Bilingual Being (21 page)

Irreconcilable, you say? Incoherent? No, just messy. Not unlike any complicated personal identity, I'm an unsettled flux of loyalties. I embrace my English intellect, my escape. But I hold dearly to my French soul, too. And that everyday battle, just like that fateful struggle in 1759, haunts me. The grass itself, stretching from the Saint-Laurent to Grande Allée, and from the edge of town to its heart, holds meaning I can't even find adjectives for. As if its worth is experienced pre-language, unsayable. As if the winding roads that lead from La Côte Gilmour to Le Musée de Quebec and circle back towards La Citadelle comprised a self-contained world, a universe, a time capsule. To imagine it bathed in blood again (fake or otherwise), as the site of loss and injury, grates on me mercilessly – as it must on everyone who lives here, regardless of their position on the “separation” spectrum.
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Then again, maybe I'm buried here too, folded into the earth. For here is a place where cultural birth meets cultural death.

That's why inside Quebec and also within French Canada – that diaspora from l'Acadie to Saint-Boniface – the plans for re-enacting that battle represent the complete disconnect that “the rest of Canada” has towards the province and the nation's «francophonie.» The aggressive coldness with which such plans, as sordid as they are foolish, are put forward demonstrates absent empathy brewed with callous
insensitivity – the typical aloofness of the conqueror. And that's precisely how it's read and heard symbolically. Those of us who originate in Quebec, who are directly implicated in its cultural and spiritual inheritance, infinitely picture «les Plaines» bathed in sunshine, fields beautifully trimmed, and iron lampposts polished, its timeless guardians left to whisper through the trees. It's a monument, a resplendent memorial to collective meaning, that enduring myth of life.

I capture special memories here in time-lapse photography. Countless groundskeepers go about their day, their chores changing with the seasons. New flower pots yield to shovels and snow-blowers, then back to lawnmowers again. In warm weather, families have picnics, play «pétanque» [a kind of croquet], have a quick ball game, or let their dogs run loose. In cold weather, cross-country skiers navigate its covered fields and impassable roads, break for wine and conversation. In daylight, tourists flock, snapping up moments (as if that were possible). In darkness, the wind blows up from the river, carries its faint but certain promise across the pregnant landscape. At special times, festival crowds gather over beer and music, mingling across lifespans of eighty years or more, sharing blankets with neighbours. At other times, its wide canvas waits.

And that's why I've gone «s'es Plaines» through every decade of my life. There was a day there I treasure among my favourites when, aged six or seven, I went with neighbours for a picnic of cucumber and fennel sandwiches on a broad blanket, just like storybook characters. There were evenings I made my way there with lovers, parking behind the Musée
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for privacy, or sitting on the grass and looking out romantically at the Saint-Laurent. I went with groups for drinking parties at strategic locations where there was the least chance of being discovered. And I went alone, especially on visits home in adulthood, to compass my journey, take my own pulse. It was, and continues to be, the perfect instinct to spend time «s'es Plaines.»

Spring 1242: Flash further back as Sa Majesté Louis IX, Saint-Louis, sworn king of France since the age of twelve, takes on the invading king
of England, Henry III, enthroned since the age of nine, who breaks the negotiated truce of 1238 to support his mother's new husband in France, Hugues de Lusignan. An unsuccessful exchange of letters, mere words, leaves a long-lasting feudal battle unresolved within the complicated context of the Albigensian crusades. Tens of thousands of soldiers on either side engage one another in two major encounters along the west-central coast of France.

The first phase takes place in April near the bridge over the Charentes at Taillebourg, pitting fifty thousand French troops loyal to Louis IX against thirty thousand English-French rebels led by Henry III and dissenting French nobles aligned to de Lusignan. It brings about the rapid retreat of the rebels. The second phase, in July, involves a siege just outside the walls of Saintes, the capital of the large stretch of land known as Saintonge, an expansive naval and agricultural centre comprising most of the modern region of La Charente-Maritime, including Brouage, from which Samuel de Champlain will originate and make his way to Quebec in 1608. Casualities over forty-eight hours – from 22 to 23 July 1242 – are relatively light as many of the rebels' French allies flee in the face of sure defeat, and Henry III retreats to Bordeaux.

The French loyalists easily take the victory, and Louis IX grants a quick peace agreement without further reprisals on 24 July 1242 – the day that ends La Guerre de Saintonge, the Saintonge War. How curious it is to see my family name like this, under the proud banner of the old French regime, its name synonymous with an ancient land that once comprised a province, and before that, a nation of its own – one rendered in historical records and folklore as «L'Ancienne province de la Saintonge» and «La Saintonge Romane.» A place that encompasses the geographic right alongside the mythical in its self-descriptions: «La Saintonge Maritime,» «La Saintonge du Nord,» «La Saintonge Centrale,» «La Saintonge Boisée,» «La Haute Saintonge,» and «La Saintonge Girondine.» It's especially strange to think that this is actually the half of the family I'd come to think of as my English side. There's that messiness one more time.

Then again, both Henry III and Louis IX were at least bilingual. Most likely, in fact, each was trilingual, or quadrilingual, or even more versatile linguistically. It seems that language was primarily an instrument of communication back then, not the main marker of identity
as it is so often today. But how did that happen over the centuries, to such an extent that I'd lose track of my heritage inside a language not primarily its own? And then I'd suffer enough in one language to want to lose myself inside another? How curious this history of language, thought, and humankind.

COMME UN MAUDIT FOU

By the time I was a few years into my school career, I had heard my Granny St-Onge regularly deliver a patently lucid conclusion to our family's language history as she saw it: most of her grandchildren didn't sufficiently appreciate their English (British) heritage, settled as they were into the local surroundings. This primary realization was categorized detachedly along with so many other irritants in her life, like the mud around the home in Charny over which she'd first hauled her baby grand piano, the impossibility of getting a proper English suit or a good cup of tea in this town, and the overly informal tone of clerical and retail staff in their dealings with her. So she dug in her pumps even deeper, spending her time with the only daughter-in-law she could relate to, the British nurse who actually sent her children to visit “the relatives abroad,” and taking the occasional trip to visit her cousin in Australia.

But for the greater part of each ordinary day, my granny stayed put in her upper middle-class home in a prestigious, older neighbourhood in Quebec. It was nestled on a tree-lined street only a ten minute walk away from «les Plaines,» and quite literally around the corner from where a huge sign now greets visitors with premature assurance, «Bienvenue à la Capitale Nationale.» Comfortably installed there, my granny spent her days chatting in an unblemished, undiminished British accent with neighbours across the lilac trees that bounded the southern edge of her home. They were an English couple who shared her critical views on the lack of refinement in this colonial environment and her great interest in following even the most minor events in the life of the British royal family. And so, she became perfectly atemporal and aspatial – detached and encompassed in a construction and performance of herself that to her last day remained entirely unconnected to her cultural surroundings.

Just like my home province, then, my family became the frothing edge of a linguistic tidal wave, the steady advance of a language that would become the single-stroke engine of the world, English, and its “one world” view so vehemently opposed to the eclectic pulse of local hearts. Meanwhile, I gained skill in that instrument of domination to secure my own survival, buying my way into new opportunities.

And so, as in that old English idiom, my world became a weaving of tangled webs. For quite unlike his own father's primary tongue (French), my father's primary tongue (English) was effaced over the years, as he worked in French each day «comme un maudit fou» [like a damned madman], as he said; he became a fan of Quebec folk music – loving, irreconcilably, Gilles Vigneault, an avowed separatist; and my mother's unrelenting vibrancy easily dominated his half-hearted participation in our home life.

Over the course of my childhood, then, our household became functionally francophone, so that even dinner conversations with my father, infrequent though they were, were held in French. But in my choosing English early on and hanging onto it for the long haul, when even my father had begun to abandon it, I'd eventually erode almost all that was French inside me except the actual words. It was a flip-flop «à la Granny St-Onge» executed one slow-motion step at a time over a period of twenty years. I became an untreatable virus that gnawed at the fabric of our family life from the inside, threatening the harmony that my mother's rule inspired and required.

And as I reflect on how the pulling and tugging of language and culture played out in the small environment of Granny's home, I can't help but connect what happened there to the precise fear that Québécois harboured on that day in 1976 when they were driven to try to change the tide of things by electing a government that put at the top of the agenda the preservation of the French language and its culture.

They were drawing a line in the sand. Not just on the land, but in the hearts and minds of the people. Blocking the steady advance of Global English that could be seen at every mall, on every store sign, and in a great many bilingual households just like my grandfather's, where the mother's tongue was English rather than French. Resisting the assumption that English would triumph here as it threatened to
everywhere else, Québécois continued to perform their role as holdouts against imperialism, as they had for hundreds of years.

MOTHERS RULE

I believe the family battle over bilingualism was even more convoluted than that, though, because the parent attached to each language seemed to matter. My “evidence” – a fair-sized collection of family members, friends, and neighbours – showed that francophone mothers married to anglophone fathers generally tended to raise fluent bilinguals who were French dominant, linguistically and culturally. But if you reversed the gender, so that the mother was English and the father was French, the usual result was a child who wasn't as strong in French and wasn't as attached to Quebec – one who was ready to leave the region for the first job opportunity or lover.

It wasn't hard science or anything but a solidifying conviction that, in time, the father would become subjugated. Was it a testament to the matriarchy that underpins French-Canadian culture? Or was I just day-dreaming about women finding their power somehow, somewhere? Who knows. I'm becoming increasingly comfortable these days with how trauma scrambles reality and fantasy like that. Then again, maybe there is something to this pseudo-scientific logic. After all, my granny single-handedly gave the aristocratic French Saint-Onge lineage a decidedly English turn. That's a huge crank of the drawbridge – just like that. Working within a modest space between four walls, she managed to «anglifier» the next generations to such an extent that three of her five sons would eventually leave Quebec, and many of her grand-children now barely speak French. Maybe that's why it's considered a mother tongue, a mother's tongue. Mothers own it.

In this light, I'm forced to admit how much energy I put into resisting the typical outcomes in my cultural matrix, as I managed my psychological departure against this great social tide of matriarchy versus patriarchy that filled, and emptied, my known world. All other things being equal – the distribution of tongues between my parents, and the French of my perpetrators – maybe I wouldn't have felt as compelled to move out of province if my early life had played out in “
English Canada” instead. Maybe the mother tongue culture and the self are so inseparable that you can't fracture one without risking the other.

Because the plain truth, likely obvious by now, is that I wasn't the only victim of the troubles. How could I have been? After all, it was engineered by a family elder and his confederates who, understandably, found many that fit their perfect body type among a genetically related group of small females. True, due to the placement of my father's store and my mother's work there for years, I was situated in the problem zone – one square city block – more than others. I suppose that's how habits grew so that things kept up even after I'd migrated to the suburbs. But other victims there most certainly were.

Of course, I have no right to break their silence, only my own. More than I'm able to describe, I respect the strength it takes for each one of them to craft her own version of survival. Yet a stark linguistic fact pierces my distress – dries my eyes and puts me back on the battle lines. Unilingual French survivors among us (two at least) have dossiers that use the difficult medical language of chronic severe depression, critical anorexia, and acute psychosis. Bilingual survivors (three at least, not counting myself) moved away from the Quebec City area in their early twenties, and English is in place of most of that medical language.

With French alone, it seems that there was nowhere to
run!
to in the mind, and nowhere to
hide!
– precious, formative instructions of the inner voice during crises. Every word, every cultural sign, served as a reminder of pain and betrayal, a confusion of what did and didn't occur, a brain scramble that wore on the soul like a slow drip of salt water. Mother tongue and self were left alone for too long, too often. The sexual trauma, in tragic irony, was played out in full in the metaphor.