Bilingual Being (42 page)

and you no longer fear

your own echoes.

21

THE GIFTS I KEEP

RECOUVRANCE

There's a famous tree on rue St-Louis, about two blocks in from one of the gates to the Old City, on the south side. A cannonball is stuck in its roots, from that day in 1759 when the fateful battle took place between English and French, after which the French surrendered primary ownership of the land. The tree has become an amusing anomaly for tourists to Quebec City. For me, it's a potent monument, in plain sight, to the difficult days that initiated my own tug of war between those same two languages, after which French surrendered primary ownership of my identity. Like that tree, my life continued around my wound. It took a minor detour, splitting around that gaping hole for a while, then found its balance, pulling itself together and sending up one strong stem that encased the site of injury, and then kept growing.

When I worked in the Old City as a tour guide, as I did for six summers, I took up embroidery during my breaks and unwittingly reproduced a version of that very tree. The trunk is brown and wide, with a large circular hole. Inside that hole, I stitched the colours of the rainbow vertically. The coloured threads work their way up the stem, side by side, to yield multi-coloured leaves – from greens to yellows to reds, left to right across an eight-inch oval. And there it was again, the language of imagery accidentally coming through, my hands speaking while my eyes failed to listen.

It would turn out to be the last summer I'd spend in the city of my birth. Sitting on my bedroom shelf today in a small glass frame, that tiny tapestry has moved twenty-seven times with me. It's a profound reminder of the connection between my internal constitution and the soil of my home, between my solutions and my symbols. I dared to dream in colour, even when the mind was dark. It wasn't that I was delusional, or ridiculously optimistic; it was merely a matter of life continuing, like that tree – enduring. And like me too, by the time that tree had moved far enough along in years, that skirmish for power between the two languages had been settled. It was then that was revealed the rooted primacy of French in its identity, against all odds.

From the cannonball tree, my memory walks about three blocks east, further into «le Vieux Québec,» and turns left (roughly north) onto Rue du Trésor. Here, painters and illustrators hang their works up and down both sides, on hooks, boards, and clotheslines. As a young girl, I remember going there with my granny to visit my American artist-uncle (her brother) and another artist-uncle (one of her sons, my father's brother) several times, as they each sold their stunning water-colours of Quebec and did quick sketches for a few dollars.

At the end of this incomparable road of grey-black cobblestones, worn smooth over four hundred years, is the Basilique Notre-Dame de Québec, the largest and most ornate church in the city. It's good to have a look inside and outside, but visitors today can't see all there really is, or was. Before its current form (dated early twentieth century), here stood the Basilique de Québec (late nineteenth); before that, l'Église-Cathédrale de Québec (mid-eighteenth); before that, l'Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Immaculée-Conception (late seventeenth); before that, l'Église Notre-Dame-de-la-Paix (mid-seventeenth); and before that, la Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-la-Recouvrance, built in 1633 by Samuel de Champlain, borrowing a name which, before that, belonged to a chapel in Orne, France, where «Notre Dame» had been worshipped since the ninth century.

The structure visible today is a layered reconstruction that's survived three major fires (in 1640, 1759, and 1922) and the furious shelling of 1759, when its destruction became a symbol of the English conquest. Its current solidity hides its migration from Old World to New World,
its uncomfortable transitions from one shape to another, its months of flame and ruin, and its years of laboured recovery. It isn't just a splendid basilica but an extraordinary metaphor of how a fixed exterior can embody a complex history. Another perfect symbol on the soil of home.

UNE BELLE P'TITE BLONDE

Reconstructing from my own flames and ruin, disguising my own personal history within a solid shell, I survived in English an elaborate crime enacted in French. I sought refuge in English, and I recalled what I could of the incidents in English. In fact, English became the vehicle of memory to such an extent that when I hit puberty – by which point I considered myself dominantly English – I created a conveniently compacted picture of the crimes against me, fully narrated in English only. French had lost its meaning, its truth, its story.

My picture was an elaborate composite of my memories, nightmares, waking dreams, fugues, fears, allergies, scars, illnesses, emotions, habits, intuitions, deductions and ongoing problems. In short, it was the product of every instrument I had at my disposal. And in executing my masterpiece, I painted my father dead centre inside a frame I hung to hide the deep gash on the wall behind. So it was that all who knew me then knew only of my problems with him – and not of any of my problems with the rest. My ironic mask over my private self. And so it was, too, that I flew home with my baby for my father's funeral in 1994 only out of a thinly worn sense of filial obligation. His passing ensured his continuing silence, so the principal guilt just stuck to him more easily after that. Meanwhile, the real details of the sexual abuse remained submerged in my deeply constricted French identity, right off my own radar. Absolved in absentia – that hauntingly quiet confessional where the one most to blame never showed up at all. And sixteen more years went by.

“It's a damned good thing Dad didn't know before he died,” my brother said recently. “It would have killed him, or else he'd have done something … I don't know what … Jesus!” My mother holds an opposite opinion about this which seems astounding in its own right: «C'est d'valeur qu'on l'sava' pas. Y s'd'manda' t'jours comment ça qu'ça
marcha' pas ent'vous deux. Eh, Mon Dieu.» [It's too bad we didn't know then (while he was still alive). He was always asking himself why things went so badly all the time between the two of you. Oh, my God.]

And what do I think? I think this is a cave of sorrows I'll have to leave to the ages. I can't enter it. Not yet.

Nonetheless, my picture provided such a practical re-transcription of events that I returned to it regularly as my viable theory, my road map through history. Over time, then, I repressed even further the actual story and its perpetrators. I couldn't see that, unlike the aesthetic integrity of the composite I crafted so carefully to try to make sense of it all, the assaults upon me had been a messy hodgepodge of men, opportunities, and events that made no sense. In English, I put a lot of effort into controlling, taming, my traumatic past. And so for years at a time, I forgot almost everything except my symptoms: itchy-crawly skin and the rest of a largely invisible collection of highly personal memorials. In French, I had not even a hope of control – «pas d'espoir pantoute.»

It would take the first-ever visit to my home in Ontario by my mother, my brother, his wife, and his son in early August 2010 – nine years after I moved here with my three children – to wake up my dormant self, knock on the closed door deep inside me. It was a simple family dinner on a Saturday night that went on a bit late. A few objective comments shared by my brother about my father. An opening of genuine kindness. A curious anecdote shared by my sister-in-law about a male in the extended family. And somehow, a tiny, tiny, tiny light went on, imperceptibly. A flickering candle in the farthest reaches of an old castle long thought abandoned, along corridors of echoes. After they returned to Quebec the next day, my brother and I began to exchange emails. And the rest, I've told. Bruce Cockburn sings that you've “got to kick at the darkness 'til it bleeds daylight.” But you have to be ready for a long project sometimes. Maybe ten years. Maybe twenty. Maybe fifty.

One of my tormentors, the Priest, was actually a quasi-famous philologist, a Franciscan who wrote French dictionaries. «Ah, y nous tanna' donc bin quand y v'na' pour souper chez-nous, lui-là. Y nous talonna' pour el bon mot pour ci pis ça, a'ec son dictionnaire s'a tab' de cuisine. Ah, qu'on aima' pas ça quand q'y v'na'.» [Oh, that one annoyed us so much when he came to dinner (at the boarding house). He'd bother
us with his questions about the right word for this and that, with his dictionary on the kitchen table. Oh, we (sisters) didn't like it when he came.] It's an ominous story my mother shared with me only recently. How can the truth stare at us in the face and still elude us? And dictionaries – my fascination, my instrument. How much of our tormentors do we absorb into our being? How much of my own thinking has been shaped by his beliefs?

For his part, my main offender, the Elder, always struggled to avoid me at family gatherings, no doubt fearing he'd trigger a recollection, a link to the unconscious state in which he was all too familiar to me. Yet feeling his rejection while others were hugged and talked to, and grasping for an explanation, I assumed he disliked me because of my escalating betrayal of «la patrie,» and took it as hard proof that I was becoming English. Given that cultural identity depends on recognition, the feeling that you belong, I wonder if I'd have “left French” as readily if he hadn't made me feel like I already had. «Vaut mieux pas savoir,» my mother always says – best to think we shouldn't know since we can't. From the practical to the parable, that's the heritage of my «patrie» too.

Between these two men – the Elder and the Priest, the first and last shards of the broken mirror, the patriarchy and oligarchy, the culture and religion, the alpha and omega of my troubles – much happened that need not be told in further detail. Unlike preposterous claims about how sin begins, the crime was distinctly unoriginal. It's been a long time, though, since I was «une belle p'tite blonde» [a pretty little blonde], words that spit like venom. In the interim, I've not only endured in English but thrived. I'm a reinvention of myself, a relatively safe, successful “me.”

Objectively, I know the horrific scope of what occurred. Yet in English, I can state calmly that I was toyed with and forced into an unspeakable submission of my body, opportunistically, during a span of many years. Unethical acts? The matter of ethics is omitted, irrelevant, here. Inhumane acts? No. Humanity is thoroughly complicit in every gesture of a twisted mouth, hand, passion. And that's about as far as I can take the explanations at this point. For the Elder himself was surely a victim of a similar crime, in similar hands, in his own time's version of men in dark cloaks spewing words purporting to be holier than
another's. And the Priest, training as an altar boy – working his own way up by moving way down – surely suffered likewise himself. Even the hangers-on to the scene, apprentices, were scarred this way and that, accumulating their own grievances.

And what of those silent women, not just witnesses but the real Silly Putty of the era? Those who placed all their bets on perfunctory penances and their own obedient incantations of the Pater Noster, «Notre Père»? Their pain precedes, maybe exceeds, mine. Aloud or alone, they prayed, «Que ta volonté soit fait sur la Terre.» [May your will be done on Earth.] And so went the rule of their world to the will of the fathers.

All were survivors of a social world where people discretely categorized accounts of sexual transgressions as “minor” or “major” – like music scales or parted vaginas – and then let their mental division satisfy them, release them of human obligations. Descartes would have been proud. Such mechanics of mind produced a sturdy, rusty chain that bound its innocents into hierarchies. A multi-purpose twist of sexual and psychological knots, one linking the other, ad nauseum. The trans-generational transmission of horror in the name of something beyond reproach. Automatic, systemic absolution.

In the case of my life in Quebec, it just happened to be «au nom du Père, du Fils, et du Saint-Esprit.» And holy ghosts, it surely left behind. So I am now the result: the girl who looks at the girl who suffered. It's only in French that memories are salient, haunting, and insistent. In French, I carry scars that speak to my absence from a sociocultural sphere that was no longer viable. In English, I keep a safe orbit.

But my act of identity has come at a price, one paid not only by me but by my family. And now we can't take it back. We can't make me into a girl who doesn't go to university and takes on the family business, like my cousins. And we can't make me into a daughter who stays close to home and entrusts her mother tongue to the next generation, like the rest. I go away to school because I've always gone away to school. And I move away to English cities because I've always repositioned myself in English spaces. English is the land of my personal migration, my purchase of distance. I am that rude child in the library, escaping a mother's reach. This is what I became, and this is who I am.

I recall my father setting traps during hunting season every year, close behind the fishing camp he purchased when I was twelve. One
morning, I found a sprung trap with a rabbit's foot in it. The foot was chewed off just above the lowest joint. “What happened to it?” I asked my father back at the camp, when I relayed what I'd seen. “It chewed its own leg off,” he explained matter-of-factly. “It understood it was stuck, so it chewed the leg off to get away. Rabbits can do that.” That story gives a heart-wrenching spin to the whole idea of a lucky rabbit's foot.

HAVE I GOT THE PROPORTIONS RIGHT?

Of course, in the context of the times, Catholicism offered a neat cover for the acts committed against me, but predation on children and women isn't unique to any religion, region, culture, or time. Pedophilia infects every society, and the incest taboo exists in ritual more than in actual rights. In a real way, then, every child is born not only into his or her mother tongue but also into its cultural version of silence. Emerging as bounded selves, we're all hostages of our own sociocultural paradigms – nested or trapped, take your pick. But a cold fact remains: if I'm deprived of my voice and my positionality in my mother tongue, it's only because I can bear the separation more easily than the reverberations.