There is a configuration of identity in our country that is becoming increasingly common with each passing day; yet, without a word uttered concerning its existence. It is a form of identity that is poorly understood by those who experience it, as it is true only half of the time. I am describing Canadians whose identities as ‘Canadian’ have been only recently conferred. Some of us were born here to immigrant parents or themselves immigrated at a young age and know of no other home. Others have just arrived with pangful hearts and a longing to return home. This is a reality for millions of Canadians.
We are individuals who adore Canada and feel immense gratitude for nearly everything it represents. And yet, our souls are pulled forever back to a different country or continent. This chimeric identity segments the psyche, usurps its values, and colours one’s worldview. Many who consider their heritage to be “Canadian” fail, at times, to fully comprehend the condition I describe. When I relay the sentiments of my split soul to friends who do not understand, they stare with the warm thrill of confused interest.
Mine is a household of native English speakers, though neither of my parents and no one before them was born in Canada. My mother was born in West Germany, a country that no longer exists. My father was born in New York City and left in his twenties. Three of my grandparents were born in Greece; the one named ‘Surgenor’ was not. They were born in mountainside villages on the foothills of the Taygetos mountain range. These villages, and their tens of denizens who stare steely at outsiders passing through, were happy to remain unfamiliar with electricity and hot water until the 1980s and remain wholly hostile to the incursion of internet cables that are buried two inches beneath the sun-baked asphalt roads; only recently replacing their dirt-path progenitors. This is a world of grizzled, grey-haired men who acquired tans shortly after infancy and never again needed sunlight; a world of elderly women with knowing eyes and unimaginably strong hands. Visible to the southeast, the Laconic gulf: a glinting azure membrane at dawn when the sun peers over the Parnon mountain range opposite Taygetos.
It was this world that informed my parents’ childhoods, and later, my brother’s and mine. I could not escape it even if I tried. I attended Greek school on Saturdays from kindergarten to Grade 8. Greek television echoes throughout my house – literally at this moment – and blares endlessly in New York where my father’s elderly aunt and uncle live.
I, like the child or grandchild of immigrants from anywhere, have been taught, consciously or not, that “ours is the greatest society this earth has ever known”. I see, know, and believe it entirely- but only half the time. I ask my grandmother,
“Why not return to Greece?”
“Oh no, Alexander, there is nothing there. Canada is open. Canada is kalos (beautiful, nobly so).”
This is a dagger, but she knows better than I. And the other half of me knows it is true. This is the perpetual dangling; having one half of your soul melancholic at any given moment. It is a deep and tragic irony that we should so obsess over lands that our parents or grandparents hurried to leave – or flee. She does not understand how the fourteenth-generation Canadian ‘Smith’ family lives, what they long for, and where in this world their hearts and values find harmony. But she delights in wondering how they have blended stoic unflappability with bursts of a joie de vivre.
With every visit to Greece, I suffer the kind of disintegration that the wanderlusting twenty-something craves every April. In my case, and I imagine in the cases of many others, the departure is painful because, for half of me, it should not be occurring. I bid the Greek part of my soul goodbye and promise to return. And with every visit, I leave Pearson Airport in a cab and am asked by the driver where I had been. I ask him the same question and for forty minutes his mind is back home. We joke about how grandmothers in Sparta are no different than grandmothers in Islamabad. He and I are kindred spirits – half of the time – who are never completely present in the classrooms, offices, or taxicabs our bodies occupy.