Pineapple Kisses in Iqaluit by Felicia Mihali

Author:Felicia Mihali
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Guernica Editions

When I told my mother I’d met a man, she replied eagerly: “Oh! That’s good!”

To her, it was not about love but about protection, despite what I had told her about Iqaluit, a place where women could make a secure, independent living. My mother had her own opinions about a woman’s needs.

During our long conversations over the phone, I told her that up North I’d met more single women than men. They were now taking advantage of their freedom to do the things that were previously forbidden to them. They braved the cold and loneliness with more stamina than the men. They transformed their rented apartments into cozy homes where they entertained themselves by chatting, reading and cooking. On social media, they mapped their voyage to this land where few of their female counterparts had ventured.

At the Frobisher Inn, the women were regulars, and coming for a nice meal was a source of pride and comfort. Nothing was too expensive for their pockets. Women now mingled easily with polar bear hunters, travellers, government men and construction workers. All of Iqaluit dined there: military men, artists, singers, film directors, regular people turned comedians in the local productions that converted the local folklore into fascinating new worlds. Ethnography had become, for the first time, a form of high art.

Men typically came up North to make money. They took on two or even three jobs and cooked the popular local stew to save their earnings. Women came up North for adventure. In Iqaluit, a woman could set aside a lifetime of thrift in exchange for a relatively huge income, placing her within reach of Canadian riches. With all this money, women shopped online for fancy clothing, ate out regularly at restaurants and chose the best and most expensive food in the shops. Women were now the white men in town.

With so many possibilities at hand, who needed a man’s protection?

But finding a lover was not the ultimate goal, according to my mother. Aside from being husbands and fathers, men carried history.

“An Irish, eh?” she said to me, laughing.

Mother’s English wasn’t great, but she was good at imitating the accent. So she took up mocking the Irish way of putting “eh” at the end of every phrase, the equivalent of the Quebecer’s use of “là.” As a historian, my mother often talked about the perpetual misunderstanding of British imperialism.

To French Canadians, every English-speaking person was an old-stock imperialist. Yet, the English-speaking community in Montreal had been formed by people who had nothing to do with London. They were mostly Scots and Irish people. The first to get rich in Montreal were largely Scottish merchants. Most of them came from the Boston area of the United States after 1767, when Nouvelle-France passed under British rule as the Province of Quebec. James McGill and Simon McTavish were ruthless fur traders and the new face of Protestant liberalism, a religion that preached that money was a blessing. Money was proof of a job well done and a meaningful life.

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