In August of 1994, Acadians held a reunion in Atlantic Canada and invited Acadians from the world wide diaspora which resulted from the exile of 1755 to come home. A quarter of a million people did. The United Nations classified the reunion as the cultural event of twentieth century. The Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien and the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros-Boutros Ghali attended the opening ceremonies.

News broadcasters from around the world came to record the two week long celebration by a people whom without ever fighting had overcome war, time, oppression and distance to survive as a people. "Notes from Exile" is a memoir of that reunion and a reflection on identity. We are all born human beings but we quickly subdivide into people with different titles, languages and traditions. How is it that I came to think of myself as Acadian?

This meditation on identity comes naturally because my father and his family are Acadian going back to 1632. My mother is a Londoner with all the history, sense of place and use of English that title implies. I can always remember being confronted with two different persona. I heard it every day in the distinctive Acadian accents of my father's voice and the clear vowels of my mother's London Grammar school.

Acadians do not exist in some Evangeline nirvana. There is no 'fatherland'. A physical homeland has been a myth for a hundred years when Longfellow finally wrote his great poem, Evangeline. The sense of being Acadian cannot be separated from the sense of being Canadian or American, English or French because these identities form both the boundaries and the interstices of the Acadian story. The Acadians are like the Basques in the sense that they have always been a people balanced on the frontier between larger, more powerful national identities.

And if we want to understand national identities, what makes an American-American? A Canadian-Canadian? It is hard to find a better place than place than the national heroes. Heroes not only generalize personal attributes nations chose to admire, they also define who are the outsiders by characterizing unwanted qualities. Americans have a triumphant individualistic vision of themselves as a nation and a people. Even individuals that manage nothing but death and disaster like Colonel George Custer get wrapped up in 'Old Glory' and go down as heroes wrapped in the Stars and Stripes. The defining characteristics of the American hero is quirky individualism and personal success against great odds whether those odds are the Sioux nation or the American government itself, doesn't seem to matter. These characteristics were written very early in the American story and have remained virtually unchanged. Al Capone becomes a hero because he takes on not just rival gangs but the government itself. And X-filers greatest enemy is a worldwide conspiracy led by some obscure, but immensely powerful government agency.

Acadians have had their heroes also but they are very different from George Custer, the Conquistadors of South America or, for that matter, Colonel John Winslow of the Acadian exile.

In the end, the history and identity of a nation is created from the lives of the individuals who have lived in that time and place. Stories written by those who have tread the nation's stage from vagabond to prime minister. "Notes From Exile" is one of those stories.

McClelland and Stewart, Hardcover 1999, $29.95
Paperback 2000, $19.95