Negotiating Canadian multiculturalism During Quebecois Separatist Events of the Sixties: Between the “Italian Wop” and the “Flying Egyptian”

Over the years much has been written exploring the multiculturalism as a term.  In the texts of Marco Micone and Saad Elkhadem under study the goal is to trace the nuances related to multiculturalism descriptively in practice during the period of growing unrest in Quebec in the 1960s which is dealt with in both texts.  Through analysis of the writing of Canadian immigrant writers like Micone and Elkhadem, various questions impose themselves regarding the feasiblity for inclusiveness for people of diverse origins under the umbrella of multiculturalism. The need to traverse the primary and secondary affiliations and cultural tendencies of immigrants becomes pressing though in and of itself an elusive task. Elusive in the sense that designating the affiliations that are open to change and those that are not can be quite daunting. Competing histories in the lives of immigrants constantly foreground themselves. Immigrants upon coming to Canada bring along personal ethnic histories and language affiliations which complicate the workings of official multiculturalism. As a result, these histories and languages supposedly die as separate and unique structures and reappear in ghost form within multiculturalism, leaving immigrants in a liminal state which has been both considered productive and detrimental. Marco Micone’s play Voiceless People (1984) and Saad Elkhadem’s novella Canadian Adventures of the Flying Egyptian (1990) explore the convoluted nature of identity construction and multiculturalism within Canada during the separatist period.