Bilingual Being (23 page)

There's an interesting twist in that English was seen as an encroaching cultural threat on Quebec in the days I buried my head in that English dictionary, yet as I bury myself in the French dictionary these days, French is seen as a safe, profitable, denatured, economic asset. Multilingualism thrives right alongside multiculturalism in Ontario – and French just rides the wave. There isn't a great «rapprochement» or anything like that, beckoning people into sympathetic postures in regards to Quebec – and it certainly isn't a manifest embrace of French Canadian culture. It is, like most relations with French Canada outside of French Canada, a lucrative business proposition.

I enter the field as an exception – a “real” Quebecer, they say – typically through interviews where one of the few bilingual teachers already in position is able to vow for my fluency. I join a pool of largely anglophone bilinguals, graduates of provincial immersion programs, valiantly undertaking a teaching task with sometimes limited fluency. I love their courage, far greater than mine, and I really love that they can't catch my mistakes. Within these strange and blurry surroundings, where everything from morning announcements to staff meetings is conducted in English and children respond more often than not in English as well, I'm able to be comfortable in my tongue and to use it – whereas I'd never be able to teach French at a fully French school here, in Quebec, or anywhere else.

QUOI DIRE?

I confess that I did consider it once. I suppose I'd been living in Victoria for so long that I'd forgotten some of my insecurities. I heard that one of the local francophone schools might have an opening soon, and I put together my resume, not such an easy thing to do with three babies. I didn't have an appointment, because it seemed awkward to call ahead and ask for one, so this visit was intended as a kind of recon mission.

I remember being so nervous, rushing around to get breakfast for my kids before it was time to go. In the flurry, I went to reach for a cereal box in one of those self-assembled small pantries from Home Depot, and the entire works tipped over on me. It sent food flying all over the floor, smashing the pretty garage-sale vase on top, so that when the spilled chips, crackers, and Cheerios had settled, I found that a piece of glass had narrowly missed my small son's eye, landing on his shirt. An omen, I thought. My fear coming to find me.

Still, I'm a grownup. I try to listen to my instincts, but not let them rule me either. I improvised a quick change of clothing that wasn't covered in sugary dust and glass splinters, apologized to my sitter for the mess, and headed off to the school to try to meet the principal. It went downhill from there. «Elle n'est pas ici. Voulez-vous lui laisser un message?» [She isn't here. Do you want to leave her a message?] The dreaded question. I took a slip of paper. And that's precisely where I got stuck.

There was my usual worry over the grammar or spelling – a mistake would have been unforgiveable. But even worse was the problem of register, for it's an infinitely more complex matter in French than in English, where an inadvertent pronoun error – «tu» or «vous»? – can reveal unseemly judgments of your relative positionality, your lack of confidence, or your arrogance. What tone was I supposed to take for someone in a formal position, while I was using an informal medium (a “while you were out” slip)? I wanted to sound formal enough to be professional but needed to sound informal enough to be counted as an insider to give myself the hiring edge.

I blocked completely. Had no idea «quoi dire» [what to say]. So I said nothing, waited for the secretary to be overwhelmed with parents,
and slipped out, discretely shoving the paper into my purse. I never went back – just got another
ESL
contract instead. I did something I was really good at that didn't remind me of what I was bad at.

My only other attempt at teaching
in
French was in Manitoba in 1984. Canadian Parents for French had just inaugurated a new program, and I was hired for it. This kindergarten job was certainly challenging for a first-year teacher: teach mornings in English, flip your head at lunch, and teach afternoons in French. There were more than fifty kids in all, with all materials bought, assembled, and prepared by me after individual trips to Saint-Boniface. It was a real labour of love where staff and parents couldn't have been nicer, but I couldn't last. And it was no one's fault.

I was a bit of a celebrity because of my new role and the relatively small size of the town at the time. So one fine fall afternoon, after the children had been dismissed, a board official showed up with a television crew to interview me live for the local news, for some understandable publicity. Lights, camera, action. Ancient triggers clicked alongside the over-sized shutter, reinstalled what I'd come hundreds of miles to forget. I quit. Left town. Tallied it as just another instalment in the lifelong silent management of stigma. Took embarrassment and inconvenience as the customary price to be paid.

DICTIONARIES AGAIN

Willing to give it another try after twenty-five years, I set out to prepare for my new roles in French immersion in 2010 by reading French curriculum materials from Alberta, New Brunswick, and Saskatchewan. I felt far more confident now than I did that first year of teaching. With decades of my beloved career already under my belt, most in language education,
ESL
, I knew I had plenty of transferable skills to draw from, and a well-seasoned classroom management style. Still, I had to learn how to say key words – like tundra, iceberg, feedback, rubric, graphic organizer, brainstorming – in French because I had no idea what they were. So for hours each day over the summer, and regularly throughout the school year – part of a self-study plan – I brushed up on my technical vocabulary, and still do.

It's a tricky thing, actually, trying to use French immersion materials from other provinces, but in this business you have to get creative about resources. Forget about finding anything you can use in Quebec, other than picture books from second-hand stores or activity books from the dollar stores. The reading that Grade 1s do in Quebec would be hard for our Grade 3s. When it's a second language, not the first, you need grammar and vocabulary pared down. Alberta and New Brunswick produce in-house French immersion materials, but they're expensive, considering the curriculum doesn't match. In Saskatchewan there's a good choice:
fransaskoise
materials for francophones, as well as decent, inexpensive immersion materials with considerable curricular overlap.

After a while, finding proper supplies starts to feel a bit like being inside the Goldilocks story. Curriculum that's too hard, too expensive, and (finally) just right. Yet it still leaves me worried about when those bears are coming back.

The problem – the bears – is my spelling of common words, especially verbs, with the proper gender and number agreement. The exceptions to the rules seem to come out of everywhere, leaving me insecure about knowing even words I think I know for sure. I keep looking over my shoulder, expecting growls and sharp teeth. That's why I'm into dictionaries again. I'm walking in the reverse order this time, though, trying to work my way into French rather than out of it, determinedly engaged in some kind of reappropriation, a re-territorialization.

The children in my French immersion classes are amused that someone who usually speaks French better than anyone else at school, a native of Quebec, runs to a dictionary and makes at least one mistake a day. They're delighted to catch any, as they should be. I give a lot of politically correct speeches about learning being continuous, referencing as a skill for living, and bilingualism inviting confusions. But in fact I'm too weak in written French for my own liking. And I'm reluctant to admit that I've never been to school in French, other than a three-week summer course in statistics before university in 1976, and a sixty-hour course in 1982 at L'École des guides historiques de Quebec, affiliated with Collège de Sainte-Foy, to certify as an elite, licensed tour guide.

The latter bit of additional training was in anticipation of the 1984 visit of «Les Grands voiliers» [tall ships] to Quebec, where the tour
trade was expected to spike so that regular guides like me could expect even bigger opportunities for summer work. The interview for that prestigious job took place sometime in 1983. My spoken French was just fine, they said, but I didn't quite have the “look” they were hoping for. This feedback came courtesy of a friend of a friend who'd been offered one of the dozens of positions herself and whose father sat on the interview committee. I looked too English, they had apparently said behind closed doors, not «une vraie québécoise.»

No big surprise there. I was used to faking a French accent to get better tips during my walking and bus tours. Tourists didn't want a guide with such good English, after all. They wanted someone who could explain things and joke around with them, of course, but you had to have the French accent – the perceived authenticity – if you wanted good tips. It was easy enough to do. I'd turn it on at the beginning of the tour and shut it off when I was done. But this committee wasn't fooled. Caught me trying to pass myself off as French.

It seems that I'm still struggling to pass myself off as French. Recently I received an email from the obviously francophone supply teacher who'd replaced me the previous day. She had a French first name, Québécois, and an English last name. She came out exactly on the other side of the bilingual equation from me, I guess, even though on paper she and I would have looked the same in some scientific calculation of a “one-parent-one-language” system. Her email to me in French was far better than any I could have composed without the time to edit carefully. I wondered what she'd thought of my teaching space. Had she found errors in my French?

I looked around the next day, back in my classroom, and the first thing I found was a message I'd pasted onto a shelf of fancy project paper: «Ici, c'est le papier du prof, alors on y touche pas s.v.p.» [Here's the prof's paper, so don't touch it, please.] Of course, I saw it then. The mistake I'd ignored for four weeks, since I made the sign. I had, in patois, forgotten the «ne» particle, as usual. Even trying to be informal as I was, I should have written, «on n'y touche pas.»

I was deeply ashamed, as I am often, that I've never attended French school and never learned to communicate well in writing in my own language. The mistake wasn't huge, and it was easily fixed, but I felt those bears breathing down my neck. For the sorry truth is that I've
been paid good money in my life to edit journals, theses, and books in English, but I need a proofreader in French just for a dozen words. Am I, then, a fraud in my mother tongue? A story character posing in this language I call my own, my first, my mother? Am I an interloper here, like Goldilocks?

UN TRÈS GRAND NOM

Beyond the drama around feeling French or not, I admit that I feel profoundly embarrassed as I hear some separatist shadow-figure berating me. It's not a persistent paranoia, just a horrible inner conviction that keeps semi-materializing as a cultural judge and jury. The source is a composite of everyone back home who detests people like me: folks who've abandoned the motherland and betrayed their hereditary trust.

«Ah, ça c'est un très grand nom» [Ah, that's a very big/significant name], a colleague once said to me. The year was 1982, and we had both been working at a poster store in Quebec for a couple of months. She spoke perfect standard French, pure and impeccable: «Tu devrais l'épeler correctement, Saint-Onge et non pas St-Onge. Il y a bien des personnes qui vont chez un avocat pour faire changer leurs noms maintenant. C'est une invention des anglais, la marque des vainqueurs, ce ‹St.› C'est une insulte, après tout. De plus, il n'y a jamais eu de ‹Onge› comme un Jean ou un Pierre. Tu vois?» [You should spell it correctly, as Saint-Onge and not St-Onge. There are many people securing lawyers nowadays to change (the spelling of) their names. It's an invention of the English, the brand of the conquerors, this “St.” It's an insult, after all. On top of that, there was never an “Onge” like a Jean or a Pierre. You see?]

What she meant was that
Onge
was never a saint. It's not a proper first name in French, not like Saint-François, Saint-Joseph, Sainte-Cécile, or Sainte-Perpétue, so you can't use it like that. Her point was that it was surely bad enough that the English took away our hereditary way of writing our names – cutting us down from
Saint
to
St
for the sake of expediency in phone books and official records. But in my case, it was even more absurd because my name should have been written as
Saintonge
from the start. My family suffered an additional cleavage, lost its direct link to a grand narrative into which my colleague digressed
briefly, subtext beneath subtext, painful digging while we walked into the stock room together.

That business of
Saint
instead of
St
wouldn't get fixed for another decade or so. I don't know the precise day or policy that made it happen. I was, as always, many miles away. But I do remember ordering a new copy of my «Certificat de naissance» for my teacher (re)certification when I moved to Ontario and receiving – to my surprise – from «Le directeur de l'état civil,» Jacques
Saint
-Laurent, on 15 March 2002, the official statement of my name as Kathleen Marie Cécile Saint-Onge. Even my father, long dead, had been retroactively renamed: Paul Saint-Onge.

We were a long way from my «Certificat de Baptème» issued by L'Église Très Saint-Sacrement de Québec on 17 November 1957, when only the church had been able to hang on to its
Saint
, and my father and I were both just St-Onge. From a few papers had come some powerful proofs of the move towards my colleague's predictions – and her politics. Reclaiming names from the conqueror, as she'd put it. I hadn't asked for it or expected it. It was just changed automatically on my behalf, executed as a simple correction of a 250-year-old error. By the new millennium, it seems the tables had turned in Quebec.