The other day on the bus an old man asked me if I was Italian, even without knowing my name, which often misleads people into thinking I am Italian. When I said no, he went through a list.
Greek? No.
French? No.
Portuguese? No.
I always get a little uncomfortable when people ask me my ethnicity because I don’t know the answer. I admit, as a garden-variety WASP Canadian it’s not a question I get a lot, since the unfortunate reality is that ethnicity in this country is so often defined by otherness from the white norm. Every once in a while, though, someone asks me my “background,” meaning where am I from in the Old Country. When I say I’m simply a Newfoundlander and/or a Canadian, it’s never enough: it’s as though I’m being arrogant for assuming that I’m Canadian while people who arrived here more recently are not. I don’t think that at all: I just don’t know anything about my family’s history before this continent, and there are few, if any, records to shed some light on the matter. So I give people the only information I know: that my family is traceable in one line back to Scotland. Three brothers moved to Newfoundland – then its own country – not Canada, in 1873.
I’ve since spent several months in Scotland and if that’s supposed to be my “home country” then I feel exceptionally foreign there. True, I look like I fit in, but I don’t sound like I do, and I am extremely put out by the lack of good coffee there and deep-fried mushrooms on my breakfast plate. I never felt like such a Canadian as when I was in Scotland: I was desperately homesick for my adopted home of Montreal in a way I wasn’t when I visited other places. I also resented paying the equivalent of $8 for a falafel.
Funny thing is, two generations ago, my family wasn’t Canadian: they were living in the British Colonies, in Newfoundland, and flying the Union Jack (not the Pink, White, and Green, as those on the Avalon Peninsula of the island would have it). My grandmother was pregnant with my father when Newfoundland became part of Canada. It was like a collective immigration, except Canada came to us. Before then (and after) my grandparents worked hard to support their large families: the men spending the winters weaving fishing nets; the springs on ice floes for the seal hunt; and the summers fishing and catching lobsters; the women gutting and cleaning fish and game, cooking, cleaning, and tending to multiple children. There are little to no genealogical records because who bothered to keep track of the poor? That and there are all sorts of children of unknown parentage because of the need to stay silent about straying from the marital bed, or jumping into bed before marriage.
As a consequence of this mysterious past, I have often envied those who can neatly say they are something-hypen-Canadian. Increasingly now, though, few people can simply define their identity with just two tiers. We need to imbue the term “Canadian” with richer diversity or come up with a new term that acknowledges that Canadians are increasingly citizens of the world. The next time someone asks me my ethnicity, I might say “hodgepodge” and see what kind of response I get.
