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![](/web/20061029113218im_/http://www.warmuseum.ca/cultur/cespays/images/pay1_14p3.jpg)
Download
a QuickTime VR movie of the exhibition
(Photo: Harry Foster © Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation)
- What nationality are you?
- Canadian.
- I mean, where do you come from?
And so we begin again to explain: I was born in Yemen, I spent my childhood
in Saudi Arabia, my adolescence in Egypt, I lived for a time in England,
immigrated ... carrying, in the guise of "home," the persistent image of
a small red house.
And so we begin again to put together fragments of our past and present
life, our social, family and personal experiences; to summon up the different
"homes," those stopping-off places, testimonies to our multiple ties and to
a mixed identity. We place the letter from a mother who has stayed behind,
in a Lebanon wounded by war, side by side with the innocent houses of an
adopted Nova Scotia, and next to a landscape in Bahrain, country of refuge,
work and love. Mirrors passed through, splinters of collected images, speak
of our need to remake an identity from journeys, roots, and a sense of
belonging to multiple cultures.
- Where do you come from?
- I come from many places; I belong to many symbolic worlds; I am one of
theirs, I am one of yours. What I live, what I express, is a line that
comes to be added to the great text that all of us, born here or elsewhere,
are in the process of writing.
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