COMEDIAN MARY WALSH ON CANADA: OTHER COUNTRIES HAVE TOO MUCH HISTORY, OUR PROBLEM IS TOO MUCH GEOGRAPHY. IT’S MORE LIKE 10 SOLITUDES AND THREE VERY, VERY, VERY LONELY TERRITORIES.
A GIRL IN ANTI-CONFEDERATION NEWFOUNDLAND, HOMESICK STUDENT IN TORONTO AND COMEDIAN TOURING THE COUNTRY — MARY WALSH SHARES A UNIQUE PERSPECTIVE ON THE CANADIAN IDENTITY
Ilearned at my mother’s knee (or, rather, at the metal knee joint of my aunt’s wooden leg) a great resentment for Canada and all things Canadian.
In 1949, almost 50 per cent of the people of Newfoundland — and I wager all the people in St. John’s — voted against Confederation with Canada. The Townies voted overwhelmingly in favour of a return to responsible government. Instead, we went from being a protectorate of England under a Commission of Government, to being the youngest and poorest province of the Confederation. We went from being England’s doormat to being Canada’s laughingstock.
I was born in 1952, and at least in St. John’s and environs, anti-Confederation feelings ran high. There was no end to complaining about the shoddiness of Canadian goods, the dour and cheap nature of the Canadian heart.
I didn’t even really run into a Canadian until about Grade 5, when Janet, a girl from Toronto, came into our class. She had four other sisters, a father who had a big job with the federal government, a mother who worked, and a maid — all pretty heady stuff for my crowd of Newfoundland 10-year-olds.
But the truly memorable thing about Janet was the nose cosy her grandmother in Winnipeg had knit and sent her to protect her delicate Toronto nose from the harshness of the St. John’s winter. We were outraged. We had TVs; we knew it was cold enough in Winnipeg to freeze the features right off anyone’s face. While in St. John’s, the weather — though unstintingly miserable — was never nosecosy cold, thank you very much.
I don’t remember meeting or seeing any other Canadians. There were Portuguese, Spaniards, Russians, Poles, Americans off the ship, and you’d see them down on Water Street. But in school, except for Janet, it was just basically us. The us sprang, as the great Newfoundland satirist Ray Guy put it, from a genetic pool the size of a pudding bowl.
My next encounter with Canadians didn’t go much better. I moved to Toronto to attend theatre school, lived in a house full of homesick and lonely Newfoundlanders, and we were all determined to make Canadian friends or die trying. There was a communal house-load of them right across the street from us, and we set our friendship sights on these Canadians. We planned to pay them a surprise visit on Friday night, but being young, nervous and socially inept, we thought we’d have a few drinks first — to make us feel more at ease.
We had a lot of drinks. We staggered over to their house and talked at them for what must have seemed like hours to them. That was before we started throwing up — a combination of the liquor and nerves. As I remember it, we all threw up, we threw up quite a lot, threw up everywhere. I think they finally had to ask us to leave, and we always saw it as proof positive of the essential minginess and coldness of the nature of the Canadian that they never tried to contact us again.
Then, touring the country as a Newfoundland comedy troupe in the ’70s, it was hard for us to understand Canada’s ongoing struggle to forge an identity, to find out who they were. Because we always knew who Canadians were. There was never any question in our mind. Canadians — they were the smug people who thought they were so much better than us.
Certainly the days of making a whole elevator full of people from Toronto fall down laughing because you said you were from Newfoundland have changed. We’re still a good time, mind you. But perhaps not as rum-soaked or horny-handed as our reputation would have us.
Today, I believe Canada has finally gotten beyond the “who we are” question. For so long, we were like the hole in the doughnut — defined more by what we’re not than what we are: Not America, not a country that, because of the American Revolution and the Civil War, was conceived and born in violence.
We’re so not America that, here in Canada, during the 1837 Rebellion, an astonishing thing happened, right at the corner of Yonge and Eglinton. There they were, William Lyon Mackenzie’s rebels ready to fight for freedom. But they started to wonder in a very Canadian way, and they started to question, and they started to not feel all that sure about the whole rebell-y thing they were caught up in. And miraculously, at the very same time, on the opposite corner, there stood, well, let’s call them the lackeys of the Family Compact, or the Loyalists. And they started to notice that they weren’t feeling 100 per cent behind the whole oppression thing that they were doing either. So they both — exactly at the same time, they say — started to back off.
That’s us Canadians: backeroffers. It’s a famous part of our history. Dennis Lee calls it the first spontaneous mutual retreat ever recorded in the entire history of warfare. And it makes sense because we’ve got so much space, so much room. Our land mass is so vast.
So we’re good at backing off. It’s our gift. There are countries that are only tiny, like, say, the Balkans — just one squat, tiny little peninsula. Their problem is that they’ve got too much history. But our problem, if you can even call it a problem, is that we’ve got too much geography. Everybody talks about two solitudes, but it’s more like 10 solitudes and three very, very, very lonely territories.
Every part of Canada is a separation: British Columbia cut off from the Prairies by the Rockies; the Prairies severed from Upper and Lower Canada by the big old hinterland of northern Ontario; Quebec divided from the Maritimes by the mighty upthrust of the great state of Maine; and the Maritimes crying out in their afflicted loneliness to a Newfoundland cut off by a grey, desolate sea.
It might break your heart … if you let it.
Someone said that history has taught us that we learn nothing from history, but Canada’s great genius Northrop Frye told us that we can learn everything from our geography. That’s right, our geography and vast land mass with a very tiny population base — once framed as our problem — is really our strength.
Culture, according to our man Frye, is formed by its geography, and just look at us: we’re blessed with a huge load of it. We’ve got the three oceans, and then looming above all those separations there lurks the ever-silent, mysterious, frozen North, totally unknown to so many of us. In total, it’s 9,984,670 square kilometres of good earth, the second largest land mass in the entire world. This embarrassment of geographic riches means we have so much room.
So much room to be accepting, to be tolerant, to throw open our arms, to be generous, to be large in our dealings with the world and with each other. Emily Carr said, “How wonderful it is to feel the grandness of Canada in the raw, not because she is Canada but because she is something sublime that are a part of.” All of us. Native Canadians who have inhabited this magnificent land for thousands of years and who shared so generously, so willingly, and at such great personal cost. The crowd who brought us together 150 years ago. Even the johnny-come-latelies like us here in Newfoundland and Labrador who — let’s face it — were not over the moon about the whole arranged marriage in the beginning.
But we’ve survived.
Now that we know who we are, what do we do with it? What happens after survival? The Newfoundland answer to that is more survival. And therein lies the sweet nut that makes me a Newfoundlander, absolutely; and a Canadian, by happenstance.
FOR SO LONG, WE WERE LIKE THE HOLE IN THE DOUGHNUT — DEFINED MORE BY WHAT WE’RE NOT THAN WHAT WE ARE: NOT AMERICA ... CONCEIVED AND BORN IN VIOLENCE.