bush culture for a bush country: an unfinished manifesto

forted by that image, because it does two things I like: it suggests the essential absurdity and tentativeness of our national condition , and it isn't successfully self-aggrandizing . Canadian nationalism, so far, is a civic nationalism - which is to say, its apotheosis does not come at the expense of others. We had better grab onto it, hold it at a point equidistant from our hearts and our minds, and understand what we are saying to one another much better than we do at the moment. BRIAN FAWCETf Toronto, Ontario bush culture for a bush country: an unfinished manifesto the bush is calling to some of us. it invites us to add, multiply and supplement its signs and texts; to write straight off the trail that is written through it; to continue the trace that meanders and guides some of us through its multiplicities, its polymorphic playfulness, its multivoicedness; and, ofcourse, to leave that track and createothers . a coming community? perhaps. something unnamed that is in and of the bush. the bush can be deployed as an allegory for something some of us desire, something some of us, those who carry western culture with us every step of the way, can almost touch but never quite reach. when many of us are in the bush, we bring with us that which is not bush. so we travel uneasily through it. the bush designates that vast part of the country that remains outside of the strip malls, covered for the most partin rock, swamp, and water, though some ofit is tundra and some of it is mountain and some ofitis prairie. a bush culture is a culture that is of the bush. and bush, unlike wilderness, allows us to think a lived relation to and in this landscape. first nations cultures, in my view, are bush cultures. the most important fracture-line in canadian 192 culture is not and has never been the linguistic one that separates franco from anglo. the most important cultural fracture line has been the division between aboriginal and non-aboriginal, and the conversations that cross this boundary. many other differences, literally, pale by comparison. but some part of canadian culture, that "non-existent" that pretends to claim "us" all, is also of the bush. if we can have the bush, if we can have our bush leagues, bush doctors, bush texts, bush bikes, bush pilots, bush whackers, bush radios, bush camps, we might as well imagine what it would be to have a bush country. we have been asked, enjoined, to think the unthinkable (which is actually "an" rather than "the" unthinkable, which is actually a thinkable unthinkable): canada without quebec. what will happen, what will remain? what will happen, of course, can be specified with acute philosophical precision: nothing. nothing will happen when quebec leaves. we will barely awaken the morning after to sleepwalk our way through other days. those of us who are the fortunate and privileged will go to our workplaces, drive or ride along the samefamiliar roads, sit in the sameoffices, read the same newspapers. the sky will sit firmly in its position. nothing will have happened. those who are not fortunate and privileged will continue, as before, to struggle to survive and to change society. canada is and will be that great postmodem nation for this precise reason: nothing ever happens here. that's why some of us love it. at least, let this be the shield under which we protect our subversive activities from the normalizing gaze of the imperial power we border. somecalculators will undoubtedly be at work in some other offices, and these will have some long term material effects. interest rates will rise, one speculates; bond ratings will lower, and firmer voices in favour of government deficit-cutting will emerge in all their masculine strength to deploy their codes of discipline and restraint. and these things, which seem to go ahead regardless of quebec, will continue to be barely noticeable, except to those who are thrown from their jobs, Revue d'etudes canadiennes houses, lives, as the cost that never makes it into the formulas of the calculators. what will remain? this is the question of moment...