STUDENT REFLECTIONS: I am 32 nationalities, and then some (02/01/98)

STUDENT REFLECTIONS

I am 32 nationalities, and then some

by Kendra Mikula

When I think of multiculturalism, I think of my sixth-grade teacher forcing us to make really tacky collages. Mine usually took the shape of a mangled maple leaf with various pasted-on color pictures of Elvis Stojko, Corey Hart, David Suzuki and Ray Hnatyshyn. I did, however, have fun with the glue stick and the manila tag paper. Just the thought of manila tag paper perked me up and made me get my pencil, glue and tiny squares of tissue paper, ready to make little dots of these tissue papers form a new-age, objet d'art. My sixth-grade teacher also reinforced the fact that these masterpieces had to be representative of the multicultural society that, as we were always told around this time of the year, we are part of.

I am a "multiculturalist" through and through, from this land to those tiny lands my heritage and perogies are derived from. Oddly enough, I am not sure what a multiculturalist is, looks like, or sounds like. In fact, I am not even sure "multiculturalist" is a word, but anyway...

My life is relatively mundane and ritualistic. I could lie and say that my life as a twenty-something-white-suburban-postmodernist-feminist-realist-Aristotelian-female is tough. I mean, just the thought of my daily schedule, at first glance, seems gruelling.

Every day, I wake up and find myself in a queen-size, posturepedic mattress, which can make life damn hard to want to enter into on those mornings when Mom is running late. When Mom is running late, there are harsh consequences. Lunch will not be made for me. Granted, getting to school and opening your nutritiously balanced lunch with the little "I love you" notes placed with care in your enviro-friendly lunchbag can be enjoyable at times. These notes can also be an impediment when you are engaged in a lunchtime conversation with your colleagues as to how ready you are to leave the cozy nest that thwarts your ability to live a struggling artist's life.

There's also the problem of deciding what vintage clothing I will wear to school so as not to look too middle-class, while also trying to avoid being lumped in with those who want everyone to know they can afford those cute, three-to-four-letter-label jeans and shirts.

After putting in a long day at school, attending the courses that will supposedly ensure me a job to perpetuate the lavish lifestyle that I am told by Mom and Dad I have become accustomed to, I arrive at home. Ahhh ... home. Yes, the place where I take off my shoes, pet the dog and rush downstairs to catch the afternoon episode of "Laverne and Shirley," waiting there to be summoned to dinner.

At about six o'clock, Mom calls down to me that dinner is ready. I arrive at the dinner table only to realize that my plate is filled with meager, white-suburban offerings. Or rather, my plate is filled with perogies, a dollop of sour cream and kovbasa for my protein supplement. I have been raised in Winnipeg as a white, middle-class, suburban kid, and this definitely constitutes a big part of who I am. Yet there is this "Ukrainian" in me that I can't get rid of, and wouldn't want to get rid of. My Ukrainian heritage sometimes goes beyond having a commonly mispronounced last name. It goes even deeper into who I am - it is a part of what I eat!

Of course, who I am goes beyond that. To enter into the world of cliches, I consider myself to be a part of everything and everyone I have ever met. I have friends of every nationality, creed, race, sex, color, intellectual level and taste (well, maybe not taste). My friends are important to me, and I think this is partly because of the diverse cultural aspects they expose me to, the diverse cultural aspects that make them who they are.

These are the friends who can come to a pot-luck dinner party at my house and dig into every dish, from coleslaw and ravioli to cabbage rolls and samosas, without ever squishing up their faces at the thought of tasting something new.

These are also the same friends who share the same post-grade-school experience of realizing at 2 a.m. that we do not know when in the national anthem the lyric "true and painted love" appears. I used to swear it was there.

These are friends who can tell stories about unique dinner combinations at their great-grandmother's house. Going to dinner there to enjoy little cabbage buns and borsch, only to find that their Icelandic neighbor has dropped by with Vienatarta for dessert.

Ultimately, I believe multiculturalism is sharing the same experiences, and new experiences under the guise of being culturally distinct from one another. Furthermore, I don't think we need to be told we reside in a multiculturalist society. For me, it is an inherent part of every aspect of my life. I don't think there is a time, place, week, month, day, year, or grade when we should celebrate multiculturalism. By simply going through our daily rituals we celebrate it each and every day. So today, let's everyone stand up in your first-year psych class, second-year honors English seminar, or third-year biology of seed plants lab, and yell out: "I am a multiculturlist and damn proud of it! Now pass the perogies!"

Kendra Mikula is on the editorial board of The Manitoban, a student newspaper. Both great-grandmothers arrived in Manitoba from Ukraine. This article appeared in a recent issue of The Manitoban in a section on multiculturalism.

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