This is My Own, My Native Land!

This is My Own, My Native Land!

(Manuscript, c.1946-47)

One of the lessons of citizenship, clarified and confirmed in the last five years is this:
It is not enough just to have a birth certificate, certifying one’s birth in Canada. It is not enough to be a native Canadian and expect that mere birth alone is everything: privileges, responsibilities, pride, allegiance. One must grow into citizenship; one must shoulder the responsibilities before there is any real joy in the privileges; one must be vigilant for the honour of one’s country, its integrity, else how can one say with pride: I am Canadian.

I can tell you almost the exact moment when I realized for the first time a thrilling identification with one’s native land:
Picture a classroom, the 8th Grade, and I, only twelve. I am enduring the literature period by passing notes across the aisle. We’ve just finished a Canto of “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” by Sir Walter Scott, and teacher says, “Memorize the opening stanza of the next Canto.”

Bored but patient, I look at the page to make sure which piece to memorize. It’s routine work: I declaim aloud at home, swinging the book around in large gestures to emphasize the grand rhythm, and I get it word and punctuation perfect. The ext day I am bypassed, and other pupils are asked to recite it to prove they did their homework, but those other pupils haven’t got it letter perfect, and I prompt them…silently of course.

The oftener I repeated the lines, the clearer they become, until the sense of the words knocked loudly on my young consciousness.

Up until then, Scott’s poem had been only a mental picture of an ancient and white-haired minstrel, with an ancient harp, singing a ballad to a company of lords and ladies of an ancient day. Now I heard clearly those words:

Breathes there the man with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said:
“This is my own, my native land!”
Whose heart that ne’er within him burned
As home his footsteps he hath turned
From wandering on a foreign strand?

It was a breathless moment, and being only twelve I didn’t know what to do with it. But from that moment those lines haunted me.

So many times after that…many times in later years…I had occasion to repeat those lines: proudly, belligerently, sadly, desperately, and bitterly. I had identified myself with Canada; bitter or sweet, my tag was ‘Canadian’.

At first I was rather shy about it, though very proud, because in spite of hardships, of hunger too, there was this feeling of belonging:

“This is my own, my native land!”

Then years later, when our struggle hadn’t brought any tangible results I wept those lines with the slow grief of knowing that the ten years would soon be twenty.

“This is my own, my native land!”

When war struck this country, when nether pride nor belligerence nor grief had availed us anything, when we were uprooted, despoiled, and scattered to the four winds, I clung desperately to those immortal lines:

“This is my own, my native land!”

Later still, after having been ordered out of my home town, having got permission to live in Toronto, after our former home had been sold over our vigorous protests, after having been re-registered, fingerprinted, card-indexed, roped, and restricted, I cry out to you:

“Is this my own, my native land?”

Well, it is. My Canadian birth certificate wasn’t enough, and my record…in a very small way…as a fighter for TRUE Canadian democracy wasn’t enough to prevent all that happened to me, because racially I am not Caucasian. I have to have something better than that. I have to have a deeper faith in Canada, a greater hope for Canada. My daily life and my future must be an integral part of Canada. I have to be a better Canadian than most of the Celtic or Anglo-Saxon variety…which hasn’t been too difficult lately…but which ought to be difficult if and when you, and I, succeed in our work.

Excerpt from: This is My Own. Letters to Wes & Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941-1948, by Muriel Kitagawa. Roy Miki, ed., Talon Books, 1985. pp. 286-288.