bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1990), p. 46
The Secret Kingdom: Interpretations of
the Canadian Character, by Dominique
Clift, McClelland and Stewart, 240 pages,
$24.95,
The Secret Kingdom is one of the finest books about Canadians I have ever read. Dominique Clift writes, after thirty years of political journalism, in both languages. In the preface, he says his book is derived in part from that experience. But even more important is his own cultural background. He tells the reader that “from early childhood I have been able to speak both English and French. Many people tell me this makes me a true Canadian but, like all those who straddle cultural and linguistic fences, I know this is not really so.” The “true” Canadian he adds is “always under pressure to choose one side over the other, or may simply be excluded from both.” His experience is “that I am not quite allowed to belong to either community when tensions run high.”
“Interpretations of the Canadian Character” is not a search for the Canadian identity. He feels that already exists. The relationship between English-speaking and French-speaking Canadians is for him a fundamental element of the Canadian character. “As a result of a long historical interaction which includes a fair amount of animosity,” he writes, “the English and French in Canada have unconsciously attempted to define their identity in opposition to each other. They have become like twin stars rotating around each other each possessing a gravitational field that encompasses the other, and each unable to break free from the force exerted by the other. Even though it is generally unacknowledged and sometimes denied altogether, the relationship is a close and clinging one.”
Each community, French and English, he finds has a garrison mentality. The French, especially in Quebec, seek barriers to protect the French language and culture from erosion by the English majority in Canada and, behind that majority, an overwhelming mass of English speakers in North America. The garrison mentality of the English-speaking majority in Canada is created by the need of barriers to protect its cultural and social values from erosion by American pressure for homogeneity, often bare-faced and financially domineering.
Clift finds an unusual degree of symmetry in these attitudes and the way in which “each language group depends on a negative view of the other in order to enhance the positive view it wants to have of itself.”
Canadians, in his view, exhibit a curious split personality on the question of language. French voters in Quebec elect provincial governments dedicated to cultural isolation while supporting federal parties committed to integration. In English Canada, the contradictory character is not so stark, but regional sentiment and community loyalties are strong, and regularly come into conflict with national unity.
But when the cloak of language is stripped aside, Canadians, whether French- or English-speaking, react more like one another than either does to any other people, English or French or even American. Clift finds “the solidarity and co-operativeness required for survival in the harsh northern environment promote personal responsibility rather than individual freedom. Canada evolved from colony to nation without revolution. Canadians outgrew their past without the need to deny it.
“In spite of the Conquest and the War of 1812,” Clift declares that “Canadian development has been peaceful and evolutionary. The people of this country were never required to make the kind of unwavering ideological commitment that is called for in times of revolution or of confrontation with an outside power. The fundamental concepts on which Canadian society rests, as well as the emotions that move it, are all drawn from every day experience and from the compromises that have been necessary for effective government.”
Clift’s optimistic outlook is that “increasingly, Canadians accept their country as their country happens to be now. No longer are there any groups who still see it in a formative stage and are seeking to impose a character exclusively in their own image, as English and French, or Protestants and Catholics, attempted in the past. The centrifugal pressures exerted by provincial administrations, however, are still very powerful, as are the forces of regionalism. Nevertheless, pluralism is now accepted in a way it has never been accepted before, particularly on matters of ethnicity, of culture, and even of language. This means that the basic personality of the country is taken as being permanently fixed instead of having to be realized in the indeterminate future.” His last sentence asserts that “Canada has become a totally different country by liberating itself from the psychological weight of its own past.”
The Secret Kingdom is a book for all Canadians, especially those who serve the people of Canada at home or abroad.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 7, No. 4 (1990), p. 46. Read the rest of this issue →
