Mixed Race Studies

How Canadians celebrate their identity — it’s all in the hyphen

The Toronto Star
2015-05-02

Eric Andrew-Gee, Staff Reporter

Hyphenated identities — Ukrainian-Canadian, Somali-Canadian and the like — have played an outsized if ambiguous role in Canada.

The Canadian poet Fred Wah is a bard of hyphens.

He has described them, variously, as “a boundary post,” “a chain,” “a bridge,” “a knot,” and “a floating magic carpet.”

In his work, hyphens do more than glue surnames together and solder on prefixes. They are also skeletons of the self — giving shape to, among other things, Wah’s own Scottish-Irish-Chinese-Swedish-Saskatchewanian heritage.

It’s not a coincidence that one of Canada’s most distinguished writers of verse would concentrate so much creative power on the humble punctuation mark: hyphens have played an outsize, if ambiguous, role in the history of identity in this country.

They have acted as a knot — sometimes securing, sometimes restricting — and their meaning has mutated over time, from boundary post to bridge, first marking people out, then connecting worlds.

Along the way, the hyphen has budded into a kind of metaphor for what we think it means to be Canadian.

American political culture, with its melting pot ideal, has long been hostile to multiple, punctuated identities. Then-U.S. President Woodrow Wilson described them as tantamount to treason, using his own vivid metaphor, in a 1919 speech:

“And I want to say — I cannot say it too often — any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”…

Read the entire article here.

Tom Williams: The TNB Self-Interview

The Nervous Breakdown
2015-06-24

Tom Williams, Professor of English
Morehead State University, Morehead, Kentucky

You’re a hard guy to track down.

I know, I know. I’m sorry. I just have a lot of obligations and duties—many roles to play.

What roles?

Husband, father, son, brother, department chair, mentor, friend, book reviewer, writer, etc.

So, mulattos, eh?

Yup.

Isn’t that kind of a politically incorrect term?

Probably, but then again, these days, what is the best way to refer to a person, like me, like many of the characters in my book, men and women who have a black parent and a white parent? Biracial—which I’ve used more than once—is simply too generic; mixed race has always struck me as sloppy. What’s that leave? Half-caste? Halfie? Multiculti? After a while, mulatto starts looking pretty good again…

Read the entire (self-)interview here.