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Rosemary Sullivan is an author and a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto.
After listening to President Donald Trump’s address to the joint session of the U.S. Congress last month, I went to bed with a headache and woke from a nightmare.
In the dream, I was in a black sedan with several men. They climbed out, crossed a square, and entered a colonial-style government building. Soon they emerged carrying a large mahogany coffin with gold handles. I bolted from the car but one of the men raced after me and grabbed my arm. When I tried to scream, only a hoarse screech came out of my mouth.
It both amused me and disgusted me that my mind could be so literal, warning me that Mr. Trump, with his tariff war and his fantasy of making Canada the 51st state, is seeking to bury Canada.
I spent the morning replaying the dream in my mind, and thinking over what it would mean if Canada were to be annexed. While the idea that they might lose their country is new to most Canadians, it’s something I know a little bit about. My husband lost his country when he was forced into exile by the military coup in Chile in 1973. I once wrote a poem about it, and the idea of country:
I always thought a country was the way the trees unleave in your head or the snow falls on your childhood, thought it part of the landscape you become. The stories that sink roots into history and repeat themselves like litanies: the family, bone-ladder you descended from somewhere
But you tell me a country is really a door. They can close it.
My family bone-ladder includes my Irish ancestors who fled the potato famine in Ireland in 1847 and made their way to Canada. The rural Guthrie Road outside Smith Falls, Ont., where my grandparents built a farm and brought up a family of 11 children, is named after them.
My country is a vast landscape whose imprint I carry. I’ve climbed onto icebergs in Newfoundland’s Trinity Bay to drink the 10,000-year-old water; I’ve gone whale watching off St. John’s, which has provided safe harbour for fishing vessels since 1527; I’ve drunk in pubs with affable Newfoundlanders who speech still retains a touch of their Irish ancestors’ lilt.
On the west coast, I’ve sailed to Haida Gwaii and walked among the Haida’s majestic totem poles; I’ve climbed through B.C.’s Great Bear Rainforest to encounter the white spirit bear and watched a black grizzly expertly fishing – when our eyes locked, it was not human-to-animal, but creature-to-creature.
I’ve spent summers teaching journalism in Banff in the Rocky Mountains among the Three Sisters peaks, and watched elk stroll casually down the town’s sidewalks. I’ve whitewater rafted on the Kicking Horse River and walked the treacherous Columbia icefields in Jasper National Park. I travelled to Drumheller, Alta., to see the mysterious Badlands, with their prehistoric fossil beds rising from the landscape like gigantic cairns.
In Sage Hill, Sask., I gazed through a telescope at the stars in the open bowl of sky on the flat prairie. I’ve fed the geese on Wascana Lake in Regina, and visited a prospector’s cave with a gang of writers in Moose Jaw.
In Manitoba, at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, I gazed on the Witness Blanket, a work of art containing more than 800 items from residential schools whose racist and brutal mission was to assimilate Indigenous children.
Driving in New Brunswick, I had to slow my car to accommodate the moose casually crossing the roadway. I was on my way to view the wonderful Maud Lewis’s iconic folk paintings in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Then I picked up my sister, who lives in Annapolis Royal, and we went fishing for mackerel in a dense fog off Digby Neck.
In the summer of 1984, I took the writer Eduardo Galeano on a tour of Quebec, from Montreal to Trois-Rivières to Quebec City, and he exclaimed that my country was a model for his Uruguay because it seemed to have been able to work out its own destiny in peace.
Alone, I’ve driven twice across Canada from Victoria to Toronto, a trip of six days, and will always remember how the Prairie rain came down like a curtain travelling slowly over the body of my car.
In Toronto where I live, I’m part of an installation project: “Poetry is Public is Poetry” organized by the poet Dionne Brand. Lines from one of my poems are set in bronze in the sidewalk of Cedarbrae library – so thrilling that my words are permanently etched on the skin of my city.
While Canada might be the second largest country in the world, we have a small population: 41 million people compared to 340 million in the United States. Almost one to nine. We’ve been good neighbours, I thought, but now some folks south of the border seem to covet our geography. What has gone wrong?
I turn to Margaret Atwood for answers. It seems astonishing that 40 years ago in The Handmaid’s Tale she predicted a United States seduced by a far-right populist ideology. Who would have thought Americans might find themselves living in a patriarchal world that polices gender and where women are losing control of their bodies? Even her trope of infertility finds space in a white evangelical anti-immigrant mentality warning against population decline – Elon Musk with his 14 children; JD Vance who attacks childless women as deranged cat ladies and warns that even “healthy, intact families” are not having enough kids to secure America’s future. Theirs is an anti-modern, postliberal worldview that advocates state authority over individual liberties, and even democracy. As Mr. Trump’s assault on the Kennedy Centre for being too “woke” makes clear, art will also be under attack in this sanitized world.
In The Handmaid’s Tale dystopia, America is ruled by a kleptocracy of technocrats. It’s a terrible prediction, but who stood behind Mr. Trump at his inauguration? Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Bending the knee.
In the old days, the U.S. government made mistakes. In Guatemala, when the democratically elected president was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup to protect the United Fruit Company, the replacement regime initiated years of torture and executions. When the government of Richard Nixon supported Augusto Pinochet in the 1973 coup in Chile, 16 years of dictatorship followed. In the name of fighting Communism, the American government backed Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression by the right-wing dictatorships of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Chile and Brazil to hunt down and disappear opponents. I used to amuse myself with a rather facetious simile: In the continental house, Canada is the attic. The U.S. stores what it wants in the attic, knowing it can always retrieve it. Latin America is the basement. The bodies are buried in the basement.
It’s hard to believe that the imperial gaze would be turned in our direction, but we must not underestimate Mr. Trump’s assimilationist ambitions. To Greenland he says: “We will keep you safe, we will make you rich.” Adding later: “One way or the other, we’re going to get it.” To Canada he says that the U.S. does not need to use military force; economic devastation will be enough. Watching the giddy sycophancy of the Republicans at the joint session of Congress, one could conclude that he might just get his way.
There are Americans who recognize the dark threat their country faces. We must align with them. We must be prepared to fight back.