Squatter

            

            On Tuesday morning it was raining and the ceiling in my living room was leaking again. Lately when it rains it comes down on the window ledge and splashes onto the floor making a loud dripping sound. 

            While that was happening I dreamed about a bottle of red wine that was more important for the cork than the contents. I was transporting it home by bike when it got free and rolled away where I could see the top sticking out from where it lay on its side in the tall dead grass beside the side street that I crossed to continue to my place. In the dream this was just around the corner from my place and so familiar that I knew I could go home first and then come back to get the bottle later. But as I was waking up and slowly leaving the dream I knew less and less where this bottle was in relation to my actual home and became worried that I wouldn’t be able to find it after all. The street in the dream was more like a service road on the edge of town than anything near where I really live. 

            I downloaded the lyrics for “A La Pêche Des Coeurs” (Fishing for Hearts) by Boris Vian and sang along with it a couple of times. It has a nice melody in the old "chanson" style. 

            I memorized the bridge for “Tennisman" by Serge Gainsbourg. 

            I was still transcribing my British Literature lecture notes when I logged on for my Canadian Literature lecture. 

            I chatted with Professor Kamboureli on webcam but I’m still the only student that does so. She says students may have privacy issues about visually sharing their space. I asked how her mother was because she mentioned last week she was taking her for a covid test since two residents in her retirement home had contracted covid. She said this had been her 92 year old mother’s second test and she was still negative. 

            The professor reminded us that we are halfway through the course. She ran through the themes that we’ve covered so far: Canlit, settlement culture, colonialism, modernism; the tension between colonialism and modernism in Icefields. She says the “double gaze" characterizes most expressions of Canadian Literature. One looks back to come to terms with the past. In Icefields postmodernism both represents and challenges. Ethnography reflects an ambivalent western view. Imposing a world view in which the other is inferior. Cartwright was disappointed that his Inuit visitors were not impressed with British civilization. They are fetishized in England and almost all die of smallpox. The impact of modernity, the sublime, the trope of wilderness, Canada haunted by a lack of ghosts. She had to remove Northrop Frye from the syllabus but the link to the conclusion of his first history of Canadian literature is on Quercus. He doesn’t ask what is Canadian identity or who, but rather where is here. Colonialism lingers and is embodied. 

            We returned to Austin Clarke’s story “Canadian Experience”. George’s father is privileged and not poor and so George is an atypical immigrant from the Caribbean. I would say that people immigrate either to improve their lives economically or because they are pushed from home by oppressive forces. So what motivates George to come to Canada? The story problematizes the Canadian perspective on what motivates immigration. His father owns a plantation but he would probably have descended from slaves forced to work on a plantation. The father is irrational and removed from reality. He claims that his family owned the plantation since before there were Indigenous people in Canada. Maybe George came to Canada just to get away from his father’s authority. George finds Canada to be a white woman.

            What is Canadian experience? Toronto is said to have the world’s most educated cab drivers. Forgetting who we are. George’s father’s plantation has a name. It is strangled by vines. Abjection is the condition of being othered by the dominant society. George worked delivering flyers but took pleasure in cheating the system by throwing his flyers away. The bank where George comes to apply for a job is in the same building where he had worked as a janitor. George is as irrational as his father. A white actress as the personification of the system. She has red and white cold sores. Red and white like the Canadian flag. The ugly red subway train of the TTC. Pat seems to understand the system although she is also abjected. Canada is feminized and black men are emasculated. She says “imagination is a euphemism for lies”. She is deluded. She is cast as being willing to do sexual favours. She names George. The elevator is symbolic of upward or downward mobility. The subway’s mobility is underground and ambivalent. The driver has mobility and this is his last trip, as well as George’s. Someone said it reminded her of the song “People get ready there’s a train coming” by Curtis Mayfield. 

            Why does George go to apply for a job for which he has no qualifications? I asked if he really had no qualifications. I think all one needs to work in a bank are a high school diploma or a GED. He could have given it a shot. He has low self esteem. Colonials penetrate the land. George is asserting his masculinity against his father. 

            W.E.B. Dubois writes of “Double Consciousness”. Looking at one’s self through the eye of the dominant other. The inner conflict by the marginalized as a result of oppression. We took a break, after which we talked about multiculturism. 

            The official Canadian policy on multiculturism comes from certain legal acts. 1951- The Royal Commission on National Development of the Arts (Massey). There was an awareness of the threat of domination by US culture. The CBC and the Canada Council were formed. The pdf is widely available.

            1963- The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. 

            1969- The Canadian Official Languages Act. 

            1971- Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s White Paper on Multiculturalism. She says that Trudeau was motivated by the fact that an election was approaching and he needed the ethnic vote. 

            1982- The repatriation of the Canadian Constitution. 

            1988- With Bill C-93 Trudeau’s White Paper becomes official policy under Mulroney. The Canadian Multiculturalism Act. Acknowledgement of French does not come to terms with aboriginal languages. What about the other immigrants? The act did not include the territories. I wonder why. There must have been a logical reason. Maybe the territories were too small administratively to enforce the Act. She says the Act deliberately left out Indigenous people. 

            Canada’s multiculturalism policy is displayed in folk festivals and communities like Chinatown, Korea Town and Little Italy. There is the assumption that other cultures are homogenous. 

            The pros for immigrant integration: 

            It removes barriers to participation. 

            It makes people feel welcome. 

            It leads to a sense of belonging. 

            The cons: 

            It leads to ghettoization and balkanization. 

            It encourages ethnic groups to look inward. 

            It emphasizes differences. 

            It fossilizes ethnic identity. 

           

            It’s showy for Canada but threatens the dominant society. It presents difference as inferior and makes identity uncontainable. People don’t feel that they belong. 

            In the Rohinton Mistry story “Squatters" Nariman explains that multiculturalism is a Canadian invention that tries to make the country a cultural mosaic rather than a melting pot like in the United States. 

            Mistry writes mostly novels but this is from a collection of short stories. Nariman is successful in India. His stories are told in the courtyard of a Parsi compound in Mumbai. 

            The Parsi community in India originated in Iran. They are Zoroastrians and there are about 60,00- 70,000 of them in India. She was a guest professor in Mumbai and visited some of the compounds. 

            Nariman wears a Clark Gable moustache. He drives a Mercedes which he nicknames, “My pride and joy.” He whistles “Rose Marie” by Slim Whitman and the theme from the “Bridge on the River Kwai”. He uses a mixed vocabulary, code switching from one cultural ideology to another. 

            There is no such thing as being purely Indian since there are so many cultures within a population of over 1.3 billion. 

            Savukshaw in cricket match between empire and colony, between India and the UK.

            Postcolonialism is a transhistorical concept. Success alone does not bring happiness. Multiculturism is satirized as being imbedded in the body in both how we eat and how we shit. 

            We have to wait for our essay marks because of all the people that handed in their assignments late. 

            As a final comment I rolled in back to Clarke’s “Canadian Experience”. I said that while we’d been talking about the story before the break it occurred to me how much the ending is similar to a story by Willa Cather called “Paul’s Case”. Although Cather’s story is not racialized it does deal with a troubled young man who tries to make it in the city far from home and in failing commits suicide by jumping in front of a train heading in the direction of home. I wondered if Clarke might have read that story. She said he probably had since he’d read just about everything. She visited his town home once and it was crowded with books piled up everywhere. 

            For lunch I had chips and salsa with yogourt. 

            I worked on finishing my British Literature lecture notes and then typed most of my Canadian Literature notes before dinner. 

            I rubbed an outside round beef roast in a paste of olive oil, thyme, rosemary, garlic powder, salt and pepper and roasted it for an hour and forty five minutes. I had a slice for dinner with a potato and gravy while watching Interpol Calling. 

            In this story a scuttled ship is found off the coast of Kenya with sixteen dead natives in the hold. It is a suspected slave ship and Interpol has so many files of unsolved slave trading cases that Duval is fed up and decides to investigate this one more deeply. In 1959 an estimated 23,000 Africans a year make the pilgrimage to Mecca but less than half return to their villages. Even if only 10% of the missing are sold into slavery it’s still a large figure. Duval goes to Mombassa where he meets a Colonel Briggs. Briggs’s driver is a native named Sergeant Hamid and Briggs orders him around like a slave and it may not be a racial thing but a British military thing. They discover that the dhow in question had to be sunk because the dead men had the plague. The ship had an engine and so Duval has the serial number checked. The dead men were probably East Africans on their way to Mecca. Duval checks with the WHO for the locations of recent plague outbreaks. Meanwhile we find the owner, Lenoir finding out that one of the crew of his boat has the plague. He calls his boss, who tells him to kill him. The body is dumped in the harbour. The ship’s engine is traced to a dealer in Mombassa who says he sold it to Lenoir. Sergeant Hamid says he’s made the pilgrimage to Mecca on one of Lenoir’s boats. They fish out the body of the dead man and identify him. They learn from his father that the captured men all came from the same village. Duval and Briggs come to arrest Lenoir and he pulls a gun. Briggs carries a swagger stick like many British officers used to do. In one quick stroke he disarms Lenoir and with a second he knocks him out. Duval is impressed. They conclude that Lenoir must have a boss that collects the villagers up country. The last group came from a village called Akello and so they go there where there is a hospital serving several villages. They talk to the director Dr Gorman but he says he knows nothing of any missing villagers but the nurse remembers the men leaving for the pilgrimage together. She also tells Duval that the doctor examines the men of the villages before they leave together. Duval asks the doctor why he didn’t report that the sixteen men that left the village had the plague. Gorman points a syringe full of deadly poison at Duval. They struggle and the doctor is about to prick Duval when Briggs comes in and hits him with his swagger stick. Duval says he’ll have to get one of those. Briggs said they are useful if you don’t want to dirty your hands. 

            Sergeant Hamid was played by Errol John, who started off as an amateur actor and a playwright in Trinidad and then moved to Britain. He co-starred in the TV movie “A Man from the Sun” in 1956. The next year his play, “Moon on a Rainbow Shawl” won the Observer Drama Competition. In 1960 it went off Broadway in New York with James Earl Jones and Cicely Tyson and was well received. He played Othello at the Old Vic in 1963. Despite some recognition and some movie roles in successful film he did not get a lot of opportunities.