WILDERNESS

I am a word in a foreign language … Whether the wilderness is real or not depends on who lives there. (Margaret Artwood, Further Arrivals, 1970).

After a month in my new home, Canada, the adaptation to the land was easy in terms of everyday life and people. But, at some level, there are some elements in this land that refused to be tamed or that doesn’t appear clearly to my understanding. In other words, this land is still strange. But what is strange?

Let’s go to the etymology of this word:

strange (adj.)

late 13c., “from elsewhere, foreign, unknown, unfamiliar,” from Old French estrange “foreign, alien, unusual, unfamiliar, curious; distant; inhospitable; estranged, separated” (Modern French étrange), from Latin extraneus “foreign, external, from without” (source also of Italian strano “strange, foreign,” Spanish extraño), from extra “outside of” (etymonline.com).

I referred to this land as strange not because is like living in Mars or I cannot adapt to the costumes of society. The term is explained because there is still a separation, a distance between the rest of the world and myself. It is the classical sensation of detachment that I have experienced many times living in new cities and countries.

I must say that the estrangement diminished insofar as I discovered new habits and people here. People help a lot to lead with unfamiliar and unusual situations as they show you that this land is strange even for them. Yes! Knowing that even locals can be strangers in their own land gives me comfort. I am not alone in this endeavor. Is not a bad critique or a quickly assumption. Knowing that a certain land is just the juxtaposition and materialization of reality in one portion of the planet relieves me because there are different layers of reality, in which the latest or deepest one cannot be grasped by ourselves either because we are always travelers of life even in our backyard or due to the incommensurability of reality itself (see this discussion in a previous post called "Deserts of the Real").

Many were born in Canada, and living unlived lives they died Of course but died truncated, stunted, never at home in native space and not yet citizens of a human body of kind. And it is Canada that specialized in this deprivation. (Dennis Lee, Civil Elegies, 1972).

Yet, I felt a certain level of unfamiliarity despite the many things and groups I am connected here. I thank all the people in Kingston that opened their doors to me. But, this is caused not only because I get lost doing thousands of things in an accelerated rhythm, it is also a product of personal issues and due to the inquiry that I use to address against the Gestalt of this place.  

The Canadian Gestalt (physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts) is that traditions here are like the invention of past things, the food is like the collection of local and international flavors and dishes, the territory is the mosaic of remote areas with urban islands and cosmopolitan cities, and so on.

In the second largest country on Earth, is kind of obvious that strange or the unfamiliar represent more the array of social dimensions in this land rather than the unified idea of a former-British colony with authority and sovereignty to determine its own future configuring a prosperous country.

I prefer to see the subterraneous cultural and social networks that constitute the phenomenon called Canada rather than the brilliant image of a peaceful country with lots of nature. Perhaps because I am cursed by the deconstruction of another American Giant (Brazil, and in some level the USA), is relatively easy to see that Canada is an invention, a very recent one, an artificial layer that mask something that I still don’t know but that is unfamiliar. Perhaps I will need more time, or maybe I never will discover what is below the superficial layers no matter as much as I dig.

Canada is like the asphalt covering the grass of the meadow, the road crossing the forest, the park covering the chink of previous nations (indeed it is), the skyscraper contrasting with the cozy houses and the parks, the people being friendly but, at the same time, atoms in a society (individuals in the liberal sense of community, different from the lost tradition of Mediterranean model of commonality), and so on. The country is all of those examples but even more. It is a kaleidoscope of costumes and a mix of fragmented traditions that reminds a lot the Southern neighbor but cannot be mistaken to it.

Turtle island, Sky woman – Aboriginal myths of creation.

Group of Seven (1920-1933) – Canada’s rugged wilderness regions needed to be recorded in a distinctive painting style. This style would break from European tradition and reflect an increasingly nationalistic sentiment.

Detail of Mercel Barbeau ‘s Natashkouan (1956) – National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

However, maybe the only differentiation of this country when compared to other ones is the wilderness. And wilderness is not only natural or geographic, it is anthropological.

The arrival of settlers and colonialists was my first contact with the history of this land as I went to a museum in Montreal after my landing. Besides, at first glance into a map, it is possible to realize this as a huge country where all the main cities are in the southern border; like if the people pretend that is moving to the south or that the wild nature from the north is gently repelling them with no coercion. A land where all the vast territories of the north are scarcely populated. A land where wilderness spreads from coast to coast, with thousand islands, lakes, and regions with severe winter and tough natural conditions for living. This is the geographic wilderness.

Historically speaking, and added to the geographic dimension, the wilderness conditions where produced by political struggles with other colonial powers in the past, to the alliance/war with the first nations, the survival in distant and remote villages, and the presence of extreme natural conditions. Nature here was generous but also treacherous in the first literature and tales from colonialists.

However, wilderness, at least for me, symbolizes the epitome of the miss-encounter of people with themselves and with other peoples. Todorov described brilliantly the alienation and lack of alterity between indigenous populations and the Spaniards in the Conquest of America. In parallel examples, the first tales of the Australian Outback were the lack of understanding of aboriginal tribes in the desert. When the U.S.A cavalry marched to the (wild) west, they faced “strange” costumes and cosmologies from the Sioux, Iroquois, Apache, Navajo, Pueblo and other nations. When the Portuguese contracted the occupation of Terra Brasilis or Island of Veracruz (Brazil) to private entradas (explorers and cattle creators) in the inland regions of the continent (Sertao), they didn’t know that this gesture was about to create one of most challenging occupation and exploitation of a huge territory, a relation that defined the fate of the south American country even nowadays.

In all of those encounters, the occupiers where no more simple people from the metropolis, neither they were part of the native landscape. The sensation of not attachment and the desolation produced a culture of not alterity but also individualism, competition (for survival, for resources, for social mobility, for prestige, for being in the top of the social stratification) that naturally was permeated by violence and conflicts that marked the very inception of new countries.

The ordered violence, or the chaotic hierarchy, is in the DNA in most of the American countries. But in the extreme north, where the wilderness was the rule and the command, the occupation was promoted in an intense consumption and assimilation (extirpation) of original cultures that produced the first attempts of trade and urbanization in Canada.

During the XVI and XVII centuries, communication was hard and the huge distances created a peculiar situation of isolation between strangers amidst the strange land. As in the case of other colonies, is possible to divide each time in a cycle of extractivism of in an economic cycle. Here, the steps were the trade of fur, production of agriculture for internal demands, and, after the separation from the British rule in the late XIX century, the process of industrialization and modern commerce, and extraction of natural commodities and energy resources. Canada was forged with the expansion of railroad companies to the west in the Pacific Ocean using Asiatic (especially Chinese) workers, with the arrival of thousands of migrants from Europe to the East coast, by the division between conservative and liberals after the separation from the metropolis, and by the recent attempts of multiculturalism and realization that in fact Canada never was a world disconnected from the British rule (French in the case of Quebec from 1640 to 1760), but at the same time was never like the European kingdoms and countries. Most ot its history, Canada was something between Europe and the struggle/assimilation of wilderness.

More recently, the attempt to recover indigenous elements or assimilate different nations and ethnical groups in a single country is an important trend. Admired by the rest of the world by its progressive politics or by opening the arms to the rest of the world, behind this narrative, there is still a country trying to encompass different populations, find a path in times of uncertainty and ecological crisis, and searching an identity that is not defined just by the national symbols and traditions. Perhaps the only thing that didn’t change was the vast and abound wilderness in the sense that the country still cannot be tamed in its integrity.

The spatial/wild/constant-changing Canada is bigger than the national/estable/social Canada. Hence, is the social Canada more an accident of international and local historical events than a project of a nation? To answer this, it is essential to look at the psychological distance between the past and the future, the discontinuation of traditions and the recreation of the same traditions, the spirit of the first settlements and the individualism from the modern industrialized society, to the forged experiences in which anthropological and social coalescence for label a territory are permeated by the strange wilderness in all its definitions.

“We in Canada are in the odd position of not having really participated centrally in what we now call modern. We were, to our later advantage, on the margins. A ‘Grenzsituation’. A border situation. We should have another name for what we then were. That we have no name for what we were is evidence that we were the always-already-there of what had not yet happened. (…) Canada is, paradoxically, supremely at home with not-at-homeness.” (Robert Kroetsch, Boundary 2 and the Canadian Postmodern, 2010).

The Myrrors – Arena Negra (album). Dramatic, reflective, ecstatic and otherworldly. shaman hailing It’s the work of craftsmen and the cosmos, equally, dialed-in to accurately reflect immensity and awe. – Ryan Muldoon Released March 24, 2015 by Beyond Beyond is Beyond Records