TIGblogs - Malcolm Lawrence

Following up on my previous post about William Gibson’s comments regarding Canada (circa 2008), I’ve located some of his earlier thoughts on topic. In a 1993 interview, Mike Rogers asks:

“… Born in South Carolina, grew up in Virginia, living in Canada. Do you think that that dilutes your sense of nationhood? They were keen on it.”

Yeah. Oh, well. Hmmm. That’s a … Oh well, interestingly put … I think what it’s done is it’s made me … made me a globalist in some way that’s not entirely … isn’t entirely theoretical … Yeah, I mean, naturally it’s put … it’s putting it too dramatically, but you could say it was literally true that early on in life I had the experience of, of, of … exilehood, essentially for political reasons which kind of led into a permanent expatriate existence. Canada isn’t … it isn’t a country. One doesn’t … I don’t think one comes to feel Canadian. It sort of isn’t. It’s never really been …

… It’s never been a requirement of their culture with regard to … immigrants, you know? The American metaphor is the Melting Pot for a generation and then they’ll become … When they come out of the pots … they’ll be American and that really isn’t … That hasn’t been the Canadian experience. The fashionable government metaphor during the sixties was the … the Cultural Mosaic. That’s what they consciously took to be their version of the Melting Pot. Where people would immigrate, keep their cultures intact and just, you know, fit them into the grid of the country. I mean, you can’t, you know, the concept of becoming Canadian, it doesn’t you know, it doesn’t compute. It’s not … in a sense it’s an artificial construction. Really, I mean there’s a distinctive Canadian culture but you know … you’d almost have to, I think, have to be born right into it so I’ve never felt, living in Canada for twenty years … Well now I’m truly becoming more and more Canadian. I mean, I’m still a guy from Virginia and my wife is Canadian and I’ll never … I’ll never really be … I’ll never really be Canadian.

- William Gibson, interviewed by Mike Rogers: Oct. 1, 1993: Link.

~ Karl Jones

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