey McLaughlin, Roy MacGregor, Charlotte Gray, Hugh Segal, Janet McNaughton, Sujit Choudhry, Aritha van Herk, L. Yves Fortier, Catherine Ford, Mark Kingwell, Silver Donald Cameron, Guy Laforest, Maria Tippett, E. Kent Stetson, Louis Balthazar, Joy Kogawa, Wade MacLaughlan, Douglas Glover, Lorna Marsden, Saeed Rahnema, Denis Stairs, Valerie Haig-Brown, Guy Saint-Pierre, William Watson, Doreen Barrie, Jennifer Welsh, Bob Rae - you will have to go buy the book!
What is a Canadian?
Joy Kogawa
A Canadian is a transplanted snail called James who sat down on a brick. A Canadian is a big fat street party on the Danforth in Toronto, 2004. A Canadian is hockey night in Canada on a small patch of ice created by buckets of water in the backyard. A Canadian is a plane full of people from Vancouver flying to Quebec with signs saying: “WE LOVE YOU.” A Canadian is the wind on the prairies that who has seen. And a red-headed girl in a green-gabled house on an island with red soil. And the Mounties who always always get their man. A Canadian trusts the law. And since we generally rank either second or third or fourth or whatever, we try harder. But weren’t we proud when Gorbachev said, “Look at Canada. They don’t kill people there.” Or something like that. That’s because a Canadian is, if nothing else, decent. Isn’t that the adjective that most commonly comes to mind? We’re as decent as the day is long, are we not--fair-minded, peaceable, not demanding guns to defend ourselves, abhorring and resisting the culture of violence we are virtually force-fed by the fee-fi-fo-fuming giant close by. My Canadian friends who travel a lot say we don’t know how lucky we are. I think a lot of us do know it. I, for one, am a Canadian who loves Canada more than words can say.
My love is not cheap. It’s been tested, and it endures. I can thank my parents for this. And I can thank the community from which I came, and which was destroyed by the particular brand of racism in my childhood. I can thank my Grade Two Highroads to Reading that I practically memorized when we were living in that once-upon-a-time space called Slocan (British Columbia). Books were precious and few. I can thank the CBC that I listened to when we were finally allowed to have radios again, after we were moved east of the Rockies. That’s when a Canadian became the Green Hornet, the House on the Hill, Share the Wealth, Terry and the Pirates and Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster and Rawhide, and that beautiful blonde skater, Barbara Ann Scott. Other Canadians from my community who were exiled missed out on all that. A Canadian is a group of more than four thousand people who were exiled for no crime. Oh sweet democratic country that I love. Some people are tired of this drum-beat.
At some point our flag stopped being bold red, white and blue intersecting slashes, and became a red pointy leaf on white, with two red bands. At some point we stopped singing “The Maple Leaf Forever”, because Wolfe the dauntless hero was being impolite planting Britannia’s flag on Canada’s fair domain. In Coaldale, Miss McVeety tried to teach us French, but it was a hard row to hoe. I don’t think she actually spoke French. She assigned us things to memorize from a textbook. “Mercy buck-ups,” the kids said. We all soldiered on. Mr. Connors and Mr. Bryant taught us about the crazy kings and queens of England, but we didn’t learn about Canadian history. A Canadian is someone who probably doesn’t know much about Canada.
There was a year of patriotic pride when we sang with great gusto, “It’s the hundredth anniversary of CON fed er a tion.” And there was no cloudy doubt in the clear blue air that Canada would last as long as the planet did. There was also no doubt that everyone in Canada was white, including me. My parents were another matter. I couldn’t really whiten them.
Years later, I discovered that I wasn’t completely white, and for that I received an Order of Canada. One of the most memorable moments of that day occurred when a fellow recipient who was sitting beside me leaned over to make small talk as we waited for the ceremony to begin. “I have been to your beautiful country,” he said. I was so Canadian and polite and smiled and nodded. He went on to tell me things about my country--Japan--and I kept nodding. He was French Canadian. I don’t know what his name was, but if we were arranged alphabetically, maybe his name started with K. Anyway, as I say, a Canadian is someone who probably doesn’t know much about Canada, including who a Canadian is.
About a year ago, I was visiting Thorold, a small town near St. Catherines, Ontario, when my son introduced me to one of his acquaintances, who looked to be about thirty years old. He glanced down at this old white-haired Asian foreigner from his not-so-great height and said, “Does she speak English?” I ought not to have been surprised. It wasn’t so long ago that only white people were Canadians. I was a bit put-off, but answered politely, “Yes, I speak English,” and left it at that. A Canadian is a foreigner who isn’t a foreigner.
A few miles away in the most multicultural city in the world, every subway ride is a trip through the United Nations. I suppose it’s our role, as Torontonians, to trumpet the news that humans from all over the world can, generally speaking, live together in peace. It’s one of the things that makes me happy about this country. Our ancestors might have fought each other, but we don’t have to.
In my untypical Canadian childhood, because I was related to the country of my ancestors, I was “a stench in the nostrils of the people of Canada.” Today, another Canadian child goes through that wringer, running home from school with her books clutched tight to her chest, and after supper she’s fighting with her parents about what she will or will not wear on her head. And somewhere in a high-rise elevator, a gentle Canadian boy is aware that, even though he is no longer wearing his turban, the old woman has moved aside anxiously. All these little moments of life are the mirrors that tell us who we are.
These days, I’m more worried about the children on the streets, in temporary shelters, in transitional housing--the children who are living on the hungry side of life in a world-wide apartheid, where the dividing line is as black and white as the rich and the poor. The mindset to be dismantled is the powerful faith that money is everything. In its name and for its sake, we are giving our all, sacrificing our lives, our peace, our children and our neighbours as ourselves. Like others all over the planet, we are drifting in the miasma of a dream of riches that has turned murky. Is there, as Jane Jacob’s book title says, a ‘Dark Age Ahead?’ Does our country have the kind of enlightened citizenry and moral leadership to guide us through the nightmare of greed?
There was one among us who died recently--a man who helped to shine the light of hope into the darkness of injustice and apartheid in South Africa. Ted Scott, the former primate of the Anglican Church was, as the title of his biography states, a man of “Radical Compassion.” Joe Clark called him, “an almost perfect representation of Canada.”
I was sitting behind a pillar during Ted Scott’s memorial service, leaning this way and that, trying to get a glimpse of Desmond Tutu, who was in the pulpit at St. James’ Cathedral. He spoke warmly about Ted Scott, about the gratitude of South Africans. At one point, I could see his left hand as he stretched out his arms and repeated the word “all.” “All – all – all. Arafat. Sadam Hussein. All. All. All. All.” He was including every single person on the globe in the human family--the blacks, the whites, the aboriginals, the old, the rich, the despised, the admired, the tyrant, the remorseless psychopath. All. All. All.
And so a Canadian is part of the All that includes our Ted Scotts and our Paul Bernardos, our Conrad Blacks and our neighbours sleeping and dying on the streets.
These days I am working with some of the neighbours in my corner of the world, in Toronto’s Old Town surrounding the St. Lawrence Market. We are trying to demonstrate, through the work of a community currency, the Toronto Dollar, that the power of caring is still alive, and that we can work together to make a difference. We are trying to connect the streets and the towers, trying to bridge the horrible gap between rich and poor. It’s a hard row to hoe, as hard as trying to learn a language from a textbook. But we do what we can.
Nelson Mandela says he comes from a culture of ‘ubuntu’, a philosophy based on belonging where the essential identity of a person is based not on “I think therefore I am,” but on “I am because we belong.” The enemy, then, is not someone to destroy, but someone to embrace.
I think Canada is closer to a culture of ‘ubuntu’ than many other countries. Je suis. Nous sommes. Where we fail, I’m thankful that mercy bucks us up.
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Joy Kogawa, poet and novelist: The dream I have for this west-coast city on the edge of the peaceable ocean is the dream I have for the world - a dream of peace. What better time than this to abolish war as we face our common planetary fate? 
