Canada and the Irish

 

The Black Rock, Montreal

Enjoying reading Apartment Seven, a collection of essays—partly memoirs—by Canadian poet Miriam Waddington. She writes at length about her alienation from the Canadian mainstream, growing up as a Jew.

It makes me think of my own ambiguous relation to the Canadian mainstream, as an Irish Catholic. 

Significantly, I notice being invisible to Waddington. To Waddington, other than Jews, there were two groups in Canada: the French and the English. Both were “Christian.”

Yet since before Confedertation, and up until her time, there would have been more Irish than English in “English Canada”; and the last thing they would have seen themselves as is “English.” Even if most of them spoke the language--as Waddington herself did. Not to mention the 25% or so of “French-Canadians” who were Irish.

And to them—to us—the dividing line between Protestant and Catholic was far more significant in our thoughts, in our lives, and in our politics than Christian and Jew.

Waddington here is typical. It is the signature experience of the Irish in Canada. We are not acknowledged to exist. We are the invisible people.

There is a Black Rock in Montreal, dredged up during the construction of the Victoria Bridge. It now marks the unmarked mass grave of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Irish immigrants who died there and were hastily buried where they died in 1847, without service or acknowledgement; as they did in Quebec, in Ottawa, in Kingston, in Toronto, where there are similar mass graves. The Black Rock is now considered the premiere monument to the Irish experience in Canada.

And on it, the Irish are not mentioned. Just “immigrants.” It was consecrated by an Anglican bishop. No Catholic priests were invited to attend.

Most Canadians are oblivious to this; including the Irish themselves. But growing up in Quebec, the Francophones always identified me as “Anglais.” An outsider. The English were, at the same time, generally well aware that I was Irish, and Catholic, and therefore not one of them, and suspect. In either case, an outsider in my own country.

Widely dispersed and largely in the countryside, without cultural power, we had little intercommunication. Therefore our actual numbers were largely invisible even to ourselves. Most of us probably assumed we were a small minority. And at the same time, most of us probably identified optimistically as "Canadian," not "Irish."

But it is also true that being Irish in Canada has always meant keeping your head down and often hiding or denying your ethnic ties and trying to “pass.” The English openly despised us, and they were in command. As we and they read of constant rebellions against English rule in Ireland, and as the Fenians raided, it did not do to admit you were Irish or openly fly that ethnic flag.

Yet the Irish in Canada did not rebel. They agitated for representative government, but the moment that took on the character of rebellion, the Irish, to a man, withdrew. They kept silent, and tried to appear model citizens. For they had nowhere else to go if Canada did not work out. They had escaped a hellish condition in Ireland. They had no money for further immigration. Most came over on “coffin ships,” followed by sharks hoping to dine on the next Irish corpse jettisoned. Those who did not die on the docks had to seek any paying work they could get. 

In Canada, while not treated as equals, while still facing “no Irish need apply” attitudes, they could own land, could vote and run for office, could build churches, educate their children, practice their faith, pass inheritance to their children; and they probably would not starve. Some who managed the money moved on to the US, but those who did found anti-Catholic attitudes stronger there; in Canada they were protected in part by the need for the British to keep quiescent the large French Catholic presence.

Knowing far worse, this was not an applecart the Canadian Irish wanted to overturn. They kept their mouths shut and heads down, and sought opportunities, as in World War I, to prove their loyalty.

Their inevitable strategy was to seek here a distinctive new identity: not Irish, not French, and not English. Canada was largely their project. This was the great project of D’Arcy McGee, and this for him and them was the ultimate objective of Confederation.

This project always struggled against the colonial mentality. Waddington laments that, in her day, members of English faculties were always either English or American, not Canadian, and they scoffed at the idea of including Canadian writing on the curriculum. They looked down on anything produced by mere locals. I experienced the same going through English Lit at Queen’s in the seventies. There were no courses available in Canadian literature, even as electives, and no Canadian writing was included in any of the courses offered. The message was that no decent literature had been or could be written in Canada, by Canadians.

Yet at about that time, it looked as though we might soon break through. We had a generation of writers who seemed to be getting things going: Waddington’s generation. We had almost-famous names like Irving Layton, Mordecai Richler, Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Robertson Davies, Timothy Findlay, Alice Munro, W.O. Mitchell, … A distinctive Canadian literature in English seemed to be emerging.

And then the empire struck back. The colonial mentality is hard to overcome. Now the only writers allowed on the curriculum are indigenous, or, again, have been born abroad. And they do not write about Canada; they write only of their own ethnicity and its differences and difficulties. No “mainstream” Canadian culture is recognized to exist.

The Irish still seem, as always, to get it in the ear.

I had a chat with a relatively prominent Canadian poet recently. He had never heard of Emile Nelligan or Al Purdy. He might have known of other Canadian poets of a previous generation; I do not know. These are the only two Canadian poets who happened to come up.

He wrote mostly about Iran, the country of his birth.

As a Canadian, as an Irish Canadian, I still wait for Canada to be born.

A Quickie CanLit Canon

 

A Kiwi friend has asked me what the essential canon of Canadian literature is, for the sake of teaching a Chinese high schooler.

These are the pillars of Canadian literature, which are the foundation for everything else. 

1. Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables. The character of Anne reappears constantly in Canadian literature. And this book established children’s literature as the most Canadian genre.

2. Stephen Leacock, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. This established humour as the essential Canadian tone. And, with Anne, the small town as the essential Canadian setting.

3. Robert W. Service, Songs of a Sourdough. Especially the two poems “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” and “The Cremation of Sam McGee.” The essential Canadian experience of the north, and the theme of survival in the face of an overwhelming climate and geography. And a focus on ordinary working people and their problems. Canadian culture is a folk culture, not “high art.” 

4. John McCrae, “In Flanders Fields.” The First World War was Canada’s coming of age.

5. Roch Carrier, “The Hockey Sweater,” aka “The Sweater.” Although more recent than other selections, a universally beloved, lighthearted analysis of Canada’s culturally binary nature.

Not that much to read, and not hard reading, but this is what anyone needs to understand Canadian literature.

Other important books worth considering, if and when you get through these:

Al Purdy, “The Country North of Belleville.” That one contains a lot of the Canadian experience.

Mordecai Richler, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Richler’s short story “The Street” would be a good shorter alternative. The essential Canadian immigrant experience.

Gabrielle Roy, The Tin Flute.

W.O. Mitchell, Who Has Seen the Wind?

Brian Moore, The Luck of Ginger Coffey.

Alice Munro is a good choice too. First Canadian to win the Nobel for Literature, and her “small town gothic” is a deep expression of the Canadian soul.

Leacock

Mr. Smith in front of Smith's Hotel

When I was a kid, I was crazy about Stephen Leacock. I borrowed and read every book they had by him at the Fraser-Hickson Library. They were in the adult section, so I had to smuggle them out using my mother’s library card. 

I recently re-read some of his stuff. No, it was not as funny as I remembered. I found the beginning of his “My Discovery of England” still laugh-out-loud funny. Sunshine Sketches is still wonderful. But a lot of the rest seemed a swing and a miss.

When I was a kid, I also thought Wayne and Schuster were brilliant. But when I see their stuff on YouTube now, they’re mostly not good at all. Corny. Hammy.

The problem is that comedy relies on a reversal of expectations. It requires surprise. This makes it more easily and quickly dated than other forms. Everything that is really good is going to look corny in a few years, because you heard it before, and because, if it is really good, it has been imitated. And so there is no longer any reversal of expectations.

There have to be periodic revolutions in humour to overcome this. Leacock looks stiff and predictable post-Python.

A friend complains that Leacock uses too many American references; as though he’s pandering for the wider audience.

I don’t have any problems with Leacock’s American references, and I don’t think he was selling out. There is a lot of that in My Discovery of England, and he was not writing for an American audience, but a British one. The truth is, we ARE Americans, indistinguishable from other North Americans to Europeans or Asians or South Americans, barely distinguishable to Yanks. It is artificial to ignore the similarities and stress the differences. I like Neil Young’s attitude, in his album “Americana.” Which he ends with “God Save the Queen.” We are British North America. This is the cultural background we legitimately grew up with, mostly the same as the US, cowboys and Indians and the frontier and the gold rush, with a few more things on top.

One thing we share with our southern neighbours is a heritage of innumerable small towns. But here Leacock illustrates the vital difference. I’ve read the classic US small town novels: Lewis’s Main Street and Anderson’s Winesberg, Ohio. Very unlike Leacock’s Mariposa. The Mi-guk literary small town is a place of despair, a place you feel trapped and alienated, a dead end. The Canadian small town is remembered fondly, as real life as it ought to be lived; in Sunshine Sketches, in Munro’s short stories, in Anne’s Avonlea. The city is the place of exile.

Have you ever read Al Purdy’s “The Country North of Belleville”?

Canadian Culture

Anne attacks Gilbert.

Canadian culture is fundamentally unserious.

Seriously.

Humor and kidlit are the two Canadian specialties. There is a reason for this.

It has to do with our democratic instincts. You start getting serious about things, and the Canadian instinct is to say “Get off your high horse!”

I recall that the rather good British 1960s series The Avengers tried to reboot as a British-Canadian co-production, featuring the intrepid Bond-like agents of Interpol operating from the environs of Toronto.

Perhaps it played well to a UK audience, but to a Canadian, it was unintentionally wildly comic. High intrigue in Mariposa? Get off your high horse!

Canadian culture is always about ordinary people in their ordinary lives, for the good and simple reason that this is all that really matters. Anything else is comic in its pretension.

And the most important events in life, as any sane person knows, take place in childhood.

A Hundred Solitudes

Gabrielle Roy

Amid all the current fuss over cultural appropriation, there is a blatant case of cultural appropriation happening right now in Ontario Schools. And it is getting worse.

According to the National Post, Grade Eleven students in the Lambton Kent School Board are all being required to take an English course focusing on aboriginal writers only.

I protest this imperialist exploitation!

Obviously, for most of these kids, Indian culture is not their own culture. So, by the logic of the day, they have no right to these books.

But then again, if we ask aboriginal students to read books written by non-aboriginals, of for that matter to write in French or English, it is also not cultural appropriation.

Instead, they are being subjected to cultural genocide.

Yet it is not cultural genocide if the books are Indian, and the students not.

If there is logic here, rather than pure prejudice, it escapes me.

The local authorities, of course, make their case.

Why, the authorities argue, should Ontario kids be studying Shakespeare?

“Hey, I love Lord of the Flies. I love Shakespeare,” Sherman said. “But really, we’re talking about 15th century Veronese landlords (Romeo and Juliet) or something like that. Does that resonate with Canadian kids? Or the British schoolboy class structure?”

So, by that logic, does it occur to you as well that what they should be reading, what they can truly relate to, is Canadian Indian novels?

Isn’t there another, more obvious, option?

Have they never heard of Canadian literature?

Not, I suppose, if they to have gone to Canadian schools.

I recently came across a discussion thread in which fellow Canadians found they could not name an actual Canadian book that they had studied in high school.

Me neither.

It may have changed recently, but when I went through, we got some Canadian poems, some Canadian short stories, but nothing so long as a novel.

As a result, I fear, the typical Canadian thinks and knows too little of Canadian culture. I think a lot of us were shocked when Alice Monroe won the Nobel Prize. Alice Monroe? Have foreigners heard of her? Do foreigners actually read her? Who the heck is she, anyway?

This strikes me as a spectacular failing on the part of Canadian governments. In what other country is the literature better known by foreigners than by the locals? It is as though Canada’s governments are deliberately undermining both Canadian culture and Canadians’ sense of being a nation.

It is the duty of a government, and of public schools, to promote national unity and a sense of national identity. That is what government schools are there for: to imbue good citizenship.

For as long as anyone can remember, Canadian governments have actually been doing the reverse. Most Canadians grow up with a sense that there is no Canadian culture. And none other than the current Canadian prime minister has actually made this claim.

If a Canadian kid wants to be a writer, in turn, he is given no models. He or she grows up, as I did, believing literature is something that happens only elsewhere.

This leads to a reflection: what books should be taught in Canadian high schools? What are the essential chronicles of the Canadian experience?

Obviously, not Canadian Indian literature, as such, and only Canadian Indian literature. This is the colonial mentality perpetuated: now, instead of being colonized by the British and Americans, we who are not Indian—the vast majority of Canadians-- get to be colonized by the Indians. No improvement.

As of the 2011 census, 4.17% of Canadians saw themselves as of native ancestry. More said English, French, Irish, Scottish, German, Italian, or Chinese. The largest group, bless them, said Canadian. The native population in Ontario, where these schools are, is even smaller. And, we are often told, different native cultures are not interchangeable: an Iroquois has no more in common with a Cree than an Italian does with a Finn. So virtually nobody here is reading about their own culture.

Recent Canadian literature has been caught up in the same Canadaphobia. Instead of presenting something universally Canadian it tends to focus on some other cultural group, portraying it as separate or even alienated from the Canadian mainstream. Case in point: Canadian Indian literature, presented and considered as a separate entity. Hardly a way to built Canadian identity and solidarity.

The books studied in Canadian schools should promote Canadian unity. This does the exact opposite.

This does not mean the novels chosen should ignore the experience of minorities. The Canadian experience is largely the immigrant experience. But said minority experiences ought to be about the attempt to integrate, not to separate.

I have a few suggestions:

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

Anne of Green Gables

The Tin Flute

The Wars

The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz

The Luck of Ginger Coffey

Fifth Business

Roughing It in the Bush

Two Solitudes

Who Has Seen the Wind?


The reader may have others.

It is time we started thinking, and writing, for ourselves.