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ON MULTICULTURALISM

For one second, please, think hard about what comes to mind when you say the word “multiculturalism” in your head. Take at least a few seconds.

Once you have some sense of what multiculturalism is, forget it, at least temporarily. Forget it as hard as you can.

Ai don’t know what multiculturalism is – and now, ai hope, you also don’t know what it is, at least for a moment. If there’s still some notion still visible in your head, please try to shake it out now. It’s time to delve into the heart of this matter.

Ai have heard many things, and read many things, about what multiculturalism is, how it has failed, how it has succeeded, how it’s part of what makes Canada the greatest country on Earth, how it’s a white supremacist farce, how the concept has good points and bad points (though it is rarely said which specific parts are good, which specific parts bad), and so on. I have also many conversations with leftists, and even some non-leftist anarchists, where the term “multiculturalism” is mentioned as a positive even though the term was never been qualified, let alone explained. When it comes to any term that is also the name of a key doctrine of the Canadian state’s domestic policy for the last half-century, it is critical to be more critical.

The only multiculturalism ai have experienced in meatspace is multiculturalism-as-domestic-policy, this meme-called-“multiculturalism” that is actually codified within, and replicated and promoted by, the institutions of the Canadian state (including the military and the police forces) and many institutions closest to the state (including conservative charities, right-leaning news media conglomerates, and all the major political parties). Although there are several permutations on the meme, they have, collectively, been assimilated by a significant percentage of Beaver Empire’s settler population – even in areas that are frequently considered to be a bit more unfriendly to “foreigners”, like in rural Alberta or the industrialized second-cities and exurbs of southern Ontario.

Ai don’t want to talk too much about the history of this multiculturalism, but a bit needs to be explained. The doctrine was devised/adopted/developed by the Liberals of the 1960s and ’70s. They probably came up with the thing, and stuck with it, for a reason, like thinking that it made sense as part of an overall plan of governing the country in the context of their political objectives and the social crises they faced at the time. It was closely related to the doctrine of bilingualism, and could, at least at that time, perhaps be considered one part of a single cultural-linguistic doctrine aimed at creating a specifically Canadian national identity. Since multiculturalism is still part of Canadian domestic policy today, even with self-conceived opponents of Pierre Trudeau’s legacy in power, it must have had some use towards that end.

The doctrine of multiculturalism is the meme as it exists in the state’s policy. The meme as it exists in the population is probably better to just call a meme. Calling it a doctrine doesn’t make sense, since few people live by doctrines. They live by rules, perhaps, or guidelines, or values, or ethics, or principles, or impulses, or inclinations, or whatever. As ai said, it’s better to call it a meme, though ai sort of think it would be better to call it a memetic idea. In any case, it may not actually be called “multiculturalism” by an individual person, or it might even have mutated into something a little different from the plank of any major federal political party, or it might even be living comfortably in the same brain as some rather subversive ideas about the function and role of the police. None of this matters! Or, to be more precise, it doesn’t matter if this meme, this idea, has nothing in it to challenge the police and all other manifestations of state power.

Ai don’t really think it’s necessary to point to all the problems that come with a population’s assimilation of this memetic idea, especially since it comes in so many permutations. Ai’ll just name a few things that seem to be particularly important points of analysis, at least to me.

First, it invisibilizes both the continued existence and rampancy of white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-black racism, and other racisms in the Canadas.

Second, it offers a false solution to the problem of colonization and decolonization.

Third, it weaksplains, and/or makes it easier to evade, the fact that Canadian immigration policy is fundamentally fucked up, and always has been.

Fourth, in other countries, it helps to improve Canada’s image, which can help to both attract the “high-quality immigrants” it wants and to inculcate foreign populations against the potential appeal of a boycott against Canadian goods (and this, friends, is definitely something that politicians worry about happening on their watch).

Finally, in the Canadas themselves, it helps to construct an image of Canada as adequately progressive – something that can go a long way towards undermining the potential for revolt in any population that believes in progress.

All this being said, the Canadian state’s multiculturalism meme isn’t wholly or uniquely evil. It sucks, sure, but in contrast to the doctrine of laïcité that the Parti Québécois has promoted since the 2007 general election, ai’d be hard-pressed to say that multiculturalism is the worse of the two. It’s unfortunate, of course, that since ai’m now a “critic of Canadian multiculturalism”, ai now share company with ethnic nationalists, “new atheists” and dogmatic secularists (like, in the Québécois context, Djemila Benhabib), and all the people who are actually more afraid of Muslim theocrats taking over their villages and neighbourhoods in northeastern Turtle Island then they are of threats that are much closer to home.

This is uncomfortable company for me. Ai don’t want to be associated with these people – all of whom ai think are stupid, or whom ai think should die, or (if ai happen to have a really low opinion of them) perhaps both! Ai hope it’s clear that what ai’m saying about multiculturalism is coming from a very different place than any of these folks. Their goals are fucked, their priorities are messed up, their analysis is skewed. On the other hand, ai don’t actually know what a valorization of multiculturalism is supposed to do to fight all of these people in accordance with anarchist goals.

The word “multiculturalism” doesn’t need to refer only to what’s been analyzed for most of this post. Maybe we should just use the word in a different sense, not to refer to something ideological or memetic, but instead as a descriptor of a situation, such as one where multiples cultures are existing together. Ai like straightforwardness! We can see, then, an anarchist appropriation of the word “multiculturalism” by making an argument against “top-down multiculturalism” and in favour of “bottom-up multiculturalism”. This is similar to how “democracy” has been appropriated by some anarchists: the good thing is “direct democracy”, the bad thing is “representative democracy”.

Bottom-up multiculturalism either exists, in concrete reality, or it doesn’t exist, in which case it is potentially something that we’re trying to make happen. In the Canadas – as opposed to, ai don’t know, Iceland or North Korea – ai would argue that bottom-up multiculturalism is simply a component of the existing social situation; it existed before top-down multiculturalism became state policy. It’s also not really something that needs to be valorized, just acknowledged.

When we hear calls for multiculturalism to be destroyed, we should understand this as a call to destroy the reality of bottom-up multiculturalism, not as a call to get regular Canadians to stop believing in the multicultural myth promoted by the Canadian state. You can’t destroy a meme, but you can destroy a reality. Such a call for destruction should properly be understood as a call for assimilation and/or ethnic cleansing and/or genocide. It obviously fits in nicely, too, with a citizenist call for the strengthening of borders and passport controls, the most essential mechanisms for maintaining the global apartheid of citizenships.

DESTROY MULTICULTURALISM, then, is a slogan best left to white supremacists. But as anarchists, we shouldn’t necessarily respond with PROMOTE MULTICULTURALISM, which is basically the same as PROMOTE DIVERSITY. Multiculturalism, and diversity, don’t need to be promoted. They don’t even need to be defended! They just are, or they aren’t. It varies from place to place, and it always will. Diversity, or its absence, isn’t the thing that matters. What matters is whatever comprises the diversity or homogeneity in question – which, for the record, are rather vacuous concepts. Like yin and yang, there is diversity in every homogeneity, and vice versa.

The image of Canadian society that gets promoted in the educational films shown to kids in middle school and high school in most parts of the Canadian state’s territory, or that shows up in the texts that those preparing for the Canadian citizenship test need to study, constitutes an obvious example of diversity – but it is homogenous in its adherence to democracy, in its respect of private property and colonial law, in its rejection of “extremism” as a means to achieving political objectives, and so on.

Let’s counterpose this, then, to another image, equally fictitious, but which anarchists and fellow travelers could actually have reason be stoked about. Let’s imagine all sorts of people, speaking all different languages, having all sorts of different philosophies about how the world works (atheism, belief in woo, Jesus was a gay communist who literally performed miracles and we should follow his example, etc.), wearing all different sorts of clothing (from burqas to loincloths), eating all different manners of food, doing all different manners of things to produce rhythmically interesting sounds or play with each other or otherwise entertain themselves without technological mediation, and so and so forth. In sum, a diffuse, multicultural, and anarchistic society.

This is, thus far, an image of diversity on the face of it – but there is at least one homogenous substrate to it. Though we might imagine that people also adhere to the Golden Rule or something, it is certain that this image can only make sense if there is, just below the superficial level, a generalized refusal of centralized authority, of states. It is, after all, authorities such as these that are going to be both the most inclined, and the most capable, of enforcing their notions about hijabs (whether pro or con) on populations of women, to name just a single relevant example. But states are homogenizing forces even when they don’t explicitly aim to shape visible aspects of culture like dress, language, or religious practice. This is certainly true in the case of Canada. The state promotes certain ideas and practices (which, together, basically are culture) that benefit it. That’s why basically everyone speaks English and/or French, and needs to speak one of these languages in order to achieve citizenship. That’s why almost all of us rely on the capitalist market for our food (including those of us who get our food from food banks and soup kitchens).

If we understand a culture to be more than its more immediately visible components, as something that includes an economic aspect and a way of relating to land and a lot more, then it is clear that bottom-up multiculturalism and states are, to at least some degree, opposed to one another. States cannot help but be opposed to any cultures that are not state cultures, that cannot exist in state space without disrupting/negating that space. The image of multicultural diversity and anarchy, as described earlier, is a possibility to which we can strive, if we so choose – but to the extent that it is diverse, there is within it a corresponding degree of absence of stateness there, a negative homogeneity that is an integral aspect of the whole.

Afterword for the confused

You might get more out of this post if you read some or all of The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Southeast Asia by James C. Scott. He’s the dude from which ai lifted the term “state space”, and the fictitious image of multicultural anarchy that ai presented is more or less similar to some aspects of the human reality in Zomia, the focus of that book.

THE COLONIAL NAME OF MONTRÉAL IN ENGLISH: ACCENT OR NO?

So ai live in Montréal, Québec. That’s the colonial name of this place, of course, but also the name by which the vast majority of people who live around here know this place, and that’s almost certainly even more true for people who don’t live around here, who only know it from photos or maps or tourist guides. The indigenous name of this place, coming from Kanien’kéha, is «Tioh:tiàke» – and ai’m going to talk about that too, though not as much. Ai don’t think ai’d have that much to say about it, anyway, other than: if you live here and you didn’t know that name, you should LEARN IT. NOW!

But first, let’s discuss the colonial name a bit. For simplicity’s sake, ai am just going to talk about the name of the city specifically, but literally everything ai’m about to say applies to the name of the province as well. Basically, there is a widespread understanding that the proper way to write the name of Montréal in English is to do the opposite of what ai’ve been doing in the entirety of this post (and this blog) so far. Instead of including the accent aigu over the letter-ee [e, E], as ai do, you should drop it. Thus, according to the folks that have this understanding, the name of this city should be written “Montreal”.

How widespread is this understanding? It’s hard to say. Let’s imagine someone from Los Angeles goes on vacation to Montréal and writes a blog post about it. Or let’s imagine an English-language author from Mumbai writes an espionage novel that includes a short scene in Montréal for some reason. Or let’s imagine some teenager in Kamloops decides to text her best friend about how she wants to go university in Montréal after high school. Ai am going to guess that none of these people will use an accent aigu, but when it comes to these folks, ai don’t think any of them is likely to have a thought-out position on the proper orthography for this city’s English name. They either don’t care, or they’re using the style that they’re likely to see whenever they look at an atlas or read a tourist guide, or it’s a slight hassle to type that character and they figure the editor can catch it, or whatever. My point is this: while these people might not spell out Montréal’s name with the accent, they don’t necessarily think it absolutely should not be written out with the accent when writing in English.

But the understanding that, indeed, the name of Montréal simply cannot be written with an accent when writing in English is fairly widespread among Canadian anglophones that consider themselves literate and who pride themselves on the professionalism of their emails and the care they put into their spelling. In the areas of Ottawa and Montréal specifically, there are quite a few of these anglophones who, as a part of their job or perhaps as a part of other activities they are involved in, actually find themselves writing emails or other sorts of documents in French quite often; such folks may either use a French-language keyboard all the time, as ai do, or they may have a toggle on their desktop that allows them to switch between French mode and English mode at will.

This understanding is backed up by certain anglophone institutions, too, and the most conspicuous of these are those that have significant connections to Montréal, such as The Gazette (Montréal’s most widely circulated English-language newspaper) and McGill-Queen’s University Press. Both of these institutions produce a lot of material that is read by a lot of people, and the standards they set are bound to be seen as somewhat authoritative.

But me, personally? Ai just don’t get it. For me, at least on one level, this isn’t even really political; it’s simply a matter of what looks good. Let’s consider the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about Projet Montréal for a moment: “Projet Montréal is a municipal political party in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.” If you’re going to add an accent to the first word that needs an accent, why the fuck wouldn’t you add accents to the second and third words? Again, it would be one thing if you were simply lazy and didn’t feel like adding the accents at all, perhaps because your keyboard isn’t set up to make it easy, perhaps because just fuck it. Ai see this all the time in bombastic National Post editorials that talk about “Rene Levesque” or whatever. But if you’re going to take the time to put an accent in one part of the sentence, why not just be consistent?

“Because,” you might be saying, “the accent indicates whether you’re supposedly to pronounce it in an English way or in a French way.”

Okay, fair enough, at least if we’re talking about Montréal – because, of course, this doesn’t apply to the name of the province. Whereas the French pronunciation of Montréal’s name is markedly different from the English pronunciation (notwithstanding the way that the narrator pronounces the name of the city in Street Politics 101, lol), the standard English pronunciation of Québec’s name is identical to the French pronunciation – at least around these parts. Ai’ve heard some Americans say KWI-bek rather than the proper KAY-bek, but hey, they’re Americans!

So yes, in the aforementioned sentence from Wikipedia, the “Montréal” in “Projet Montréal” is supposed to be pronounced mon-RAY-al (in rough phonetic English) and the “Montreal” in “Montreal, Quebec, Canada” is supposed to be pronounced MUN-tree-all (in precise phonetic English). One could definitely argue that the orthographic difference helps to make the difference in pronunciation more clear. But personally, ai feel like it isn’t really necessary, and it leads to some unnecessary ugliness. Maybe this is just me, but when ai read “Montréal” (accented) in an article, ai still pronounce it in my mind like MUN-tree-all. If ai see it next to a word like «projet», ai probably pronounce it differently. This is almost certainly because ai am a pretty word-based person, and because ai know more than a rudimentary bit of French, but ai also don’t think this would be hard to learn for most people. Ai certainly don’t think it would be hard for those pedantic Canadian anglophones who are actually very bilingual but nevertheless insist on an accentless orthography in English.

Now ai’m obviously coming from a place of simply thinking it looks nicer with an accent; in fact, ai like accents in general. Ai think they spice up a sentence, visually speaking. There are some who may say that this aesthetic predilection of mine is not shared by all, and shouldn’t be taken into consideration for design choices, especially when it makes the language somewhat more complicated to read aloud. Such folks are generally in favour of a more phonetic language. But ai don’t buy that shit. If we’re going to try to make written English and spoken English less divergent, there are much more important places to start than the name of this city. Hell, ai would even argue that it’s not such a bad thing for us to be constantly reminded that things don’t necessarily correspond perfectly between text and speech, and that it’s actually fine to be familiar with words in writing without being familiar with how they are actually pronounced. If you know where Shenzhen is on a map, you know that – and can even talk about it – whether you know how to pronounce the name of that city or not.

Ai used the example of a Chinese city in the last paragraph because the rules of Hanyu pinyin, which are actually very consistent and exist in order to make it very easy to pronounce Chinese words, are nevertheless quite non-intuitive for English-speakers who don’t know yet know those rules. Ai happen to be familiar with the rules of this pinyin, so ai can be all smug if ai want to be, but ai don’t consider myself familiar with how Kanien’kéha orthography relates to Kanien’kéha pronunciation. Like, in the word «Kanien’kéha» itself, ai have no idea what the apostrophe is supposed to represent. Ai am sure that it wouldn’t be too hard to learn, but at the moment, ai’m clueless. Nor do ai have any sense of what the colon in «Tioh:tiàke» is supposed to represent pronunciation-wise. For all ai know, these characters could have no impact on pronunciation whatsoever, and are instead there much like the accent aigu in the way ai spell the name of Montréal in English – in other words, there for decoration only. (Ai suspect that this is not the case, but again, ai’m clueless.)

Besides, toponyms seem to be an area of language where there is particular divergence between pronunciation and orthography. Did you know that the name of Kiribati, a country in the Pacific Ocean, is pronounced kee-REE-bus? Assuming you were somewhere in Beaver Empire last October and you were having any decent political conversations at all, did you have any idea about how to properly pronounce the name of Elsipogtog until you heard someone say it out loud to you?

But of course, Montréal is not like these places. It is different. There is, in fact, a narrative that it is a bilingual city, a city that is equally “English” and “French”. Thus, it should have a bilingual name. But again, ai don’t buy this shit. The original colonial settlement was entirely French, and while it later came under British sovereignty, it would have originally been referred to exclusively as “Montréal” – except perhaps by Americans, Englishpeople, and Scots who simply didn’t care to add the accent aigu. After conquest, buildings were built in Montréal that had an accentless MONTREAL engraved on them somewhere, along with other words in English – and ai can only interpret this as a sort of dickishness on the part of anglophones against francophones. Things are very different now from what it was like here in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, obviously, and the local power dynamic between francophone and anglophone has changed enormously. And yet this small, subtle dickishness is now seen as “only natural” by people who will add purely aesthetic accents elsewhere in sentences, as in: “Hey, can the two of us meet up at that cute little Parisian-style café in Old Montreal?”

Language is never natural. Language emerges from decisions that people make.

If we are to use a colonial name for this city at all – and, for the record, ai am open to the idea that we shouldn’t – then ai think it makes sense to just use a single name, to give up on this bilingual shit. The whole “two official languages” thing that the Liberals of the 1960s and ’70s implemented federation-wide is a vapid farce that, despite its total artificiality, has helped to keep the Canadian state together. We should therefore take objection to it.

The implication, for the name of Montréal, is that it doesn’t need two colonial names, one for each official language. It only has one colonial name. Whether you actually care to write that name out or not, ai don’t know. Again, if you’re lazy or you don’t have the right keyboard or you simply give no fucks, that’s all legit. Even if you buy my arguments but would like to keep writing out this city’s name without the accent because you think it’s funny to annoy people who give as much of a fuck about orthography as ai do, well, that’s legit too (though obviously you’re a brat). But if you DO care about writing it out properly, and you’re adding accents to things anyway, then you MAY AS FUCKING WELL add an accent to the name of the city. Ai kind of apply this logic to the Kanieh’kéha name as well. Both on my computer and on my phone, it’s pretty easy for me to add the accented letter (whether the ‘é’ or the ‘à’ in the words ai’ve used in this post), so ai’m gonna do it, cuz that’s how ai roll. Ai am less likely to go to the trouble, though, of using the right characters to spell a Polish or Vietnamese place name that has some intense diacritics going on, and that’s especially true if it’s for, like, a text message to a friend. Like, if ai want to speak about places like Łódź or Hải Phòng City and use the correct characters while doing so, ai pretty much need to copy and paste from Wikipedia.

In conclusion, please do you want, and please don’t feel like ai’m bossing you around. But if you’re making the decision to care about orthography, don’t be selective about it?

BONJOUR/HI IS A STUPID SALUTATION

If you go shopping in downtown Montréal, or if you want to buy a coffee at Second Cup or a burger at McDonald’s, there is a very good chance that the first word out of the mouth of the employee who greets you will be be «bonjour», the second “hi”. This construction, bonjour/hi, is possibly unique to Montréal, although ai wouldn’t rule out that it gets used in Sherbrooke or the North Outaouais as well, and maybe even in some francophone parts of Ontario.

As of the last time we heard from them, the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) doesn’t like it when cashiers, bank tellers, receptionists, wait staff, or people trying to sell electronics for commission at Future Shop use bonjour/hi to greet customers/potential sources of revenue/unpleasant people that the wage system obligates them to interact with. The OQLF would prefer a simple bonjour, thank you very much.

In the spring of 2012, the Office released a series of studies that included the claim that the use of bonjour/hi had increased by 1300% in the period of time between 2010 and 2012. Louise Marchand, who was president of the OQLF from 2010 until her scandal-driven resignation in 2013, said around the time of the report’s release that «ce n’est pas une infraction à la Charte [de la langue française], mais ça peut contribuer au sentiment que Montréal s’anglicise.» And that would be a problem.

At some point, ai’d like to write a longer post about this phenomenon called “the anglicization of Montréal”, whether it’s actually happening or not, and what it actually matters to anything. But that can wait. For now, ai would like to direct most of my vitriol to those good Canadian citizens that have rushed to bonjour/hi’s defense. For these people, bonjour/hi is “that familiar and uniquely Montréal greeting” that stands as a true testament to everything that Canada is supposed to be.

As for me, ai hate bonjour/hi. Let me name the reasons.

#1. It isn’t a single salutation, but two. It’s like saying hello/good day or bonjour/salut. That might be fine in some cases, but as a constant go-to? And this isn’t even very similar to a common greeting like “hey, what’s up?”, either. It’s not a salutation followed by a friendly and perhaps irrelevant question. It is just two greetings. There is no need for this.

#2. The word «bonjour», by itself, simple means “good day”. First of all, ai just think this sounds silly, and secondly, it sounds British to me. It always has, ever since ai started learning this language in Grade Three. If there were five defining characteristics of what it means to be Québécois, being opposed to all things Britannic would be among them – so this has always struck me as a bit strange, even if ai realize that it obviously isn’t a translation of the British greeting. Perhaps it’s less that it sounds British specifically, and more that it sounds European generally. In any case, ai don’t like it, whether by itself or as part of a bonjour/hi.

#3. The only person who would ever say bonjour/hi to me is someone who wants to sell me something, or someone who works for someone who wants to sell me something. It reeks of artificiality. This is not some innocent collision of two languages. Bonjour/hi is borne of an intentional effort to appease both Québécois nationalists and anglo chauvinists who are so fucking stuffy about being spoken to in the right language that they might just take their loonies and toonies to another bread-and-tomato-sauce establishment if you fuck up the greeting. Sadly, such people actually exist, and they are obviously annoying as all fuck, but the point is that bonjour/hi only exists to get money out of people – and thus it is totally inappropriate except when you have to deal with pricks. No one says bonjour/hi at a fucking house party! No one says bonjour/hi when they’re meeting their neighbours for the first time!

#4. There is a significantly better greeting available in French, a word that can be used in English as well: «salut». When there is this greeting available, which is so musical and nice, why would anyone ever use the shitty other one?

Ai am going to stress this last one again. When ai go to the small fruiterie near my house, the cashier usually says salut to me, whether it’s the cashier that likes to make small talk with me in French, the one who likes to make small talk in English (sometimes), or one of the cashiers who has never expressed interest in talking to me. If there’s any greeting that the self-proclaimed champions of Montréal English should be stoked on, it’s salut.

There is a possibility that someday, perhaps someday soon, ai will be forced to get a job at a Tim Hortons or some other shithole, and it is quite possible that my boss will thereafter inform me that ai must greet every coffee drinker and donut eater with a fucking bonjour/hi. At that point, as much as ai hate the likes of Louise Marchand, Mario Beaulieu, and other anglophobes, ai will be tempted to call up the OQLF or the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste or someone, and then ask them to picket my store until ai can say salut like ai want to.