How do you practise your culture? A story

Cyril Dabydeen

“How do you practise your culture?” he asks with unaffected ease.

“My culture?” I reply, feigning surprise.

A moment of my Canadian non-being, let it be said. Non-descriptive, if swarthy-complexioned he is, but with aplomb—this confident-looking youth here with his friend of European background (you could say), also in his twenties. I am sandwiched between them in this open-air public space, but now confined we think we are.

His question is without malice aforethought; and maybe he is hoping for some kind of camaraderie, or familiarity. Verisimilitude, yes.

But strangers we are, in our anonymity here in this capital city with new peoples regularly coming to our shores and, inexorably the demographic shift taking place. Thousands of new peoples becoming settlers in Canada, with the presumably standard Canadian culture changing, ah.

Where now the “multicultural abrasion,” as the country’s main newspaper had called it, or “the cult of multiculturalism”—once ballyhooed. Passé it all is, because of the palpable diversity I see all around. Forty million people in Canada now!

This youth, perhaps wishing to “welcome” me as a newcomer with his sense of tolerance—not with foreboding. He sees me as a foreigner, at best a newcomer to Canada. His intelligent eyes move around with a wry smile on his face. I feign indifference, like a sudden ploy.

“My culture?” I persist with my sense of intrigue, or simply being an interlocutor.

“Yes,” he murmurs, with expectancy in the air; and the word “culture” is with us. Some loaded term, with indefiniteness, you see—and now asking what really is one’s culture, or cultural baggagery, so to speak?

He has assessed me with my ethnicity, the way I look—phenotypical, but not consanguineous. Real Canadian, do you know? The sense of my identity tied to topography—where I’ve come from and will occasionally look back upon with my poetic penchant. Janus-faced—looking forwards and backwards simultaneously, in my imaginative-cum-numinous manner.

Unconsciously reverting to my immigrant self, I subliminally begin to question my having become acculturated (read, integrated) I sometimes boast about—provenance not lost on me.

This youth with his aplomb nods—and yes, it’s about practising my culture? Asian I am—where he has actually placed me, come from an exotic sub-continental place, maybe; he has demarcated me, placed me between border lines. Indian essentially I may be, if a Hindu? Deepvali festival gone. Holi (phagwah), yes. What’s really emblematic, or more socio-politically relevant? Hijab-wearing women are now part of the natural landscape, I figure.

My hesitation imperceptibly grows; as the youth ironically warms to me, mixed in with my own forbearance (my visible minority status self-proclaimed).  Cultural difference I still dwell upon. Margaret Mead instinctually comes to mind—as anthropologists come and go. Famed Edward T. Hall whom I’d once met—his noted volume, Hidden Dimension, examined the cultural contexts of space and how people actually define themselves with their personal or community ambience, all part of the “accepted” cultural norm. And my being “highly-contexted,” you see, meaning about my being people-oriented due not least to my tropical, or simply Asian, origins. What more do I subliminally come to grips with?

Now in this month of Ramadan, the Muslims’ own religio-cultural presence; and the Hindu holi celebratory event having just passed by. I have also intermingled with Jewish friends’ own celebratory Passover. More to come—as we will imagine who we actually believe we are.

This youth seems, well, somewhat embarrassed because of my growing hesitation about how I will keep practising my culture—a “foreign” culture, far beyond what’s deemed the Anglo-Celtic and francophone norm. Who’s the real Canadian with cosmopolitanism all around us? Sheer humbug!

Why not ask him how he practises his own culture, because I figure that he was born—where? Definitive-sounding, with everything correlative, not actually causal. More claims I am curious about, you see. The other youth remains steadfastly silent, non-communicative.

Now everything is instinctively neural with me. My way of parlaying with him, you see. “And you,” I ask, with forthrightness, “how do you celebrate your culture?”

“Me?” He’s taken aback, by my countermand.

“Yes, indeed.”

Comes revelation: he is a Native Canadian—an Ojibway. I should have read between the lines: he welcomes me in more than a ritual manner, with Canada now going through a greater awareness of the Native peoples’ sense of themselves tied to self-governance. Culture and heritage existentially aligned.

We have come to an understanding in a matter of seconds. Now tell him that before he was born I`d lived in bush camps with Native peoples in the Lake Superior region and encountered bears and moose in the Lakehead. I’d also imagined myself a pioneer, like early Canadian writer Susanna Moodie—as “a drawer of water and hewer of wood.” And that over the years I’ve read (literary, that is) with some of the finest Native Canadian writers; and, in my work Native images and metaphors are more than emblematic. Tell me who I am and what really is my culture!

And when I was involved in governmental agencies I`d coordinated conferences of diverse peoples across the country on the East Coast and West Coast, and interacted with the leaders of the Assembly of First Nations.

Insider-outsider binary is still at work, with reductionism somewhere in our consciousness. And juxtapositions of the immigrant Canadian with the birthright Canadian, if corollaries at best. “The narcissism of small differences” (Michael Ignatieff) I reflect upon, and Canada being the “first post-modern nation” (mused by former Prime Minister Paul Martin).

Importantly, tell this youth here with me what I’ve come to internalize—now as folklore when I warmed to Indigenous singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie (Cree)—an Oscar winner (in the Canadian Music Hall of Fame), who talked about her songs being “a bridge between worlds”—in the “tangle of colonialism.”

A visionary at best she is, not a warrior, and an advocate for peace as she brings “rock-and-roll to the reserves”; and that her songs are an “alternative conflict resolution” she hopes “can last forever.”

To the youth I declare that I will continue to admire Buffy Sainte-Marie, even as controversy surrounds her; and it’s how I will practice my culture. Meegwetch!

Cyril Dabydeen is a Sandy Hill resident whose latest book is a work of fiction, My Undiscovered Country (Mosaic Press)