WHERE ARE YOU? OR THE POST-PAST
Aïda Sameer
Part of where you are is where you've been . - Margaret Atwood
1979
The speaker is Roger Wyte who is recording, on tape, his desperate views about the nature of politics and why he must embark on a career as a sniper in Montréal:
Politics is the means to personal power. These separatist radicals are ultrabourgeois at heart. They want their own private show to run. Like the federal boys. You can't blame them. Or you'd have to blame them all.
September 1995
Reading
these passages, I had to call a friend who has recently moved to Calgary.
"Susan! (Thank God you're home!) I just started reading an amazing book
on the Québec question. Finally someone with impartial views! Someone
who looks at what's going on from the margins."
"Who is it by?" Susan asked in her patently authoritative voice.
"Someone by the name of Jake Wollstoncraft; never heard of him before."
"Me neither. Where'd you get it?"
"Thanks to Professor Smith from the Can. Lit. Department. The book has
never been published except by the professor's small independent press. He'd
known Wollstoncraft's wife, who confided the manuscript to him after his sudden
death while he was working on Patriotic Chatter ."
"Is that the title of the book? Autobiographical?"
"Maybe. Or fiction. Fictionalized autobiography? That's more of a flexible
label, if labels can be flexible."
"Whatever."
"Well, the narrator decides to become a sniper. It's one hundred and
one pages."
"Sniper?"
"You heard me right."
"That's a new one. Listen, can you get another copy?"
"I'm seeing Professor Smith tomorrow morning. So I'll buy one for you;
you should be getting it in four days."
"Yeah, I'd really like that. How are you, by the way? What's the stress
level?"
"'Stress' isn't the word. 'Panic'. The thought that perhaps, on October
31st, (November 30th?)my family and I will wake up living in different countries...
It makes me paranoid."
"I know what you mean. It made me drive back here didn't it?"
"Listen, my phone bill is gonna go ballistic phoning you at this time
of the day. I'll e-mail you soon, O.K.?"
I hang up, the book still in my hand. I examine the cover page again; I flip
through the pages and caress the smooth cover. Tonight, I'll swallow the patriotic
chatter in one breath. I light a cigarette and go down to the street to bid
goodbye tothe sun goodbye for the day. Dusk is such a sad time. I hate moments
of transition; it makes you feel you're in limbo,hanging somewhere in the
air. I hate 'change', period. But then I love change, too.
As soon as I get to Laurier Street, I bump into my friend Marilyse. Marilyse
is a vehement Québecoise nationalist, who is in love with a refugee
from Yugoslavia (or Croatia, you have to be careful not to insult one's deepest
sense of belonging) whom she just met. One of the things I used to enjoy doing
most with Marilyse was talking about politics with fuming cigarettes in our
mouths. When we were graduate students at l'Université de Montréal,
we used to have hilarious times together: she would imitate René Lévesque,
and would do Pierre Trudeau. Now, we don't talk about politics anymore.
"Comment ça va avec Josip?" I ask.
"Bien. Mais..." Her tone is hesitant.
"Mais what? You guys exhausted the passion already?"
"Non, non..."
(She has said she was not going to use the word NON before the evening of
the Referendum vote results. See what love does!)
"What is it, then?"
"J'trouve qu'il n'est pas assez intégré," she confides
sadly, pronouncing her last word with special care.
"Voyons donc! I think you guys have gone off kilter wanting everyone
to vivre en français!" I respond impulsively.
Don't kid yourselves, my anglophone, breasbeating listeners, you're just the
same. You'd dearly love a shot of chauvinism to hype you up. Wouldn't you?
You billow in a patriotic wind like a flag.
I feel like a pressure cooker with anti-separatist fumes starting to heat
up our conversation.
Marylise looks sad, but determined. She does not respond. We had agreed to
disagree and promised to not talk politics, anymore. But who can separate
politics from real life in this country these days?
"What aspect of Québécité do you want him to integrate
into?" I continue, aware of our new silent agreement, that it is now
inevitable we confront each other on the subject. Of course, I am speaking
on behalf of Josip. I myself am fully integrated according to her standards;
but she knows that I would not call myself 'Québecoise'.
"It was his choice to come here, wasn't it?" Marylise queries in
a sober voice, pointing to the Café République around the corner.
"Can we go there? I'm thirsty."
On our way to seat ourselves, I continue in an intense yet subdued tonality:
"Do you think that refugees and immigrants come here because they're
in love with the Québecois culture? To discover les cabanes à
sucre and Michel Tremblay? They come here for the SYSTEM. The Canadian system,
American, North American."
"Why don't they go to Toronto then, to Ottawa, to Saskatoon? It's the
same system, isn't it? Let them go to Yellowknife."
She goes to the counter and gets herself a Perrier. When she comes back to
the table, I in turn go and get myself an Espresso. I perceive a big blue
mug with Vivent les différences inscribed on it. Why should Vivent
les différences apply to Anglo-Canadians and the Québecois,
and not to ethnic groups as well? Why are we still stuck with the notion of
two solitudes? Nostalgia, I guess. It's reassuring to be nostalgic, but it's
not going to lead us anywhere. There are one hundred and fifty different solitudes
on Côte-des-Neiges alone; Parc Extension is a mini Ottoman Empire (God
forbid that history repeat itself!), and Ville St-Laurent is a concentrated
Third World. Ethnic groups have their own nostalgias, histories and différences.
One day, Chinatown will hold a referendum.
If we all aspired to our "historical rights," we'd all end up back
in the cave. Or in the sea. Or at what point in history did your presence
or that of your ancestors anywhere become sacred?
"Besides", I continue eagerly as I seat myself,
watching her impatient features, "one day this country is going to be
not simply multicultural, but a multinational country..."
"You're going too far, Leyla..."
"It depends where you're coming from."
* * *
October 1995
A couple of days into the Indian summer and the primitive warmth -- which
usually makes Quebeckers forget that winter is coming -- has been contaminated
by an anxiety of the worst kind, separation anxiety. Division, schism, split,
dissociation... Indian Summer, Québecois trees, Canadian maple leaves,
even alien bodies... Whatever... No matter how you name things, in the end
the dream of the Enlightenment has turned out to be nightmarish, and the idea
of the Nation-State, violent.
* *
The last time I felt this panicky was the night I learned that my parents were going to divorce each other. My father had already been away from home for a few months. One night, while we were at the dinner table, Mother announced that she was going to take us to Canada for good, before my brother reached the age at which he would be taken to the war. My heart had sunk to the bottom of my chest; and I saw only darkness all around the dining-room. I was a consciously non-rebellious adolescent, though; I would not question my mother's decisions.
"To Montreal?" I blurted out, holding tightly onto the thyme twig which was in my hand, trying to focus my temporarily stunned vision on the swaying bowl of tabouleh.
I used to think, like the majority of people in the Middle East or Europe, that Montreal was the capital of Canada. All I knew about Canada was that it was governed by a Queen, because my mother collected stamps and she had rows filled with the Queen's head in all colors. I also knew about Canada's designer clothes with "Made in Canada" labels that my sisters and I used to buy in Little America in downtown Beirut. We never took those labels seriously. Our next-door neighbors, a family of five women and five sewing machines, sewed up blue jeans night and day, and their finishing touch was to sew on the left-side pocket of each pair a badge saying "Made in Britain". Every Friday afternoon, a man came and picked up all the jeans and sold them downtown at unbelievable prices.
"We received a letter from Uncle Zaki yesterday", my mother continued excitedly. "He has moved to a place called Vancouver, and he says it's the city that looks most like Beirut in all of Canada. There are mountains just by the Ocean, and the weather is mild. It's close to Los Angeles, and you can see Japan with binoculars. Except that it rains a lot there. He says they call it Raincouver; but that doesn't matter, love. We'll have a car. Uncle Zaki says everybody in Canada has a car; it's like America."
"I won't go if they don't have radishes there," my youngest sister, who was eight years old, pronounced in a most serious tone.
Mother assured us that there was everything one could dream of in Canada . Except for war. She said they even have tomatoes in the middle of the winter.
* *
It might have well been a funeral. That indescribable day, October 31st, 1985, when together with twenty two huge suitcases in which our life was buried--twenty two coffins with identification cards and school report-cards, locks from best friends' hair, cassettes with songs from the war... placed with care among the clothes and the herbs and the pots and the pans, and even empty shells from snipers' guns, collected from deserted streets... We stood at the airport, along with the fifty members of our family, our sobs intensifying against the roar of the planes landing and taking off. And then, inevitably, we held the rest of our tears and moans back in order to formally say goodbye, as the voice of a hostess announcing our flight echoed high above the mobs. A British Airways jumbo-jet flew us to London, then to Seattle, then to the Vancouver International Airport. And we became Landed Immigrants.
* * *
This is a nightmare! If I don't move from one country to another, countries move on me. Oh Canada! You can't move on me! If I have to move to Canada because of the separation, then I'd have moved twice to Canada--(that is pretty twilight zone!)Oh, Mr. Parizeau! You should have posed your question in another way, something like: "Do you want to suffocate in homogeneity?"
* *
October 30th, 1995
I am anticipating public unrest. When I was on the bus today,
I could not take out my Globe and Mail for fear that a separatist might snatch
it from my hand and take me hostage. A Sufi Mullah who got on the bus from
near the Temple of Iman on St-Viateur and Parc Avenue took out his Kor'an
to read; I went up to him and told him with an extremely contained voice to
put it away, in Québecois French. He looked at me with startled eyes,
and folded his holy book back into his briefcase. I looked around for more
dissidents, but there were none. Only yesterday, I found a scratch-and-win
ticket in my mailbox with three circles. You had to scratch for an answer
to the following question: "Quel est votre rêve?" I scratched
the first circle, and the answer was VIVRE EN FRANÇAIS. The second
one read the same. I scratched the third, hoping I might win a VIVRE EN AMOUR.
The third scratch uncovered VIVRE EN FRANÇAIS. That was it: there was
no choice. The ghosts of separation pulled my muscles so tight that I could
no longer breathe, and I almost swallowed my tongue. In the middle of the
night I wanted to talk to my father in Beirut, but the screen on my phone
kept flashing FRANÇAIS SEULEMENT ICI. This morning I phoned my Lebanese
friends, and they said they would not leave the house tonight. They've heard
that Parizeau has ordered the Québecois army to take over the Federal
buildings downtown should the vote be a YES.
"If THEY win, and THEIR army starts breaking into the Federal offices,
then we will certainly have a war," Khalil reported to me with a vibrant
voice.
"And if they don't?" I asked, expecting an equally fabulous analysis.
"If they lose, then they may declare independence unilaterally, and that
would also start a war."
* *
I should have planned this better. I am not staying alone tonight, yet I do not want to go too far from my place. As the rays of the sun no longer shine inside the apartment, and the afternoon gradually gives way to dusk, I become more and more concerned about an imminent danger. I phone my friend Cynthia who lives close by. She and I have become more intimate friends since we discovered we had a cause in common--that of a United Canada. (We both came to live in Montréal from Vancouver at around the same time, and both of us have our immediate families there.) She asks me to go to her place to watch the CBC coverage of the Referendum vote; she too needs to be in solidarity with someone from home.
When I get there, her roommates, Karen and Andrew, are in front of the TV. They are on the YES side, just because they want a change for Canada. And there is Igor, a young exchange student from the Czech Republic, whose English allows him to say "I like" and "No like" with a sexy accent. The three of them are in a cheerful mood; Karen and Andrew have had a few beers, and Igor's face and eyes are already red with Boréal Noire. He once had his thumb up for Boréal; "Is like Czech beer", he had said with a big smile.
The red and blue lines measuring the percentages of the votes on the TV screen indicate just the beginning. Cynthia and I are uneasy; our eyes are alert and our muscles tensed by insecurity.
As the numbers rise on both sides, Cynthia goes to phone her parents to report that the YES side has reached thirty nine percent. I also want to phone, but I decide to wait a little. The numbers are rising on both sides. I go and stand by the phone. It cannot be. Is this for real? Forty eight point eight percent YES? And still rising? I close my eyes and the mental images of the furniture and objects in the room sway and bounce as in an earthquake--I am losing balance. I do not want to open my eyes.
Peter Mansbridge's voice comes from far-off. I hear Karen shout from miles away: "Switch to Radio Canada! I wanna hear him in French." Andrew switches to channel 3 and opens his sixth Black. The reporter's voice gradually fades away and a roaring sound of tanks shakes the walls of the apartment building. It is happening again. Peace is only speeches on the radio. "Call my father at the office and tell him not to come out. Do you hear the sniper? He's inside the minaret. The Imam won't be able to recite the morning prayer. Don't let anyone pass by there. Are all the kids inside?"
* *
There were dismal distances and unlived years between me and my words. When I open my eyes again, I see Igor's red face. He is giggling. His eyes are rejoicing and they candidly reveal a basic truth that lies in the nadir of every human soul. He utters something that sounds like words in an unlearned language.
When I look at the TV set, there is Parizeau and his wife
clad in blue next to him. He is about to deliver his historic speech:
"Mes amis,..."
"Switch to the CBC," Cynthia screams, "it's not fair, I want
to hear what he's saying."
Parizeau's speech was short, but onerous.
"The man is a psychopath," declared Andrew in a defeated voice.
"He'd better resign, man!" Karen intoned, equally disappointed.
And all the while, the earth, turning on its axis, was revolving us through
space at 1,000 miles per hour. And spinning us on its orbit around the sun
at 1,000 miles per minute. As it's doing so right this instant. To all of
us. Hurtling us about like some crazy cosmic roller-coaster-ferris-wheel-carousel...
I ask Cynthia to call me a taxi. Champlain, the closest to where we are.
"Smoking, please," I tell Cynthia to ask the receptionist.
I walk slowly towards my jacket, mumbling "and a Lebanese driver. Or Ruwandan, or Bosnian... someone from war..."
It is too late, though. She has already hung up.
THE END