Passages: Welcome Home to Canada

R. Gordon Moyles is professor emeritus of English at the University of
Alberta, the co-author of Imperial Dreams and Colonial Realities:
British Views of Canada, 1880–1914, and the author of The Salvation
Army and the Public.

This collection of essays about the immigrant experience showcases the
talents of Canadian writers M.G. Vassanji, Alberto Manguel, Michelle
Berry, Shyam Slvadurai, Anna Porter, Ken Wiwa, Brian Johnson, Ying Chen,
Moses Znaimer, Dany Laferriиre, and Nino Ricci. Each essay eloquently
re-creates the emotions of leave-taking and newly arriving, of both
regret and happy expectation, of giving up old habits and acquiring new
ones. Those experiences provide the reader with a renewed understanding
of the wonderful social fabric of Canada.

As one writer puts it, “immigration is not just about changing
countries.” It has as much to do with finding oneself, with
displacement of the imagination (as forcefully felt if one moves from
Newfoundland to Alberta as from Tanzania to Toronto), and with the
various ways in which we all search for and find belonging. Whether
Stalinist repression, or Nigerian brutality, or merely the English
countryside, what has been left behind shapes, and sometimes distorts,
what is newly offered.

This timely—and timeless—book does more than offer insights into
the physical aspects of the immigrant experience. Ultimately, Passages
is a powerful exploration of human courage and resilience. Read it,
Canadians!