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I recently read a book by Nancy Huston called Losing North about her experience as a Canadian expatriate in France for over thirty years. I have to say – I have always had a lot of questions about what it means to be an expatriate and I haven’t been able to find many answers.
Huston writes – I have betrayed my country, and I have lost her. She also writes - you carry your childhood with you everywhere, and there is nothing you can do to escape it. She makes a point of emphasizing that the people you love and care about will eventually forget about you if you leave. Of course, there is the perennial reflection that those who leave are often looking for something that isn’t there or trying to escape something that will follow them.
These are painful thoughts, especially for me. For a long time I have intended to settle permanently outside of Canada.
My rationale for wanting to leave is probably more complicated than I let on, but it is certainly not for a lack of love of Canada, and in particular the provinces of Atlantic Canada. I know that I grew up here and that this place shaped me, and it hasn’t escaped me that this place is better than 90% of the world to grow up in. I love all of the connections I have made here, and Emily and I are both invested in keeping our families close to us.
Yeah – it’s about surfing, it’s about language and culture and the proximity for travel. It’s about seasons and precipitation and population density. It’s about cost of living and access to education and job markets. It’s about poisonous critters and it’s about making friends. It’s about a million things that are just so important for the way the future plays out.
Consider this -when our ancestors left Africa they moved immediately into India and across the Southeast Asian continent all the way to Australia. Why did they keep moving through the fertile jungles of India, across mountains into Burma and all the way down to Indonesia? Why, when their numbers were so small and food was so plentiful? It’s the human spirit. It’s really kind of stupid. We want everything and we want to go everywhere and when a seed falls it should be far from the tree.
I still want to find some place that feels strange while also familiar, like Hawaii felt or like I misremember Hawaii feeling. In my mind all these years later it seems like – it felt like waking up. We drove through sugarcane fields on the way to the beach and I remember or misremember thinking that the smell had rang a chime in me somewhere.
I still intend to leave, and I expect that it will probably hurt.
