Fact
Reviews

Moribund Multiculturalism

Stephen Henighan

Canada has been multicultural in the past, but it is not multicultural any more

My neighbour Jiwani immigrated to Canada from Africa with her husband and three children. A medical doctor, she was barred from practising in Ontario. Jiwani set up her own business, giving classes in traditional African arts. Last summer Jiwani and her husband were awarded a prize by an association in Toronto devoted to promoting the culture of their country of origin. When I congratulated Jiwani on the award, she grew restive.

“I was very uncomfortable,” she said. “It was our country this and our country that. They called us ‘ambassadors to Canada.’ But we live here! I’m proud of where I come from, but what we need to do now is make all these different people come together to form Canada. We all made a choice. I’m Canadian now.”

Jiwani’s children regard the continent where they were born as being, in the parlance of young people in my neighbourhood, “background”: “What’s your background?” The word is telling: it suggests that national or ethnic origin, although not forgotten, is of secondary importance to the role the individual plays in the present. This is a far cry from the old Canadian mosaic, in which people were presumed to cling for generations to their cultures of origin.

In the late 199s I lived in London, England. With its rigid class structures, suspicion of foreigners and absence of rags-to-riches immigrant mythology, Great Britain takes centuries to assimilate newcomers. In East London, the differences between old-stock Cockneys, Bangladeshi Muslims and West African Christians were irreconcilable; the different groups disdained each other’s customs. By contrast, suburban southern Ontario, where I now live, combines multiracialism with cultural uniformity. Everyone, except for older immigrants, speaks with the same accent; everyone hangs out at the mall and watches American television. The espousal of “multiculturalism” by the media, as the new banner of Canadian identity, feels like a sham. Canada has been multicultural in the past. But it is not multicultural any more.

“The mosaic was the precursor to multiculturalism,” Jean Burnett writes in The Canadian Encyclopedia. Yet it may also be true that the mosaic was multiculturalism. The great multicultural societies—seventeenth-century Mexico City, late Hapsburg Vienna—are multilingual arenas in which disparate cultural elements, each retaining its shard-like specificity, collide. Canada has experienced such societies in the past. After the Laurier-Sifton migration, when the country’s population increased by forty percent between 19 and 191, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, Swedes and other Europeans who settled on the prairies retained their differences, both from each other and from pre-existing populations of First Nations, Métis, French and British origin, far longer than would have been possible had they known television and shopping malls. This coexistence of difference persisted for decades. A few years ago I attended a panel in Montreal where writers commented on the city’s cultural identity. Refuting a question that claimed multiculturalism as a hot new development, Mavis Gallant said: “It’s always been a cosmopolitan city! Why do you think I got interested in Europe? Because I constantly met Europeans on the streets of Montreal.”

Early twentieth-century Canada, already becoming racially diverse, contained a mixture of cultures. In No More Parades (1925), the second volume of Parade’s End, Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy of novels charting the disintegration of the British aristocracy during the First World War, the protagonist, Christopher Tiet

Tags
No items found.

Stephen Henighan

Stephen Henighan’s most recent novel is The World of After. Over the winter of 2022–23, Monica Santizo’s Spanish translation of Stephen’s novel The Path of the Jaguar will be published in Guatemala, and Stephen’s English translation of the Guatemalan writer Rodrigo Rey Rosa’s novel The Country of Toó will be published in North America. Read more of his work at stephenhenighan.com. Follow him on Twitter @StephenHenighan.

SUGGESTIONS FOR YOU

Reviews
Peggy Thompson

What It Means To Be Human

Review of "All the Broken Things" by Geoff Inverarity.

Reviews
KELSEA O'CONNOR

Rocks in a Hard Place

Review of "A Field Guide to Gold, Gemstone & Mineral Sites of British Columbia, Volume Two: Sites within a Day’s Drive of Vancouver" by Rick Hudson.

Reviews
Debby Reis

Dreaming of Androids

Review of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? " by Philip K. Dick.