when silvern voices

ralph has posted, has been posting, some slices of home lately. pictures he took from a trip to st john's, though i don't know when. today's entry a picture of quidi vidi village, picking its way up the sides of the narrows. you can't see it from the picture, but the village lies under the protective shadow of signal hill; now, too, under the shadow of the rooms, the newly built cultural centre of the city that pretty much dominates the landscape. i haven't been to see the rooms yet - god knows i don't go home enough to have seen the way its changed. and in many ways, i haven't the desire to.

how to go home to a place you never felt belonged to you in the first place? or maybe, better, how to go home to a place you never felt you belonged to in the first place?

my relationship to newfoundland has always been complicated. moreso, interestingly, since the shipping news brought the place into the north american imagination (though this last bit is a longer story, and one that i'll save, maybe, for another time). it's a place that captures the imagination, to be sure. how could it fail to? a wind-hewn rock in the middle of the ocean, the youngest child of confederation, and then only ever a child adopted with a too-strong memory of its past, a yearning deep inside it to return to its natural parents, who have long since put that past behind them. newfoundland is the oliver twist of the north atlantic.

but a place so steeped in past creates its own orphans. i was one. a cfa from the start, i moved there when i was three, and stayed for fifteen years. and never quite fit in. my body betrayed me, what with skin that could never have held, through blood anyway, a name like stokes, or parsons, or peddle, or - and the irony here is priceless - dyke. i never had people from glovertown, or gambo, or old perlican, which conferred some sort of belonging, the outports being the seat of authenticity, the places with a memory for life before the orphanage. i learned quickly to curl my tongue around the rounded vowels of newfoundland english, to crack the double t's, and play loose with leading h's. but learning the language doesn't a citizen make, no matter how kind people are to you. the question always comes up, even when you think you've sidestepped it with your clever accent, with your knowledge of place, and food, and custom: "so where are you from?" i'm from here, i want to say, but it's never enough, because i know what the question means. where are your people from? where's your home? and when it's the only home you've known, then how do you answer?

and i know this isn't a new story. it happens all the time, still, here in toronto. it happens to 3rd, 4th, 5th generations of canadians whose bodies don't spell europe. and it's funny because when i'm asked that here, i smile, and say i'm from newfoundland. and oddly, that seems to satisfy. indeed, it seems to make me a lot more interesting. i just don't tell people the part about not belonging. because it's only when i'm away that i can easily claim newfoundland as my home. when i'm actually there, i feel as orphaned as the place itself. and as at sea.


ron hynes - sonny's dream