Where is Here

 

- Nino Ricci -

During the four years I spent studying and teaching jn Montreal, I had a friend like me, both an Anglophone and a newcomer to Montreal, who conscientiously followed the news in both English and French media and could report on discrepancies between the two. He was an ideal to aspire to, a sense of the world formed not by the bald statements but by the silences between them. And in his thoroughness I saw a commitment not only to the truth but to the place he lived in, a place that commanded sufficient respect in him to inspire the efforts he made to understand it.

My own relationship to Montreal, and to its media, was more haphazard, governed, it seemed, more by circumstance than will. For all my good intentions when I arrived in Montreal, within a few months, as my life took on a certain pattern, assumed certain priorities, I had  cloistered myself in an anglophone ghetto I never really emerged from, and by the time of my departure Montreal’s francophone world remained in some ways as foreign to me as when I’d arrived. I accepted my failure then as a simple failure of will; though I have to acknowledge now that some of it was due to an actual aversion to Montreal, an aversion perhaps partly explainable by my own relationship with and attitude towards the media. Few of us regard what we read in the papers as « the truth »; and yet it seems clear that the media, by their ubiquity, go a long way toward determining what will be « in the truth », to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, toward conditioning us to accept certain matters as important while others are neglected. In my own case, I was raised in Ontario in a town some 40 miles from the U.S. border, a town where Maclean’s was scarce and Saturday Night  unheard of while Newsweek and Time were readily available, where the Detroit Tigers were the baseball team of choice, and where the two Big Threes that dominated our lives were Ford, GM and Chrysler, and CBS, NBC and ABC. For all the U.S. influences, I can’t recall that we ever mistook ourselves for Americans, ever failed to spot them in our midst, riding in their low-slung Cadillacs and Buicks down to Point Pelee National Park, spending their American dollars, speaking their American twang, ever failed to realize that there was a crucial demarcation between « there » and « here » that occurred somehow at the border. But if, as Northrop Frye says, the crucial question for Canadians is not « Who am I? » but « Where is here? », then that question was answered for me in the negative « Here is not where important things happen », the inundation of American information and images creating the sense that we were somehow beyond the margins of truth, that « here » took on meaning only in its distance from « mere ». Certainly in adulthood I developed a much more critical attitude toward the U.S. media than I’d been able to have as a child; and yet till the time I moved to Montreal 1 continued at some level to discount the Canadian media as irrelevant or insignificant. In Montreal, however, my habits began to change: gradually The Atlantic and Harper’s were replaced by Books in Canada and Saturday Night, The Manchester Guardian by the Montreal Gazette, and National Public Radio by « Morningside », « As It Happens », and « The World at Six ». At the time these changes seemed a kind of concession for my inability to integrate myself more fully into Montreal culture — if I could not discover Quebec, I would discover at least the rest of Canada. But in retrospect I see that my relationship to the media in Montreal was repeating a pattern established in childhood, with Quebec now substituted for « here » and English Canada — historically Quebec’s « other », just as the U.S. is Canada’s — for « there », as if English Canada had become for me now the centre of truth I felt excluded from and therefore felt compelled to take notice of. This habit of looking elsewhere for « truth » might not have become so instinctive in me had I not also been, as a child of Italian immigrants, a member of a  cultural minority. The corollary, in yj childhood, to « Here is not where important things happen was « things that happen here have nothing to do with me », a message conveyed in the thousand ways that dominant cultures have of making minorities feel excluded from them. Of course « The Brady Bunch » and the Detroit news held up no more accurate a reflection of the reality I lived than did the representations of Canadianness I had set before me, through the media and elsewhere; but while the former did exactly what they were supposed to, that is present a vision of « there », of what was outside of me, the latter, in claiming implicity to in- elude me when it seemed they did not, became in a way all the more arcane, impenetrable, like codes I lacked tlie secret to, and as a result I instinctively resisted diem. I can remember the few times I picked up French newspapers in Quebec experiencing exactly the same sense of disorientation, of impenetrability, that I’d felt as a child watching Canadian news, the sense of something at once half-familiar and yet utterly foreign, outside of me.
I now suspect that had I simply approached Quebec as if it were a different country, the way I’d approach, say, France or Belgium or Sweden, instead of as a place where I might somehow reclaim a part of myself, of what I’d been taught to believe was my Canadian heritage, then its foreigness would have been more a matter of curiosity for me than aversion. But as it was, finding myself again in a place where I sensed die dominant culture could hold up no accurate reflection of me, I fell once more into the mentality of the minority, instinctively resisting the culture around me because at some level I imagined it to be a denial of my own.
At the same time, from the distance of Quebec — just the right distance, somehow — I was able to shed some of die resistance I’d felt toward the English Canadian media when I’d lived there, not only because I somehow privileged it for being distant from me but also because, paradoxically, I no longer felt obliged to see myself reflected diere. I fled Montreal about three years ago, feeling somewhat mat it had been a place I had passed through but never really inhabited.
My friend, however, still lives there, and still conscientiously follows the news in both English and French; and no doubt it is a much larger place he sees than I did, large enough to be « in the truth », to give meaning to « here ». •