Passages: Welcome Home to Canada

by Michael Ignatieff

  Alberto wanted to know if I’d ever considered moving to Canada. I replied that I’d always had a soft spot for Canadians, especially after the way Canadian writers and the Canadian government had championed my father’s cause and spoken out in support of him. I might even have explained that during my first visit to Canada in 1995, when I attended a PEN benefit in honour of my father, I’d had a drunken premonition that I would one day live in Canada. But when Alberto suggested that I consider moving there and told me that the government had a visa program that encouraged writers and artists to come and work in Canada, I recoiled from the idea. I couldn’t imagine upping sticks to a country I barely knew.

  Over the course of the next year the idea grew on me. The more I struggled to find my voice, the more I came to appreciate that a change of scene might help. So I began to reconsider—especially as I kept running into Canada’s growing literary profile. And the more I heard that this was due to Canada’s openness to writers from all over the world, the more attractive the Canadian option became.

  I am watching my son sleeping. Somewhere in the corridors of my memory I can hear the words from a television documentary about the lions of the Serengeti.

  When the cubs are old enough to fend for themselves, the stentorian voice of the disembodied narrator is explaining, their parents will chase them away and into the wild, where the young lions will roam until they are ready to settle down and establish a pride of their own. When it is ready to die, a lion will trek for miles across the parched Serengeti to the exact spot where it was born.

  The memory of these words triggers an old, recurring pang of guilt. My father sent me abroad so that I would return home one day and apply my expensively trained mind to the problems facing our people. But here I am in Canada, as far away from Africa as he could possibly have feared—and this after all the financial and emotional expense of my education, and after my father has been murdered for trying to protect the idea and sanctity of our home and community. As the familiar feelings of betrayal well up, I find myself reflecting on those lions of the Serengeti. Whenever the past gnaws at my conscience, I try to calm myself with the thought that we are all lions on the Serengeti. Each of us, at some point in his life, has to leave home to establish his pride, to find a place of his own. Which, when you think it through, means that a lion never dies in the same place as its progeny.

  I sometimes wonder, as I stare out of this window, at the U-turns, chance meetings, reckless gambles and inspired decisions on which our lives turn. Do we actively make choices or are we passive objects of the choices that fate imposes? Was it really some unconscious desire to return to Africa that sent me on this grand detour? Because of course the irony is that when I am in this room, I actually feel closer to home, to Africa, than I have ever done since I left.

  I knew, the minute I set eyes on this room, that I wanted to live in this house. It is a small room, maybe ten by six, an annex of my bedroom. I say “I knew,” but it was as much an unconscious as a conscious decision. So many of the choices we make in life are informed by our past, and I strongly suspect that my wish to live in this particular house was inspired by summer holidays spent loitering in my father’s study in an annex of his bedroom in Nigeria. I would scan the shelves of his library, plucking out any book that caught my wayward fancy, dipping in and out of its pages, reading indiscriminately—Swift, Shakespeare, Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Flitting from Soyinka to Senghor, between Achebe and Pepper Clarke, I would search for something to help while away the holiday until it was time to return to school in England.

  The books on the shelves in here are familiar. I too have accumulated a library featuring Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and John Pepper Clarke. I also have two books by the grand old man of African letters, the former Senegalese poet, soldier, priest and president Leopold Sedar Senghor. Monsieur Senghor was my father’s ideal of the Renaissance man, l’homme engagé, as Ken Saro-Wiwa liked to envisage himself. I’ve never actually read Senghor, but I bought his books anyway. I am conscious that this room is something of a shrine to my father, that it reflects an unconscious need to belong, to establish a connection with him and with that faraway home.

  When I look around at the mess in here—the jumble of books, newspapers, passports, compact discs and photographs—I see a pattern in the rug. I see the outline of my face, I hear the sound of a voice, barely audible, like a faint whisper carried on the wind. Take, for instance, the books on my shelves. They are not arranged in any particular order, but I know instinctively where to find every title. There is a method to this madness, because those books didn’t get where they are by accident. I remember why I bought each one, why and when I placed it, seemingly at random, on the shelves.

  When I left England, I had to prune my library. I had far too many books, and I decided to leave behind the ones that had helped construct the identity I was no longer comfortable with. I spent hours trying to decide which books to take and which to leave behind, yet I still ended up shipping a hundred titles over. Books are deceptively heavy and these ones cost me far more than I could afford; but I brought them anyway, because I knew I was moving to a country that encourages you to bring your past with you. Even the books that have been added since I arrived here have a recurring theme: the quest for personal identity against the foreground of politics and the recurring echoes of history. You get a generous baggage allowance when you move to Canada.

  There are two books in here that I carry around with me wherever I travel. They contain a log of all the journeys I have made since 1995. My two passports record some of the places I travelled on my father’s behalf: New Zealand, Canada and the U.S., Germany, Austria, France, Belgium, Ireland. I went to all these places in an effort to save his life. Even after he was killed, I carried on travelling, trying to understand what his life and death would mean to me. I went to Burma, to South Africa, back to Canada again, and finally to Nigeria to bury him last year. I still travel a lot—sometimes on his behalf but increasingly on mine. But wherever I roam, all roads lead back to Canada.

  My passports also tell another story. In my Nigerian passport I am identified as Kenule Bornale Saro-Wiwa. In my British passport I am listed as Saro Kenule Bornale Wiwa. The official who issued my Nigerian passport last year informed me, somewhat gleefully, that he had to use the name that was on my previous Nigerian passport. So even though I had legally changed my name in 1993, the Saro-Wiwa name lives on in Nigeria. I will soon be eligible for Canadian citizenship and I toy with the notion of reclaiming the name if I apply for a Canadian passport. It’s only a fleeting thought, though, because the short answer to the question “Why Canada?” is that I came here to discover and define who Ken Wiwa is. Canada, as it promised, has given me the space to reinvent or at least discover myself, and I now have a clearer sense of who this Ken Wiwa is and to whom and what the fellow owes his allegiance. That said, I am also aware that deep down there will always be a Ken Saro-Wiwa in me.

  I often shrink from the realization that so much of my writing is self-centred. But I also suffer from the delusion that my experience reflects a wider, more universal, or at least Canadian concern. The world is shrinking so quickly, people are moving around so much, mingling and intermarrying, that we keep being told we now live in a world without frontiers—a global village. But I sometimes wonder whether it won’t be more important than ever to root ourselves in something, to identify with somewhere specific. We still need to fix our values in a coherent system, to believe in something—an idea, a community of shared aspirations perhaps. We have to lay down a default identity that we can turn to and cling to in times of confusion and bewildering events. As James Baldwin once surmised, too much identity is a bad thing, but too little can also be a problem.

  I imagine that’s why the only shelf in my library that displays any semblance of order is the one devoted to my father’s books and letters. My father roots me, reminds me of the place I came from. He is my default template, the clay from which I mould
my image. And now that I have defined him, quantified his values and made sense of the questions he once posed to my sense of self, I can begin to look for my own answers. When I am in here, I feel reassured that he is close at hand, that I can reach over and reread his words, look between the lines, talk to him, engage in a debate with him. When I am in here, I am in my father’s study. I am also back in Africa. And I am in Canada. I am at home.

  As I sit here typing these words, writing into the future, I am conscious of the folder that sits on the shelf with my father’s books. In that folder is a letter my father sent me from his detention cell. It was one of the last letters he wrote to me, and it contains the most important advice my father ever gave me:

  I don’t mind you growing your children outside … you should use the advantages which your British experience has offered you to promote your African/Ogoniness …

  Those words have become my mission statement in life. They define and sustain me in my quest to fulfill my obligations to myself, my family, my father and my community. If Ken Saro-Wiwa had known how things would turn out for his first son, he probably would have substituted Canadian for British in that letter, because it is here, in Canada, that I found the space from which to express myself and begin the quest to promote my home.

  Brian D. Johnson

  FROM THE LIGHTHOUSE

  I NEVER USED TO think of myself as an immigrant. Not until my wife, who is Canadian-born, played the birthright card during an argument we were having about national unity during the last Quebec referendum. “But of course,” she said, “you’re not from here.”

  I still have trouble calling myself an immigrant without some irony. We associate immigrants with the colonized and the dispossessed, whereas I came from the so-called Mother Country, home to the colonizers and the self-possessed. My family moved here, not to escape hardship or repression, but because an executive post opened up for my father at the Canadian branch of an English insurance company called the Pearl—the Pearl Assurance Company, which had a more comforting ring than insurance. For us, it would always be the Mother Company, mother of pearl, cradle to grave. I’d lived just five years in England before emigrating. But it would take much longer to feel released from the embrace of empire, with all its cozy intonations of class and race and gender. When we moved to Canada, England moved with us. And I wouldn’t shake myself free of it until my mid-twenties, when I “emigrated” a second time, from English Canada to Quebec. There, in a quicksilver romance with another culture, in the bright shock of difference, I caught a new reflection of myself—at home in my own skin—and finally left England behind.

  Since then I think I’ve come to understand that immigration is not just about changing countries. You can cross four thousand miles of ocean from England to Canada and not feel like an immigrant; or you can move five hours down the road from one piece of Canada to another and make yourself strangely at home in a foreign culture. Then there’s the country of the mind, where the frontiers are elusive, forever shifting.

  My early childhood memories amount to a handful of sensory images. I grew up in a seaside town called Whitley Bay, near Newcastle upon Tyne. We lived on Queen’s Road, which ended in a field where horses licked sugar cubes out of my hand, and beyond that were out-of-bounds brambles and railway tracks. I remember making mud balls by a coal fire in winter. Summer weekends on a cold beach, knees turning blue in the icy shriek of the North Sea. Eating potato crisps from a bag that came with its own little pack of salt that got mixed up with the sand on my fingers. When the tide was out, we’d walk to the lighthouse. Out and back. That smooth white tower was Whitley Bay’s postcard landmark.

  On the other side of town was the Spanish City, a carnival midway greased with danger and dark skin. It was the most foreign place imaginable. I never went there but always heard it talked about as a forbidden zone, a cartoon example of what it meant to be “common.” Years later, in Canada, whenever the family would drive along a country road and ride over those sudden hills that make you feel briefly airborne, we’d shout “Spanish City bumps!” in a happy chorus. It was a reference to the roller coaster in that Whitley Bay fairground, but the phrase had become so familiar to me that I’d forgotten its origin, assuming it was just an English idiom for a hilly road.

  When I left England at the age of five I was too young to know what a country was, never mind a “Canada.” I was under the impression that we were taking a ship to see a cannon. Ship, cannon—there was a certain logic to it. And I still remember the disappointment of walking down vast white gangway corridors into an indoor ship that didn’t look like a ship, and then being told, amid much laughter, that there would be no cannon, only this place called Canada. It was October 1954, and we were sailing on the Empress of France—my mother, my ten-year-old brother and myself. My father had gone ahead by plane to buy a house.

  It was a rough crossing. In the mid-Atlantic we were whiplashed by the tail end of Hurricane Hazel, a monster storm that was a step ahead of us, also en route to Toronto but travelling at a faster clip. We spent most of the passage lying seasick below decks, being served Canada Dry ginger ale by a kindly cabin steward. For my mother the whole experience was terrifying. She’d never been on a ship or a plane, and hadn’t ventured farther from home than the Devon coast. Now she was travelling alone, sailing into an uncertain future with two small children. On the ship, we met the Chilcotts, a couple immigrating to Toronto because of another branch-office job at an English insurance company. It’s as if the insurance men were the last missionaries, out to civilize a precarious future. The Chilcotts became our good friends. In our new home, where we had no relatives, we’d spend every Christmas with them, keeping alive the English tradition of turkey with stuffing balls, bread sauce and sherry trifle.

  Although the passage was rough, we weren’t exactly boat people. We spent out first three weeks at the Royal York Hotel, experiencing a comfy form of culture shock. After reaching Toronto, we couldn’t get to our new house because Hurricane Hazel had washed out the bridges to the west end. (Hazel was the worst natural disaster in Canadian history. Eighty-one people were killed in Toronto, thirty-two of them when a row of fourteen houses slid into the Humber River.)

  In the New World everything looked huge—the streets, the cars, the buildings, the steaks. My brother and I spent our days tearing up and down the mammoth corridors of the Royal York, which was the biggest building we’d ever seen, the centrepiece of a skyline that was immeasurably tall and modern. Boys love bigness, and Canada was larger than life.

  We moved to a bungalow on the suburban frontier, an Etobicoke subdivision still scarred and muddy from the storm. The wildness of the country was just a short walk away, across the field and through the woods to the creek and Snapping Turtle Pond. My father spent weekends sinking fence posts around the treeless yard, and panelling the rec room. He finished just in time to sell the house and buy a better one, where he panelled another rec room. My brother and I hung plastic models of American warplanes on the fresh walls, and played ping-pong to pancake stacks of 45s. Ray Charles, Del Shannon, Duane Eddy, Chuck Berry. The novelties of growing up—music, TV and toys—were American, but the rest of Canada was as British as it was Canadian. So we fit right in. It was the early sixties. There was no flag, no Margaret Atwood, no Gordon Lightfoot or Joni Mitchell. Aside from the black-and-white beauty of Hockey Night in Canada, a ritual our whole family happily embraced, Canadian identity was barely an idea. But everywhere you looked, there were signs of the Motherland, from ubiquitous reminders of the Queen to the home-country twang of Ray Sonin hosting Calling All Britons on CFRB radio.

  We were not rich. My father worked so hard to create a comfortable life for us that he didn’t live long enough to fully reap the benefits. His own father had died when he was a boy, so he gave up a dream of becoming an engineer and went to work to support his mother. He always had a healthy respect for money. He would keep coins stacked in perfect little towers on his dresser. A man of ro
utine. He once told me, with a grin of immense satisfaction, that he always put his socks on first when he got dressed in the morning. Although he never offered an explanation, it always struck me as a precaution against something. As an insurance man, Father believed in guarding against calamity.

  My parents arrived in Canada with some notions of class that were not about money. They couldn’t get used to the idea of seeing my older brother and me heading off to school in jeans. They worried about us falling in with the wrong crowd, the kind of kids their own parents would have called “common.” So they scrimped and saved to send us both to Upper Canada College, an uncommonly private school, where I would spend ten years. Upper Canada was an ersatz England, with masters instead of teachers, forms instead of grades. The cane, not the strap, was the scourge of choice. We played cricket in the spring. And there were more than a few English accents among the faculty.

  My most formative teacher was a Brit who got me addicted to reading books. He fed me true stories of the Second World War, and by the time I was twelve, I’d read them all: fighter ace Douglas Bader gunning down Germans in the Battle of Britain after losing both his legs, the Dambusters sneaking bombs down rivers, wounded men on morphine skiing to freedom in Scandinavia, frozen sailors manning convoys to Murmansk, the silent dread of the U-boat wolf packs, the bomber crews haunted by the sweet odour of human flesh burning in the incendiary attacks on Hamburg and Dresden, and all those nifty British aircraft—Spitfires, Hurricanes, Lancasters, Mosquitoes. In the late fifties the war was still in the relatively recent past, and its literature had blossomed. It was, I think, the reason I became a writer. I wanted to emulate what I’d read, and even attempted a bogus short story of escaping from a prison camp and waiting to feel the thud of bullets in my back.