Books Discussed in This Essay
The Amazing Absorbing Boy
by Rabindranath Maharaj
Knopf Canada (2010), 352 pp.
Cockroach
by Rawi Hage
House of Anansi Press (2008), 312 pp.
Netherland
by Joseph O’Neill
Pantheon (2008), 272 pp.Expatriates often long for their homelands, so it’s no surprise that Rabindranath Maharaj’s fictions have focused on his native Trinidad. He lived there for the first four decades of his life, until he moved to Canada to pursue a literary career in the mid-’90s. His first book, Homer in Flight (1996), takes place in his new home, but then he turned his attention to the place he left behind, setting his subsequent novels, including the celebrated A Perfect Pledge (2005), against the backdrop of his island origins. His latest effort, The Amazing Absorbing Boy, returns to his earlier inspiration. Released in January, the book migrates along with its narrator, Samuel, from the warmth of the Caribbean to the cold streets of Toronto’s Regent Park.
Mourning his dead mother in an alien land, Samuel recalls an apposite childhood fantasy. He once knew a boy who lived in a swamp, and he came to imagine that this poor wretch possessed abilities found in the comic books they read. As the swamp dweller held a piece of chalk, he grew ghostly pale; touching mahogany, he became even browner than his true complexion; and dipping his finger into a drop of ink, he’d turn as dark as Samuel’s current predicament. A virtuoso chameleon, the swamp boy effortlessly approximated the world around him.
Like the multinational, cricket-playing New Yorkers in Joseph O’Neill’s recent novel Netherland, Maharaj’s comic-tinged fantasy serves as a particularly apt metaphor for aspects of the modern immigrant experience, one straightforward enough to immediately strike readers as such, yet sufficiently complex to reveal greater depth as the narrative develops. In Netherland, a Trinidadian immigrant named Chuck Ramkissoon longs to build a cricket stadium in Brooklyn, his zeal and industry echoing the pioneering spirit that drove generations of newcomers. Through Ramkissoon’s quixotic quest to sow native soil in his adopted land, O’Neill touches on themes of self-reliance, outsized ambition, and ultimately disillusionment — in short, the joints and fissures of the American dream. Canadian literature has made a cottage industry of similar narratives in recent years, and for understandable reasons. In many ways, our multicultural nation is defined — and constantly redefined — by immigration. While such books often flatter this cherished self-perception, they can also illuminate the troublesome process of adapting to a new, disorienting, and complicated Canada.
Maharaj’s shape-shifter and O’Neill’s cricket pitch recall two better known metaphors, the melting pot and the mosaic, the dominant modes of self-perception for the two nations (the US and Canada, respectively) that absorb immigrants better than most. These contrasting tropes suggest that Canada’s kaleidoscopic shards form a culture more overtly variegated than America’s comparatively homogeneous stew, but they also elide both nations’ colonial pasts, a history that has particularly important implications for Canada’s complicated approaches to assimilation. The truism that everyone here came from somewhere else obliquely acknowledges that English and French imperialism supplanted existing cultures.
Modern Canada is as much a palimpsest as a mosaic, a truth perhaps engrained somewhere in our national consciousness — and one that manifests itself in two divergent traditions of immigrant assimilation. In English Canada, the fraught legacy of cultural imperialism — whether the slaughter of native tribes or the injustice of residential schools — results in a reluctance to impose a uniform Canadian culture on newcomers; whereas Quebec, ever afraid of diluting its francophone heritage, demands that immigrants conform to an atavistic conception of French-Canadian culture. Maharaj’s novel offers a window into the former predicament, while few give as dark a view of the latter as Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (2008). Taken together, these books deliver a harrowing examination of the ways in which these approaches falter.
Among the world’s most ethnically diverse cities, Toronto provides an ideal if unsurprising setting for an assimilation story, and Maharaj expertly captures the varied carols of its urban multiculture. Samuel’s initial exposure to the city is bewildering, as he’s overwhelmed with sensations as seemingly foreign as the subjects of his favourite comics. In a way, this is only fitting. Toronto did, after all, inspire the comic book city Metropolis, and Superman, created by a pair of immigrants’ sons, is, in its idiosyncratic way, an assimilation story. But the Toronto of 2010 isn’t 1938’s model city, and rather than a lone alien in a uniform world, Maharaj’s Samuel is just another part of an urban mélange that would have confounded even the rechristened Kal-El.
Encouraging immigrants to hold on to their cultural identity while they embrace Canadian life can help ease their transition, and binary immigrant identities certainly enrich our national culture. But in The Amazing Absorbing Boy, this well-intended approach complicates acclimatization, as new arrivals become trapped in ethnic enclaves, lost amid a sea of alien cultures. “Just cross the street, and you are in a completely different country,” a fellow immigrant tells Samuel, who finds this confluence of the newly arrived as perplexing as it is comforting. He must negotiate not only the exotic social norms of a foreign Canadian society, but also the vagrant fragments of every nation on earth: there is no monoculture to absorb, no single body to become attached to.
At one point in the novel, Samuel’s uncle, preparing to visit Toronto, asks his nephew to list typically Canadian characteristics he should adopt. Though Samuel easily describes a quintessential Trinidadian, his uncle’s query stumps him: “There was no such creature as a regular Canadian.” This sentiment captures the singular wonder of our pluralistic society, but also the immigrant’s struggle to grasp our amorphous national identity.
Later, Samuel meets a homeless immigrant planning to write a comprehensive history of the Americas from 1492 to the present day, detailing the scraping away of earlier peoples — one of the ways in which the novel connects contemporary Canada to the continent’s history of cultural usurpation. Elsewhere, this anxiety surfaces in the concerns of the older immigrants who Samuel hears lamenting the influx of fertile newcomers — men who embrace dark rhetoric about counter-colonial immigrant hordes that will leave Canada unrecognizable. This sort of paranoia is often voiced by native-born Canadians, but by attributing it to previous generations of immigrants, Maharaj at once emphasizes the irony of non-indigenous people decrying immigration and illustrates the factionalism that can arise in isolated pockets. Believing themselves to be well assimilated, these older immigrants would shut the door on newcomers whom they imagine are less malleable.
English is Rawi Hage’s third language, and, like Joseph Conrad, he uses his tertiary tongue to map the darkest corners of the human psyche. His first novel, the IMPAC Dublin Award–winning De Niro’s Game, charted the ravages of war in his native Beirut; his latest, Cockroach, follows an anonymous Arab as he struggles to adjust in an unwelcoming Montreal. While Maharaj’s vision of immigrant life is cast in shadow, Hage’s is nearly pitch black.
Ontario attracts more than half of Canada’s immigrants, with the majority settling in Toronto. In contrast, Quebec draws less than one-fifth, and Hage’s portrait helps illustrate why. In a way, Quebec’s problems are the inverse of Toronto’s. Whereas Toronto lacks a clearly defined culture for new immigrants to join, Quebec is intent on maintaining an increasingly untenable homogenous identity. In this sense, it is the country’s largest ethnic enclave, and its tireless efforts to preserve its unique culture can breed xenophobia in ways a less ossified culture might not. Hage’s negative depiction of immigrant life results from numerous factors — authorial sensibility, specificity of characterization — though Quebec’s commitment to cultural preservation is clearly a major one.
Cockroach’s unnamed narrator faces hardships similar to Samuel’s, though far more severe. While Samuel finds solace in his transmutational daydreams, Hage’s narrator embraces a darker fantasy, imagining himself transformed into the novel’s eponymous insect (if, indeed, he’s imagining). Maharaj and Hage are both talented fabulists, but just as the absorbing boy is inspired by the tetrachrome stipples of his creator’s youth, Hage’s metaphor has obvious antecedents. And like Maharaj, Hage adapts it to his consideration of immigrant life with great success. Beyond suiting his narrator’s febrile misanthropy, it cuts to two issues inextricably linked to his experience of Canada: the dehumanizing feeling of marginalization, and the nativist fear of foreigners breeding like vermin.
