Tag: Canada

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Where I’m From

I stand in the line at Subway in Alberta, shifting nervously. Each time the young high school student asks me about which bread I want, which meat, or which vegetables, I am confused. I have never been asked these questions before. I don’t know what kinds of bread there are. They are on the sticker on the glass. He points to them. I scan them quickly, trying to hide my shame. I realize later that these questions are predictable, like driving a road you have been on before: you know the landmarks to look for before your turn. But I have never driven this road before. When you know what they will ask, the quick words spilling out of the mouth mean something. I don’t know what these words mean yet. I do not belong. 

I am playing on the beach by the Arabian sea with my siblings, building cities in the sand, as young ladies walk by trying to talk to us. Their hair and scarves blow in the wind as they giggle to each other. They pinch my cheeks, asking me my name – asking me where I am from. This is what everyone asks me. I stare down at the sand and continue my digging. If I ignore them long enough, they go away, usually. I do not belong.

I am in Kindergarten in a small school that is run out of a large house with just a few classrooms. I’m wearing the school uniform of a white shirt, grey shorts, white shoes, and everyone is staring at me. I am in the courtyard. It is lunch time and I am the only kid with white skin and blonde hair. The only one. My stomach is a tight knot, and I wish I could cry, but that would only bring me more attention. I do not belong. 

I am walking outside. I am all ages. I am almost anywhere. “Look at the angrez,” the ‘English or white-people’ a child, or a parent, or an old lady or young man calls. Everywhere I go am angrez. Nowadays I want to tell this child I’ve lived here longer than he has. But I know the anger their words build in me is far stronger than any emotion that was put into those words. They are children. 

It is summer – the end of it, and I am riding my bike to my grandparents house. We have been in Canada for almost two months, moving from place to place, visiting family. The joy of ice cream, dill pickles, good burgers, real cheese, crunchy peanut butter, sweet corn, a community swimming pool, riding bikes around town and picking raspberries has begun to wear off. I miss my room in our house at home where we have to mop almost every day to keep up with the dust that collects everywhere, and the gentle thrum of the ceiling fan above my and my brother’s head as we sleep. I miss our little car port where my dad parks our old white nissan. I miss watering the plants on our flat roof, splashing water onto the ground so my bare feet don’t burn on the hot concrete. I am ready to go back to Pakistan. I do not belong here. 

I stand at the doorway to my dorm room in Saskatchewan, not sure how to ask my roommate. “Can you help me use the washing machine?” He is confused. I’ve never used a washing machine like this. He walks me though. He is patient and kind. I’m thankful I’m spared any further embarrassment. 

I am twelve. My parents are talking to someone in Sindhi. I am listening, not quite understanding the complexity of this adult conversation. I tug my dad’s sleeve. “What is he saying?” My dad explains. 

“He doesn’t speak any Sindhi?” They talk like I am not here, like I don’t understand what they are saying. I don’t argue because I don’t. Not all of it. Not enough. Not enough to be enough. I don’t belong.

I am walking along the street to go buy yogurt and some vegetables for our lunch. My mom has sent me out because she forgot to ask my dad to get the things when he was out shopping earlier in the morning. A couple kids shout “ching chong sheea cheecho”. This is apparently what Chinese sounds like to them. And they think I am from China. They have never seen a foreigner before. 

I am in Grade 8 in Canada. I do not know the English word for okra. I’ve never learned it. My classmates look at me like I’m crazy. I’m staring at the word now, spelled out on paper, letting it sink in. I catalogue the words I know where the Urdu comes first. Electricity. Market. Storeroom. Lentils. Flatbread. Tea. Why am I like this? I do not belong. 

I am twenty years old, sitting in a taxi on the way up the hill to my old boarding school for my sister’s graduation. I am overjoyed to be back in Pakistan to visit. Everything is familiar and strange at the same time. The evening air blows in through the open window of the small Suzuki Mehran. I am speaking to the driver in Urdu, talking about my time in Pakistan and asking him about himself. “Your Urdu is not very good.” I smile. Thank you? Do you say thank you to that? Only twenty minutes ago someone in the airport told me I speak Urdu very well. My ego had a short stint of happiness. It’s over now, as I look out the hills at the pine and spruce trees going by. 

I am standing at the post office asking to mail a letter. I am speaking Urdu, and I am thirty years old. The man is asking for my national identity card. I do not have one. I tell him but he doesn’t understand. I have a passport. I show him a photocopy. He is still confused. “But you have a CNIC card too, right?” He is not listening. I pull the blue passport from my pocket and place it on the counter. At last he believes what I’ve been telling him: that I don’t belong. But inside, I’m glowing. 

My wife and I walk through the bazaar close to our house. Our infant son is asleep at home and we are on a night out together. It is winter, I am wearing a chadar wrapped around my shoulders and she has her head covered. We eat street food and later step into a crockery store, looking at the various pots and pans, wanting to replace our pan that is quickly wearing out. The shopkeeper is a brusque bald man with little time for dithering. He knows his pots and pans. He asks us if we are from Gilgit (a city in the mountains of the North). I am so happy. My wife and I look at each other and smile. 

I am walking down the street, going to buy a few groceries from the store. No one looks at me. No one stares. No one does a double take. This is happiness. To be unseen is to be seen. To be unnoticed is to belong. Do I belong?

I am getting motioned over at an army checkpost on the way to the airport. The soldier asks me if I have foreigners in the car. Yes, I say. My sister, brother-in-law and their children are with me. I go with my brother-in-law to the small booth where an officer sits with a large ledger. I have my passport ready to show him. He asks for my brother-in-law’s. He does not ask for mine. He asks me where I am taking them. I say to the airport. He makes a call. He tells his superior officer of some foreigners passing through. They have a Pakistani driver. Yes yes, it’s all fine. They give my brother-in-law back his passport. I wait for a moment, confused, and then turn in delight. I am the Pakistani driver. 

I sit having chai at a chai shop, talking to the owner as he preps the lunch dishes they are making for the day. He knows I am Canadian. Another man sits, smoking a cigarette, chiming in on our conversation here and there. Near the end he asks if I am from Gilgit. I smile. No. And I am in heaven. 

I am walking down towards the house we are staying in for the summer. A teenager passes me on the road. “Hey bro.” He is trying out his slang with me. “Are you from China?” I laugh. This again? Has this guy never watched a movie?

“No.” I laugh. And continue on my way. He calls from behind me. 

“Where are you from?”

This question only gets harder these days. Canada doesn’t describe it. Sometimes if I’m feeling subversive I say Lahore, where we live now, but that’s only been the last four years. I feel deceptive if I say Pakistan, but in those moments when I doubt my claim, it seems strange that I can say I’m from a place that I’ve only spent ten years in, and really mostly in my adult life. And here I am, living more years in a place where I feel, inexplicably, that I am entwined with. So where am I from? 

I’m from never belonging. I’m from running down the sand dunes on the banks of the Indus and feeling the river is mine somehow. I’m from street food, and drinking chai, and buying fruit off carts on the side of the road. I’m from not looking women in the eyes, and from hugs before handshakes with men. But I’m also from liking my privacy, and not liking to talk about how much money I make when people ask. I’m from telling almost everyone I meet that no, I have no way to sponsor you to move to Canada. I’m from politely demuring from offers of chai by shopkeepers. I’m from loving bacon, and having to keep it a secret that I eat it, and from thinking and dreaming in English. I’m from needing a piece of paper every year from the government to let me stay in the country I spent most of my childhood knowing as my only reality. I’m from cherishing my Canadian passport as one of the most precious things I own – the first answer I give on one of those “what would you save in a fire” questions. 

I’m from this land, this people, this language, but I’m not. I am not Pakistani, but there is no me without Pakistan. You don’t live this many years in a place and not have it be a part of you – a part of the way you think and feel. When Pakistan went to war with India for a week in May of this year, an irrational nationalistic hatred pounced out at me from a place I didn’t think existed. When my wife asked if it wouldn’t be prudent to get a flight out to another nearby country until the political tensions relieved, I couldn’t explain to her that I felt like I couldn’t abandon this land I would almost rather fight for than leave. This feeling is the same feeling I felt a few days ago as I stood with my four year old and two year old sons on the way to the bus stop in the town nearby as two Pakistan Air Force JF-17 fighter jets roared in wide circles over the hills. These are our planes. I could feel it. When I stood in line with the kids I was coaching from my school during a tournament in Karachi, tears flooded my eyes as a video of the Pakistani national anthem played showing these scenes of mountains, rivers, people and places that were mine – that were threads of the cloth I was sewn from. This land is a part of me. As I drive in the mountains, or walk in the hills, or sit in the twilight of the city, or drink chai under a grimy fan, I belong. 

I sit on a rock in the forest right next to the path I run some mornings here in the summer, in the foothills of the Himalayas. The cicadas are buzzing in the trees, and birds flit from branch to branch as the morning sunlight slants in through the oaks and pines. I breathe in the smell of the forest: spruce, pine and leaves of the undergrowth. I know this place, and I feel this place knows me. 

I am sitting outside the Hungarian Embassy in Pakistan. I am there to get my citizenship verified. My grandmother happens to be Hungarian and only within the last couple years has my father realized he could have his citizenship as well. And now that he has completed his, my brother and I can complete ours. I am waiting to be called up to the window, sitting under an awning in the breeze of a pedestal fan. It is a hot day for Islamabad, the capital city. A young Pakistani man is sitting across from me in a maroon suit. I ask him why he is here. He is applying for a scholarship to study in a university in Budapest. He looks clean, professional, and nervous. “Are you Hungarian?” he asks. I am not sure what to say. I realize suddenly that I’m basically here at the embassy to say I am. And if this process can be completed, saying yes to that question will be perfectly true. How can I be Hungarian and not Pakistani? How can I truthfully be allowed to be from a place I have never lived and don’t speak a single word of the language, and yet feel I can’t lay claim to a place that has been the home for three generations on my mother’s side, and a land has clothed, fed and raised me for twenty two years of my life? 

I am thirty-two. I am carrying bags of gravel from the trunk of our car to the parking area of the guesthouse we are staying at. I have just driven down to a spot outside a collection of shops and houses where an old man is sitting on a seat cushion laid on top of a stone wall, smoking a cigarette. He greets me with a smile and we talk about the per-foot cost of gravel and about memories from Murree in the years passed. While we talk, a young man shovels five cement bags worth of gravel and helps me load them into my car. Back at the guesthouse, I rake the gravel across the front half of the lot where the mud collects in the monsoon rain. Three young boys walk by the chain-link gate. “Hello,” they say in English. I smile at them. “Where are you from?” They ask. They are about the age of the kids I teach at school. I speak in Urdu. I tell them I’m from Canada, but I live and teach in Lahore. I ask them where they are from. 

“Peshawar,” they say with some pride in their voices. I ask them if they are visiting for long, and if they are staying in the apartments down the road. They say they are here for another week or two. I ask them if their schools are starting soon. I tell them mine begins next week. They all have different start times. There is no anger. There is no frustration. I am still raking the gravel between the conversation, and they smile and begin to move on down the road. “See you boys later,” I say. And that is that. There is no shame. There is no deep questioning of myself and of my place in this world. I am simply myself. 

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Into the Unknown

I handed in a resume to two school boards today, with a little breathless hesitancy, covered over by my best attempt at a calm and friendly smile. I think one of the most helpful and underrated teaching techniques I’ve come by is pretending to be confident and relaxed even when you aren’t. That way at least somebody feels like you know what you’re doing.

It’s strange to be reaching the end of a chapter of my life that I’ve been in for what feels like forever, and yet also seems to have gone by so fast. After being in college and university for the past five years, the thought of finding a full time job, getting married, wading through Canada-US immigration, moving into a new place and beginning life as a couple is all a little frightening. I have nightmares of being a stay-at-home job seeker, trying desperately to get some work as a substitute teacher while Michelle and I both struggle and learn through all the things that come with life on our own. I don’t actually have nightmares — they’re more like flashes of panic in the middle of an English class or on a bus ride — the kind that I imagine might flash through the mind of someone about to jump out of the open door on their first attempt at skydiving. It’s this feeling of, “ohmygoodnessidontactuallyknowificanmakeit!”

But I can make it. The panic subsides. I reason with myself and look at all the years I’ve spent preparing to be a teacher and tell myself that I’m equipped and able to live through my first year of teaching students. I can do it. Or I think back on my first field experience of student teaching and think of how I felt after the initial newness of it all had faded — how comfortable and familiar I began to feel with the kids. I can calm myself by looking at school board websites and budgeting tools, estimating how Michelle and I will be able to make it through our first year financially. It all helps.

But ultimately I find myself looking back over the past few years. I think of all the unknowns that have now become landmarks behind me, and all the questions I once had that have since fallen into place. I think of all the desperate prayers I’ve voiced, and how they’ve been answered, in some way or another, just as the Lord desired. I think of Michelle, and the fact that, though I feel pretty unprepared to care for her and provide for us as a couple, I’ve seen the way God has cared and provided for us along the way, with each of our faltering steps. I remind myself that “thus far the Lord has helped us,” (1 Sam. 7:12) and we can know that He will continue to do so.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed about all the things that have to come together —all the details that need to be sorted out, and and all the changes that need to be adjusted to. But I know that we haven’t been alone. And I know that He who has brought us this far will lead us where we need to go, and provide for us in the moments of uncertainty and craziness. It’s exciting, exhilarating, stretching and fun, and I’m so glad I’m not alone in this journey into the unknown.

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On Being a Student/Teacher

I don’t think I’ve ever had a semester of university where I’ve felt so conscious of how close I am to the actual responsibilities of a teacher, and yet been so acutely aware of my student-ness at the same time. It’s been the first semester where I don’t have a single class under 110 minutes (the person who thought that was a good idea obviously forgot what being in those classes was like). It’s also the first semester that I have made a conscious effort to start doodling in some of my classes, just to help me get through the class. At the same time, this is the first semester that I’ve gotten to step into a real Canadian school (since eighth grade).

My journey back into junior high has been an interesting one. So far I’ve only spent a few Fridays observing in classes, but it’s been enough to remind me of what high school is like. I’ve found that while lunch break in a junior high can look a lot like a zoo with all its enclosures open, there’s something uniquely calming about walking through that zoo a head taller than everyone else. Because as I walk through the sea of noise and bits of food or wrappers left after a messy feeding, there’s a degree of safety that comes with wearing the zoo-keeper clothes.

Of course, it’s not all crazy. One of the joys of being with junior high kids is the constant variety — the smiles as well as the snarls. It only took one boy and his brief spell of acting like a cat to bring back memories of my own junior days — when hissing at a new teacher might be thought of as a good idea — for a moment. The thing is, I remember. I remember the tangle of peer-pressure and social anxiety that junior high brought. I remember spending most of a math class colouring every other square of my page in my notebook, invoking an angry outburst of passion from my normally placid teacher in the process. I remember the joy of writing something that got that cherished praise in red pen. And I remember trying impossibly to keep up with numbers that became increasingly invaded by the fringes of the alphabet. I can remember spending whole classes drawing pictures on a graphing calculator by arranging 1’s and 0’s. I can remember filling pages of notebooks with the beginnings of stories and ideas for would-be books. I can remember what it was like to spend reading time with popular science magazines instead of “real” books, and I can remember the long hours that I spent making stop-motion powerpoint presentations that had nothing to do with school.

And now I’m here — drawing pictures in the margins of university handouts and stretching the coffee breaks as long as I can, walking back to class slowly with friends, dreading the next hour of lecture. In some ways not much has changed. I’m still that same boy. I still get tired of sitting in a chair for more than an hour at a time, and I still like talking to my classmates as much as teachers will allow. I still work harder on poems and blogs that have nothing to do with school than I do on assignments or exams — even in university.

For two more weeks I am a university student. But my place is changing. More and more often I find myself standing at the front of the classroom. Soon I’ll be the one handing out work and trying to get kids to have some interest in the lessons I’ve planned. I’ll be the one trying to convince them that school is worthwhile and that bringing a pencil to class should be a fairly routine task. A part of me is terrified — terrified that I might face students like myself, or like my classmates, when we were in junior high. But at the same time, I’m excited too, because I know. I know what it’s like to be in boring classes, and I know how fun the good ones are too. I know that most people (myself included) have things that they love and care about, which usually aren’t worksheets or homework assignments. I know these things now, and I just hope I continue to remember them. It may not make teaching any less like working in a zoo, but it just might make that zoo feel a little less strange — a little more normal.

So as I walk this strange no-man’s land between teacher and student, I hope I can see what it’s like on both sides — to remember what it was like being an animal in a zoo, running through the halls, so that when I’m the zookeeper, and I’m the one despairing over spaghetti smeared onto the floor, I can smile at the sloths slouching against the walls and remember what it was like to be them.

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Life in Pieces: the Attempt of Life Writing

This paper was something I wrote for an English class in university. Thanks to a flexible teacher, and an open invitation for an assignment, I was able to have a lot of fun and tackle a topic that was really meaningful to me. We were asked to write for an audience other than our professor, and to write in a style that would be appropriate for our chosen venue. So, with her permission, I wrote for my blog. I’ve changed some of citation formatting used in the original paper, but other than that, here it is:

***

Life in Pieces: the Attempt of Life Writing

“Where are you from?” The question seemed to suck the air out of the room. Pictures and memories filled my mind. The home that I grew up in. The dusty streets I played in. School in the mountains. Fog and rain hovering over the trees as the monsoons poured from the skies. Too many memories. Then, in Canada, there was my grandparents’ house. Summers spent picking raspberries and running to the community pool.

“Three Hills, Alberta.” It was simpler. No need to explain the torrent of memories with its confusing variety of places. Three Hills was a piece of the truth. A small piece. The real truth was too messy. Where am I from? The answer, if there was one, was in stories — memories and pieces. But people don’t want pieces, they want history. A history that can be fit on a page.

History is not just the story you read. It is the one you write. It is the one you remember or denounce or relate to others. It is not predetermined. Every action, every decision, however small, is relevant to its course… (plaque in Canadian War Museum, Ottawa)

27 December 2007.

Benazir Bhutto is assassinated in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. A man levelled a gun at her as she was leaving a rally, standing in the skylight of a car. She was shot twice — once in the neck. A few seconds later, a second man detonated a bomb he was wearing. Almost two dozen people around the car were killed in the blast.

I remember standing in the darkness on our roof, staring out over Hyderabad at the glow from burning tires, dancing on the walls of apartment buildings nearby. There were people shouting. I could see a figure walking in the dark street below, carrying a large tv he had looted from a store. We had a small stack of loose bricks on the roof. I can’t even remember what we ever used them for. But that night I asked my dad if I could throw one down from the roof. I was fourteen. I suppose it made sense to me at the time. Looters were in the streets below. Justice could be mine to deal out in the form of a brick. They wouldn’t even know where it came from. It would just drop on them out of the darkness. I’m glad my dad said no.

We had people over at our house for a late Christmas get together. They ended up staying the night since it was too dangerous to go home in the rioting. They slept in different rooms around our house. It was like a multi-family sleepover. My dad drove a few families back to their homes in the quiet of the early morning, when the chaos had died down. Soon after, the rioting started again, and no one could go anywhere.

History remembers the death of the first female Prime Minister of the Muslim world. I remember the fires burning across the city. I remember a brick.

History, like narrative, becomes, therefore, a process, not a product. It is a lived experience for both reader and writer (Hutcheon 306).

Prairie Heart

I long to see that surging ocean
of grasses in the breeze,
I long to hear the gentle winds
wash o’er the emerald seas.

I long to gaze across the world
and see where sky meets earth,
I long to breathe the moving air,
that gives my life rebirth.

I long to be on that pleasant sea,
the true pacific calm,
I long to ride the waves of grass,
where a prairie heart is home.

I wrote these lines four years ago. I hadn’t even left Pakistan yet. I never would have written them today. There’s something naive about them — not just in the style, but in the longing. I never actually had a prairie heart. I had pictures from Grandma and Grandpa. Memories from the long drives across Canada the few times we were visiting “home.”

Reading these lines now, I realize what I wanted most. Not to be home in Canada — it felt the least like home — but just to have a home. To belong somewhere. I suppose I thought I could write home into existence. I thought I could write a past I didn’t have. I wanted to be the prairie boy missing home — but I was a boy whose only prairies were the yellow fields I saw in calendars from Canada, hanging on the wall by the light switches in my parents’ bedroom.

***

“You grew up in Pakistan?” At some point the question gets old. I always know what comes next. I’ve it so many times before — that question that was never thought through enough before it came bumbling out of someone’s mouth in an effort to understand. “Pakistan, eh? What was that like?” What was it like? What was eighteen years of my life like? What was eighteen years of travelling, learning, living, loving like?

“Good.” The answer usually seemed as empty as the question. Though, at least they tried. I’m never sure what kind of answer was expected. A quick history of my life? A few colourful descriptors for a country they didn’t know or understand? I never know.

“To write of anyone’s history is to order, to give form to disparate facts; in short, to fictionalize. […] narrativization is a form of human comprehension, a way to impose meaning and form on the chaos of a historical event.” (Hutcheon 302)

We went to a lot of museums, growing up. I would usually run ahead, looking at all the displays while my parents read the descriptions on the exhibits. I wasn’t as patient. History was what I could see — old tools, pottery, weapons, and clothes. Objects from years passed. Objects from foreign places. History. I would stare at them through the glass where they sat protected, contained, preserved; their labels and descriptions filling in the gaps between seeing and understanding.

***

I had a small bug collection given to me when I was a boy. Someone was passing on the small selection: a scorpion, a few butterflies, a large centipede, and a few others. Each of them were impaled with tiny pins to keep them on their display. I always wanted to add to it. I would catch butterflies with all their vibrant colours, wanting to keep them forever and preserve them on my board.

But I was never able to add one to my collection. I couldn’t bear to kill them — to stick that pin through in that piercing act of documentation. And so my board never got more bugs. I can’t even remember what happened to it. It used to sit up on a shelf with its small rows of exoskeletons, collecting dust.

I would try to draw the butterflies instead; sketching the intricate veins that traced through the wings, trying to bring them to life with crayola colouring pencils, as best as my sixth grade scribbling could do. But even these were a flat replica at best. The butterflies were always most beautiful when I saw them free, resting on a flower — their vibrant mosaics opening and closing to reveal their kaleidoscope wings.

My grandparents have a glass display of butterflies at their house, hanging on the wall by the back door. Sometimes I take it off the wall to look at the wings from the other side — the hidden side, with their subdued browns and earthy tones.

Memory

A few days
its deep purple petals
splash their vibrance — a radiant violet
sunset.

But too soon
the stem begins to feel its scar.
Like dried blood, its colour
browns.

In time
each pale and crinkled tissue drops
until only a skeleton stem remains.
It too, soon,
will fade

It took me a while to begin peeling back the layers of memories from Pakistan. I had realized it was easier to be Canadian for conversations. It wasn’t worth having to explain my life story to everyone. Besides, it usually didn’t explain anything.

But alone, on paper I would sink into the recesses of memory — to look at scars of memories I had covered up because they were too complicated to talk about. Good scars. I began to write the stories — to order the places, people, and words. In his book Running in the Family Michael Ondaatje wrote, “History is organized” (p. 26). But people aren’t. Most times my stories don’t seem to have any order at all. They’re just pieces. Good times. Hard times.

***

I used to push back against anything Canadian in me. There was a feeling that accepting the fact that I was here now would mean rejecting the fact that I was ever anywhere else. It was either one or the other. So what was I? Pakistani? Canadian? Both; and yet somehow neither.

Somewhere along the way I accepted that I would never be Canadian. I’d never be Pakistani either. I’d just be stuck somewhere in the middle. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Maybe being stuck in one or the other was what I feared most — the fear that kept me drifting.

***

To write self-reflexively of history as a process in progress, instead of as a completed product, is to breakdown the finality of the formal narrative closure. (Hutcheon 312)

Today, some of the confusion has left. I’m still faced with the impossibility of trying to mediate a past full of memories and experiences that seem to escape me. I try to write glimpses and fragments of a world I can never really capture.

Somehow there is solace in the past. There’s something both frightening and exhilarating about reaching back into memories — rearranging, reordering, reliving. I wonder sometimes if it’s really the past I’m trying to understand or if it’s actually the present. Maybe I’m just ordering the pieces of myself, trying to make sense of it all. But in the end, there’s often little sense to be made. There’s no real story to tell, no lesson — just pieces. Pieces that, in some ways, die the instant they’re put on a page — contained and preserved, their angular skeleton strokes lying in neat rows of letters. They become lifeless, ordered history.

The stories we live are rarely like the stories we read — like those in we find in history. We may try to lay out and describe a person, down to the last bone of their body, but the result is never a person. The Japanese have a style of painting called hatsuboku, or “splashed ink”, where artists splatter ink onto a page and then paint with what is is on the paper — the little drops of black ink, waiting come to life. You have little control over how the paint gets on the page — only what you paint with it once it’s there. Life writing tends to be similar. We don’t choose the events that happen to us, but we make the best of what we are given and paint a picture as well as we can.

Despite the failures of writing in capturing life, there’s something valuable about it as well. It’s a chance to learn and make sense of the jumble of memories and experiences that make up a person. The finished product will be far from the actual life, but it will be an attempt — at best, a sketch of a butterfly with crayola colouring pencils. Like Michael Ondaatje said of his Running in the Family: “The book again is incomplete”(p. 201). Life writing will always be incomplete. It’s only ever an endeavour, in scraps and pieces, glimpses and glances, to capture the life of a person and the memories that make them who they are.

***

Quotes taken from:

Hutcheon, Linda. “Running in the Family: The Postmodernist Challenge.” Spider Blues: Essays on Michael Ondaatje. Ed. Sam Solecki. Montréal, Canada: Véhicule, 1985. Print.

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Print.

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A Failure’s Guide to Writing in University

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If you have any aspirations to be a writer, or you enjoy writing, reading, or generally tossing around ideas and theories, don’t go to university.

Before I go any further, let me preface this blog by saying: lots of people enjoy university. These people, whether by amazing chance or undying optimism, continue to find motivation and purpose despite the dozens of papers they have to write during their university existence. I, on the other hand, have had a different experience. I do have to say though, I have had some classes, papers and assignments that I have enjoyed and thrived in. Unfortunately, these tend to be more like snow days — you have to go through weeks and weeks of trudging along through mounds of snow, that are just not quite enough for schools to close, before you finally reach that limit — that ever alluring snow day. The same goes for papers. It takes a lot of boring papers before you get to the occasional nice ones.

Writing papers is a slow suicide of your ability to write. By the time I left high school, I thought I knew how to write a paper. I mean, in many ways it’s pretty simple — come up with a driving statement that can be broken into three different points, and then write. It seems simple enough, but somehow, in college, I started to give up on this. The usual formula of the essay just didn’t cut it. It bored me, and likewise bored my reader — or should have. I have been a little surprised sometimes at how the most cookie-cutter essays I have written have still gotten me by in university.

Regardless, formula bored me, so I scrapped it. I had a couple good classes that were loose enough to allow me to step out of the normal “analyze rhetorical strategies in a book you don’t care about” and was able to try something different. So I went for blogging. I’ve gotten used to writing these blogs and have developed a bit of a system that feels comfortable. And knowing I have a much easier time writing blogs than I do writing papers, I decided to try it. So, rather than come prepared for rigidity and analytical arguments, I relaxed. I had fun. I let myself write in a way that felt natural. This worked really well on a couple select papers (well, I can only think of one that I used it for. I have yet to get back my grade for my second attempt at this). But I hit a wall with this too.

The problem I’m now facing is that I really don’t want to write anymore. I’m tired of reading, tired of writing, tired of blogs, tired of papers — tired of it all. Instead of feeling like I’m actually getting anywhere with my writing, I just feel that all the guidelines I used to use have just fallen apart. I’ve watched as I made terrible sentences in emails and then just left them because, frankly, I didn’t care. When you spend hours upon hours of your life fixing your writing so that you can get good grades, bad sentence construction in an email doesn’t even warrant the effort.

So, here I am. I have papers to write that I really don’t care about writing at all. The world doesn’t need one more paper on a work of eighteenth Century literature. And, to add to my lack of care, I’m not even sure I know how to write well anymore. I’m somewhere in between recklessness and hopelessness, and don’t know what to do. But, as the saying goes: “desperation breeds ingenuity.” And I am desperate. Perhaps the fact that I am boring the world with a blog about my paper-writing speaks to how dull this all really is. I mean, who writes about writing papers? But, I have to remember I’m writing a “guide”, so I’ll explain what I intend to do now, if it’s at all interesting.

Since I’m so bored of words, of which I seem to have far too many in this blog, I’ve decided to step away from the way I usually write and take a stab at trying to build a visual map of my paper instead. Having said this, I realize it really doesn’t seem that revolutionary. I mean, authors have been mapping out novels and other books for years, so why wouldn’t I? But, I suppose that’s half the point. I’ve decided being an academic is not for me. However, I’m in university and I still have two more years worth of papers to write. So, I’m going to throw the academic out the window and try my hand at being a writer — an author. I don’t mean that in a pompous or noble sense. I mean, I’d love to be an author someday, but I’m certainly not there yet and probably won’t be any time soon. But I do think there’s something valuable to stepping away from the formula of writing, and asking myself: How can I make this interesting for me? And, in answer to that question, one of the first things that comes into my head is: make it something else. Make it different.

As a result, I’ve decided to try something new. Try visual. Try pictures. Try pieces of paper spread all over a desk. Start with fragments and allow them to fail to relate to each other. Embrace the mess of writing and let the scraps fill an empty space. And then, once you have a perfect mess in front of you, try to put it together. Figure out what threads and ideas are pulling the pieces together and begin to stitch the fragments into a paper. The result will be… well, I don’t know yet. It could be failure. If so, that’s alright too. I’ve only ever failed one paper in my life, and it didn’t kill me. I just wrote a new one. People are little like teacups. It’s our failures that shape us — that push us into a form, bend out the handle, and scoop out a hole in the centre of us. All our successes do is to add the shiny glaze on the outside of the cup. Successes may look pretty, but it’s our failures that make us who we are.

So, bored reader, if you are you are still reading, and for some odd reason found my stories about writing papers remotely engaging, here are some encouragements I have for surviving papers in university:

1) A bored writer makes a bored reader. If you’re finding yourself bored writing a paper, your reader will probably find themselves bored too. And though good writing may still warrant an average grade, it’s not ideal. So, find a way to make the paper interesting for yourself. Pick a topic that you’ll enjoy. And if you hate them all, suggest one to your teacher, if they allow that. And if they don’t, take the topic you hate least and play with it until you find something interesting about it. And, if all else fails and you absolutely hate them all, at least make the process of writing an adventure.

2) Take risks. Don’t attempt stream-of-consciousness writing in a university paper — that’s not the kind of risk I’m talking about. But try something different. Don’t be afraid to experiment and break out of the box, even if it’s just your own box. University might seem like a scary place to experiment with your writing, but don’t let it scare you. What better place to practice than when you have doctors (that can’t save people’s lives) reading your work, and giving you feedback because they’re paid to? In some ways I think university is really the best place to take risks with writing. So try different things. Push your writing in ways you haven’t done before and mix up your method. Chances are you’ll come out of university with a much better handle on what works best for you.

3) Let your voice be heard. Too often I’ve put my voice on the back burner and have opted instead to let the academic in me speak. I use big words, repeat myself for emphasis, talk about things I don’t care about, and work myself into arguments that are as empty as the daunting page I’m trying to fill. Don’t do that. Be intelligent. Be analytical. But most of all, be you. People want to hear you, and you have things to say, so say them. Again, sometimes I can almost be afraid to let my voice come through, as if it doesn’t have a place in the fancy halls of university academia. But why shouldn’t my voice be heard while I’m in university? Shouldn’t I be able to let me show through? I almost fear that if I go too long without letting my voice be heard, it’ll soon learn to be silent out of habit. I don’t want to do that, especially since my voice is the only one I have.

4) Have fun. Writing a paper, fun? I know it may seem like a stretch, but it’s worth a try. I mean, look at writers like Coleridge or De Quincy — they knew the secret of being happy while you write, and decided opium was the way to do that. Please, don’t try opium to enhance your university writing. I don’t think that works well. But, do find a way to have fun and enjoy writing. Make tea, go for a walk, talk to a friend, draw. Do something that will either help you break out of the mundane task of writing (as long as you come back to it eventually, feeling happier and more motivated) or do something that will let you think about your paper and work it out in a way that makes it feel fun. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” — and we all know dull boys don’t write good papers.

And, that’s my “failure’s guide to writing in university”. I think I could basically sum this all up as attempts to try to keep myself from getting bored and from getting stuck in the dusty cobwebs of university writing. University really isn’t all that bad. In fact, I almost enjoy it. It’s that necessary adversary that encourages me to fight back and strengthens me in the process. I just need to find ways to make the journey interesting and different. So, as a final encouragement:

5) Don’t let university be something that’s done to you. Be the doer. Shape your own experience in a way that helps you learn the best and keeps you most engaged.