This evening Nadine and I took the porch at the back of my house for a test drive. We've got our combined birthday festivites here on Friday nite and still quite a few days of warm evenings, so after she arrived on the bus from Hamilton (an hour away, and where she lives and teaches) we went to 'Candian Tire' (which is kind of like Mitre 10 Mega in NZ) to get some deck chairs.
The chairs we ended up getting are awesome - cheap, comfortable and suitably Canadian. Yes, indeed, they are bright red and have Canadian flags on them, loud and proud!!
I was stoked to find such fabulous and cheesy outdoor furniture (and especially with the end of season sale) and as Nadine and I wrestled them off the shelf (and carted them home on the subway - yes I'm a big city girl now and that means everything is brought home on public transport) we talked about the difference between buying a chair with a Canadian flag while I'm here and buying a chair with a US flag when I was living there. There is a difference, a big difference, but it's hard to put my finger on what that difference is.
We could say that the US has such dodgy foregin policy and uses symbolic displays and articulations of patriotism in order to justify heinous acts both on its own soil and beyond its borders. We could say that the US flag cannot be uncoupled from the history of its use. We could say the US flag is hegemonic.
We could also say that the Canadian flag stands in for a country whose values I hold, a country which doesn't have much of a hand in big international affairs and which, like NZ, is unlikely to have the capcity to perform acts of comparable injustice even if it so desired. We could say that I like living in Canada and can see myself living here in the long term if things worked out that way.
Indeed, just this past week I acquired the official Canadian booklet about the path to citizenship here, which outlines the knowledge you need to have before you can truly belong.
I have got Canadian flags on my deck chairs because of all of these things, but I cannot help but think about the layers of complexity that lie underneath. Canada is like NZ in many ways, including not only its values and positive attributes but also its appalling treatment of Indigenous people and its complicity with (even if not leadership in) injustices on the international stage.
Patriotism is going to matter a lot over the next month: the rugby world cup begins in New Zealand, and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 is commemorated in the US and beyond. There are a lot of flags in my future beyond the ones on my deck chairs, and they stand in for national characters and histories and hopes as well as failures.
I am writing this post on Tuesday but I want to keep believing it's Monday because from my experience it still is: I haven't gone to bed, my Monday has continued regardless of what teh clock has to say. Sure, my Tuesday will be a bit shorter because of my extra-long Monday but I am committed to blogging every day so if I accept it is Tuesday then I've let myself down but I've also let you all down too.
Monday? Tuesday? Who gets to tell? Patriotism is such a funny beast, allowing excesses in some ways and clipping off things in others. It relies on a kind of blindness even where that blindness is for a good purpose or even when it is (as these late nights are for me, when the clock turns from late hours into early hours) imperceptible.
No comments:
Post a Comment