"Being a foreigner is not a disease"
About this Quote
A single, stubborn sentence refuses a lethal habit of mind: the urge to treat outsiders as contaminants. Calling someone a foreigner and then imagining danger joins two different kinds of thinking, the social and the medical. The word disease carries fears of contagion, quarantine, and cure; it invites panic, control, and exclusion. Set against that reflex, the statement restores proportion. A person from elsewhere is not an illness to be isolated but a human being with a story, a language, and a set of ordinary needs.
Alden Nowlan often wrote from the perspective of someone on the margins. Raised in rural poverty, largely self-educated, and deeply sensitive to shame and stigma, he spent his career giving voice to those treated as objects of curiosity or suspicion. This blunt reassurance fits his plainspoken moral vision. By stripping away ornament and speaking in the negative, he exposes how prejudice works: it smuggles pathology into the description of difference. If foreignness is cast as a symptom, then common decency can be recast as treatment. Hospitality becomes risk management; empathy becomes prophylaxis.
The line also echoes a distinctly Canadian conversation that intensified in the mid-20th century, as the country moved toward an official policy of multiculturalism. Debates about who belongs often masquerade as neutral concerns about order or health. Nowlan refuses the cover story. He asks readers to watch the metaphors they live by, because metaphors make laws. When people are imagined as vectors, it becomes easier to justify camps, raids, and walls. When difference is named without diagnosis, the door can stay open.
There is courage in the simplicity. No grand theory, just a moral stop sign. The stranger is not a pathogen. The appropriate response is not quarantine but welcome, curiosity, and the patient work of living together. The sentence is small, the correction fundamental.
Alden Nowlan often wrote from the perspective of someone on the margins. Raised in rural poverty, largely self-educated, and deeply sensitive to shame and stigma, he spent his career giving voice to those treated as objects of curiosity or suspicion. This blunt reassurance fits his plainspoken moral vision. By stripping away ornament and speaking in the negative, he exposes how prejudice works: it smuggles pathology into the description of difference. If foreignness is cast as a symptom, then common decency can be recast as treatment. Hospitality becomes risk management; empathy becomes prophylaxis.
The line also echoes a distinctly Canadian conversation that intensified in the mid-20th century, as the country moved toward an official policy of multiculturalism. Debates about who belongs often masquerade as neutral concerns about order or health. Nowlan refuses the cover story. He asks readers to watch the metaphors they live by, because metaphors make laws. When people are imagined as vectors, it becomes easier to justify camps, raids, and walls. When difference is named without diagnosis, the door can stay open.
There is courage in the simplicity. No grand theory, just a moral stop sign. The stranger is not a pathogen. The appropriate response is not quarantine but welcome, curiosity, and the patient work of living together. The sentence is small, the correction fundamental.
Quote Details
| Topic | Human Rights |
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