ABSTRACT
Perilously hungry to explore Canada’s rich and contested history of immigrants, new scholarship is forging across disciplines to interrogate the troubled relationships mainstream White Canada has had with immigrant communities from Asia. This essay explores the tenuous, troubled, and pockmarked narrative of divisiveness and disquiet that have been the calling cards of the reigning Anglo Canadian administration since the 1800s until the present. By cracking open the fictional representations of the atrocities meted out to Sikhs in the Komagata Maru incident, the Japanese in the appalling internment camps during the Second World War, and the Chinese in the implementation of an inhumane Chinese Head Tax, this chapter brings to light how cultural fascism in the fashioning of national history has punctuated the personal history of exile among Asian immigrants to Canada. By examining powerful representations of food and cultural objects in diasporic cultural producers – Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, Judy Fong Bates’ The Year of Finding Memory and Midnight at the Dragon Café, and Anita Rau Badami’s Can you Hear the Nightbird Call? – this chapter asserts that the invincible resistance of hundreds of thousands of diverse Asian immigrants who were made to feel outsiders, as members of visible minorities, ingesting different foods into their “different” bodies, attempted to disrupt the centrifugal insularity of Canada’s dominant centre and threw out a singular national narrative. In the attempt to tell their community’s stories about being forced into a constant state of exile, these cultural producers have forced the secular hope of diversity into a promise of cooperative federalism where new legislation has been forged towards a morphing scaffold of “multiculturalism.” Exile for these Asians is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a home, between the self and its true repository: its essential sadness can never be surmounted, as Etienne Balibar, Edward Said, Giorgio Agamben, and Annahid Dastagard argue. The intent of this essay is to offer a connection between the theories of exile and the praxis that sutures the idea of citizenship, power, and the appropriation of power to those who are seen as the children of a lesser God.
