Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

father to Emma. Since he starts writing in
1939, after discovering his father's identity,
why does Charlie pretend not to know it?
And can we listen without wincing to the
sophisticated conversations Charlie, aged
six, has with his mother? Doesn't the sound
of a six year-old Charlie playing Irene to his
mother's Vernon as they perform the Castle
Walk at thé dansants in 1917 stray way off
key? The piano tuner's voice needs retuning.
Shaping Ethnicity
Neil Bissoondath
Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in
Canada. Penguin $16.99
Denise Chong
The Concubine's Children: Portrait of a Family
Divided. Viking $27.99
Reviewed by Marilyn Iwama
Neil Bissoondath describes Selling Illusions
as his "personal attempt to grapple with"
the policy of multiculturalism in Canada.
The personal nature of this text is palpable.
Complementing Bissoondath's views on
multiculturalism are the story of his immigration
to Canada from Trinidad, a chat
about his family and friends, and a detailed
rendering of the "creative process" of his
writing. The reader learns Bissoondath's
opinions on a constellation of topics surrounding
politics and art, including his
lengthy rebuttal of certain criticisms of his
own art. For the reader concerned with the
decontextualized interplay of writer, text,
and critic, Selling Illusions is, then, a helpful
volume.
But the policy of multiculturalism affects
all Canadians, and by also promising "to
look at where we are and how we got there,"
Bissoondath engages in a more public discourse,
if not analysis, of Canadian political
and social history as they relate to ethnicity.
Regrettably, Bissoondath's discussion is
constrained by a simplification of ethnicity
heavily dependent on media sources and
isolated quotations, sometimes uncited or
selected from John Colombo's Dictionary of
Canadian Quotations (1991). It is at this
level that Selling Illusions flounders.
A strong component in critical discussions
of ethnicity over the past two decades
has been the substantial interdisciplinary
effort invested in observing and articulating
the process of racialization.
Bissoondath acknowledges the entrance of
the term "racialization" into the discourse
on racism, claiming not to know the word,
either, he says, through naivete, or his "distance
from racial concepts and politics."
Earlier in the text, he muses that racialization
"seems to imply. .. to see life and all its
ramifications through the colour of one's
own skin." Resting on his definition,
Bissoondath's commentary skirts the complexities
of racialization, and diminishes
historical injustices it has caused.
Simultaneously, his conviction that a
racialized subjectivity is simply a matter of
individual choice allows Bissoondath to
subsume—as he does—individuals with a
racialized sense of self under categories like
the Nazi regime, and "the architects and
defenders of apartheid."
Throughout Selling Illusions,
Bissoondath links ethnicity with geography,
the undeveloped imagination, the past, and
an "ethnic" nationalism which entails
patriotism, empire and exclusion.
Bissoondath describes the dominant center
of the "old Canada" as having been made
"void" by the country's present "multicoloured"
social reality. His desire is that
Canadians fill this national void with a controlled
"multiplicity of voices and visions,"
a center that would be, nonetheless, "distinct
and firm and recognizably Canadian."
This Canada would enjoy the inclusive
"civic" nationalism that Bissoondath finds
in Quebec.
The polemic of Selling Illusions rests on
Bissoondath's equation of ethnicity with
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