Reflecting on Difference

The first assignment I gave to the 2^nd year students that was not simply assessment for my own knowledge was a poem entitled ‘I am a Dane’, the idea was for them to write their version of Redbird’s ‘I am a Canadian’; I shared my poem in an earlier post. I have been marking these poems recently, an endeavour that takes longer than any marking I have ever done before because it necessitates the use of Google to educate myself about the things they have written about, in some cases Google translate must be used when they have included words that they haven’t translated (for poetic reasons of course). In reading the poems a common theme emerging is that of difference. What makes a Dane, a Dane? A Canadian, a Canadian? There is a tendency to focus on difference but there are those who also point out that these differences aren’t really so different and that modern society ought to embrace diversity and that a Dane is not one thing, nor is a Canadian, and so what does it all mean?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Still it seems like there is no resisting the allure to discuss and analyze difference even when it is small, I think it has something to do with interpreting and understanding, we need to think about and compare with what we know. Jesse and I had a good conversation about little differences on our bike ride to soccer the other day; it was focused on a favourite topic, food. Incidentally nearly all my students included food in their ‘I am a Dane’ poems. Danish food is not so unfamiliar, they make a mean open-faced sandwich and pork is well loved, nothing is strange or wholly unfamiliar, but it is not the same.

In recent days we have had tinned mussel based chowder in an attempt to re-create a good Haida Gwaii chowder, and Jesse never thought he would miss salmon so much. We talked about how we wish we could pick berries (we see plum trees that seem wild but they are big and we are ladderless when we bike about the town), about how we wish we could go fishing (or at least eat the fish others have given to us), and we would love to bar-b-q some back strap, or have a nice venison roast with chanterelles (I hear there is good mushroom picking already on Haida Gwaii). Even minor differences make us think of home and our stomachs frequently direct our thoughts.

We eat well here, it’s not like we are suffering. The bakeries are all too tempting, the cheese is cheap and delicious, and the candy… I have a soft spot for gummy candy and licorice and the soft spot is going to grow if I’m not careful, there’s like a whole isle of the stuff in the grocery store, and in the next isle the beer, the wine, the booze. You can drink it walking down the street too, and if there are any underagers reading this, you can buy it at 16, but you can’t get a license or go into the bar until you are 18. Still with the legal age of purchase at 16, and the starting age of my students being 16, drinking is a part of school culture like I have never experienced before, at least not until university. Today on my walk to morning class I passed a stack of empty kegs from Friday’s after school party. Some differences feel bigger than others.