I Just Want to be Canadian
December 17, 2016 8:06 PM   Subscribe

Wonder and worry as a Syrian child in Canada transforms [slNYT] The Mohammads were from a particularly conservative village in Daraa Province. Their union was arranged by their families and governed by clear tenets. Back home, Eman Mohammad, 36, did not leave the house without asking her husband’s permission. She did not socialize with men who were not relatives. Women in the village did not drive. Against the odds, and Abdullah’s initial reluctance, she had worked as a nurse, one of only a few women in her circle to be employed outside the home after having children...

Over 10 months, the relationship was reshaping the family, rewriting roles and rules they had always followed. Abdullah and Eman found their marriage on new ground, the fundamental compact between them shifting. Bayan, their oldest child, was going from girl to adolescent, Middle Eastern to North American all at the same time. She was the one most likely to remember their now-obliterated life in Syria. On some days, her parents believed that she could meld her old and new identities; on others, they feared her Syrianness was being erased.

...

In Syria, children are bound to respect the authority of their parents, even in adulthood. The rule had governed the Mohammad family for generations, backed up by relatives, friends, an entire culture. Within months of arriving in Canada, Bayan shocked her parents by beginning to question their decisions out loud.
posted by modernnomad (31 comments total) 19 users marked this as a favorite
 
That was a really interesting read. I hope that they continue to keep covering the Mohammads as they have been. I'd like to see how things develop for them. I suspect the father just needs to find a comfortable door into society and his attitude will change a lot. Everyone else in his family are finding their own doorways, but he is stubbornly refusing to find one.
posted by hippybear at 8:24 PM on December 17, 2016


As a Canadian, I'm proud that we're doing something for Syrians but "Canada welcomes Syrian refugees like no other country" seems a bit of a stretch when you compare the total numbers of refugees admitted to countries like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Greece and Germany. Like, we've taken in one tenth of what Germany has taken.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:32 PM on December 17, 2016 [16 favorites]


I believe it's about the support structure that Canadian Syrian refugees are being given, not the numbers being admitted to the country.
posted by hippybear at 8:40 PM on December 17, 2016 [16 favorites]


Wow. This is a common story among immigrants. Sadly their stories are too infrequently told.
posted by k8t at 8:44 PM on December 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


Has anybody read Anne of Green Gables with recent Canadian immigrants, especially mothers and daughters? Because I want to read that book club's opinions. So bad.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:59 PM on December 17, 2016 [16 favorites]


I've recently started volunteering at a library program in Halifax where they are offering free English lessons to New Canadians, most of whom are refugees from Syria. The adults take the lessons, and they bring their kids, who hang out and play in the kids section with me and the other volunteers.

It's been very interesting getting to see the adjustment process up close, to say the least. The younger kids just run around, play with toys, and are generally as carefree as kids could be (which is so good to see, considering what they've been through). The older kids are a little bit more reserved, and *incredibly* polite, and you can tell how seriously they are approaching the challenges of living in such a different context. When I talk to them in English they respond with the poise and diction of someone being interviewed for a competitive job. They are still kids though, and have their moments of silliness and chaotic energy just like the youngsters.

Mirroring what is discussed in this article, the people who I see struggling the most are the Dads. I haven't had the opportunity to speak with them much, but many of them project the same kind of "lost" feeling that Mr. Mohammad described. I think that coming to Canada has shaken a lot of their previously well-established notions of masculinity, and some of them will doubtlessly struggle to integrate and adapt. The Moms, on the other hand, consistently project a much happier energy.

Growing pains are to be expected, anyway, and I'm just happy they're here. I hope we bring as many others over as we can, as quickly as we can.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 9:01 PM on December 17, 2016 [44 favorites]


A friend of mine in Denmark plays a similar role to that of the sponsors of this family. She participates in their local system that matches refugee families with Danish families in the neighborhood. She's been assigned to the same family for about five years now. I've really enjoyed hearing about her challenges in walking that line between opening doors for the family into activities and societal roles that they would never be able to play in their home country versus not stomping all over their culture and mindset. She especially struggles with these issues around feminism vs traditional Islam and how that tension affects the family's daughters, who are the same age as her own kids, and are assimilating more than their parents would prefer.

My friend says that one of her roles is to liaise between the family and the school, although this is becoming less as the parents' Danish improves. She says that as well as translating messages from the school for the parents, she finds an important role is to explain to the teachers where the parents are coming from when they make decisions the teachers don't understand, i.e. to give some context about the parents fears that the children will lose their connection to culture, religion, language, etc, so the teachers don't just think they are being stubborn for no reason, or that they are ignorant of Danish norms.
posted by lollusc at 9:07 PM on December 17, 2016 [17 favorites]


I guess I should be less cryptic maybe. "Anne" deals in several places with how Anne and her friends are part of the avant garde of young women who are allowed to go out with less chaperonage and who can perform in public at school concerts and so on. I'm super-curious if Syrian refugee families (i.e., mothers and daughters) are reading the Anne books (as part of their immigration to Canada or as part of their general world literariness -- Anne is ridiculously popular in Japan, where her life as an orphan gave a map to post-war orphans after WWII), and, if so, how they're reading Anne's independence vs. family protectiveness as a young girl in an era where girls were highly protected but were gaining independence as Canadians.

I suppose it's on my mind because I was just reading the Betsy/Tacy/Tib novels (Betsy starts high school in 1906 in rural Minnesota), which also put in mind of the recent article I posted about how high school both corralled teenaged children for their parents, and also gave teenaged children a way to escape their parents. (Anne goes to boarding high school at Queens in about 1880, she's a generation older than Betsy.) Laura Ingalls starts teaching in 1883 in the Dakota territory; In Little Women, Jo turns 21 in 1868 and Beth dies in 1869; Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and A Girl of the Limberlost and Daddy Long Legs are all set in that same 1880 to 1910 time period of girls beginning to go to high school and college away from chaperones and parents. Francie of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is born in 1901. Anne Gilbreth of Cheaper by the Dozen started high school in about 1920.

It's hard to negotiate freedom and independence as an American parent of American children in 2016; it's hard to even imagine how it would be to negotiate those issues as a Syrian parent of Canadian children, coping with both natural teenaged independence AND translation to a new culture.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 10:04 PM on December 17, 2016 [32 favorites]


Eyebrows McGee: I guess I need to read Anne of Green Gables! My mother went to and loved Catholic boarding school. She escaped my grandmother and her bad habits there and had a great education.
I read most of the Little House books growing up and liked them.
Thanks for explaining the Japanese fascination with Anne of Green Gables, it never made sense to me.
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 12:27 AM on December 18, 2016


"Thanks for explaining the Japanese fascination with Anne of Green Gables, it never made sense to me."

It was translated by an English-speaking missionary into Japanese just before WWII and used as a teaching text for Japanese students after WWII, when the story of an orphan finding a home was very resonant in Japan, where orphan stories were not very common (because of extended kin networks). It was incorporated into a lot of school curricula after the war when Japanese school officials were looking for wholesome and enriching Western lit to incorporate into literature classes (in both English and Japanese). Critics have also noted that Montgomery's flowery language describing Canadian natural scenes has a lot in common with Japanese literary descriptions of nature and that may provide an entree for Japanese readers. Then it got made into an anime in 1979 (Akage no Anne)! There's a defunct theme park in Japan called "Canadian World" that's modeled after Green Gables, and PEI is terrifically popular with Japanese tourists to Canada.

Anyway it's your basic Bildungsroman so Anne has a lot in common with adolescents all over the world who are learning how to make their way, but I'm super-curious about Anne and the immigrant Canadian experience! Especially since Anne is set when women are just starting to step outside the domestic sphere in Canada, and many immigrants have a similar experience moving from countries where women are still more limited to domestic life to very egalitarian Canada.

(But it's a rich period in general for the literature of girlhood in English, as girls in the Anglosphere start gaining independence and education outside the home, probably other texts would also be interesting from an immigrant-experience standpoint, I just like Anne best and she's clearly the most Canadian.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:39 AM on December 18, 2016 [12 favorites]


Atlanta is a big place for refugee settlement in the US. As a result, I have students who are from (or whose parents are from) every place where there has been a humanitarian crisis in recent decades. I love teaching at a place where a daughter of Bosnian refugees is not afraid to tell her classmates why Trump reminds her parents of the Bosnian genocide, or where a student from Venezuela and a student from Lebanon have a friendly debate over whose country is more unstable.

The assimilation process is really interesting to watch at the college age. We are a commuter school, so most of our students live with their families, regardless of ethnicity, and like college students everywhere, all of them struggle with questions of defining their own identities. In some ways, there is a big difference between the identity struggles of a umpteenth generation white Georgian who is a first generation college student and a Syrian refugee, but they seem to find a lot of common ground in questions about thinking about their parents' religion, choosing their own major and life versus letting their parents choose for them, deciding when to move out, and providing financial and social support to their parents.
posted by hydropsyche at 5:07 AM on December 18, 2016 [7 favorites]


but he is stubbornly refusing to find one.

Dude, I suspect it's way more complicated than that.
posted by From Bklyn at 5:43 AM on December 18, 2016 [3 favorites]


There was an old Toronto paper from 1913 that we found during some re-modelling and IIRC it had at least two articles about problem teen girls. One was a concern piece, about the increasing number of young ladies working retail and worry over them having disposable income and unsupervised time which they might spend at ice cream shops talking to boys.... a BIG problem.

The second, I've brought up here before; was a court report about a teenage girl (described as a jewess) from Montreal who was caught working in Toronto, disguised as a boy.

It worries me when I think of all the social progress that's been made in my lifetime, to see the forces at work, trying to claw it back.
posted by bonobothegreat at 7:51 AM on December 18, 2016 [11 favorites]


....meaning that what we might imagine as Taliban-type conservatism isn't so remotely far back in the past of a place like Toronto.
posted by bonobothegreat at 8:00 AM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I'm part of a sponsorship group who's family arrived last Thursday (and yes, I bawled at the airport to finally see them here after a year, and hethy and smiling with a two week old baby in moms arms swelling the family to 7).

This sort of narrative about the change for women preoccupies the volunteers in my group, and I expect that as we get to know the family it will be "more complicated" as From Bklyn says. The Syrian translator volunteers laugh and remind us that in Canada we are very diverse in our opinions on the role of women, and the families coming here will be just as diverse.
We've learned that one cultural norms for Syrian fathers is a very strong expectation that he must work, making it hard to take the year for English learning and accepting support from a gaggle of helpful volunteers at every turn.
I can understand how this makes it hard for a father and husband, as in this story, to see his wife get work first. It's gender role expectations of him, as much of his of her, if that makes sense. I've heard that desperation for getting tons job in so many interviews with Syrian men in the past year.

Also very Canadian is the expectation that immigrants keep their culture ("Canada is a mosaic not a melting pot" is the mantra). It's very strong in the Canadian ethos (and mythos) and our stories about ourselves.

So when these new Canadians say the want to be Canadian... Well it can get complicated as there is no fixed version of that, and they themselves will be building the new version of what Canadian means. It will surely mean a Syrian restaurant in every town in Canada... And not only Syrian children growing up with Anne of Green Gables, but surely also new contributions to Canadian literature in future.
posted by chapps at 10:13 AM on December 18, 2016 [9 favorites]


Also the part about Halloween reminded me of the children's picture book Frome far Away that Robert Munsch co-wrote with a girl who came to Canada as a refugee from Beirut, and wrote him.about her story. If your kids are in classes with some of the Syrian kids, or if you just want to talk about refugees with young kids, I highly recommend.
posted by chapps at 10:21 AM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yep, women in Canada were jailed for dating or being "incorrigible" up until the Female Refugees Act was repealed in 1964.

Complicating searching for employment is that many jobs (not just in Canada but around the world) require either family/friend connections or else advanced social skills. Obviously many new Canadians do not have the personal connections and women are usually socialised to have more advanced social skills.
posted by saucysault at 10:31 AM on December 18, 2016


I'd almost rather hear what the fathers think of Anne of Green Gables, with Mathew providing an interesting role model for how to deal with the increased independence of the women in their lives. Getting them to read it though...
posted by Meeks Ormand at 12:04 PM on December 18, 2016


Is there an Arabic translation of Anne of Green Gables? Seems like a good place to start. Or maybe a parallel version with English on one page and Arabic on the facing.
posted by hippybear at 12:11 PM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Matthew's parenting advice: stand back, listen, smile gently, speak up for a girl's right to puffed sleeves.
Matthew's advice for brothers of strong sisters: stand back, listen, smile gently, speak up for a girl's right to puffed sleeves.
posted by chapps at 12:22 PM on December 18, 2016 [4 favorites]


I watched the TV series with my dad every Christmas growing up. When Matthew dies we'd both yell plaintively "maaaaaatheeeeeew!"
posted by chapps at 12:23 PM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I watched one episode (was it longer than one?) of the new PBS adaptation. I remember that I watched the old series when I was younger, but it didn't stick. I enjoyed the new bit that I watched.
posted by hippybear at 12:35 PM on December 18, 2016


It's hard for Americans to remember that Irish and Italians weren't regarded as "white" at one point. Similar with Anne?
posted by hippybear at 12:35 PM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


Also Finnish people and Ukrainians.
posted by chapps at 1:06 PM on December 18, 2016 [1 favorite]


I don't think race comes up... But being a ginger certainly does.
posted by chapps at 1:07 PM on December 18, 2016


I don't think race comes up... But being a ginger certainly does.

In my recollection race is not and issue but yeah red hair is definitely a symbol. Mostly though it's about being a girl and worse being a girl who doesn't behave as she should.
posted by Jalliah at 2:07 PM on December 18, 2016


We've learned that one cultural norms for Syrian fathers is a very strong expectation that he must work, making it hard to take the year for English learning and accepting support from a gaggle of helpful volunteers at every turn.

It's a strong norm in so many cultures, to the point that I wonder whether programs like this have considered finding work placements. Surely having some pocket change would add to one's sense of dignity, as well as help people adjust. It would be a place for the worker to get connected to others and to practice English in professional contexts. And skills like carving meat at a butcher shop would translate well, no?

advanced social skills... and women are usually socialised to have more advanced social skills

Is this true in non-Western societies? I'm curious. In this specific case, for this guy to co-own a grocery and two butcher shops, to deal with a co-owner, customers, and employees, he must have decent people skills.

Last thought: I hope this NYT spotlight is helpful and not an additional challenge. I'm glad the article spoke sympathetically of the parents' challenges and how they were finding ways to deal with them together.
posted by salvia at 3:02 PM on December 18, 2016 [2 favorites]


The refugee centre in my town has a job placement program specifically for migrants transitioning work skills... Language really is a big barrier, though.
posted by chapps at 3:15 PM on December 18, 2016


I seem to recall that on one of my periodic re-readings of the Anne books a couple of years ago, there is a very light but unpleasant sprinkling of random racism. I wish I could remember the details, I just remember thinking ugh, Marilla, REALLY??

It was the first time I'd picked it up in what must be dozens of readings over the years, so whether that speaks to how subtle it is, or my tiny baby steps in being more aware of the overwhelming whiteness of much of the literature I remember so fondly from childhood, I don't know.

More on point: This article was really interesting. Thanks for sharing it!
posted by Stacey at 6:31 AM on December 19, 2016


Is there an Arabic translation of Anne of Green Gables?
Yes there is - but it appears very poorly done according to the reviews :(
There also appears to be a cartoon on DVD, but no word on what that's like.
posted by milnews.ca at 11:53 AM on December 19, 2016


I seem to recall that on one of my periodic re-readings of the Anne books a couple of years ago, there is a very light but unpleasant sprinkling of random racism.

Some of it is an artifact of the books being 100 years old, but as a descendant of a red-headed Islander from the same area, I can assure you that there was (is?) the typical rural suspicion/ignorance of the Other in PEI, whether it was outsiders of any stripe or non-conforming locals.
posted by cardboard at 1:44 PM on December 19, 2016


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