Multicultural Net
In a modern society, everything and everyone is connected. All those who live in big metropolitan areas are like nodes in a net. We depend on each other. We survive, prosper and flourish or we stagnate, linger on and die together. The metaphor that suggests that a country like Canada is like a net has been used before but, more than ever, it serves the purpose of taking the pulse of this culture that boastfully talks about its multiculturalism, its cultural mosaic and its immigration policies.
A net, as Manuel Castells defines in his book The Rise of the Network Society is an “open structure capable of limitless expansion, assimilating new nodes as long as they can communicate inside the net”.
The debate around immigration, multiculturalism, assimilation, expatriation, mono-ethnic or Africentric education and ghettoization is a long way from over, despite the fact that it is recurrent all over the media. Doug Saunders published an article in The Globe and Mail (February 28, 2009) on the subject of single-ethnic communities, showing that the people he interviewed are not all experiencing the situation the same way. Some state that they perceive their ethnic neighbourhoods as traps “in a culturally isolated island of poverty and permanent segregation”. Others regard their ethnic enclaves as an option, “where people choose to live among fellow immigrants in order to forge ties to the new country.”
Countries like Canada, prone to accept immigrants and proud of cultural diversity are, eventually, bound to face cultural clashes. But the fault for this friction should not always be attributed to the society that received the immigrant. Quite the opposite. If the adopting nation is the net, the new node is guilty in this scenario because of what Castells mentions: lack of ability to communicate with other nodes.
Obviously the process of choosing a country for immigration is difficult and time consuming. Or, at least, it should be. Why come to Canada? If, primarily, it’s not because of a healthy admiration for Canadian culture, then all other reasons should fall, and eventually will, like a castle built of a deck of cards. To abandon a former life, city, country and culture in exchange for the dream of the mighty Dollar, power, and public recognition is part of a wild goose chase. It’s the same as hunting clouds of smoke on a windy field.
This kind of immigrant tends to resist assimilation by the new country, has difficulty with the language, speaks with a heavy accent even after years of arrival, expects and asks more of the authorities while those that immigrated pursuing personal growth or who really took their time to decide where to immigrate to, seek a fast and efficient path to assimilation through hard work and constant exposure to the culture and language of the adopting country.
But is there a line, a limit, where a node without abilities to communicate with its surrounding nodes disrupts the net? The answer is yes. A person proficient in English, faced with a non proficient English speaking immigrant in a situation that is culturally distant from his or her reality, will, generally, under the auspice of Canadian politeness, look the other way or, if possible, put some distance between the “stranger” and himself.
Neil Bissondath published in 1994 a controversial book called Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada. He is adamant, and Stephen Henighan in his book A Report on the Afterlife of Culture agrees, that “tolerance requires not knowledge but wilful ignorance, a purposeful turning away from the accent, the skin colour, the crossed eyes, the large nose.” Both authors walk the same line when they state that understanding, in opposition to simply tolerating, requires effort, a far more difficult proposition that, nevertheless, may lead to acceptance.
Henighan, in the same book goes one step further: “To tolerate people is to fail to engage with who they are and how they differ from you.” And in Canada, how do you engage the person, how do you try and understand the strangeness, how do you bridge the cultural gap if both nodes don’t have in common at least the proficiency of the English language? It’s understandable that an immigrant stay for a while in his ethnic enclave for support while getting his bearings in the new country. But the limit, the line in the sand is drawn when he garrisons himself in that community and spends the rest of his life berating the land that he chose to live in, unable to communicate, unwilling to try to either understand or adopt the culture he supposedly chose to be immersed in.
And a question comes to mind again: Who’s to blame? The net or the node? The guilty are all those that have come to Canada without preparing themselves further or who simply don’t appreciate Canadian culture. And, on the other hand, but to a lesser degree, all those who noticed something different in a newcomer, something new, something strange and, by omission, hardly uttered a word.
