Picture it.
You’re a nine-year old recent immigrant, one-time exemplary student, forced by a certain language law that shall remain nameless to undergo a year-long French immersion program ironically called (I can only imagine, by a civil servant with a twisted sense of humour) “Welcome Class” where you find out that anything you accomplished in your home country wasn’t worth much if you couldn’t speak French. You would expect that the government, in its wisdom, would enlist culturally-sensitive teachers to ease the transition of impressionable, terrified, and in some cases, somewhat traumatized youngsters into Canadian and Quebecois society.
You’d be wrong. Or at least you would have been in a certain classroom in 1987 Saint-Laurent, Quebec.
“What is this?”
The teacher, who shall also remain nameless, pointed to the picture I’d been asked to draw of myself earlier that day with the word “Palestine” scripted in a child’s hand underneath. It was past 3:30 pm, the class had emptied, and a ragtag group of fellow-immigrant friends with whom I communicated mainly through sign language were waiting for me outside. Also, the teacher had spoken in French which at that point in my life, sounded like what you might get if you played a Pink Floyd tape backwards.
Eventually, through a combination of terrible English (hers), exasperated explaining (mine), and yes, sign language, I managed to decipher that Miss Cultural Sensitivity 1987 could not understand how a person born in Beirut, Lebanon, could possibly call herself Palestinian. My nine-year-old self threw around words I once thought of as mundane as “bread” or “water” but were actually inflammatory, misunderstood, and controversial in this frosty new country of mine. Words like “refugee” and “birthplace” versus “racial ancestry” or even “travel visa” versus “passport”.
Clearly in no mood to argue, my teacher tore off the part of the picture that said “Palestine” and wrote “Lebanon” instead. She hung it back up on the wall, along a row of similarly crafted self-portraits, drawings with words like “Syria”, “Iran”, or “El Salvador” written in brightly coloured crayons underneath the smiling stick figures.
The curiously altered piece of art was the subject of some discussion among my classmates the next morning, but I quickly cleared it up. Though I was born in Lebanon I had never, in my entire life, held a Lebanese passport. My grandparents were Palestinian, as are my parents, which in turn makes me Palestinian. Simple. The kids got it. The adult had not. Call it an early lesson in absurdity.
Some years later I’d come to understand that in the Western world, unlike the one I’d come from, there was not one set of laws for some people, and another for others. It didn’t matter that your grandfather was born in a small coastal village south of Jaffa where he tended the local coffee shop until the Nakba of 1948. Neither the olive hue of your skin, nor the distinctive shape of your eyes ever drew any special attention beyond mildly annoying comparisons to Disney’s Princess Jasmine.
What mattered in this new country was a newfangled notion regarded as quaint where I’d come from. If you were born in Canada, you were Canadian. If you weren’t, you could become one through a clear and unbiased process, after which you were every bit as Canadian as the descendants of Samuel de Champlain. It was a cultural quirk that had pitted the preconceived notions of a stubborn nine-year-old against those of a narrow-minded teacher.
But that was 1987.
In 2009, the picture has become very different.
In 2009 Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who was taken back to his native Afghanistan by his father when he was a minor and was subsequently labelled an “enemy combatant” in a questionable conflict, with questionable goals and questionable motives and currently sits in a cell located in a tropical naval base of questionable repute and origin. He’s been sitting there since 2002, waiting for the federal government to throw a charge at him that actually sticks.
Also, in 2009, Suaad Mohamud, a Canadian citizen was finally allowed back into Canada after being unlawfully detained for three months in Kenya because a customs official didn’t think she looked like her passport picture too much. Maybe she’d lost weight; maybe she’d gotten a haircut, or switched her glasses for coloured contacts. Who knows. You’d think the process standing between you and three months in an African prison would come down to something slightly more substantial than whether you happen to be bloated that day. Anyway, she’s back, after DNA testing established that she was indeed the biological mother of a Canadian kid whose two-week stint with babysitters had turned into three months. The Canadian IDs, credit cards, transit tickets and old dry cleaning stubs hadn’t done the trick.
Finally, this summer, a bittersweet ending to a six year ordeal. The court-ordered return of Sudanese-Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrasik to Montreal after countless efforts by the federal government to bar his re-entry, each more surreal and cruel than the next (decreeing, for example, that he will be re-issued a Canadian passport if he can purchase his ticket back to Canada, knowing full well that all his assets have been frozen, and invoking a law stating than anyone caught assisting Abdelrasik in obtaining return fare to Canada can be prosecuted. George Orwell couldn’t have made this up).
Today, September 11th, marks the eighth anniversary of the event that triggered the reconsidering of such quaint notions as citizenship rights, Canadian support for citizens incarcerated abroad, or even clemency requests for Canadians sitting on death row – a practice in direct violation of Canadian laws and principles.
South of the border, a Black man ran for president on a platform of change, and won. Here in Canada, our government has morphed into a gleeful champion not of its citizens, but of the laws and decrees set by the now-defunct and discredited Bush administration, ex-rulers of a foreign nation.
Some might say the world the nine-year-old immigrant girl had left behind, the one her coddled teacher knew nothing about, had triumphed over Canadian principles and values. That Canada is slowly turning into the kind of place where things like where having a Middle-Eastern, African, or Southeast Asian last name and tan skin matters more than what kind of passport you hold, or whether or not you’ve actually committed a crime.
Some might also say a Canadian passport is no longer worth much at all.
Here’s an apt quote, on this day of rememberance, to keep in mind. In his decision ordering the Federal Canadian government to repatriate Abdelrazik, Federal Court Judge Russell Zinn writes that this unlucky Canadian is:
”as much a victim of international terrorism as the innocent persons whose lives have been taken by recent barbaric acts of terrorists.”
Indeed.
Cross-posted on the CJPME (Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle-East) Blog where I’ll now be contributing every once in a while. CJPME is entirely volonteer-run and has been an tireless advocate for the rights of Middle-Eastern and Southeast Asian Canadians, and has become the Canadian governments source for the reactions and positions of the Canadian Middle-Eastern community. CJPME has produced dozens of fact sheets providing a brief but meticulously researched background on hot political topics on anything from settlement building activity in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, to the case of victims of anti-terrositm discrimination like Omar Khadr’s. Please check out their website.
