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Rudy Wiebe, one of most under-read of the greatest Canadian
writers, introduces us to the Inuit conception of spatial structure in Playing Dead. Any area whose dimensions
are undefined or unknown is understood de
facto as long and narrow. Likewise, anything that is stationary and visibly
bounded becomes “areal”; relatively equal are all of its perceived geometric
dimensions. When something is in motion, it becomes “linear”, presumably
because of the trail it leaves behind, the tracing of a path through what is
both familiar in its enormity, and in its details, new and wondrous with every
individual step.
He’s
transforming local spatial concepts into linguistic metaphors about the
Canadian North, or any north for that matter. What’s important to remember is
that death comes to those who remain motionless in the Arctic. If we move, and
therefore become linear in dimension, he writes, “on the so-called barrens of
the Arctic it is impossible for a living person to stay lost; or by the same
token, it is impossible to hide.” This idea, as I understand it, is readily
applicable to the pluralistic civic nation and its problems, problems that
arise as a result of being made to share a plot of land with one another.
Political tensions that gave birth to the rights revolution, the recent
reasonable accommodation debates, suspicions predicated on, in many cases, the
subtle differences between ethnic groups and the dominant faction can all be
remedied if we choose to see them as spatial.
Different
peoples organize, create, use and deploy space in their unique ways, which
often end up interfering with others’ plans. My idea, condensed, was to connect
this conception with how space is articulated by the relationships between
characters in narrative commercial ads on television. By looking at these
relationships and the gestures that represent them as rhetorical, I hoped to
characterize them as influential of an ongoing program for Canadians: the
program of the mundane and its pivotal role in defining who we are as a collective
body. I wanted to prove that these commercials - like Tim Horton’s Proud Fathers and Canadian Tire’s A Bike Story and Bell Canada’s Dieppe - show us the kind of nation we
aspire to be, despite seeming contrived and melo-cinematic. They convince us
that the poetry-in-motion of everyday life diminishes and renders insignificant
our political demands and the conflicts they ignite. We are all stuck on the
same grid, and so we must smile, nod, wink, and practice community through
reciprocity and compromise.
The kind of
thinking this type of assertion requires (What did you say? Commercials are
actually culturally beneficial? An ideal society is one in which cultural
identity is upstaged by consubstantial order?) is usually met without fail by
raised eyebrows in today’s post-secondary, especially north of the 45th
parallel. That is, among other factors, why it never saw its own expression in
dissertation form (other factors were money, cash and funds). The freedom one relinquishes in such a constrained and
misdirected process can be quite suffocating, a premonition that caused me to
politely jump ship partway through a potentially destructive doctorate. So with
the umbilical cord cut, and the world beginning just outside the old wooden
door of my Montreal home during the first snowfall in autumn, I will tell this
story at my own variable pace, drawing on my not-so-carefully selected bedtime
literature collection for guidance and friendship, and seeking momentary
inspiration in each gulp of espresso.
The last four
paragraphs cover a lot in a short span without much indication as to what kind
of story is worth telling. As a preamble, I return to the Inuit conception of
spatial structure, extending it to a global scale to test its conceptual
parameters. There are two types of motion in the circulation of people around
the world. On the one hand, we have local
motion. Mrs Retiree leaves her home in the morning to go do volunteer work, after which she
has afternoon tea with friends at her favourite coffee shop, after which she
stops in at the grocery store to buy some fresh vegetables, and upon arriving
home, brings in the mail. Local motion is linear, but is also repetitive and
cyclical, is highly structured and scheduled, and occurs with fluidity,
depending on one’s abilities and energy levels. Above all, it is a reflex to
stay alive and kicking. Basic socialization and association takes place in the
realm of the mundane. It is very much a matter of our survival as individuals
with interests and as agents in a structured system. On the other hand, we have
at our disposal the type of movement that is linear, unidirectional, covers
significant distance and is intended as a permanent reconfiguration of one’s
reality. Radical passage is the
reduction of the human nomadic reflex into a moment in which we recognize the
incompatibility between our personal mode of survival and the surrounding (and
luckily regional) organizing principles that engage us. It is sometimes also a
response to the recognition that despite the competence of one’s current
assurance of the ongoing provision of basic needs, one has a better chance or
is certain to “live better” elsewhere.
In both
instances, the concept of space operates, either as a tool of familiarity,
proximity and routine, or as a measurement of distance, discovery and renewal.
While living in a city, we may be “areal” or sedentary at a global level, but
on a local scale, the linear paths we create crisscross endlessly, forming a
complex web of interconnections, recognitions and assurances - in other words:
waves and winks, meetings, dinner parties, and car accidents. By the same
token, distance plays a pivotal role as a measurable degree to which we remain
separated from all the places in the world we (sometimes subconsciously) long
for. Radical passage as new beginning requires a necessarily violent rupture;
spaces once familiar crystallize into memory. Languages, cultural codes, ways
of relating to one another (or not) no longer serve us how they used to,
forcing us to adapt and discover how easily we can exceed our once thought
limits. Meanwhile, we grapple with our reflections, never quite facing this
complex relationship we have with our skin, with our origins, often making our
return during years of good harvest to reassemble our identities.
All of this to
say that while communication technologies (in the broad sense) and the global
economy have cooperatively eliminated the caribou hunt (or rendered it almost
exclusively ceremonial), they have created alternate exigencies our nomadic
instincts can be resuscitated momentarily to solve. In modern societies, a once
reflexive type of movement can now be understood as a rational, calculated leap
of faith. In what follows, I chronicle two such leaps almost two decades apart:
those that eventually led to my existence. The stories of the migrations of my
paternal grandparents from war-scarred Italy in 1955 and my maternal
grandparents along with my mother and uncle from one-party Portugal of 1972 are
not unique. They are at once every ethnic Montrealer’s narratives. What, then,
is the use of telling them if they are simply joining the established chorus of
voices? A responding analogy would ask: Why record an album of popular
Christmas carols? Two reasons jump out here. The first and most obvious is that
beauty and authenticity reside in the singular interpretation. However, I have
far from sat down to interpret the life and times of anyone. Rather, I’m filled
with the Christmas spirit, to extend the metaphor, with an irreversible
compulsion to give, to receive, to communicate, to examine a historical
trajectory and finally, to feel the same unity carolers share.
So the second
reason is simply to inscribe. The hours of interviews conducted with family
members are themselves timeless and infallible inscriptions. Therefore I write
in the hope of providing a display case for their preferred arrangement, but
unlocked so as to invite future changes, elaborations. I write for my unborn
children in full knowledge that they will grow up far from knowing the
“foreign” cultures that gave them their unique names. Take myself and my
brothers for example. As a first generation born Canadian on my mother’s side,
the fiction of the mosaic (perhaps appropriately) ravaged what potentiality I
had of learning her language, or that of my father. I am another Anglophone
Canadian with a Torontonian drawl given to me by that slice of Ontario within
Quebec we call the West Island. I see what traditions my parents grew up with
now in a constant state of reinvention. In this day and age, the way we run our
lives needs to serve our momentary needs and desires, and it is so shallowly
set, it can all change in an instant. I see fewer and fewer people, myself
among them, who adhere to deeply entrenched principles in their decision
making. Improvisation is the new mantra.
So this act of
inscription will ideally help me to discover what’s left, if anything, of an
authentic way-of-being brought here from somewhere else, whether it amounts to
familiar reactions to social stimuli, the simplicity or complexity of emotions,
of psyche, or perhaps how we are often hardwired to deliver humour like others
in our lineage. Regardless, I’m almost convinced for the record that there is
nothing left. After all, spatially speaking, the neighbourhood raised me, and I
am a son of this country through and through. One element that threads the
generations is our need to be surrounded by family. Though not unique in any
way, our heavy reliance on and willingness to support and be ever present to
our siblings, parents, grandparents, cousins, uncles and aunts, is the only responsible factor to our privilege
and prosperity in so short a time. With confidence I can say that this
relationship of warmth has not been in any way drained by the washed out
watercolours of multiculturalism many so overzealously tout.
Of this movement I
write.
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