{"id":42187,"date":"2015-08-09T05:34:29","date_gmt":"2015-08-09T05:34:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=42187"},"modified":"2015-08-11T20:18:26","modified_gmt":"2015-08-11T20:18:26","slug":"how-canadians-celebrate-their-identity-its-all-in-the-hyphen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=42187","title":{"rendered":"How Canadians celebrate their identity \u2014 it\u2019s all in the hyphen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em><strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestar.com\" target=\"_blank\">How Canadians celebrate their identity \u2014 it\u2019s all in the hyphen<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestar.com\" target=\"_blank\">The Toronto Star<\/a><br \/>\n2015-05-02<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/ericandrewgee\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Eric Andrew-Gee<\/strong><\/a>, Staff Reporter<\/p>\n<p><em>Hyphenated identities \u2014 Ukrainian-Canadian, Somali-Canadian and the like \u2014 have played an outsized if ambiguous role in Canada.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>The Canadian poet <a href=\"http:\/\/www.fredwah.org\/\" target=\"_blank\">Fred Wah<\/a> is a <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wiktionary.org\/wiki\/bard\" target=\"_blank\">bard<\/a> of hyphens.<\/p>\n<p>He has described them, variously, as \u201ca boundary post,\u201d \u201ca chain,\u201d \u201ca bridge,\u201d \u201ca knot,\u201d and \u201ca floating magic carpet.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In his work, hyphens do more than glue surnames together and solder on prefixes. They are also skeletons of the self \u2014 giving shape to, among other things, Wah\u2019s own Scottish-Irish-Chinese-Swedish-Saskatchewanian heritage.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not a coincidence that one of Canada\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>They have acted as a knot \u2014 sometimes securing, sometimes restricting \u2014 and their meaning has mutated over time, from boundary post to bridge, first marking people out, then connecting worlds.<\/p>\n<p>Along the way, the hyphen has budded into a kind of metaphor for what we think it means to be Canadian.<\/p>\n<p>American political culture, with its melting pot ideal, has long been hostile to multiple, punctuated identities. Then-U.S. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Woodrow_Wilson\" target=\"_blank\">President Woodrow Wilson<\/a> described them as tantamount to treason, using his own vivid metaphor, in a 1919 speech:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cAnd I want to say \u2014 I cannot say it too often \u2014 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.\u201d&#8230;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the entire article <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thestar.com\/news\/gta\/2015\/05\/02\/how-canadians-celebrate-their-identity-its-all-in-the-hyphen.html\" target=\"_blank\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How Canadians celebrate their identity \u2014 it\u2019s all in the hyphen The Toronto Star 2015-05-02 Eric Andrew-Gee, Staff Reporter Hyphenated identities \u2014 Ukrainian-Canadian, Somali-Canadian and the like \u2014 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 \u201ca boundary [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,19,125,8,394],"tags":[20663,8386,4798,2117],"class_list":["post-42187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-canada","category-identitydevelopment","category-media-archive","category-socialscience","tag-eric-andrew-gee","tag-fred-wah","tag-the-toronto-star","tag-toronto-star"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42187"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42197,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42187\/revisions\/42197"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}