Tyler Clark Burke

“I still seem to connect immediately with other Americans whenever we find each other in a crowd”

I came here in the early ’70s because my dad was hired to create a film department at the University of Manitoba. The plan was to move to Winnipeg for five years, then return to New York so he could find a teaching position at an American college. There were probably a total of four other New Yorkers in Winnipeg at the time and somehow my parents managed to meet every one of them. As a result, I grew up in a bit of an expat community, and Canadian life was often studied through an American lens. A storied example is when my dad went to campus to teach his first lecture and found 50 students standing in a line in front of the door. No one had checked to see if it was unlocked – it was – and I remember how fascinating and funny this was to my parents.

My dad wasn’t a conscientious objector to the war per se, but he enrolled in grad school to avoid the draft – and to skirt a type of life in New York City he didn’t want to lead. His father was the youngest of nine, born to a homemaker and a plumber in Brooklyn who became New York’s Attorney General and a judge.

The expectation was that my dad would become a well-paid professional like a lawyer, doctor or trader. Instead, his parents were ashamed when he became am academic. They introduced him at family functions as Dr. Burke, hoping others might think he was an M.D., not a niche Italophile obsessed with Fellini. As a result, there was no real place for my dad, identity-wise, in New York, and culturally we felt different from many of his closest relatives.

This was less true for my mother, who really suffered living away from her close-knit Long Island Italian family. My mom’s mom was a family outcast because she married my troubled Irish grandfather, yet still managed to shape interesting adults who later raised my generation of artists and writers.

All of my extended family still live in the States except for my dad, sister and brother. My mother moved to New England to be closer to her family, and she lived there until her death a decade ago. Politically, my family is almost entirely left and lefter, although we have at least three Republicans, and one cousin is a police officer. On that branch of my father’s side, we also have some family members involved with the U.S. military. This pro-military identity is foreign to anything I’ve known in Canada, but historically we rarely dug into these ideological issues because we saw each other so infrequently. I suspect that political silence would not hold true if we were to meet today. New York Irish. It would get bloody.

Most of my family loves the idealized notion of the America they grew up in, but everyone can see how divided the country is now – and hopefully acknowledge that it always has been. I often say that the U.S. contains my most favourite and least favourite parts of modern culture. I think most of my family would share this sentiment.

Despite having lived in Canada most of my life, I’ve travelled back for work frequently. I spent the last nine years working as a designer and consultant for Mardi Gras World in New Orleans, and have also lived at times in Vermont and New Hampshire. I was planning to move to New York in 2004. I was feeling lost in Toronto, and recognizing that I kept inadvertently befriending Americans like my parents did in Winnipeg, I wondered if I was somehow culturally too different from Canadians. I visited Brooklyn a few times, but quickly learned there was an intensity and competitiveness among artists that was off-putting, as was the way art-making and selling was commodified. I remember going to an art fair in L.A. and collectors would walk from CV to CV, scanning for big-name schools without even looking up to see the art. I doubted I could ever establish myself as a “Canadian” artist in America.

And yet, I still seem to connect immediately with other Americans whenever we find each other in a crowd. I don’t know what it is exactly. Maybe a certain type of directness or extroversion? I know Americans, to my dad’s story, are less likely to wait in line without checking to see if the door is locked – so maybe that speaks to some kind of impatience with artificial barriers? When I started my record label, Three Gut, I remember getting in trouble for “not following the rules” – or the expectations of the Canadian music industry. More recently, I was on a committee and good ideas kept getting vetoed because they were against the rules. My question was, “So how do we change them?” And I asked myself this exact thing over and over again as we prepared to send the kids back to school. Some of the TDSB’s rules seem arbitrary and unsafe, but no one seems to want to challenge them. Maybe that’s the difference – Americans want to avoid the line?

But who has the authority to control the line? Certainly that last question speaks to this obsession in the States with free will and individual rights – and it’s this same preoccupation with individualism that is destroying the country. Intellectualism and science-based thinking are also both under fire for supposedly trampling rights and freedoms. It’s hard to watch.

Another difference: There is a history of immigration and settlement in New York that defined generations of people (see New York Irish and New York Italian), even to this day. I feel Canadians aren’t obsessed with success to the same degree. In fact, my immediate family likely wouldn’t be here if not for my grandparents’ obsession with status and my dad’s desire to create a different life for us. On a related note, I have an adopted Black brother who just turned 17. I wouldn’t want him to travel alone in the States right now, nor would he wish to.

I have been working on getting my Canadian citizenship for years. I’ve completed my forms and I will mail my application off once again before 2020 is over. About five years ago, I was offered a job in one of my favourite American cities, New Orleans. And even though I would have been connected with a great art scene and music community, I couldn’t get past the gun culture and racism, both especially prevalent in the south.

I don’t think I’ll ever leave Canada, although lately I have been wondering about moving out of Toronto. It’s not Toronto I want to leave specifically; I just worry about whether we can continue to live here economically as artists/designers/writers. Living in Canada as an American has enormous tax implications. It’s really a bit of a nightmare, but giving up your citizenship isn’t easy either; you have to pay to do it. I wanted to renounce my American citizenship but was told to keep it because it would improve my favourability with American publishers. I recently landed my first U.S. book deal. Not sure it would have happened otherwise.