What Does the New Year Mean to You?

I wake up slowly, first realizing that I'm in my own bed.  I feel my husband's warm body next to me.  My next awakening thoughts are that my daughter and mother are safe and alive.  My brothers and sister and their children are all alive.
I recall that it's the last day of the year, and I am in a country where freedom is possible.  I'm suddenly grateful to my grandmother for getting her family out of Europe travelling on the Pennland (shown here) from Antwerp arriving in Halifax on June 13, 1926.  Fifteen years later, her family and neighbours would be herded into ghettos, trains, camps, and ovens.

It's hard to appreciate my freedom without thinking that, in whatever time is left for me, with my own small words and deeds, I have to move in the direction of peace and freedom for all.

From my winter window, I see the barren trees reaching into the grey sky -- nests in the high branches, now visible.  I wonder whether the builders of those nests will return home, to the same tree, in spring.  Like the birds, I've learned to create new homes when necessary.

January 1, New Year's Day, is my mother's birthday.  She will be 86.  January 1 is also the day my father died in 1969 at 43 of causes related to his trauma and injury in the war.  My early morning thoughts again take me back to the war, back to Europe.  The man who will become my father attempts to capture an enemy pillbox and steps on a landmine which blows off his foot.

January 1 is always a day of remembering death and celebrating birth - in my family's story and in the year itself.

I'm in Canada now, so I get out of bed and wander to the local Tim Horton's to write these thoughts.  My Tim's, at the corner of Parliament and Winchester in downtown Toronto, is always full of people and conversation, so I connect with humanity, but I am never disturbed by the conversations.  People speak in all the languages of Africa, Asia, and eastern Europe.  They inspire without distracting.  Welcome to Canada.  Welcome to the new year.

As Jack Layton said at the end of his last letter to Canada:  "Love is better than anger, hope is better than fear, optimism is better than despair.  So let us be loving, hopeful, and optimistic, and we'll change the world."  Starting with ourselves, of course.  Happy new year.

Have You Lived Through a War?

As bombs continue to rain down in the Middle East and Egyptians are once again filling Tahrir Square, I am aware that I have never lived through a war in my neighbourhoods, not even a turf war.

In 2005, eighteen terrorists were arrested near Toronto.  They had plans to behead our prime minister and blow up the CBC headquarters and the Canadian Parliament Buildings.  They were somewhat inept though.  While training at a camp north of Toronto, they were monitored by 200 police.  Even their trainer was a police mole.  That's the closest I've been to an enemy attack since the Cuban missile crisis.

In a war, you might be surrounded by people who want you dead because you seem to belong to a different side.  They may fire rockets and bullets at you.  They might slice you with machetes.  You might also fire at them.  It's impersonal and also extremely personal.  I live in a neighbourhood of immigrants and refugees, people who have been in wars and have found their way to Canada where they can live with less daily, traumatizing fear.

One of my former students writes me a rambling email in the middle of the night. It includes these lines:

I know almost nothing about politics, history, or religion.  All I know is that my grandmother got a piece of grenade shrapnel in her breast, that my dad was shot at by a sniper, that the dog died of epilepsy after the war, that I haven't seen my uncle or cousin in 20 years, that I got beat up by groups of hooligans in Slovenia who would ask me if I am Muslim or Serbian then proceed to beat me up regardless of what I said (I am in fact technically both, and neither, since I know nothing about either and never practiced and neither did my parents).

He probably lived through war.

Our Canadian/American parents and grandparents probably lived through war.
Almost all of my grandmother's family lived through war in Europe.  A brother hid in Brussels, another in France.  The rest were murdered by Nazis.
My father lived through war as a US soldier in WW2.  A landmine blew off his foot.


My favourite Somali-Canadian hip-hop singer K'naan lived through war.  To face the trauma directly, he writes and sings.  He has no real faith in his "wavin' flag' - which always reverts to the pre-freedom non-waving:  "and then it goes back, and then it goes back, and then it goes back."

Andrei Codrescu gave a talk a few years back at the Key West Literary Seminar.  He is a novelist, poet, essayist, and NPR broadcaster originally from Romania.  His panel topic was "What does an immigrant writer know that a non-immigrant writer does not know?"  Among his answers were the following:

• The immigrant writer knows that the non-immigrant writer doesn't know he's a non-immigrant writer.
• The immigrant writer struggles and wrestles with language.  The non-immigrant writer takes his language for granted.
• The immigrant writer knows more about pain, including the pain of Nazism, communism, Castroism, Pol Potism.
• The non-immigrant writer knows about the pain of bad parenting, nervous breakdowns, divorce, the terrible career choice to be a writer, alcoholism.
• The non-immigrant writer has the uneasy feeling that his suffering is inferior to the immigrant writer's.  

I don't like to compare suffering:  suffering is suffering, but I know I'm a non-immigrant writer, and I have not lived through war.

Have you?