Blood and Belonging (27 page)

Dennis is wearing a hockey shirt and jeans, and his thin blond hair is down to his shoulders. His Quebecois is fast, heavily accented, and sometimes too much for my French-French to understand. He apologizes that he doesn't speak English, and then points down to his three-year-old daughter, who is pushing a large plastic tractor across the living room. “She's going to be in English immersion.” English immersion courses are in their first year in Trois Rivières. “We don't want to be cut off,” he says.

I was looking for someone who could talk to me about the economics of independence from a worker's point of view, and union organizers in Montreal gave me Dennis's name. Besides, Trois-Rivières is the heart of Quebec, a unilingual town that used to be the capital of its pulp and paper industry. There used to be twelve mills in the region, going twenty-four hours a day, making the paper for the phone books and newspapers of a whole continent. No more. Demand is down due to the recession, and in Alabama and Georgia they have plants that can produce the paper for less. Only six mills are left, and at Dennis's factory they have lost one-third of the workforce in the last year.

“A lot of layoffs at my mill. Over two hundred. Same at the Belgo, Kruger, and worst of all is the PFCP, which used to have a thousand workers. Now it's closed. We've got 17 percent unemployment in Trois-Rivières. It's bad. I could lose my job anytime. When I go out to the rink to play hockey with the guys I never know who's going to be there.”

Hardly the moment, I would have thought, for nationalist experiments. But that's not how Dennis sees it. “The government ought to do something. We need a jobs policy, but Quebec doesn't have the power. Employment is federal. We need to get our hands on the levers.”

Dennis isn't a Parti Québécois militant, but he is a phenomenon—he represents the spread of Quebec nationalist doctrine from the cafés of Montreal intellectuals to the industrial heartland. Three years of recession have, paradoxically, turned him into a nationalist. “We've got the businessmen, we've got the skills, we could make this place work, I'm sure of it.” The Canadian government, he thinks, takes care only of English Canada.

Why, I suggest, don't you make common cause with the workers in Ontario? They're having just as hard a time as you. Dennis won't budge. “Ontario won't give us the powers we need. They say we have too much already.”

Dennis is a cheerful, openhearted man, diffident with strangers, but with convictions no amount of arguing on my part can shift. It doesn't make much impression when I tell him the Canadian government has been pouring money into the fight against unemployment in Quebec. It doesn't matter that an independent Quebec might have just as much trouble keeping a tired old paper mill in business. He knows what he knows, and that is that a sovereign Quebec couldn't make a bigger mess of his life than Ottawa has already.

I can't help feeling that for Dennis, nationalism may just be a welcome flight from disagreeable economic realities. One reality is that his mill used to be owned by a Quebec company. They failed to put in the necessary investment and sold it off to an American company. The Americans are now investing, but it may be too late for the plant to compete
against the company's own lower-cost plants in the United States. What, in other words, can Quebec ownership or Quebec sovereignty do in the face of the competitive economics in a continental market?

But, then again, if he thought the way I do, he would give up. Nationalism gives him hope, and in Trois-Rivières you need all the hope you can get. The curious thing, of course, is that it is such a Canadian style of hope. We Canadians believe in government. Social democratic interventionism is as much in my bones as it is in Dennis's. The sad thing is that this common faith is leading us into different countries.

Although Dennis feels strongly, there is little or no aggression in what he says toward English Canadians. He did visit Niagara Falls once, and while he had some trouble making himself understood, he liked it “down there.” Had Dennis ever been in my hometown, Toronto? He shakes his head and grins. As for holidays, he and his wife would rather head south to the East Coast beaches in New Jersey and Massachusetts, or farther south, to Florida, where there are so many Quebecois in the winter that they run a newspaper in French just for them. This is part of a pattern I observe throughout my visit in Quebec. When you ask people where they go when they have a little free time, they all say the States. They never say Canada.

After a couple of beers, it is time for Dennis to head down to the arena for his hockey game with the works team. It's one of those places from my Canadian childhood, a big, gloomy, vaulted place, bitterly cold, with a lozenge of white, gleaming ice in the middle, and no glass to keep the pucks from flying into the rows of hard, gray-painted bleachers where I take my seat.

This isn't just any hockey arena. It's like the sandlots of Santo Domingo, where the world's best baseball shortstops grow up; or like the pitches in north London where Arsenal players learn how to curve a ball into the net. Trois-Rivières is one of those places where hockey is played best in all the world; it is from arenas like this one that the National Hockey League (NHL) draws its talent.

I have hockey in common with Dennis, as any Canadian does. I grew up listening to NHL games on the radio in the days before television. I have all the same names in my head that he does—Geoffrion, Béliveau, Richard—from the Canadiens' teams of the 1950s and 1960s. I used to play in arenas like this.

I sit in the stand and I watch the Wayagamack boys play. Dennis is good: low, fast, crafty, hardworking, darting in and out of the play, digging pucks out from under people's skates, hitting people when he has to, a big smile playing on his face. When he's on the bench, he pushes the helmet back off his face, sips on a Coke, and roars, “
Allez les boys! Allez les boys!
Look at that guy's acceleration! Tabarnak!”

I sit watching him, levering himself over the boards to join in a power play, wishing I still had my skating legs and wondering, finally, why I feel such fierce separation from a Canadian scene which is just as much mine as it is his. We share all these things, and yet we don't. Language falls between us, even though I am bilingual. His Quebecois is not my French. We play the same game, in the same arenas, and we cannot quite connect. Class, perhaps? But it is much more than that: a question of language and old resentments and a history of bitterness, real and invented, which seems more robust and full of life than any of our understandings.

A scene like the hockey rink in Trois-Rivières sets you thinking about what exactly it is that people must share if they are to live together in a political community. Is it mere sentimentality to suppose that people ought to share the same rituals, the same cold nights under the bright lights of a hockey rink, in order to feel a common belonging? Nation-states, after all, can cohere even when the peoples who compose them share much less than I share with Dennis. The core of my separation from Dennis comes down to this: we cannot share a nation—we cannot share it, since I am English-speaking and he is French-speaking, and he was born in Quebec and I was not. Because we do not share the same nation, we cannot love the same state. I tell myself this might be just as well. Shared love for a nation-state might be a dangerous thing. Perhaps the gentleness, tolerance, and good-naturedness of so much of Canadian life depends, in fact, on the absence of a fiercely shared love. Yet one can sit in a hockey arena in Trois-Rivières on a Tuesday night, watching a young man skating his heart out, with a wild grin on his face, and wish, suddenly, that we did actually love the same nation and not merely cohabit the same state.

KURDISTAN

BORDERS

The mystique of nations is to appear eternal, to seem like elemental features of the landscape itself. Yet the borders of a nation lay the mystique bare. There, you realize how unnatural, arbitrary, and even absurd the division of the world into nations actually is. Border walls may bisect villages; barbed wire may put two sides of the same street into different countries; checkpoints may exile one-half of a family from the other half; lines on the maps may divide the same ethnic group into two different nations; that sinister straight line of border watchtowers may violate the resolutely non-national contours of hill and valley.

The border I am now approaching is especially arbitrary. Behind me, the grasslands of southeastern Turkey. Ahead of me, the steep green hills of Iraq. In between, a long, two-lane, concrete bridge over a tributary of the Tigris River. I shoulder my pack and begin walking in the direction of the Iraqi hills in the dying light of a May afternoon.

What frock-coated gentleman in Sèvres or Lausanne decided that this side would be Turkey and that side Iraq? The same people—the Kurds—live on either side, 9 million on the Turkish side of the border and 3 million on the Iraqi side. Yet until two years ago, nothing at the border post took any notice of these people's existence or even acknowledged that the border bisected their homeland. I am here because
now, at last, things have changed. A hand-painted sign up ahead at the end of the bridge, in Arabic and English script, says: “Welcome to Kurdistan.”

What Kurdistan is this? The land the Kurds claim as their own stretches across five nation-states: Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, and Armenia. In the melancholy offices of Kurdish exile groups in London, I've seen the map of this Kurdistan of dreams, stretching from the Syrian Mediterranean on the west to Armenian Mount Ararat on the northeast to the oil fields of Kirkuk in Iraq and the mountains around Kirmanshah in Iran. This is the land which a tribal mountain people, descended from the ancient Medes, have settled and claimed as their own for four thousand years, only to see their claims denied by the Ottoman Empire and by the modern nations that rose upon its ruins. At the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman Empire lay prostrate and Woodrow Wilson's principle of the self-determination of peoples was briefly in the ascendant at Versailles, the Kurds were promised a state. But between the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920, which promised them this homeland, and the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923, which ratified the new borders of Turkey, their claim was betrayed. Over this dream, the men in frock coats dropped their border lines like a net.

It has been the Kurds' misfortune that their homeland is the meeting point of four of the most aggressive and expansionary nationalisms in the modern world: Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, and Syrian. The Kurds are thus a people whose struggle for a homeland has been deformed and deflected by nationalisms more virulent than their own.

The Kurds have always been regarded as a threat to the unity of the Turkish state founded in 1923 by Kemal Atatürk. Guided by Atatürk's centralizing, secular nationalism, the
Turks set about forcibly assimilating the Kurds, denying them the right to speak their own language, to educate their children in it, or even to call themselves Kurds. Until a decade ago, official Turkey described the Kurds as “mountain Turks.” “Kemalism” fused nationalism with the rhetoric of modernization: the goal of a modern Turkey was to end the Ottoman heritage of backwardness. The Kurds, therefore, were victimized not just as an alien ethnic minority, fated to assimilate to the Turkish norm, but as a backward, barbarian people, fated to succumb to the modernizing energies of the Turkish state.

Likewise, to the modernizing nationalism of the Shah of Iran, the Iranian Kurds were a tribal throwback unaccountably standing in the way of a modern autocracy. Worse, they were Sunni Muslims, while most Iranians were Shi'as. After the Shah fell in 1979, the Iranian Kurds hoped their chances of autonomy would improve, only to discover that the fundamentalist revolution of the ayatollahs was even more hostile to them than the Shah. Not merely did their stubborn mountain revolt stand in the way of the totalitarian control envisaged by fundamentalism; they were also religious renegades,
Sunni obstacles in the path of Shi'ite universalism. Even now, Iran rockets Kurdish villages within Kurdistan and sends bomb-laden Mirages screaming over Iranian Kurdish villages inside the enclave.

The Ba'athist nationalism of Syria and Iraq was, at least in theory, less relentlessly centralizing than Turkey and less driven by ethnic intolerance. Iraqi Kurds were defined constitutionally as a national minority and retained the right to educate their children in Kurdish. Nominal autonomy was granted by recurrent Ba'athist regimes, but only as a result of stubborn revolt by Kurdish tribal and national leaders, the most famous being Mulla Mustafa Barzani.

When Saddam Hussein came to power in the 1970s, new oil wealth, coupled with Western and Russian military support of his regime, made possible a rapid transition to nationalist totalitarianism. Saddam used Arab nationalism to legitimize two imperatives: to modernize Iraq, and to make himself the most powerful and feared leader in the Middle East. The Kurdish revolt, begun in 1961 by Mulla Mustafa, and continued on and off ever since by his sons, presented the most substantial opposition to Saddamic totalitarianism and forced modernization. Saddam has not succeeded in mobilizing the Arabs' long-standing popular ethnic hostility toward Kurds. Instead, he has fought them simply because they are the most consistent challenge to his particular form of despotism.