The Importance of Being Ethnic and the Value of Faking It

Abstract

Towards the end of Rohinton Mistry's story "Swimming Lessons," the protagonist's parents reflect on the merits of a book written by their son and decide that he will be a successful writer only if he continues to write about his recent experience as an Indian immigrant in Canada, because, they argue, Canadians "are interested in reading about life through the eyes of an immigrant." They worry, though, that he will become "so much like them that he will write like them and lose the important difference." Mistry's story is funny, but his suggestion that ethnic minority writers are encouraged and expected to reproduce recognizable images of ethnic difference is serious and is echoed by a number of contemporary Canadian writers, including, for example, Tom King, Dionne Brand, Eden Robinson, and Fred Wah. "Coercive mimesis" is the name that Rey Chow gives to the dynamic described by these writers, all of whom suggest that they have been asked, in one way or another, "to resemble and replicate the very banal preconceptions that have been appended to them." Focusing on the work of poet and essayist Fred Wah, this paper considers how the idea of fakery or faking it can be used to undermine the dynamics of coercive mimesis.