Sebastian White :: Coming of Age in Canada -- and the U.S.

ESSAYS

Quest for Identity: Coming of Age in the Borderland

By Sebastian White

My family likes to joke that we ended up in Canada only after being arrested and taken there by sheer force.

It's not entirely untrue.

My grandfather, five generations removed, a hardy and firebrand New Englander if there ever was one, once fought to take the northern shore of the St. John River (present-day New Brunswick) for a growing United States. He raised the American flag on English soil and conspired with others to resist the laws of Great Britain in a bitter dispute that did more to lengthen his criminal record than expand Yankee territory. Ultimately he landed in the Fredericton jail and in a twist of captivity-induced circumstance, my American family became a Canadian one.

Fast-forward 200 years to that same superlatively beautiful stretch of lonely, rolling farmland, ground zero of the vibrant, if shrinking, Acadian population which flanks both sides of the border-delineating river. I spent a hefty portion of my youth here, in a sprawling home nestled between potato fields and riverbed near Edmundston, the largest community in northern New Brunswick and a city about as French as they come.

Aside from the quite comical harassment I regularly endured at the hands of finicky waitresses at my favourite Chinese restaurant, who were typically dismayed by my disjointed French, I always thought of my childhood in the St. John Valley's fabled Republic of Madwaska as perfectly normal and unremarkable.

In fact, it wasn't until running into a colourful Canadian duo at a summer soiree in Los Angeles (Canada's fifth largest city, as the joke goes) that I began to think about those years I spent coming of age along the porous border in Frenchest Atlantic Canada, where two nations—two supposedly unique worlds—merge so quietly into each other.

Amidst the throngs of southern Californians was this most entertaining pair: an oversexed Edmonton film producer and a brooding Toronto journalist who recently exiled himself, as Canadians do so often, to the intoxicating sun and sand of south Florida.

We had somehow been attracted to each other at this huge party, in this imposing city, as if Canadians could be easily distinguished from others in this perfectly nipped, tucked, and tanned crowd. But as we joked about the Canadian Peso and argued about the allure of Niagara Falls and Naked News, Toronto's contribution to ratings-grabbing journalism, a mingling crowd began to avoid our triumvirate, perhaps intimidated by our exclusive lingo and occasional awkward pronunciation.

It was clear we were different. We were somehow outsiders in this crowd.

A decade earlier, as a young teenager, I was an inadvertent outsider in another crowd: northern New Brunswick's francophone world. My anglophone family had moved there when I was eight years old and it was, at first, a culture shock. I didn't speak French, wasn't a fan of crooning local-boy-made-good Roch Voisine, and was decidedly uninterested in trying poutine, that most French Canadian of dishes that combines French fries, gravy, and a hefty portion of cheese curds in one artery-clogging mass.

It was a disorienting experience coming of age in a place where, with time and with teen age, these differences began to subside and it became increasingly difficult to differentiate between Canadian and American people, institutions, and cultures. This was a precarious borderland confused by an ambiguous national identity from centuries of shared history and language, all more Canadian than American.

Disconnected from Canada's revered urban centres—Quebec City, the nearest "real" city, was three hours away—it was tough to feel Canadian in this slim finger of northwestern New Brunswick that, on the map, appears as if it's in danger of being swallowed by neighbouring Quebec. In the other direction, to the south, Boston was eight hours away, which meant it never felt very American, either.

Here I was, about as far as you can get from any place, confused.

It wasn't until I arrived at university in upstate New York that I began to feel distinctly Canadian and relate more comfortably with that half of my identity. People would give me a blank stare when I mentioned New Brunswick ("where on earth is that?") or brought up Jean Chretien in politics class ("who on earth is that?"). I knew I was far from home.

Growing up, I'd cross the border like most people cross the street. It taught me that beyond the French language that distinguishes Quebec and parts of New Brunswick, the real differences between Americans and Canadians—particularly those afforded the enriching experience of living life in the grey zone between the nations—are superficial, even negligible. Still, my time in the borderland left a lasting impression on my perception of self: to this day, I haven't developed a solid national identity that is overtly Canadian or distinctly American.

But is it even important?

The St. John River Valley that my long-ago grandfather tried to commandeer and declared the Republic of Madwaska today feels no more Canadian than it does American. Rather, it's a place that has come to reflect the growing fluidity of our continent's borders and the ambiguity of identity that is a by-product of our increasing mobility. The obsessive Canadian trend of self-consciously enumerating every single way in which Canadians are distinct from Americans has become tiresome and largely unnecessary.

Those nine years I spent along the meandering border gave me the ability—not to mention the lingo and the taste for some really odd fare—to feel at home in both countries, regardless of which one actually issued my passport.

But, like the author Will Ferguson writes, "there is a weariness in being Canadian. With it comes an opposing force: the desire to escape." I left for university in New York five years ago and haven't been back to New Brunswick since. It was that weariness that got to me. It was the deliberateness, the self-consciousness of the everyday pursuit of difference that turned me off.

Ironically though, it was the human need to deliberately find (or craft?) a distinct identity for myself that led me to make my exit.