Canadian Experience

"Canadian Experience" identifies one of the difficulties within the multicultural system: the inherent hierarchy is race and class based. Here is an immigrant from Barbados who wanted to live his “Emigrant Dream” but on coming to Canada he faces disillusionment. He is unable to fit into his new environment. The very first scene is very important for it displays Du Bois’s double consciousness. The protagonist seems to be working under an invisible gaze and hence his discomfort and realization: the realization that he is too black, the realization that he may not get a proper job. The sense of splintered sensibility is brilliantly depicted in the following lines: “its reflection of his body tears into strides and splatters his suit against four glass panels and makes him disjointed”. His laughter has a strange eerie feeling to it which reminds us of Clov’s “brief laughter” in Beckett’s Endgame, the laughter that fills up the gaps of uncomfortable silence. Pat stands for Canada herself, her getting the job at the restaurant shows how white skin was a currency in Canada and helped people to advance their future based on it. After spending eight futile years in Canada his disillusionment and failure leads him take his own life : a reassertion that at least in a white country he still has control over something- his life.

Shafia Parveen 

PGI