Bilingual Being (2 page)

Her encounter with a single child from another village has changed Élise-Liza forever. Our bilingual has realized that her new language is a passkey to another culture. Slowly, she's being transfigured, and her life will never be the same. Goodness knows, she was already a complicated girl, with her circular logic and that unfixable bucket. But she's now become incomprehensible to her family. For she's begun to imagine the impossible – and then, to consider it possible. Begun to know she's from «El Pays des vieilles chansons» [the Land of Old Songs], but that she could choose the Land of Nursery Rhymes instead.

And now a single thought: show me a bilingual person's autobiography, and I'll show you someone who's apologizing for something.

BILINGUAL BEING

The moon once begged her mother to make her a gown. “How can I?” replied she. “There's no fitting your figure. At one time you're a new moon, and at another, you're a full moon, And between whiles you're neither one nor the other.”

Aesop

Nous ne sommes hommes et nous ne tenons les uns auz aultres que par la parole. [We are but human, and we hold on to one another but by our word.]

Michel de Montaigne

From this point on, a series of cleavages will incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon.

Jacques Derrida,
Archive Fever

Boxes

I seek out counselling in English:

describe my trauma as if I read it

or saw it on an evening newscast.

Yet in my mother tongue, pain is

embodied in a thick, bitter amber,

and I am closed, refusing therapy,

certain I wouldn't ever survive it.

The unconscious is a single field:

experience as an old French film

dubbed in English,where random

phrasing – long strings of lonely

echoes – erupt from thin fissures:

strange, haunted gaps in line-time

where it feels like I never existed.

But my consciousness is divided,

in its coding of inner talk (more

English than French) and its ego.

One voice is condemning, bleak,

abusive, self negating, critical;

another that is stronger is loving,

supportive, nurturing, confident.

Memory isn't bilingual either:

seems the brain has shifted the

responsibility for recording on

the psyche – so life's recalled

unevenly in duelling languages:

different readings of the past –

variant views of self and world.

Bilingual, it's hard to be consoled

or understood in one or the other.

Identities and ideas inhabit boxes

on separate inner shelves of mind.

Best to hang on to your languages,

or you'll need a dictionary one day

just to realize your own thoughts.

1

MY MOTHER TONGUE/MY MOTHER'S TONGUE

SANITIZED FRENCH

In September 2010, I found myself in a Grade 4 French immersion classroom in the Greater Toronto area. I'd already been a teacher for more than twenty-five years, so it was no surprise to find myself in a classroom. But it was my first year teaching French immersion since 1984.

I'd been underground as a francophone for a quarter century, nearly my whole career, teaching in English in English provinces – Manitoba, British Columbia, and Ontario. And that day I was handling a new problem, which is that one of my students, his parents also the product of French immersion programs, had shown me a note in his agenda telling me that «vidanges» – which I'd put on a word list – didn't exist.

What were they talking about? I use it all the time. «Vidanges» means “garbage” in my Quebec French – it's a real word. But according to the parents, who'd apparently been taught a sort of sanitized French devoid of cultural moorings, I should have used «ordures.»

I wasn't surprised at the comment, actually. We all know just what we know, and the boy's parents didn't mean any harm. I had a chat with my student about synonyms, with examples from English, and we called it a draw. I also stuck in some political commentary about the dominant francophone population in the country being from Quebec, so Quebec French matters.

But then a pattern developed with these agendas. The next week, another student, another note. I'd apparently erred in using the word «bicycle» instead of «bicyclette,» according to this parent. Again, «bicycle» is perfectly acceptable in my Quebec French. Some days the notes broached the absurd. One parent wrote a long message asking me to double-check the verb «gaspiller» [to waste], which I'd given the students the previous week, because she was sure that the word is «gaspiyer» instead. It's not. But by now my French was being corrected randomly, continuously, by individuals who had the best intentions but who couldn't help the fact that they'd apparently acquired a sort of sterile French from standard texts and a few teachers who were short on synonyms.

And so the ironies kept flying. After more than thirty years of drifting across this country to separate myself from my French heritage, deliberately and incidentally, and trying until only recently to stay mum about my French origins, I found myself half-defending French culture and French expressions. I also had to run to the dictionary daily on the sly to check that I was right about things, like the verb being «gaspiller» and not «gaspiyer,» because the sad truth is that I wasn't sure – even though I'm a francophone by birth, by baptism, and by any other way you want to measure it. French is my mother tongue, my mother's tongue.

LIKE MME X

These days, in the halls before and after school, the few parents who are native francophones (one in a typical class here) reach for my elbow, grab me for a quick chat. They're hungry for word from home, literally, and not afraid to seek and emit a human connection. But a quick comment about the weather, a digression into the day's plans, and I make sure we're both off again on our separate ways. That's all the French food there is to eat today. It's enough for me. Almost too much. I'm afraid they'll catch me out, discover that I don't have a French husband, French children, French friends, favourite French authors, television shows, movies, or music – or a French lifestyle of any kind outside of school. Thankful for cautions about fraternizing too much with parents, I take my sturdy English legs down the hall, smiling as we part. Another day, another escape.

It's the same fear reflex with staff. The only other teacher who claims French as her birthright (again, one in a typical school here) finds me in the photocopy room, bemoans some new grammar error in a colleague's classroom, gender misagreement on signs and handouts – «
le
fenêtre, franchement» [honestly]! She articulates her familiar complaint: «Pis après, c'est moi qui 'es a l'année prochaine, pis leu' français est d'ja plein d'erreurs.» [And after, it's me who has them next year, and their French is already full of errors.]

She's funny, generous, artistic, and hard-working. Still, she seems to have a bit of trouble maintaining allies in the staff room, among the other dual-track teachers at this school – mostly anglophones, and a few who are certified, with mixed confidence, as “French qualified.” Maybe it's the judgment calls coming from her end, or maybe it's the anti-Quebec backlash coming from theirs. Hard to say. Even among bilinguals here, the identity tension is anything but dissipated. It's okay to speak French – “good to
have
,” everyone says, some gritting their teeth a bit obviously, for
FI
is a lucrative pass into the slowing teacher's job market. But to
be
French Canadian – now, that's another thing altogether.

Their acquired French, in almost every case, comes from urban Ontario language education programs in bilingual schools and a quick summer in Europe – or, more rarely, part of a life spent in Egypt, Algeria, or the Ivory Coast. “I just don't get Quebec at all”: that's the summative opinion here, expressed daily, weekly, monthly. Some have never even been. It's only a few hours away, I say, and historically stunning, I tell them – in English, of course. “Maybe next summer,” they say. “Or maybe the south coast of France.”

But I'm different. And the jury's out, apparently, on whether it's in a “good way” or a “bad way.” “You speak French just like Mme X,” some Grade 3s pointed out to me recently. Even with only a handful of French words and two years of
FSL
under their belts, they can spot dialects. “Real French,” the kids call it. “Like on the videos,” they say. So, of course, from where Mme X stands in the teacher's workroom today, I'm a rare find, an ex-pat – «J'toujours la seule, t'sais. Mais là, on'est deux. J'contente.» [I'm always the only (native French) teacher (at schools I'm placed at). But now, there are two of us. I'm happy.] She's articulating her fundamental allegiance with me. As if a shared accent is all it takes to form a sisterhood, hold a secret society tight. Note that
I say “articulating” instead of “trying to negotiate,” because my loyalty to her, and to French, is naturally assumed, taken for granted, thanks to my “authentic” speech.

But that's precisely what I'm afraid of, my speech, because I know this type of conversation all too well. It stirs up trauma from the deep: a dangerously worn, mixed bag of not belonging yet wanting to belong, and of being afraid – entirely unable, in fact – to do either. So I try to change the topic, not because of some high, solid moral ground against gossip – in truth, ground of any kind rarely holds still for me – but because I haven't been educated in French, like Mme X has, and the subject of grammar is as dangerous for me as it is for the colleagues she's currently critiquing. I know – or at least, I profoundly believe – that if I don't find the stapler or the hole punch soon, and make my way out of here back to the safety of my classroom, it's only a matter of time before I'll be found in error myself, queried on some technical issue or, God forbid, be asked to proofread something of hers in French. That's when I'll blow my fragile cover. Shatter my thinly held illusion of safety.

So what's happened to keep me away from French, then draw me back when I'm past fifty? To make me leave it, and now promote it? For it to be the language of my heart, yet a language I can't put onto paper without a dictionary? For me to be embraced in my profession as a native speaker, yet rendered suspicious for the same reason? And why am I teaching children to do what I've never done myself, and what I've never wanted my own children to do – attend school in French? Why, too, is it that after a lifetime as an “anglophone Canadian,” it's still Quebec's folk songs, tales, reels, and rivers that bring me to tears, that evoke a sense of belonging, whereas the English landscapes of earth and mind never do? My emotions are completely entangled in French rather than in English – a connection of first language and inner being that is potent, even gut-wrenching.

LES BONS PIS LES MAUVA' CÔTÉS

These are the thoughts that engage me as stories come pouring out of the fissures left by «les bons pis les mauva' côtés d'la vie» [the good and bad sides of life], as they say in the «joual» of my native city, Quebec.
My trauma is twice lived. Once, in multiple incidents five decades ago. And recently, in the “confirmation” of this difficult knowledge.

My truth starts to crawl out of its tomb one ordinary day in early July 2010, when some elderly females of my French «tribu» share expensive champagne to celebrate their longevity. Working its usual alchemy, alcohol begins to transform the essential properties of original identities. On this day, it dilutes the fragile boundaries of a pact of secrecy left vulnerable by the intervening decades and the ravages of age. It is but a simple bit of slippage in an otherwise pleasant afternoon of «p'tites crudités» and reminiscences. One who mistakenly thinks everyone knows something about the subject says a few things too many, and too loudly, to one who knows for certain. The knowledge is received haphazardly by the others – denied, disguised, refused – in clashes of silences and outbursts in the bathroom that quickly turn the mood sour. Seems an ill wind has blown into the otherwise charming summer interlude.

Naturally, one might have tried – and so it was apparently attempted – to forget it altogether. To annul the comment and its sequelae, to stuff things back into the bottle and cap it really tightly once more. After all, what are a few faults in the course of a life? What good is it to worry about water under the bridge? What right does anyone have to speak thus of the dead? Isn't it true that «on a bin toutes nos bons pis nos mauva' côtés» [we surely all have our good and bad sides]? Tears are exchanged, traded from one to the other, as personal grief is weighed in the service of justice. Seems an ancient tactic is being redeployed to forge a new deal. But for the sake of whom, now? Hard to say, but I'm told there was a concerted effort to restore the «joie de vivre» of the innocent afternoon.

Yet it is too late. I'm less than fifty days away now from a startling affirmation that the human lot is full of very pleasant people without any sense of honour. The critical information has been released by one of those ugly old brass keys that looks like a mutated claw – a cold, twisted skeleton. The kind that jingles in a rusty metal noose from an old man's dirty pants pocket. In the weeks to come, the secret will make its way steadily towards me like a brave little worm, guided by emails begun separately – serendipitously – between a sister and brother giving their shared origins one more try. There are pointed questions
from me – and intriguing replies from him – about obnoxious scents, rooms with double entrances, men with particular traits, and windows of time. Slowly, reluctantly, the past begins to yield itself up to the light of the present, as words run furiously behind the scenes between my brother, sister-in-law, mother, and various aunts. At issue is what, exactly, was said in July – and how it strangely matches some of the garbled shreds of my memory. History's translatability. Unsurprisingly, I'm miles away while it all unfolds.