Category Archives: Books

Immigrants in Prairie Cities

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Canadians know themselves as ethnically diverse, as belonging to a country where multiculturalism is “official.” Although we probably think first of major cities like Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver when we consider where this concept is displayed, the cities of the prairies – Winnipeg, Regina, Saskatoon, Calgary, Edmonton – have also shaped “a distinct variation on the Canadian model of cultural diversity,” say the authors of Immigrants in Prairie Cities: Ethnic Diversity in Twentieth-Century Canada (U of T Press, 2009).

They were relatively smaller, inland cities, and received wave after wave of immigrants, thus requiring “sustained inter-group contact.” They were “a forcing ground” for Canada’s long and ongoing discussions of multiculturalism.

Royden Loewen and Gerald Friesen were professors of mine when I returned to university, about a decade ago now, to do a master’s degree in history. I also sat in on a few meetings of a group of post-doctoral and graduate students whose research would contribute to this volume.

Their book examines the ethnic networks or “webs” that immigrant communities developed in their new environments, and the activity in the “boundary zones” where established residents encountered immigrants. It also pulls into the mix the largest single group of “foreign” newcomers to the city – those second and third generation Canadian immigrants who were part of a great mid-century migration from the prairie countryside into the city.

If there’s one overarching impression Loewen and Friesen leave, it’s how rich and complex the whole process of immigration has been in prairie society. Immigrants faced huge challenges within, and sometimes against, established groups and structures. But they seemed endlessly inventive in negotiating identity and well-being in their new country. Religion and family were very important, though there was also conflict in these spheres as generational and gender expectations shifted.

The “old” Canadians changed too, of course, sometimes intentionally, sometimes reluctantly. (Loewen and Friesen take on the Canadian myth that we’re not a racist country. It’s exactly that: a myth.)

I’ll leave the scholarly assessments to other historians and just say that I enjoyed this book. I’ve lived in three prairie cities and am the granddaughter of immigrants to the prairies, so it felt more than theoretical to me at many points. I think it would be of interest, and useful too, to anyone who finds themselves in situations of ethnic diversity – in boundary zones, as it were – wherever it might be in Canada, but especially in one of the prairie cities. Knowledge of the past goes a long way to explaining the present and, in demonstrating how “old” and “new” have interacted, also suggests correctives and hope for the future.

My only critique would be of the cover. The painting, “Saturday Night,” is lovely but there’s an elevator in the background and to me the scene has the feel of a small town rather than a city.

The experience of reading “Gilead”

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I may very well be the last on the block to have read Marilynne Robinson’s hugely popular Gilead (HarperCollins, 2004). But I’ve done so now — and I enjoyed it too.

Gilead is a novel told in the voice of John Ames, an old man, a minister, who sets down in diary form what he wants his young son to know about him. It’s a story about fathers and sons — several sets of them. Since so much fine commentary has already been expended on this book, I’m going to simply recommend James Wood’s review in the New York Times, which calls it “a beautiful work — demanding, grave and lucid.”

Although I found myself sometimes impatient with the narrator’s style, which mirrors what we perceive as the faults of the elderly — a slow and meandering speech, and something of a preoccupation with the past and one’s own wisdom — Woods says, “Gradually Robinson’s novel teaches us how to read it, suggests how we might slow down to walk at its own processional pace, and how we might learn to coddle its many fine details.” He’s right.  

I will also recommend Debra Dean Murphy’s reflections on re-reading Gilead, which reminds of its theme of blessing, and will pass along a friend’s assessment: “This is a great book for pastors.” (She’s pastoral care coordinator in a local church.)

Gilead being what it is, however, so attentive to life itself, I thought I might also share two “extras” that the experience of reading it gave to me.

1. I read a library copy, so others had been there first. I began to notice that occasionally a word was circled. I went back to find them all. Insouciant, effulgence, susurrus, bodacious, probity, caviling. And then lines in the margin beside this sentence: “…age has a tendency to make one’s sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.” Since these markings were in pencil, I didn’t mind finding them. (Erasure is possible — it’s the folded-over corners that always hurt a little on behalf of the page, because their scars cannot be healed!)

Who was this other reader? Someone sad at their own loss of the self? But still keen of mind, determined to look up the hard words in the dictionary? It was good to contemplate another person with this text, to know that reading is not just about a book but about people at the practice of it.     

2. At one point, the Rev. John Ames talks about Hagar and Ishamel. There was something about what he said that sent me off to that story — in Genesis 21. I simply plunged myself and my concerns into it, and was startled, and — to use Gilead vocabulary — blessed. The Genesis storyteller refuses to favour one character more than another. The clash between Sarah and Hagar is dramatic and difficult, Abraham’s dilemma heartbreaking, and the wilderness for Hagar too, but everyone in the story gets their loving due before God. What a good lesson for a fiction writer, or anyone for that matter. It reminded me of something Mary Anne Isaak said in a recent piece about the woman who wept at Jesus’ feet, that “meaning is created by the way others narrate the story…”

Then, back at Gilead later — second last page, in fact — the old man remarks, “Augustine says the Lord loves each of us as an only child.” I think that’s what Genesis 21 is saying too. (I also notice I seem to be bumping into Augustine everywhere lately, which is probably my just desserts for becoming tired of his Confessions when I read them!)

No, reading is not just about a book, but about the places we go because of it. 


Further to “Original Sin”

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I promised, in my previous post, to say something about our “Take and Read” evening around the book Original Sin: A Cultural History by Alan Jacobs. I can report that the weather was cold, the roads icy, attendance about 17, and the desserts delicious. (No apples, but a hint of fruitiness in the lemon chiffon cake. The chocolate torte and Toblerone cheesecake, however, were temptation enough on their own.) 

More to the point, though. In summarizing Jacobs’ work, Paul Doerksen stated his discomfort with Augustine as he hardened his views about “sin, sex, and unbaptized babies.” With these disclaimers, Doerksen also urged us to consider “a more robust view” of original sin. As Jacobs points out, the doctrine does have its positives: it’s liberating (versus anxiety — if I can get it right, am I getting it right?), it’s democritizing (proceeding from an egalitarian spirit), and it has explanatory power (the only way we can understand ourselves). 

If we did take on a more robust view, what would that mean? One of the discussion questions posed to us was, How would an embrace of the doctrine of original sin shape the vocation in which we find ourselves? Doerksen reflected on his job as a teacher, for example. Was he more Wesley or Rousseau in his approach to his students? Thinking more of the image of God in them or of their shared sinfulness? The former has its difficulties and the latter offers some surprising potential, implications like Yes, they need guidance, but I do too, so mine shouldn’t be punitive but gracious, etc. 

The discussion ranged across many facets of the book, as such discussions do, but many participants felt that Jacobs had not done as well as he might have in placing original sin within its larger theological context of grace. Sin has to be seen by the light of the cross.

I took home with me a number of matters to reflect on further.

The matter of Mennonites, for example. They have not embraced Augustine much, being accused rather of semi-Pelagianism, said Doerksen, and thus prone to legalism, to a kind of uptightness, wanting the church to be pure, trying to getting it right. How many divisions there have been because of that!

There’s much about the origins of my own group, the Mennonite Brethren, that I love — that stirring up, under the preaching of Eduard Wuest, a Lutheran, of the sinner to see “the bottomless pit that opens itself at his feet” but then grasping “Christ’s own blood and righteousness / My beauty are, my glorious dress,” and the willingness to open mouths long closed by traditional practices of silent prayer, to pray aloud, to speak of these things, to find new and passionate language for what was experienced within, and that receptivity to the ideas and spiritual practices of others, like a new lens in a telescope revealing more stars.

But I also hear the hard words of the Document of Secession erecting new boundaries  — “Therefore, we herewith completely dissociate ourselves from these decadent churches, though we pray for our brethren, that they shall be saved…” If they’d been more Augustinian, could they have stayed and continued renewal within? Some of that separatist, uptight spirit lingers with us still.

Then there’s the matter of my vocation — as writer and editor. What would a greater awareness of my sinfulness look like there?