The Canadian Identity and Other Oxymora

An American couple adopts a one-year-old baby from Canada. In the months that follow, they spend all their time trying to teach the baby to say "mama" and "dada", repeating the words over and over again every time they see the child. Alas, the baby stays silent. Time passes, and finally comes a day when the babe utters his first words. Seated at the dinner table with his adoptive mother and father, he slowly opens his mouth and asks, "So how's the weather, eh?"

Though it isn't very funny, this joke does bring forth an interesting question: what does it mean to be Canadian? Surely, we can all agree that there is more to the Canadian identity than a quirky obsession with the weather and the constant use of the word "eh". However, beyond the conviction that there is more to our nation than mere stereotypes, it is rather difficult for us to clearly define a culture that, less than fifty years ago, still bore the Union Jack on its national flag. The truth is, the matter of the Canadian identity has been debated for quite some time and has yet to be resolved.

Ray Smith's short story (for lack of better term) Cape Breton Is the Thought-Control Centre of Canada: A Centennial Project (hereafter referred to as Cape Breton) and Fred Wah's novel Diamond Grill both deal with the issue of Canadian culture in their form as well as their content. Using their respective structures and narrative styles as "sedimented content", the two texts each address and embody a different version of the Canadian identity. Juxtaposing a multitude of fragmented storylines, Smith portrays a still undefined culture mired in the confusion of its various facets, while Wah employs run-on sentences to speak of the coexistence of different cultures within a single territory.

This essay first analyses some of the literary devices in Cape Breton and Diamond Grill: it examines how the form of compiled fiction evokes the notion of an uncertain identity and how a first-person point of view and the use of run-on sentences suggest a union of different ideas. It then explains how these literary devices are used to convey two distinct portraits of the Canadian identity.

Smith's Cape Breton constitutes what the author refers to as "compiled fiction": a seemingly random amalgam of unrelated storylines. Some, such as the opening section, consist of a simple conversation:

"Why don't we go away?
Why?
Why not?
Because."

Other threads read like an aggressive anti-American manifesto: "For Centennial Year, send President Johnson a gift: an American tourist's ear in a matchbox." The various plotlines each carry their own pace and narrative style, adopting a wide range of genres, including the memoir—"I have had stories rejected by a number of magazines in Canada and the U.S."—and the play:

"Two men sit on a park bench [...]
Bill: Nice day.
George: Yes, it is. Though the weatherman said we might get rain later.
Bill: Yeah, it looks like it.
George: It's in the air [...]
Bill: Like a sip of rye?
George: Ummerrahhohhehh..."

The different storylines never connect with one another (other than thematically): the two men on the park bench do not meet the stereotypical couple, and neither have anything to do with the section in Poland. The overwhelming number of plotlines, genres, and subdivisions evoke a sense of plurality and confusion. The text is mired with conflicting ideas: "we've always been friendly with you people, living so close to the border"; "Would you rather be smothered under a pillow of American greenbacks or cut open on a U.S. Marine's bayonet?" Conflict also takes place within the sections themselves, adding ambiguity to the vision they promote:

"Things would be the same. Change starts inside.
No. Change can start outside."

Furthering this ambiguity are the constant breaks in the text. The stereotypical couple's story is interrupted six times throughout Cape Breton. Its fragments are never properly introduced. For example, the second section to involve the stereotypical couple begins abruptly and without any reference to the opening section (in which the couple first appears): "Do you love me?" There is no indication of whose voice this is. Observing the speech patterns of the characters, the reader must deduce (with no certainty) their identity. The fragmentation of the numerous plotlines and their intertwinement is disorienting.

However, the shifting narrative provides a link between the different storylines, a connection that seems almost absent in their plot content. Cape Breton begins with the couple's argument, then shifts to the anti-American manifesto: "So you believe in Canada and you're worried about American economic domination." From there, its narrative jumps to a political joke: "Did you hear about the Canadian Pacifist who became a Canadian Nationalist?" The married couple only reappears three pages after their introduction. The storylines, and thus the different ideologies they promote, progress together, expand together. They evolve as one.

The narrative itself is aware of this evolution. The text contains several instances of self-reflexivity: "Recently a friend conned me into explaining my interest in compiled fiction, an example of which you are now reading"; "But let the reader construct the rest." The narrative, embodiment of all the ideas expressed in the text, is conscious of both its plurality and ambiguity. By continuously moving from one tale to another, it avoids any clear beginning or ending (except in a physical sense, of course). The final section offers little closure: "For Centennial Year, send President Johnson a gift: an American tourist's ear in a matchbox. Even better, don't bother with postage." Cape Breton has no true end. The self-conscious evolution of its plural and ambiguous identity is ongoing.

Like Cape Breton, Diamond Grill deals with the notion of multiple identities. Plurality, in Wah's novel, is expressed through a seemingly endless series of unnumbered and extremely short chapters: the twentieth, "Once in the New World, the Immigrant Can", consists of a single paragraph of three lines. These chapters are organized in a fiercely non-sequential order. The actions and habits of the narrator's father, for example, are still recounted well after the mention of his death: "Sometime after my father dies"; "My dad really wants to go through Walla Walla, Washington, just because of the name."

Even the plot threads that unfold chronologically are fragmented. The narrator's complaint to his mother that he "deserves a raise" and his father's reaction the next day are separated by a chapter about Seto, the pastry cook of the Diamond Grill. The plot thread about his "father's gun" is interrupted by seven chapters, resuming approximately twelve pages after its introduction: "I think of him walking home on a snowy night over the old bridge across the Columbia in Trail with the money bag under his overcoat and his hand on the pistol in his pocket. Alone." Diamond Grill often feels less like a novel than a collection of random thoughts and short stories.

However, the numerous chapters are united by a single narrative voice, that of the fictional Fred Wah on whom the story is centred: "I must take sole responsibility for this text [...] These are not true stories but, rather, poses or postures, necessitated, as I hope is clear in the text, by faking it." The sham aspect of the novel, the author's act of "faking it", is subtly alluded to in the text itself: "The domain of this track is an ordered fiction, a serious intervention. Until we now know the only fiction here has to be the reader. You know, relative." As in Cape Breton, such moments of self-reflexivity suggest the notion of self-discovery. If the text itself is geared inwards, then the ideology it conveys must also deal with introspection.

Other self-referential instances include the explicit footnotes at the end of some chapters: "Last week I began to look at a little of the structure of one of the varieties of the Western ‘conscience'. One admires its ingenuity." These footnotes, excluded from the narrative by their very nature, all consist of voices other than Wah's. The opinions they express are often contested and ridiculed. The forty-fifth chapter is composed of a single blank page with a footnote containing an extract from a racist discussion about poker by Garrett Brown:

"Does one suppose the Geary bill, prohibiting Chinese immigration, would ever have passed into law had the Mongolians taken kindly to poker? It was not fear of the introduction of idolotry by these heathens that impelled the congress of the United States to set up a fence against them."

By isolating it thus, as if its idiocy were beyond comment, Wah humiliates Brown's discussion, and by presenting it as a footnote instead of incorporating it to his narrative, he distances himself from opinions of this kind. Despite its structure that suggests the union of various ideas, there are some Diamond Grill refuses to assimilate.

Another manner in which the novel unifies different thoughts is through the use of run-on sentences:

"Yet the oceans of women migrant-tongued words in a double-bind of bossy love and wary double-talk forced to ride the waves of rebellion and obedience through a silence that shutters numb the traffic between eye and mouth and slaps across the face of family, yet these women forced to split, out of bound-up feet and torsoed hips made-up yarns and foreign scripts unlucky colours zippered lips—yet, to spit, when possible, in the face of the father the son the holy ticket safety-pinned to his lapel—the pileup of twisted curtains intimate ink pious pages partial pronouns translated letters shore-to-shore Pacific jetsam pretending love forgotten history braided gender half-breed loneliness naļve voices degraded miscourse racist myths talking gods fact and fiction remembered faces different brothers sisters misery tucked margins whisper zero crisscross noisy mothers absent fathers high muckamuck husbands competing wives bilingual I's their unheard sighs, their yet still floating lives."

This single sentence constitutes a full paragraph. A number of different notions are brought up in it: double-talk, family, religion, the ocean, racist myths, etc. There are many such sentences in the novel, amalgamating various ideas, foreign to one another, into a single statement. The deliberate absence of quotation marks has a similar effect. In Diamond Grill, dialogue is not isolated by speech marks. In the tenth chapter, when the narrator's mother explains "how people in Swift Current reacted to her marrying a Chinaman", it almost appears as if she herself is narrating the chapter: "I've forgotten a lot of things. Your dad, he shrugged it off, though I know it hurt him [...] Why do you want to write about this anyway? That's all done with." Again, different voices are presented as one.

The notion of plural identities is not the only element Cape Breton and Diamond Grill share. Both texts also address the question of the Canadian identity. Almost every storyline in Smith's compiled fiction deals with either Canada or the concept of national identity. The stereotypical couple considers moving away but ultimately decides to stay in the country: "I mean I like Canada, really [...] It is home." The anti-American manifesto is mostly concerned with keeping "Johnny Canuck" from getting on his "hand and knees" and licking "Joe Yank's" boots. And the memoir discusses publishing in Canada: "no Canadian magazine has kept one [of Smith's stories] less than three months."

By using a fragmented narrative to depict the Canadian culture, Smith implies that there exists no unified manner of being Canadian. Our national identity is still young and has yet to be clearly defined. Instances of self-reflexivity hints at introspection: Canadians are struggling to define themselves. Finally, the absence of a clear-cut conclusion suggests that this struggle is ongoing. Smith is stating that the Canadian identity has yet to take a definite shape. He celebrates this ambiguity by contrasting it with a slighting vision of American patriotism: "If the Americans would just read their own Constitutional documents instead of memorizing them."

Diamond Grill's take on the Canadian identity focuses more on its notion of multiculturalism: "Another chip on my shoulder is the appropriation of the immigrant identity [...] Why be in such a rush to dilute? Those of us who have already been genetically diluted need our own space to figure it out." Wah criticizes Canada's hypocrisy regarding its acceptance of ethnic variety: "The teacher telling us who we get to be, to write down what our fathers are. Race, race, race. English, German, Doukhobor, Italian. But not Canadian [...] After school. Chink, Limy, Kraut, Wop, Spik." The novel's fragmented narrative is reminiscent of the numerous cultures trying to find their place in this country. As in Ray Smith's Cape Breton, self-reflexivity is used to convey national introspection.

Wah's ideal of Canada is a place similar to the Diamond Grill, the diner run by his father. It is a place where one can freely navigate between cultures, where the menu includes "a complete listing of sandwiches, steaks, soda fountain, and Chinese food". People of all races and origins mingle freely at the Diamond Grill, either as customers or employees: "Miko and Donna Mori have their own rooms above the café and become an integral part of life in the café; almost family, as they say." Traditionally, the Chinese and the Japanese do not get along, but it matters little at the Diamond Grill.

To emphasise the symbolic importance of the diner, the novel inserts drawings in its narrative, such as the "Special Christmas Dinner" poster and the sign painted on the Diamond Grill's wall. The Diamond Grill is central to Wah's novel. It is a fundamental expression of his father's efforts to find his place in this new country and, ultimately, of his (relative) success.

Expressing their respective visions through their narrative form as well as their plot content, both Ray Smith's Cape Breton and Fred Wah's Diamond Grill perceive Canada as an amalgam of different identities. While Smith's compiled fiction celebrates the resulting ambiguity surrounding our culture, Wah's novel criticizes the manner in which our country has dealt with the presence of numerous ethnicities. The two texts suggest that the answer to the question of our national identity lies in our culture's non-identity. Canada is defined by its diversity and its inability to define itself universally.

Three men are stranded in a crashing plane: an American, a British man, and a Canadian. Having no parachutes available, they all decide to leap into oblivion rather than die in the plane. The American is first to go. He screams, "For democracy and the American way!" and jumps out of the plane. The British man then yells out, "For the Queen!" and plunges to his death. The Canadian is the last to jump. After a few moments of hesitation, he leaps off the plane, and shouts…

Well, I'm not sure what he shouts. That would all depend on what kind of Canadian he is, wouldn't it?

Read about Cape Breton's fractured narrative

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