THE DIALECT(S) OF MERCY

By Stefanie Lee

In the beginning, God folded a pine tree into a prayer and whispered, “Here. This will be the dialect of mercy.” It landed between oceans like a spilled secret, its rivers already fluent in longing. The snow arrived before the people. The snow was a prophecy. Hushed, unending, it taught the rocks how to listen. Then came the first people, who knew the syllables of thunder, how to bend silence into ceremony. One day, someone mistook kindness for emptiness and built a country from myth. Planted a railroad like a spine across the continent’s sleeping back and called it nationhood. Gave it an unpronounceable name: Kanata. Canada. Can-adieu. Can-a-do?

We were born in translation. During childhood, we sang hymns to maple leaves, offered blood to mosquitoes in the summer, learned to say “sorry” with both apology and rage. O Canada — where the winters are long, and the stories even longer. To be Canadian is to balance your heart in one hand and your grandmother’s pierogi recipe in the other. It is to love a place that both embraces and forgets you. Half-remembered in census data, your tongue too twisted for the official forms. We are a coat made of other coats. A kaleidoscopic patchwork of immigrant sighs. Every jacket smells like someone else’s dream. Listen: being Canadian means navigating a forest of hyphens. Irish-Canadian. Anglo-Québécois. Afro-Canadian. Asian-Canadian. And Indigenous, untethered, hyphen-less. You carry your ancestors on your shoulders like snow piling on telephone wires. Yet still, you do not collapse. This land has room for contradiction. Some days I feel like a loon calling across the mirrored surface of identity. My reflection doesn’t echo back. We are a people stitched together by frost and irony, humour so dry it cracks your lips. We apologize when we bleed across someone else’s floor. Say “eh” to fill the gap where certainty should be. Let me end with this: If Canada were a person, she’d be a woman knitting scarves from forty million snowflakes, her hands chapped from centuries of forgetting. She'd ask you to stay for tea, offer you a butter tart and advice you didn’t ask for. She’d forget your name, but remember your mercy. Sing in two languages and dream in seventeen. And she would never say that she is perfect. But she would say: “There’s room, if you’re cold.” And that, too, is what it means to be Canadian.