Perugia, Italy
Friday, July 21, 2006
CHECK AGAINST DELIVERY
Thank you for the great honour you do me in conferring upon me this honorary doctorate. I am especially moved because you have given me the opportunity to look back on my youth and to reflect with you on the reasons that led me to study the Italian language, literature and culture.
Time always gives us a fresh perspective, and as I stand here before you, I feel somewhat like Calvino's baron sitting high atop a tree, contemplating the world. Time has proven to be my own tree, where I now sit to cast a broader glance at my past.
It was the travels of my youth that led me to discover Italy. That period in my life when the time between high school and university seemed to stand still; when, like so many other adventurous young people, I set out to discover the world and expand my horizons.
I yearned to discover new places, people and ideas. I had an irresistible urge to open myself up to new realities. I wanted so much to immerse myself completely in what I was already calling the school of life. Think seventeen‑year‑olds aren't serious? Well, at that age, I dreamed with absolute seriousness of going to Afghanistan. I felt strangely drawn there, farther than I could have imagined, farther than I had ever been.
And as my imagination took flight and I set off on my journey, I found myself first in Italy in the 1970s. It was a time of great excitement, a time when, still reeling from the events of May 68, the people were crying out: power to imagination! I remember how the streets were alive with protests by workers, feminists, students having a field day shaking up long‑held beliefs and reinventing the social contract. People everywhere were speaking out publicly; bitterlyand yes, even violentlychallenging the established order like so many other calls to freedom.
I was in shock. Literally bowled over by those identities: from the South and the North, from regions proud of their history, women and men who dared to dream of new ways to live together, who felt compelled to reinvent the world. It was here that another voyage began. One that I could never have imagined when I set out. One that would change my life forever and steer me down paths I continue to explore to this day.
For that young woman I once was, a rebel in her own right, who fled with her parents from a tormented world reduced to whispers by dictatorship and oppression; for that child of exile who had found a safe haven in Canada, a country where anything is possible, the experience of being in Italy during those years was nothing less than a renewal of speech.
So unlike anything I had ever known, and yet so like the exuberance of the Caribbean, Italy made me want to proclaim my own identity and explore in my own way what matters most to me. As though that detour into someone else's world allowed me to look more closely at my own identity. Italy has shown me who I really am.
To me, Italy was a fertile land where I could reflect more deeply upon the world. And culture, which had always fascinated me, became a vehicle for bringing people and new ideas together. I cannot help but smile as I tell you, in the words of Dante, that for me, Italy meant a vita nuova.
I returned to Montreal at the end of an exhilarating year, determined to prolong the experience. I remember telling my mother when I got back that I was going to register for university and delve further into my exploration of the Italian language and culture. As a student of the Faculty of Italian Studies at the Université de Montréal, I threw myself into my studies, wanting so much to make that intriguing language and way of speaking my own. The spirit of the Italian language became a part of me, a natural extension of myself.
I discovered the depths of Dante's insight, the dazzling images of Petrarch, the bold vitality of Boccaccio. The road before me promised a great adventure and, as I walked that path, I ventured into new worlds of meaning and sensibilities, stopping along the way to discover Foscolo, Moravia, Levi, Sciascia, Morante, Pasolini, Gramsci, Pavese, Pirandello, Eco, Rosi, Visconti, Fellini, Taviani, Antonioni, Strehler, Cavani and Toto. The adventure was all the more exciting for having been encouraged and embraced within the hallowed university halls.
Thanks to scholarships awarded within the context of the bilateral relationship between Italy and Canada, I would soon set out on my own adventure through Italy's universities.
And so it came to pass, just over twenty years ago, that I stepped through the Porta San Pietro, my heart pounding, and entered the University for Foreigners Perugia.
And I made the most of the opportunity, expanding my study of the Italian language and culture to include Etruscology, so captivated was I by the wealth of history all around me. Here, in Perugia, the past is alive and palpable to the five senses. Every fragment whispers with the voices of a civilization.
For me, having come from the New World, where all history preceding the European conquest of the Americas is largely ignored, this adventure was critical. I, like all Blacks in the Americas, am the product of a whitewashed history; my slave ancestors were stripped of themselves, their memory, their languages, even their very names.
Hence my need to understand how to interpret the signs that time had left behind to enrich our present. Not just in Italy, but for all of humanity as well.
I was on a treasure hunt, for culture is indeed a treasure. A treasure that travels down through the ages and is itself ageless.
Culture is the constant evolution of the world. When memory fades, there are always clues left behind. Markings, stones, maps, texts whose meaning escapes us. Culture speaks to us, if we know how to listen, of places near and far, of those around us and those who have not yet crossed our path.
In our desire to find its beginning and end, to understand where it has been so that we might know where it is going, History, where all culture is imprinted, is the very lifeblood of time and the most striking record of the women and men who have come before. To look into the face of History is to acknowledge the periods of rebellious unrest interspersed among the periods of docile calm. It is to take its full measure, to see where it has been and where it is headed, to strike out on North American soil, thinking it to be India.
Such was my frame of mind as I arrived in Perugia, an enthusiastic twenty something. I would continue to learn how to think and reflect, to write and gesticulate, to joke and speak . . . in Italian. Those years meant the world to me. And the woman who now stands before you still carries them with her today. I cannot begin to express my gratitude to you for having opened my eyes and my heart to the many gifts that Italy has given to universal culture and human adventure.
And that is what I will tell all of those professors who could not fathom why a young, Haitian‑born Canadian was so passionately interested in Etruscan art and Italian literature.
More than anything, I learned from the Italian cultures, and I use the plural intentionally, from Sardinia to Friuli, that history is nourished as people put down roots and come together, as they pull up stakes or are exiled to new lands. This is why it knows no boundaries.
Consider for a moment that each civilization is like a star that, over time, makes up the vast constellations that guide us here on earth. That image is never far from my mind as I fulfill my role as governor general of a country that contains the world and has given me the extraordinary opportunity to see beyond what separates us and embrace wholeheartedly the values that we all uphold for the greater good and now share. I never forget that.
No more than I could forget, if you will permit me to digress a moment, that Garibaldi, the son of a Genoese sailor, recognized the strategic and liberating alliance between the Polish soldiers requisitioned by Napoleon and the Haitian slaves. The result was nothing less than the proclamation of the first Black republic in the world and the first step toward ending slavery in the Americas. Garibaldi would look back on this period in history as an example of solidarity and a vindication of human rights.
It is perhaps not so very difficult to imagine the effect that Garibaldi's affirmation had on the imagination of a young girl whose ties to her country of birth had been brutally severed by the tyranny of a merciless dictatorship.
I firmly believe that history is an inexhaustible source of renewal. You know this as well as I do, for it was you who convinced me of this. Our memory of history is essentialnay, vitalbecause it affects how we think, create, dream, act and reinvent life.
It allows us to look upon the world with eyes wide open to millennia of experiences. And it is in institutions such as yours that it remains alive and vibrant, becoming a strength for us all and a kind of compass leading us to a better future.
I adore this university because here, students are free to let their thoughts and ideas flow, buoyed by the History all around them, and to engage in a dialogue of cultures, made possible by learning a new language and grammar.
The learning that takes place within these walls prepares us to continuously rethink the world and life itself. And in this rethinking may be the one true freedom that nothing and no one can ever take away from us: the freedom to understand, to explain, to create, to wonder, to communicate. It is a freedom we should never take for granted.
In these troubled times, when barbarism threatens our way of life, when fear of the other can sometimes blind us, it is especially important to remember this. Our freedom, our very future are inextricably linked to our ability to think. A person who no longer thinks is a person forgotten. A person forgotten is doomed to loss. And a person doomed to loss withdraws from life itself. The absence of thought leads to boredom, desperation and, most tragically of all, to violence. It is precisely because they are bastions of thought that we must protect institutions like yours and ensure their place in society.
History always written in the present requires that we work together to redefine the ties that bind us to one another, ties that are being tested at this very moment around the world. The principle of supply and demand, to which globalization must far too often yield, will never be enough to forge those ties.
Rather, and perhaps more profoundly, it is the unique ability in all of us to think about the world, to lessen its onslaughts, to protect its vulnerabilities, to challenge its impasses, to soften its pains and to increase its joys that is our best, if not our ultimate, chance at putting a human face on humanity.
Let us dare to imagine a world in which we stop throwing up our differences as barriers between one another, where instead we embrace the values that we all share as we venture forth into the 21st century. What might the future hold if we all shared this ideal? Some might find it daring, others naive. But for me, it is so crucial if we are to have any hope of putting an end to this terrible notion that feeds off of ignorance and suggests destruction as the only way out.
And so I would like to invite everyone here to reflect on that ideal. Having embraced the lessons of history that I was privileged to learn here among you, having adopted the language whose passion you shared with me, and now watching my daughter grow each day, I have to believe in that ideal. Because that ideal nourishes my hope that the cultures of this world will one day create a bond of fellowship and a feeling of belonging shared by all of humanity. It is my deepest wish. For my daughter. For all of us.
And, as the Italian proverb I heard long ago so eloquently says and sums up my love for Italy, to which fate has forever bound me: [translation] "Sun, fire and thought are all without end."
May happiness find you always.
