CHAPTER 33 Posthumanitarian Fictions
Despite the popular mantra of multiculturalism in the 1980s, I grew up
in central Canada at a moment when interracial marriages were frowned
upon, a moment when old women responded to the childish misbehaviors
of our brood by whispering It’s the mixed blood!, a moment when the word
“shit” circulated with schoolyard titillation to describe the color of my skin.
My father was a child of Partition, born in India in a region of rural Punjab
that would, in 1947 when he was six years old, become Pakistan. In the mass
upheavals and extraordinary violence of that political moment, he migrated
with his family to Amritsar, just on the edge of the Indian border hedging
against a newly carved Pakistan. He would later immigrate to Canada to
study at McGill University in Montreal, where he would meet my mother.
She was herself a child of the diaspora, born in Ireland to a German Jewish
mother who had been sent away from Berlin with the rise of Hitler, and
to an Irish intellectual father who would accept a position at McGill and
shift his family to Canada in the 1950s. My parents were drawn to each
other’s differences and beauty, filled with the enchantments of the 1960s,
the glamor and possibility of unions across divides. But theirs was an un-
easy marriage, fraught with cultural differences and the legacies of personal
and political violence that persisted and proliferated through them. By the
time I was born—the fourth and last of a motley hybrid crew—the utopian
spirit of the ’60s had quite dispersed.
When I was young, my father completed medical school and we moved
from a two- bedroom unit in a duplex to a huge, bedraggled blond- brick
home in an area menacingly known as “the Gates.” Couched in a small bend
of the Assiniboine River, it was an estuary of Winnipeg’s old money, the
homes of the nation’s early bankers and their ilk. It was made clear to us that
our kind was not uniformly welcome in this neighborhood. But my mother
had a special fancy for historical homes, and for trees whose lives and leg-