In my newsfeed from the New York Times this morning was this article by Carlos Lozada:

An immigrant from Peru, Lozada details the conundrums he faces daily regarding his immigrant identity. I was deeply moved by his writing. Moved enough to write a personal note to him at his email address at the NYT. (I don’t expect him to answer.)

His opinion piece evoked a memory of what Joy Kogawa had to say in Obasan, her novel written in 1981. I felt compelled to find those words again and share them with Lozada.

Here is the letter I wrote him:

Carlos, 

As I was reading your piece, I can’t tell you how it resonated for me.  What’s interesting is I was born here in Canada, my mother was born in Canada, my father was an immigrant as were all my grandparents; I personally feel more “immigrant” these days than at any other time in my life (I’m heading toward 82!). In today’s actively antisemitic world I feel my token “jewishness” separating me from my “christian” friends and neighbours. The conundrums you describe are present in my life in such subtle ways but they are there.

I feel my “immigrantness” weekly when I visit two young Afghan families recently come to Canada. I spend a couple of hours a week with each family chatting in English, reading children’s books in English, to help them learn a language they are working so hard to learn. I visit weekly for these young women to help them overcome the isolation a lack of common language forces upon them. These new permanent residents to Canada have become like grandchildren/great-grandchildren in the almost two years I’ve known them. 

I can’t imagine their decision to leave Afghanistan and their families behind. I know the facts of their escapes through Iran, arriving in Turkey as illegals, the unimaginable luck of making contact with a Canadian citizen sponsorship group who helped bring them to Canada. I’m not an official part of that group (my youngest sister is), but through my investment of time these past two years, I have come to feel a small bit of what my grandparents must have experienced, who knew they would never see those they left behind, many of whom a few decades later would have ended in Nazi crematoria. Both sets of grandparents left Lithuania and Poland/Ukraine respectively and arrived in Canada in the early 1900s. I have no names of those left behind but I am absolutely certain many relatives did not survive WWII.

Canada, like the USA, is a nation of immigrants, yet so many people seem disconnected from that reality. In Canada, we’re a bit more aware of our crimes against the First Nations people – our halting attempts at reconciliation keep reminding us that we displaced them, disenfranchised them, demeaned them and that everybody else has immigrant origins from all over the world. 

We are experiencing in Canada a growing sentiment that we don’t want more immigrants, we need to keep “these people” out – they’re taking “our” jobs (in spite of the fact that Canadians don’t want to do the jobs they are willing to do), making housing impossible to find (that’s really the fault of those of us who made development decisions fifty years ago), overrunning our healthcare system (who actually made the decisions to cut back spending on medicine, education, dentistry, social work, … forty  years ago?). We need these new people for their willingness to work hard, for the cultural diversity they bring to us, for their talents and skills which enrich our community.

Shortly after it was published (1981) I read Joy Kogawa’s novel “Obasan” – there’s a passage in it that has stayed with me these 40+  years – written words of the Aunt (Obasan) who had been born in Canada but sent with her family to a Japanese internment camp during WWII:

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“The entire manuscript was sixty pages long, I skimmed over the pages till I came across a statement underlined and circled in red: I am Canadian. The circle was drawn so hard the paper was torn. Three lines of a poem were at the top of the page.

Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who never to himself hath said:
This is my own, my native land!

The tanned brown edges of the page crumbled like autumn leaves as I straightened out the manuscript.

The exact moment when I first felt the stirrings of identification with this country occurred when I was twelve years old, memorizing a Canto of “The Lay of the Last Minstrel.”

So many times after that I repeated the lines: sadly desperately, and bitterly. But at first I was proud, knowing that I belonged.

This is my own, my native land.

Then as I grew older and joined the Nisei group taking a leading part in the struggle for liberty, I waved those lines around like a banner in the wind:

This is my own, my native land.

When war struck this country, when neither pride nor belligerence nor grief had availed us anything, when we were uprooted, and scattered to the four winds, I clung desperately to those immortal lines:

This is my own, my native land.

Later still, after our former homes had been sold over our vigorous protests, after having been re-registered, fingerprinted, card-indexed, roped and restricted, I cry out the question:

Is this my own, my native land?

The answer cannot be changed. Yes. It is. For better or worse, I am Canadian.”

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Securely Canadian having been born here myself, I still feel Obasan’s struggle as somehow my own.

Your NYT piece has evoked all those same feelings about country and belonging that I found those many years ago in Kogawa’s writing,

Thanks for such a passionate piece.

Judith Newman