Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice

Chapter 6. Stranger Than Paradise: Immigration and Impaired Masculinities

CHAPTER 6 Stranger Than Paradise: Immigration and Impaired Masculinities CHRISTINA STOJANOVA A spectre hovers over the denizens of the liquid modern world and all their labours and creations: the spectre of redundancy. –– ZYGMUNT BAUMAN Displaced persons hoping for another chance to “recycle their wasted lives,” as the Polish-born social philosopher Zygmunt Bauman would have it, are gradually but surely evolving from exception to norm in our “liquid modern world.”1 Therefore, frictions between the welcoming populace and the newcomers – –whether solicited by the “benign forces of globalization” or by undesirable side effects of their unpredictable impunity– –are inevitably bound to get worse. The strangers at our door with their incessant clinging to material signs of once solid identities (burkhas, hijabs, yarmulkes, turbans) also painfully remind us of what our pleasure-seeking postmodern society has lightheartedly thrown aside along the way toward the dubious freedom of, as Bauman has it, “not being tied up by any legacies of the past, wearing one’s current identity as one wears shirts that may be promptly replaced when they fall out of use or out of fashion.”2 Despite the great significance of immigrants and immigration for both English Canada and Quebec, their representations on screen differ radically in tenor and mode across the cultural divide, obviously due to the clash between what Regine Robin calls the “trop plein / too full” (Québécois) identity , usually “manifested through the absolutization of differences of racism, nationalism, ethnic retreat, and religious fundamentalism” and the “trop vide / too empty,” pulverized identity “represented by American mass culture ” (and by extension, by the English Canadian one), by the “reign of the 101 102 EMOTIONAL GEOGRAPHIES OF ANXIETY, EROS, AND IMPAIRMENT image, and the post-modern erasure of history.”3 Indeed, English Canadian culture offers seemingly less resistance to the solid cultural identities of foreigners vis-à-vis the elusive Canadian identity, which is vaguely defined by the pursuit of (material) happiness and respect for the law of the land (and, one feels eager to add, for the pre-eminence of the financial, political, and intellectual Anglo-Saxon elites). This explains why in English Canada films about immigrants are made mostly (if not singularly) by immigrants, and why most of them share an ironic approach, beautifully formulated by Julia Kristeva in her “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner”: “Always elsewhere, the foreigner belongs nowhere...There are...those who [find themselves caught] in struggle between what no longer is and what will never be– –the followers of neutrality...They are not necessarily defeatists, they often become the best of ironists.”4 The fact that one of the most prominent Canadian directors, Atom Egoyan, has succeeded in consistently reflecting on his personal experience as an offspring of Armenian-Egyptian immigrants (Family Viewing, [1987]; Calendar [1993]), and in pondering the most tragic historic event in Armenian history , the genocide of 1915 (the million-dollar epic Arrarat [2002]) challenges Bauman’s criticism of the liquid promiscuity of (post)modern identities and cultures. In this sense, Egoyan, to quote Kristeva again, is one of the “foreigners ...who transcend: living neither before nor now but beyond...[His] is a passion for another land, always a promised one.” A “believer,” she says, who is however most likely to “ripen into a sceptic.”5 In contrast, I argue, films about immigrants in Quebec are made mostly by francophone filmmakers. In the context of the province’s notoriously confused politics of diversity and its variously competing majority discourses of multiculturalism, separatist nationalism, and rural xenophobia, these works are interesting in the context of Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice for their focus on a decidedly impaired vision of immigrant masculinities . QUEBEC’S CULTURAL DILEMMA It is difficult if not impossible to imagine CBC’s Little Mosque on the Prairie being filmed in Quebec, where Bauman’s global paradigm is played out in a particularly complex manner, and where Quebec’s more “solid” identity is opposed not only to the English Canadian “liquid” one but also to the “full” identities of the newcomers, which seem to “solidify” in direct proportion to the reluctance of the host society to accommodate them, thus enhancing the endemic tendency toward cultural regression that is characteristic of the immigrant experience. Cultural and social theorist Homi Bhabha has noted that in every discourse sanctioning diversity, the host society or dominant culture makes STRANGER THAN PARADISE STOJANOVA 103 sure that the incorporation...