It’s been almost three years since I moved from Italy to Vancouver, and I am about to move again and embrace another cultural shock. This time I’m moving from the super progressive and green West Coast to Montreal, a French speaking city said to be really “similar to Europe”, whatever that means. I reflect on my first three years abroad as a memento for my future self.
I am an immigrant in this country. Many would call me an expat: thanks to my husband’s high skilled job I moved from Europe to North America and I was granted a very good visa. I’m white and when I speak my accent is sometimes mistaken for Quebecois. I have all the prerequisite to be an expat, but calling myself so would mean to validate and reinforce a privilege that I acquired by chance and not by merit. I’m not necessarily a better worker or person than the seasonal farmers from Central America who spend ten hours a day picking berries at a farm 30 km from where I live. So why should I be an expat, and they should be immigrants?
I honour the land I live in. I know that my passage here has an impact on this city, I know I am contributing to its gentrification. I feel responsible to acknowledge and get to know the history of the land hosting me: the unceded territory of Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations. These lands are unceded because, different from other parts of Canada, British Columbia was never ceded through treaties to the colonizers. I see understanding the history of this place as an obligation to the Indigenous People who have lived here before colonization, and who have been dispossessed of their land and oppressed in order for me to be here enjoying my privileges. I honour the history of this land, that is different from the history of my land, but different doesn’t mean it is worth less.
I am not here to be reassured. I’m not here expecting to find people who look, think, eat like me. I am here to take the risk of having to overturn my reference points, my beliefs and paradigms. I am ready to lose and find myself again every single day. This is probably the scariest part of living in a foreign country: taking the risk of finding out that you are not who you (or someone else) expected you to be. Maybe you will find out that don’t miss your country as much as you thought you would have, or you enjoy the freedom from social or family conditioning a little bit too much, or you find out that you don’t care about defending the “cultural -or culinary- supremacy” of your home country. But if you try to cross the bridge and leave the land of the known and, to reach the shore of the unknown and the unexpected you might find yourself capable of living in the contradictions, without the need to judge every single thing that stands outside of your comfort zone.
I choose my words carefully. Language shapes reality and words carry meanings that are not just literary, but given social and cultural power by their usage over time. Living in such a diverse country as Canada I thoroughly understood the importance of choosing my words carefully. I do so, not to shield my reality behind the veil of political correctness, but to dismantle the structures like patriarchy and racism and the privilege that certain words carry with them (like the words expat and immigrant).
I can’t cancel where I am from. I can’t erase my origins, the way I’ve been educated. It shapes who I am, but it doesn’t make me better or superior. Getting to know this new country ignites my interest in learning more about the place where I am from. I study its history, art or literature from a new perspective and it makes me better understand certain parts of me and of my roots .
I’m ready to move again, to question again who I am, to be scattered into pieces and recompose myself again, always open to recognise the similarities we humans all share.