Many claim that attitude is everything, and that living conditions and circumstances are merely tests that build character. Nevertheless, outcasts who are wounded by discrimination and newcomers who are unwelcomingly oriented are commonplaces. Many Canadian works serve as simulations featuring fictional characters that resemble the authors themselves, with authors ranging from first-generation Jewish-Canadian Mordecai Richler to past second-generation Margaret Atwood, who puts herself in both previous and future Canadians’ shoes to narrate her stories. By their narrative styles of self-application, even fictional works attribute to immense authenticity. They depict the social conditions of Canadian life, addressing the link between settlement and poverty, and how that relationship leads to stigmas that hinder the community’s values, consequently inflicting the scarring consequence of isolation upon those affected.
Immigration with hope for a better life but lack of sufficient funds, a job, or a social network is often what plummets new settlers into poverty. Being a nation built on global immigration from colonists and emigrants to refugees and displaced persons, many Canadians reflect upon their beginnings, but these beginnings collectively share the similarity of sufferings and challenges.
Alexander McLachlan, a Scottish-born Canadian poet, animatedly depicts the perspective of an impoverished stranger in “We Live in a Rickety House.” The rhyme opens and closes with the description of their living space:
We live in a rickety house,
a dirty dismal street,
Where the naked hide from day,
and thieves and drunkards meet.
(McLachlan)
With that indecent imagery, the narrator carries on to mock the further degradation from their local “pious folk.”
When our dens they enter in,
They point to our shirtless backs,
As the fruits of beer and gin.
And they quote us texts, to prove
That our hearts are hard as stone;
And they feed us with the fact,
That the fault is all our own.
And the parson comes and prays –
He’s very concerned ‘bout our souls;
But he never asks, in he coldest days,
How we may be off for coals.
(McLachlan)
Although the recent settlement of the speaker is not explicitly stated, the distance his self-righteous neighbours rigidly set in place by their interactions strongly implies that his people are foreigners to the community. Nevertheless, it is apparent that they are incredibly poor, and their poverty is credited to be “the fruits of beer and gin,” that is, drunkenness, and the likely texts of faith that “prove that [their] hearts are hard as stone” only contribute to further reason for saintly condemnation. To justify the state of the den they entered, the pious folk make it a fact that “the fault is all [their] own.”
Further, it is the parson’s visit that upsets the speaker the most. The visitor’s complete ignorance of his hosts’ physical needs and his sanctimonious concern for their souls anger the speaker, depicting the broken and conflicting relationship of the poor and affluent of the community. One perspective is the direct verbal and spiritual mistreatment and judgement of the impoverished by the pious people, but the other is shrouded hate for the pious by the poor. Their loathing comes with good reason, seeing that there seems to be no attempt by their visitors to hear their story and understand their situation. The pious community values words without action, while the wretched and impoverished sinners seem to value nurturing resentment toward such things.
The link between settlement and poverty is accentuated by the setting and transparency of the speaker’s indignance. Authentic presentation of external comment and internal response is essential in thoroughly evaluating relationships between people caused by the conditions of one or both parties. Despite the speaker’s exasperation toward the parson, they expressed it as no more demeaning than it really was, and then criticized the pious folk for their needless ignorance as they truly felt necessary. Although the immateriality of circumstances and conditions is what gives meaning to the tangible, it is only where there is honest portrayal of what is seen that there is credibility with what is not.
Furthermore, Mordecai Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz also portrays the parallels between settlement and community stigmas. Although the novel follows the life of young Duddy Kravitz growing up on St. Urbain St. in Montreal, many of his grandfather Simcha’s stories of settling in Canada pave the road for Kravitz’ own story. When Simcha first arrived, he was not poverty-stricken, and as a shoemaker he was able to send for his family and set up a shop within three years. Moreover, his foreign status did not stop the local district of gentiles and Jews from increasing Simcha’s stature.
Among the other immigrants he was trusted, he was regarded as a man of singular honesty and some wisdom, but he was not loved. He would lend a man money to help him bring over his wife, grudgingly he would agree to settle a dispute or advise a man in trouble, he never repeated a confidence…
Blondin the blacksmith had been kicked by a horse. Simcha, not the first man on the scene, forced Blondin to drink some brandy and set the broken bone in his leg before the doctor came. After that whenever there was an accident… Simcha was sent for. (Richler 45-46)
And while the rest of the chapter informs of Simcha’s good works and the high regard he possessed from his community, he still “was not loved” (45). For a man who seemed to be the manifestation of a good neighbour, his virtue could not surpass his status as a Jewish immigrant. It seems that even a culture of respect and admiration did not learn to love and care for the Jews as their own.
A similar but less noble example comes Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, where Atwood wrote a series of poems narrated from the perspective of Susanna Moodie, who was a prominent nineteenth-century colonist-Canadian author that often complained bitterly about the difficulties of getting settled in Canada. One of the poems in the journals is called “First Neighbours,” and Atwood, borrowing Moodie’s voice, speaks of how “[t]he people I live among, unforgivingly / previous to me” (46) would grudge the way she breathed the air of the property on which she lived. This grievance was not whimsical on part of the Indians who lived in her area, rather, Moodie had settled in the British colony that had a dishonest relationship with the natives.
Despite her attempt to “adapt,” she was told to “[g]o back where you came from,” and this hurt her because she “knew that England was / now unreachable” (46). As the poem carries on, Moodie
got used to being
a minor invalid, expected to make
inept remarks,
futile and spastic gestures
(Atwood 46)
but that she also “grew a chapped tarpaulin / skin” (46), demonstrating her resilience against her scars. The irony lies in her self-address as a minority while the white colonists thrived in the nation, as well as her confession of submission to the local’s expectations of her behaviour. Even while Moodie’s act was traumatic for her, her greatest difficulty is the discrimination she faced from the community.
For a nation internationally reputable for its politeness, the factual and fictional Canadian testimonials of the people who built this country affirm the contrary. The authors who contributed to the characterization of Canadiana’s social living conditions amongst a community made clear that the bond between settlement and poverty are not easily severed, and that communities develop stigmas to outline borders within itself, and that isolated peoples are wounded by the discrimination they experience. While attitude is a key factor in the growth of an individual’s character, it serves as no excuse to ignore one’s living conditions and deny them communal acceptance. Hidden in the plethora of Canadian stories to poems to paintings, the gem of solemn advocation for any foreign individual rejected by their community exists unostentatiously for anyone who will observe and listen.