Myths Like Pure Imagination: Willy Wonka, Peace by Chocolate, and a Canadian Model Minority
Nicholas Rickards, Ph.D. Student
Faculty of Education, Brock University
University Lecturer & Public School Teacher
There’s something about Willy Wonka that’s creepy and unsettling. Maybe it’s because his monopoly of the candy game goes seemingly undiscussed. Or, maybe it’s because he has a propensity to “import” small brown and orange men from some unnamed jungle to live and work in his monstrous factory, smokestacks spewing soot. At any rate, it all reeks of industrial imperialism. I don’t trust the guy.
Derived from Roald Dahl’s 1964 children’s novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and beloved by the entertainment industry, Hollywood is fond of revisiting Willy Wonka and his suspicious hijinks every few decades or so. Strange, as I see it, especially because of the character’s flamboyant representation of White masculinity, with its predilections for predation and pedophilic demur — hey kid, want some candy?
Gene Wilder’s Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) creeped me out as a kid. Johnny Depp’s Wonka in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) unnerved me as a young adult. After organizing and taking all of the grade seven students in the school I work at on a field trip to the cinema before the winter holidays in December 2023, I found that Timothée Chalamet’s iteration of the character in Wonka (2023) gave me the same icky, saccharine aftertaste. However, not all the treat makers in our popular imagination are made the same.
The film Peace by Chocolate (2021) is perhaps the most novel addition to the cinematic pantheon of memorable chocolatiers, providing an alternative racial and cultural script to the imperious gadfly Willy Wonka for one more fitting to the multi-culti Canadian palate. Peace By Chocolate follows the true story of Syrian refugee, Tareq Hadhad (Ayham Abou Ammar), his father Essam (played by the late Hatem Ali), and their family as they land in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, and attempt to rebuild their lives and chocolate business (which was one of the largest in Damascus before its destruction) through their love of chocolate, family, and the niceties of their new Canadian neighbors.
In February 2024, shortly after viewing Wonka with my students, I attended Tareq Hadhad’s keynote address at the South Western Alberta Teachers’ Association conference in Lethbridge, Alberta. Hadhad’s immaculate delivery and message of Canadian benevolence stuck its landing with the audience of educators, heads frothy from mid-school year malaise. Hadhad is, without question, one of the most skilled orators I have witnessed thus far in my life and is exactly what you would expect a Canadian Willy Wonka to be; he is of the perfect tinge of melting-pot off-White, almost Anglo, but clearly not, all smiles, praise, gratitude, and very, very trustworthy.
The force of Hadhad’s message and the gregariousness of his character was somewhat overpowering in how it conjured a fragrant brew of race, space, citizenship, and national pride, the likes of which we Canadians try not to be too spellbound by, but at times is unavoidable; how gracious of us that we let in such a fitting member of the Canadian cultural and ideological mosaic.
Although critics like Amil Niazi (2022) of The Globe and Mail argue that the film Peace by Chocolate is “flattened by sugar-coated storytelling that leaves little room for the true saltiness of the immigrant experience” (para. 2), I see the film as being very successful for what it was made to do. Hadhad’s frequent media appearances and the canonization of the film collectively function as a cultural text that is quite revealing of the ways in which the immigrant body and experience is aggressively encoded with preferred readings fitting of the Canadian cultural landscape. What results is a clear delineation of the discourses that the immigrant is and is not authorized to access.
Never in the film does Tareq, his father, or any other member of the family express their political views in relation to the Syrian civil war, immigration status, Canadian foreign policy, or biases toward Muslim and Arab “terrorists” in Canadian media. The entire time Hadhad was speaking at the South Western Alberta Teachers’ Conference, I couldn’t help but wonder what his thoughts were on Israel and Palestine, or the recent rollbacks of Canadian student visas given to foreign students, questions I know that I will probably never hear the answers to. By way of citizenship, marginality, and Otherness, representations of the Hadhads are emblematic of what media scholars refer to as “model minorities” (Guerrero, 1993, p. 48). In one way, the trope functions to frame the model minority as the immigrant who succeeds with initiative and perseverance while being seamlessly assimilated. Conversely, the immigrant poorly suited to the milieu relies on social services and speaks too often and too loudly about his politics. What Peace by Chocolate and Tareq Hadhad’s media appearance illustrates is that the model minority works hard, but does so with his mouth shut and his eyes down, looking up only to give smiles and gratitude that make us feel safe. When purchasing the bars, safe is what one might feel, in part because the multicolour packaging of the summer series is so in tune with the frequency of the progressive consumer, in line with the zeitgeist of our time — rainbow capitalism or queer liberation?
Alas, if we must maintain a rhetoric of depoliticization, I should touch on the apolitical. Peace by Chocolate is more than good candy. To rank it somewhere above Cadbury but below Hershey’s is to be both cantankerous and dishonest. The white chocolate caramel bar with confections is perhaps the most delectable sweet I have ever put in my mouth. You can find it at your local Sobeys, Foodland, Safeway, or specialty candy shop.
If you’re going to have some for dessert, be sure to pick up some Indian, Chinese, Caribbean, Vietnamese, or “Middle Eastern Cuisine” on your way home. At least you’ll find some spice and flavor. You might only find it in food, though, since we prefer our Canadian immigrants unseasoned before they are added to the melting pot.
References
Burton, T. (Director). Charlie and the chocolate factory [film]. Village Roadshow Pictures.
Guerrero, E. (1993). Framing blackness: The African American image in film. Temple University Press.
King, P. (Director). Wonka [Film]. Village Roadshow Pictures
Niazi, A. (May 5, 2022). Peace by Chocolate fails to sweeten the tale of Syrian refugees finding new life in Nova Scotia. The Globe and Mail. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/reviews/article-peace-by-chocolate-film-review/
Stuart, M. (Director). (1971). Willy Wonka and the chocolate factory [Film]. Wopler Pictures.
