Canada Reads contenders Gurdeep Pandher and Dimitri Nasrallah share immigration stories
The great Canadian book debate takes place March 27-30, 2023
Bhangra dancer, teacher and viral video star Gurdeep Pandher will champion Hotline by Dimitri Nasrallah on Canada Reads 2023.
Hotline follows the story of Muna Heddad, a single mother living in Montreal in the 1980s after escaping the civil war in Lebanon. After applying to numerous teaching jobs, Muna takes a job at a weight-loss centre as a hotline operator where she fields calls from people responding to ads in magazines or on TV. In these conversations, she becomes privy to the invisible barriers of Canadians, and through their collective struggles Muna exemplifies a story of immigrant resilience and hope.
Pandher, who promotes joy through his motivational dance videos, was elated to champion Hotline, a novel which parallels both his immigration story and his message of enduring positivity.
Canada Reads will take place March 27-30, 2023.
They will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem and on CBC Books.
Nasrallah and Pandher got together virtually to discuss Hotline before the debates on March 27-30. Watch their conversation above, or read an excerpt below.
Gurdeep Pandher: Hi, I'm Gurdeep Pandher. I'm championing the novel Hotline for Canada Reads 2023. Dimitri Nasrallah, the author, joins me now.
Hello, Dimitri! How are you doing today?
Dimitri Nasrallah: I'm doing well. How are you, Gurdeep?
GP: I'm doing fantastic!
Hotline is a unique book in that it depicts an uplifting immigration story. Why was this something you wanted to represent?
DN: I wanted to go in completely the other direction of what I'd done before. I wanted people to look at something very small and very real and not dress it up with any epic tales of a journey or things that made it fantastic. I wanted a clear picture of what immigration feels like in the first year, especially. It's a story that involves the great perseverance that we never talk about in our society. It requires a lot of dignity, quiet confidence and faith.
I was surprised by how many readers afterwards felt as though it hadn't been represented yet. Even though so many people live this experience there, it revealed to me this division in society by those who know this story and those who don't.
GP: I totally can relate to these experiences — I went through some of them myself. Sometimes there's a gap in understanding the life of newcomers and people who are settled. The challenges can be different, the barriers can be different. Access to very basic things such as food, education, medicine. These can be different. I remember my experience when I was new to Canada, my English was sort of broken. I had a hard time making people understand me and understanding others. Sometimes expressions were different.Those early years, they can be unique in that they can test someone's ability to adapt; they test your strength.
DN: When my parents arrived here, they didn't ask for help from anyone. It was almost as though they bought into this silent shame that comes along with being new here.
They didn't want to expose that to other people. You pretend that you know the culture more than you do, so you can get a pass and you think that acceptance will happen that way. Society was much more one-sided at that point, especially in the '80s, in that there was a definite cultural centre and there were margins. That's changing in some ways, but it hasn't changed completely yet.
Gurdeep, you came here in the 2000s. I'm wondering if you had a similar dynamic along the way.
GP: I moved to Canada in 2006. Yes, as a newcomer, my first approach was similar to the way you described — presenting your best and pretending that you knew everything. But I realized that was actually not the path to follow.
When we come to a different country, there's a system set up which is waiting for you and you have two choices. You can live in that system forever, all your life, or you come out of that system and follow your own path. I decided that for my own personal growth I had to learn about the country, to learn about the people and to learn about myself. Because if I pretend forever that I'm just safe in that little circle of family or friends, then I would be limiting myself. I wouldn't be learning anything new.
When we come to a different country, there's a system set up which is waiting for you and you have two choices. You can live in that system forever, all your life, or you come out of that system and follow your own path.- Gurdeep Pandher
DN: It's interesting because when I arrived in the '80s, I was about 11 years old. For the first seven or eight years, I lived in that first system that you talked about. You're very much doing things as people expect new immigrants to do. The only difference was that my parents came from this mindset where they didn't want to remain connected to the past at all. So the Arabic we had learned all but slowly disappeared and we stopped using it. And at the same time, Canadian society wasn't really letting us in either. We ended up in this middle ground where there is no past, no community to connect to, and then there's also no connection to the new community as well.
It began to create this division between me and my parents at that point. I eventually had to move away for that reason. I came back to Montreal. It created not only a cultural division but a generational division that led to a lot of the negativity I held onto for the next two decades in my life. And it was a negativity that fuelled a lot of good things. I wrote some good books out of it, and it was a chip on my shoulder.
However, the older I got, the more I found that it was limiting at the same time. It made me predictable. So this book and it's move toward optimism goes all the way back to that those early episodes and breaking out of that that mould that you speak of and finding your own way and the roundabout journey it takes.
GP: As someone from Yukon, I could relate to much of the novel's setting during cold and powerful Montreal winters. How was this element important to Hotline?
DN: One of my first bad memories of being in Canada was having to wait for a school bus to show up in -32 degree weather and the bus being late. It was our first year, and I was standing there with my sister and we were both very unprepared. We didn't have the right clothes, the wind was gusting, the sun hadn't even really come up. One of those really cold, dark days of winter. So the weather felt like a character in my life at the time. It's an interesting character because among all the characters that represent Canada, it is the least discriminatory. It's unfair to everyone. Everyone shares this feeling and we are all equally burdened by winter. It has a way of hurting us all but bringing us all together. We all talk about winter in a very revelatory way in that we've endured it and we've made it through, and somehow it's made us stronger or given us character.
Speaking of winter, I've been curious this whole time since I found out that you were championing the book, why did you decide on Yukon of all places to settle in?
GP: Mine is an interesting journey. After I immigrated to Canada, I lived in many, many places in different provinces. So when I became a Canadian citizen in 2011, I was going through a big reflection of how much I knew about Canada. I knew about big cities like Vancouver, Toronto or Montreal, but I was questioning myself how much I knew about small communities. I was born and raised in a village in Punjab myself, so I've always been close to villages and rural life.
When I came to the Yukon, I did not know a single person here. My very first day in Yukon, I met some people and they invited me to their gathering. It was a gathering outside in a campground, a very wonderful sort of cultural gathering, and people were playing music, dancing and telling stories. I felt connected to the people of Yukon and that planted the first seed in my heart to think of living here. That belonging, that connectedness which I felt here, which I didn't always feel in bigger cities — although they are great too in many ways.
DN: You're right that it's more difficult in cities because cities have a lot more going on. The pace of life is quite different and there's more hierarchy in cities, and yet if you find your way out to smaller communities, it kind of flattens that line a little bit. All of a sudden you can talk to people, individual to individual. Was it always as inviting as it was in those first moments for you, or did you have other experiences as well?
GP: I had some experiences when I was judged based on my look, based on where I come from. But then I decided to go with hope, joy and positivity. Although those moments were also great in my learning — when I think about racism, when I think about the barriers, when I think about different other things which you described in your book, I know that if those experiences did not occur to me, I probably wouldn't be able to relate.
But I also received lots and lots of love from the people of Yukon, so I decided that I will choose hope and I will take those moments to create some awareness.
DN: It's interesting because I think that's what Muna goes through in the book as well. And what I went through in that at some point you have that choice to make, right? You realize, well, I'm going to either be a hopeful person or I'm going to choose to let this hate and negativity manifest. And both are equal choices. But one of them brings you down as a person. It makes your inner life very tumultuous, whereas the other one allows you to become a teacher by example to others. Since I've lived with this book for a while, I've learned that hope is a more difficult path. Hate is the easier impulse, but it's definitely the more rewarding path to hold onto positivity because you're the one who has to live with it in the end, right?
I've learned that hope is a more difficult path.- Dimitri Nasrallah
GP: Our human mindset is hardwired to choose negativity. We can very easily choose a path which could be destructive. Sometimes those situations are valid too but at the same time, choosing hope, even if it's difficult, could lead to really wonderful results. As you mentioned, it can make you a teacher. It can change many other people's perspectives and opinions as well. It can then shift a whole community and eventually, it can form really wonderful interracial cross-cultural bridges. So choosing hope is difficult, but it's great.
LISTEN | Dimitri Nasrallah discusses his book Hotline:
DN: I think this is ultimately what the message in the book that I wanted to convey, that having a hopeful outlook doesn't make all of society's negatives disappear. They're still there. They're going to grow stronger even while they're there, but you do have a choice between being consumed by it [or] letting it consume you. You can melt away, disappear or hold on to your sense of self and preserve that. And really, hope is the solution for that.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
