by Pico Iyer
At the very least, I thought, the government was trying, in its earnest, sometimes too ponderous way, to do the right thing, and I felt that there was a public consciousness, a sense of relaxation and even trust between citizen and country that I hadn’t seen so much elsewhere. The man sitting along the sidewalk on upper Yonge Street held up a sign that said, disarmingly, $ for pot and the “squeegee workers,” as they were called, who cleaned my windshield were as often as not young girls with rings in their noses; a sidewalk artist in the new world order was a Chinese man smiling outside the Eaton Centre (CENTRE OF THE MEGACITY) long after midnight on a Saturday night, trying to interest passersby in his handmade signs—YOUR NAME WRITTEN ON A GRAIN OF RICE and PALM READING / ANCIENT METHOD (while a colleague performed the obligatory drawings of Madonna and Brad Pitt).
Toronto had for me a little of the savor of Paris in the twenties, a self-conscious place for people from other places to forge a lively culture based on internationalism (“Writers have to have two countries,” Gertrude Stein had written there, “the one where they belong and the one in which they live really”); people here seemed amused at the world, while living at a small distance from it—able, that is, to play Iago as well as Hamlet (not far from the Planet Kensington jazz bar in Kensington Market, and Toronto’s Spice Terminal, listing all the major stops on the backpacker’s trade routes, a large sign announced GLOBAL CHEESE, followed by the boast “When it comes to cheese … we speak your language!”). The hustler working Bloor Street on a sunny summer morning was a man standing in front of two ABM machines (as they’re locally known), saying, “I can do your financial services for you. Especially you contact me early in the morning. Accounts, taxes …”
I knew that Greeks had recently disrupted the hoisting of the Macedonian flag in Toronto (and the paper had described Sikhs burning an Indian flag at City Hall); in 1992, the city had been shaken by its first taste (since 1837) of what it rather overanxiously called “race riots.” Yet there was a steadying quality, too, among the immigrants, and when I went to the Toronto Islands on a Sunday, I saw grandmothers wheeling strollers, and families enjoying picnics—couples courting as if they were still in Hanoi or San Salvador (the “old Canadians” going in the opposite direction, towards their “cottages” in the north).
An Indian on the Toronto map (though he turned out to be from Pakistan) was the young man who picked me up in his cab, one spring afternoon on University Avenue, and said, in the quiet, questioning inflections of his place of birth, “I have, like, lots of Indian and Sikh friends, and they’re nice people? Like, I’ve heard the problems you have over there in India / Pakistan”—the two terms becoming more than ever one here—“they’re made by the government? But here we’ve got a Canadian government, so we don’t have those problems?”
We were driving down streets decorated with nine-pounder cannons of the kind used in Crimea and Waterloo, and statues of Scotsmen, past a memorial to a “gun park” and a monument to “those who went out to battle and died for freedom’s cause” (“freedom” in this case a euphemism for “Britain”). We were driving towards King Street, past the statue of Winston Churchill that oversees a Speakers’ Corner, which, in archetypal Canadian fashion, encourages all speech so long as it’s nice (“the Canadian Criminal Code prohibits slanderous statements or statements promoting genocide or hatred against an identifiable group or race”).
“In any case,” said this new Canadian, “most of the people who’ve come here, they’ve come to get away from all that? Like, I’m not interested in those issues?”
It could have been New York, except the man was smiling.
One night, I went to have dinner with my friend David, whom I’d met on a plane down to Havana (he springing out at the first stop to play catch on the tarmac with a boyhood friend who turned out to be the editor of a Canadian magazine called—of course—Borderlines). David lived in an area that was now known as Portuguese (most of its signs Italian and Vietnamese and who knows what), and his girlfriend, Alicia, was a shining young Goan Christian who’d spent her earliest years in Pakistan. We sat around their kitchen table, eating tomatoes, munching on olives, the sounds and smells of Portugal wafting in through the garden window. I admired a framed print of Rabindranath Tagore (“Yes. David gave me that for my graduation!”) and Alicia’s sky blue salwar kameez (“I got it in Hyderabad, actually. Twelve dollars. Because it’s bright: Toronto needs bright colors”).
My eye fell on the box of “Global Frozen White Eggs” that sat by the door, on a program for a conference Alicia had just organized, called Competing Realities (eager to find a voice for her own heritage, she was studying South Asian writers, especially female; David, meanwhile, held Spinoza reading groups every Tuesday night to try to draw closer to his Jewish roots).
“Did you see the paper today?” he was saying now, picking up the Globe and Mail. “That piece on the back page about multiculturalism? I went to high school with that woman. Beth! I couldn’t believe she was writing so beautifully about the blending of cultures.
“See, when I was growing up”—David, I recalled, was a born storyteller—“we had this really strong nationalism, this xenophobia, and it was directed against Americans! One time—I’ll never forget this—I was sitting at my friend Beth’s dinner table, and her father was there, too, this quintessential New York Jewish intellectual. He used to cook, and he had polio, but that didn’t stop him from getting up between courses to play the violin. He lived as if he were still in New York!
“But to the nationalists, that meant a kind of ambivalence! And one time he was talking, and this other guy at the table, he just said, ‘I can’t take any more of you Americans!’ and he threw his glass—this big heavy glass—over his shoulder. Went right through the window; I’ll never forget it.”
He smiled at the thought of how far the country had come. “Now, the new form of nationalism is multinationalism. This nationalistic impulse is toward all nations. And I love it! It makes me weepy. Ask Alicia—it’s true. Two things, they can make me cry: one is the new multiculture we’ve got here. The other is the lakes and wilderness. Make me weepy every time.”
“It’s true,” said Alicia, smiling fondly. “It does.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” David went on. “There’s nothing else like it in the world. It can bring tears to my eyes, this multiculturalism: the glorious promise of it.”
Suddenly, the phone rang—it was one of David’s best friends from his “postcollege, choose an identity” days, a full-throated Italian who was playing hooky at the racetrack—and Alicia showed me the complete program of her conference, sponsored in part, I noticed, by the Multiculturalism Programme, Canadian Heritage Department.
“You should come here sometime for Desh Pardesh,” she said as he talked with his friend. “You know, the South Asian arts festival they hold every year in the summer. It’s really different from most of these things: it’s gay and lesbian and bipositive: antiracist, antipatriarchal, anticommunal.”
“Sexy, too,” said David, returning to our conversation. “Really sexy: all these beautiful young things coming out to party.”
“What does Desh Pardesh mean?” I asked, and they both looked startled: a Hindu who couldn’t understand a common Hindi phrase.
“ ‘Home Away from Home,’ ” said Alicia. “I’m amazed you didn’t know that.”
“The problem is,” said David, picking up the strand of what he’d been saying before, “it’s all theoretical. Everyone is told, ‘Be who you are,’ and so everybody is taught to resist. Multiculturalism here is about resisting; it’s not about sharing. Like these Portuguese here”—he motioned out the window. “I talk of them, but not in a very friendly way. How many times have I been to their houses?”
“But you can taste Portugal. You can feel it and smell it and see it.”
“Sure I can. But on the streets, in the restaurants. That’s not the same as being in their homes.”
“That’s what I w
as saying,” added Alicia. “On the level of food, everyone will get together. But not in a deeper way. Multiculturalism actually increases the distances between us.”
This was the pattern I’d got used to hearing in Toronto: high hopes, followed by second thoughts—and I recalled what I’d read in a book earlier in the week. “Except for the odd visit to an ‘ethnic’ restaurant, we do stay with our own kind” was the verdict of an American exile here, who loved the city but found it more “clannish” than any major city he knew. “Perhaps this is a reason Americans, on holiday from their disintegrating cities, find Toronto such a peaceable and agreeable place. What they do not appear to realize is the extent to which this ‘peace’ is a result of extraordinary self-policing and self-segregation.”
And yet, I also thought, here were two people from radically different countries, religions, cultures, and they had found much to join them. Canada was the place where they could put such categories aside.
“See, everyone would like to be closer,” said David. “They would like to accommodate themselves more to what’s going on. And so, although people are in their own niches, they’re being changed, getting less homogeneous than they think they are. The glory of Toronto is that everybody accommodates to the new. The WASPs who rule here, they just handed over the keys to the city. The immigrants who come in don’t have to adjust to the city; it adjusts to them. I think of my father, a poor immigrant from Russia, and he came here because it gave him a chance, and was a civil place. And it is a civil place.”
We sat at the table and talked of Israel, India, Pakistan: all the many places where pieces of our past were scattered. I thought of my drive through the suburbs a little earlier, coming upon one grand monument after another, in the midst of empty fields—a huge onion-domed Ukrainian Catholic church, a mosque, a Salvation Army Korean church, a site for a Durga Mandir—each of them glowering, I’m sure, at the others. (Jan Morris’s image would now have to be changed, to one of a hundred arriving immigrant women among a few pale, classically polite “Torontonians.”)
“When I was growing up in Malton,” Alicia said, matching David’s reminiscence with her own, “there were only one or two South Asian families there (now, sometimes, I’m riding on a bus there, and, except for the fact it’s comfortable, I look up and think I’m in India. Everyone’s South Asian!). But when I was growing up, my best friend was called Julie English. Which was funny, because her family really was English. Our family and hers shared a driveway, and the driveway became this kind of special space.
“And I remember having to explain my skin color to her in terms of suntans and things like that, so that I would be acceptable to her. Because the Englishes were blond-haired, blue-eyed; they had a dog, they had a cottage—the kinds of things my family would never have dreamed of having. And in those days, suntans weren’t even very common.
“So when she asked about why my skin was so dark, she was being innocent. But as we grew older, those layers of innocence fell away. When I hit dating age, all my closest friends became these Italian girls, because their families were superprotective of girls and had all these strict rules about dating, just like mine did. And strict rules about what clothes they could wear and where they could go.”
“They were probably more Italian than they’d be at home,” I said. “Foreignness can intensify the customs we’ve forgotten.”
“Yes. But it was still strange, the way we grew apart.”
“Maybe what you regard now as racist really was innocent,” I said, thinking that the fact people here seemed so sensitive to even the shadow of intolerance might be the most hopeful, New World thing about them.
“I know. But racism became the convenient language to use whenever we did anything different. If I saved a seat on a bus for a friend and a white girl didn’t like it, she’d call me a ‘Paki.’ ” (And vice versa, too: a few days earlier, the paper had reported how a Sikh boy in Vancouver had faked a racial attack on himself so as to get the new haircut and nonethnic clothes his parents had forbidden.)
Alicia told us about the Christmas meals she’d had as a girl—turkey, but with rice “and all these fruits in it” (as in the novels again, the Christmas turkeys of Romesh Gunesekera stuffed with ganja and mandarins); she told us how she’d never even noticed that some of her relatives had accents until she’d got an answering machine. Both David and Alicia, I saw, pronounced project with a long Edwardian o, and schedule as if it were cognate with shh.
“You know, it’s funny: I’ve noticed that my relatives can be much harder on other Indians than on other groups of immigrants. Almost as if they’ve learned to internalize the attitudes they hear around them. They’ll say, ‘Look at those Sikhs! How can they block the road like that for their festival?’ ”
“My own son,” exclaimed David, “he’d never known what racism is till he went to India! Suddenly, everyone was staring at him, wanted to touch him, wanted a piece of him. He’d never had that over here.”
For Alicia, however, that was a Western reading.
The heart of Canadian exceptionalism, as we conceive of it at least, lies, of course, in its sense that it’s not exceptional; through an unhappy accident of geography, it’s the only country in the world that sits right next to the planet’s dominant superpower, which it resembles just enough to be reminded constantly of the differences. Sometimes this can strengthen identity, sometimes it can erode it, but the fact remains, as I once heard the director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology say, that Canadians have to look for their own movies in the “Foreign” section of the video store. It’s easy, therefore, for Canada to think of itself as one of the world’s great afterthoughts, an overlooked Taipei to America’s Middle Kingdom; and even as Canadians are routinely asked which part of America they come from, Canadians in America are taken to be full-fledged foreigners: one of the sharpest editors I’ve worked with in New York was, by virtue of being from Toronto, “technically ‘without papers’—or, as my immigration lawyer has it (it’s a wonderful phrase), ‘out of status’ ”—and so, while polishing the prose of America’s strongest authors, deluged with literature inviting him to learn “English as a second language.”
Such a legacy of slights made me feel, often, in Toronto, that even as I was watching it become the Next American Nation, its own people were worrying about why it wasn’t the last one. Whenever I would tell Torontonians how liberating I found their town—not stuck in its old image, as England or America might be, and yet not too precipitously clinging to a new one—they would look bewildered, express their pride with an apology or a shrug, define their city by telling me everything it wasn’t. One curiosity of being a foreigner everywhere is that one finds oneself discerning Edens where the locals see only Purgatory.
This tradition of self-doubt seemed doubly ironic at a time when so many young Americans, traveling in Europe, painstakingly stitch maple leaves onto their backpacks so they’ll be mistaken for Canadians, and when Toronto itself is the beau idéal of what the world conceives to be America: for years now, the Canadian city has been Hollywood’s favored stunt double, and photogenic stand-in for New York (as Vancouver has been for San Francisco and Seattle)—the North American city that looks most like what an American city should look like (except cleaner, safer, more manageable, and less expensive). When the world dreams of America, it is dreaming of Toronto, though the imagination’s trade imbalance continues as Canadians think constantly about America, while America the Beautiful hardly spares a thought for Toronto the Good (“Canada’s a beautiful city,” I heard a bus driver say at the Atlanta Olympics).
I went one evening to a typically chic, tribal, purple pool-table bar on College Street, and talked about the city with six bright Gen Xers who were making it in the media, music, photography. As the night grew more liquid, and blurred into the early hours, the area around us filling with smoke (all six were waving cigarettes), the conversation turned, as it might have done even had I not been there, to what Toron
to really was.
“You know, everyone says that Toronto is the New York of Canada. But I think it’s really the Boston.”
“Paul says it’s actually the Chicago of Canada.”
“You know Torontonians are regarded as the Americans of Canada—more aggressive, bullying, always saying how everything’s bigger and better at home?”
I asked why it was that Canada has produced such an astonishing line of female singers, especially folkies (from Joni Mitchell and Jane Siberry to Sarah McLachlan and Loreena McKennitt); in response, someone told me pointedly that its main resource, in fact, was comedians—Rich Little, Rick Moranis, John Candy, Jim Carrey: not earnest innocents, in short, but satirists. “Maybe because we’ve got Americans to laugh at,” he said (and, I’d have added, an un-American sense of mischief to bring to its neighbor’s broad spaces).
“You know why all the newscasters in America, all the game-show hosts are Canadian?” someone else said. “Peter Jennings, Alex Trebek, Robin MacNeil? Because they’re all so bland, and speak without an accent.”
“But what about the Cowboy Junkies?” I said, as the local band played “Sweet Jane” on the system. “Wholesome world-weariness: isn’t that you?”
“Maybe,” somebody else said, and Canada’s defaulted identity was turned over and over like a pig on a spit, the same person who told me the talismanic tale of how Morley Callaghan, the Canadian writer who’d gone to Paris in the twenties, had challenged Hemingway to a fight (and punched him out!), going on to conclude, “Toronto’s just a provincial Protestant town” (making me think that that was the country’s misfortune in a nutshell, its provinces, instead of states, generating the most dreaded of adjectives).