Bilingual Being (44 page)

EPILOGUE

«J'en'rviens pas comme t'as 'ne bonne mémoére, toé-là» [I can't believe what a good memory you have], my mother recently said, not without irony, as we reminisced about an aunt's life. My brother concurred. Seems I've been recategorized from family oddball to family historian, for our first two decades anyhow. Yet with all due respect to their opinion, which does matter, it's my own view of myself that's having the biggest impact on my life these days. Because ever since my sexual abuse was confirmed, I've realized that I held on to core beliefs about my convoluted world against some powerful odds. And that's the critical affirmation that gives me the courage to set down my burden, these words.

Throughout my twenties, and possibly a bit before or after, I dreamed I was at a precipice, or in the middle of an empty field. And I'd open my mouth and just scream and scream and scream. I'd wake up every time with the same conviction: that if I actually did that, somehow everything would be better. That I'd be better. I dreamed it over and over, but I couldn't figure out what it meant. By then, I'd long forgotten about having once been a raging baby. And I'd even outgrown that «maudite belle p'tite fille» – damned to mutism as she was.

I hadn't even thought of this dream in decades, but I had it again right after finishing the final draft of this text. It was an agonizing reminder of what it was like to be at the scene of the accident that was me. And upon waking, to know that I'd managed to walk away with my scratches, that I'm no longer there. To know, too, why screaming
and screaming – the wild release of trapped sounds – would feel better. Because it does.

I do understand that there was a huge hole in my bucket all these years. A void, an immeasurable mass of stillness without clear contours right in the centre of my self. Through that hole, I kept some things and watched others drip away, just like dear Élise-Liza. But after much mystery about my own constitution, I finally get that I have an English valence of identity as a sturdy layer, a fix atop a complex personal profile. It's what makes it possible for me to pick up my bucket and go about my daily business. It's a fairly decent repair job, too. My exterior looks reasonably strong, though more than half a century has passed since the first rupture of its original integrity, its body, its bucket-ness.

But I don't want to keep looking back. Even just reading this narrative throws me for a reverse loop that's hurtful testimony to how far I've come – of how language education delivered my personal liberty, my psychological emancipation. Besides, reality testing tells me my homeland is safe for me now and my world is no longer closing down around me. After travelling all that time and distance, I discovered that my voice was waiting where I left it. And that my bilingualism provided the greatest security I ever had – my state of mind.

So I've come full circle from intending an
apologia
to refusing altogether to apologize for my journey – my linguistic drifting, my sociocultural distancing, my “self-othering.” After all, I survived in no small part because of it.

The last time I saw my mother inside the writing frame of this book, we took time for a special outing that had been awaiting my next visit home. We went together to a renowned «restauratrice» on Avenue Maguire to have the tear in the
Madonna
painting fixed, after all these years, more than twenty now. It was promising to be expensive, almost $400, but my mother held dearly to doing it: «Ej sais q'c'est bin spéciale pour toé, ç'ta peinture-là.» [I know it's very special for you, this painting.] By then, both she and my brother had reviewed a partial draft. «Y'a des bouts qui sont bin dur à lire,» she'd told me. [There are parts that are very hard to read.] They were hard to write, too.

We wrapped the painting carefully in a clean sheet for safe transport, and we somehow got a parking spot right in front of the shop, on one of the most popular streets in Quebec – a lively hustle of
caféterrasses and specialty stores – on a Saturday, the busiest day of the week. It was a necessary miracle, for the years are wearing heavily on my mother's body, secrets and disclosures both taking their toll. But as we described the painting for its official record on the invoice, my mother and I were each stumped for the French word for “halo.” «Bin, c't'une couronne, en fin d'compte» [Well, it's a crown, after all], she insisted. Yet I didn't think so: «Non, c'pas 'n couronne. Ej sais ça. Mais el bon mot m'échappe» [No. It's not a crown. I know that. But the right word escapes me]. Old age and psychological distance manifesting the same symptoms.

It would be late that night when my sister-in-law would furnish the right word, «une auréole,» while we waited for the Elton John concert on the grounds of the Festival d'Été – still hanging out «s'es Plaines.» And until I woke up the next morning, she had me blissfully, delightfully confused. The same word for a bird and a halo? That seemed perfect. But no, the bird was an «oriole» and the halo was an «auréole,» the online translation dictionary brutally announced at daylight. In truth, I was happier in between somehow, lost between my languages, between blurred possibilities.

I was happier until I remembered later that the area around a woman's nipple is a close word, too, «l'aréole» – in English, “an aureole.” In both languages, that word's also used for the moon's luminous corona and the circle around infectious skin rashes. How quickly that reassuring ambiguity of bird-and-halo became uncomfortable: bird, nipple, moon, disease, and halo. If I speak of my
Madonna
in French, then, as having an «auréole,» I cultivate the beautiful allusion to a bird. But other meanings I don't care for – reminders of infection, bright flashing lights, a naked female body – come rushing into the semantic field, and I can't stop them. On the other hand, if I speak of her in English as having a “halo” (rather than an “aureole”), she's pure and plainly good. Stripped of depth, maybe, but stripped of dangers, too. Small difference on the tongue, big difference on the ground – and on the psyche. Bilingualism is just that.

My mother sat in the car looking strangely peaceful that afternoon. Seems she was satisfied about finding something we could mend easily, even after all these years. But still no «ej (je) t'aime» from my end – and still no «pauv' p'tite» [poor little one] from hers. We're at a verbal
impasse – a
impass
able point we can't overcome and which is, so the word itself tells us, awfully close to what is effectively
imposs
ible. Before writing this book, I'd never thought of it as our tacit social contract. But it strikes me now that this is precisely what it's been all along, and that fifty-four years is a very long period of precedent-setting. So it is that silence continues its double duty – in the service of peace, in the service of violence.

Rereading, of course I realize how cold and detached this all sounds. So damned English?

We drove away, leaving behind us along Chemin St-Louis the nearly adjoining cemeteries overlooking the Saint-Laurent where are buried my grandfather St-Onge, my granny St-Onge, my paternal great uncleartist, two of my father's brothers, my own father, and the eldest of my brother's two sons, who died in infancy. Yet we were a long distance – a lifetime away – from the cemetery where lay my grand-papa Dumont, my grand-maman Dumont, my grand-grand-maman Blais dit Raisin, plus countless other elders and priests from those days in that first neighbourhood of Saint-Sacrement.

My
Madonna
will be delivered to my mother's home a few days later, when I'm safely back in Ontario, adding to my already cluttered refrigerator door a few souvenirs from another typical visit “back home.” One day driving in, two (maybe three) days there, one day driving out: I reach my practical limit. There's chatty breakfasts, family dinners, a restaurant meal, a cultural event, the inevitable half-day shopping «din' cent' d'achats» [at the malls]. And somewhere in there, an indispensable drive into the Old City – usually alone. My kids have definitely got a “been there, done that” feeling about that piece of the trip by now.

I come up from down below, along Boulevard Champlain (to the south) or Boulevard Charest (to the north), and head up the steep rock face. Or, depending on the traffic and my mood, I come as straight as an arrow down Grande Allée through La Porte Saint-Louis. But the destination is always the same: the statue of Samuel de Champlain on that point of land that juts out boldly into the Fleuve Saint-Laurent, the absolute edge of my world. I park if there's room – if not, I just slow down. I look around the whole square, from La Rue du Trésor to Le Château Frontenac, and out onto the water that points to the «Pont d'l'Île d'Orléans,» and beyond, to the open ocean. I take a deep, deep
breath. And I say a quiet greeting to Samuel. Maybe it's a prayer, but I don't know for sure – and I don't know for whom either, exactly. Just life, really.

I admit that lately my eyes well up more than they used to, doing this. But I only linger briefly, then drive away. My trip to Quebec feels done then and there, every time. Climaxed. I'm incapable of being home, or leaving again, without paying my respects like this. Without having «un p'tit bout d'journée dans l'Vieux» – a part of a day in, among, the Old. That's what's left now. Bits of time. Snapshots of ancient history.

What'll I do from here on in, with my self in mid-restoration – that refinished bucket? I'm not sure. But I've begun filling it with art pencils, the whole glorious range from 4
H
to 4
B
, and I'm contemplating taking it to a drawing class. I still find my favourite subject-objects among my old friends at the treasured borderland between reality and fantasy: baby animals, birds, and bugs of all kinds, especially dragonflies. Creatures like the dear crawler I had for a pet as a toddler that was a story (and a universe) all on its own. I search for them in books, or in the grass near my home. I like trying to sketch their homes, too – trees and flowers of all kinds.

And I've also started my PhD, part-time, to explore the therapeutic potential of language education. How is it possible, psychologically, for this kind of internal rescue to happen? How can you imagine yourself as a survivor, and then become one? It's research as a different kind of art, a different kind of blurring of reality and fantasy. Seems I'm safe at school again.

“Are they all like this, your drawings? So soft and innocent?” a colleague recently asked. I hadn't really thought of them like that before, but perhaps they are. Then again, why shouldn't they be? Psychological theft isn't at all like physical theft. In a fundamental way, I still own everything that was taken from me.

From being bilingual to
bilingual being
. Not just one view or possibility for existence, but many. Not just an identity in translation, but a profound reinvention. Not just enduring, but living.

Bilingual, paint from different language brushes layers specks of many colours upon the canvas of the self. And in the end, it's good enough. «En fin d'compte, c't'assez.»

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I'm a linguist and language teacher who's focused on bilingual education –
ESL
and
FSL
– for over twenty-five years. Language is my passion. Recently, that interest prompted me to interrogate my life as a bilingual Canadian. I was curious about my linguistic and cultural drifting – away from French, towards English – following a decade of sexual abuse as a child. I found myself reflecting on how my education in English created an alternative social space where I made a new life for myself, one so different from that inscribed by my hereditary French setting. Learning a new tongue gave me a new voice as a bilingual being. It's a story centred on Quebec, Canada, French and English, and Catholicism, but I trust it's a story that goes beyond its location to become a tale about the power of language and culture over the self – and the reciprocal power of the self over both. It's because having a choice of tongues translates into having a broader choice of lives. And in that wide expanse of possibility between language worlds, there's the opportunity – the invitation, even – to overcome the past and embody a new identity.

Before closing, I'd like to express my gratitude to York University's Faculty of Education – my new grounding in a shaky world – and specifically, to Lisa Farley, Jen Gilbert, Colette Granger, Alison Griffith, Karen Krasny, Razika Sanaoui, Sandra Schecter, and Belarie Zatzman. Special thanks to Mario DiPaolantonio, my first instructor after a twenty-five-year gap, whose warmth secured my engagement; Heather Lotherington, who first encouraged me to tell this story; Carol
Anne Wien, who nurtured its initial stage; and Karen Hardtke, my therapist at York's
CDS
. And to three outstanding individuals for their support, and for ideas now inseparable from my psyche: Deborah Britzman (the emotional world of education); Alice Pitt (the hide and seek of learning); and Daniel Yon (the messiness of identity). I'm also grateful that decades ago, there was another university where I felt safe and supported: McGill. Here, I thank Myrna Gopnik, Michel Paradis, and Vicki Zack. And my deep appreciation for McGill continues, in particular for Mark Abley, of McGill-Queen's University Press. He graciously reviewed my manuscript and persevered with me for over a year, providing thoughtful critiques and comments that sustained my courage.

I also have intellectual debts to a number of writers whose work changed my life. Ariel Dorfman, author of the first language memoir I ever read, who confirmed my “double life.” Eva Hoffman, for her reflections on life between English and Polish – the best representative of the genre. Sandra G. Kouritzin, for her wrenching study of language attrition. Aneta Pavlenko, who interrogates the connection between language, emotion, and identity. Kathleen Dean Moore, an environmental philosopher who is Beatrix Potter for my adult life. Donald W. Winnicott, a psychoanalyst, for his ideas about false selves, the work of play, and the good-enough mother. The two most esteemed folklorists of Quebec, Jean-Claude Dupont and Luc Lacourcière, who connect me viscerally to my inheritance of the heart. And the inimitable philosospher, Jacques Derrida, my adoptive father «en théorie.»