Bilingual Being (6 page)

In terms of academics, I was apparently a star pupil from the beginning, perhaps because I'd been playing schoolteacher on a card table in my front yard – literally feet away from my kindergarten desk – for the entire summer. In any event, I was spared the hardship of being a second language learner in school. I was, instead, simply an over-ready four year old with an early love of school. It was an eagerness that my mother, to her demise, initially admired – and that my father, true to
his opinions on books, schooling, and authoritarian systems in general, completely ignored.

I was, after all, the child of a one-parent-one-language mentality, though no one called it that then. The difference was felt in their names: one English, “Daddy,” and one French, «Mamie.» Day-to-day life involved “talking English with Daddy,” and «on parle français a'ec Mamie» [we speak French with Mum]. That was how my brother and I were raised and then sent to school in English, so that we'd spend our entire lives henceforth with me speaking in English to my father and brother (unless my mother was present) but French to my mother – and my brother speaking English to me (unless my mother was present), but French to both of our parents. It was complicated, hanging on my brother having stayed back far longer than me in the 1970s and learning to live in French, to love in French, and to make Quebec his home – while I took to school, then more school, then further schools, anglo partners and husbands they hated, cities too far for a weekend trip, making my life in English and rarely looking back.

But in that summer of 1961, our linguistic trials appeared to be nothing more than the most superficial confusions. We learned, bit by bit, that you had your “head in the clouds” in English instead of «dans' lune» [on the moon]; that you had a “frog in your throat” instead of «un chat dans'gorge» [a cat in your throat]; that “goosebumps” were identical to «d'la chaire de poule» [chicken skin]; that if an idea was any good, it had to be “able to fly” instead of «s't'nir d'bout» [stand still]; that you should treat some people “with kid gloves” in English instead of «des gants d'soie» [silk ones]; or that in English, you needed to completely “clear your head” to relax, whereas in French, you could just «t'changer 'es idées», change the ideas that were in it.

One day we were loading the car for a trip and a francophone neighbour, a girl my age, was helping out. My brother, two years younger than us, found himself with a free hand while our friend carried more than she could manage. This prompted my father to tell him to “give her a hand.” My brother heard the English and translated it into French, his own internal language. The idiom in French, though, is quite literally, «Vas donc y donner un coup d'main.» [Go and give her a hit of the hand.] And so my brother walked right up to our young neighbour and, dutiful son that he was, struck her across the face.

Needless to say, the next hand flying was my father's. And that's how my brother and I both acquired the precious knowledge that a «boubou» [error] can easily turn into a «bobo» [a small hurt in French, yet still just an error in English]. Rather than a good laugh at the expense of our bilingualism, the memory is etched in my mind as a dire warning of the trouble that would lie ahead, as our brains tried hard to do what our hearts could only achieve with difficulty – to be divided within and among ourselves.

MOTHERESE

That «boubou-bobo» confusion was an early symbol – one might even say a symptom – of a major complication in our lives. We just didn't know it yet. Of course, every language has its own special way of addressing children. There's even a name for the language we use to talk to the very youngest: “motherese,” or baby talk. Each tongue has its own ways of cooing, and its usual “first word,” normally the one for “mother,” or baby's approximation of it. That's how the mother tongue starts, with a word for “mother.” And it seems the point where a baby knows his own language, through rhythm and intonation, is as early as a handful of days. So a baby who's barely two weeks old can tell the sound not just of his mother but of his mother tongue.

We can't imagine the questions on a bilingual baby's mind, about the kind of weird world he's been born into. I don't mean anything at all about potential trauma or hardship: I mean an odd universe of sound patterns where wavelengths and amplitudes are a difficult business. A curious sensory space where vocalizations that are so similar to one another – “words” – represent entirely different things. Like «boubou» and «bobo.»

But it can get even trickier than that for a bilingual baby. There's a natural confusion between my two languages, for instance, between «doudou» in French and “doodoo” in English. How can a baby tell them apart? By articulation? Impossible. By tone? Perhaps. By meaning? Of course, he must. In French, this «doudou» is a lovely, soft thing that you sleep with, the transitional object of modern psychology, the special “stuffy” on the bed, the “blankie” you drag around. One «doudou» I personally loved is still in my possession, in a fancy hat
box where I keep my most precious curios. It's a white rabbit about the size of an eggplant, and you'll have to trust me that it's a rabbit because it doesn't look much like one these days. It's a rabbit shape, but that's about it. Along the way, I ate the whiskers – thick, tasty plastic. The tail is falling off, and both eyes are gone. Its dirty feet used to be pink, and one of its filthy pink felt ears is torn away. To top it off, it's almost bald, worn down to the real rabbit skin it was made from. I apparently inhaled the fur right off its body, especially along its back.

It's still with me today because it was special not just to me but to my mother, who sheltered it for forty-five years in plastic shrink-wrap until she shipped it out one day when she was cleaning the basement. That's the way it is with a «doudou.» You hang onto it unless you lose it. You never wash it. It has a busy life because it goes everywhere with you. And it's called a «doudou» in French because, quite plainly, it's «doux-doux» [very soft].

The etymology of the English “doodoo” is something else entirely: it's a childish term for excrement, simple as that. Not something you want to hang onto. Something you do wash off. It's true that it can be soft, but most people don't talk about their bowel movements openly like that. It's something that's highly unlikely to be spoken of as beloved – quite often, just the opposite.

So the bilingual baby hears the same word being used, by one or both parents, to mean either the most precious thing in the world or the mess in the diaper. Freud could not have anticipated his own accuracy any better than this single word dangling between French and English. A psychological bonanza. And the child's polar feelings towards the French «doudou» and away from the English “doodoo”? A psychological yoyo.

Yet another example is the matter of the French «dodo» and the English “dodo.” In French, it's a reference to sleep, made from a simplification of the verb for sleep, «dormir.» Some of the most common expressions in any French-speaking household with children include being enjoined to much-needed sleep, «fait un beau dodo» – and the promise that something will happen after this sleep, «après ton dodo.»

In an English-speaking household (other than the scientific reference to a dodo bird, which surely isn't that common), “dodo” is slang for someone who's intellectually incompetent, forgetful, error prone.
When you'd hear it, you wouldn't be encouraged to do it, or to be it. In other words, in French, you'd want to move towards this word in your affect, while in English, you'd want to move far away from it. Emotions torn in opposite directions once again. Not just a plain word, but a conundrum.

I don't even want to consider the confusion stemming from “doodoo” and “dodo” taken together. Similar enough in sound. Agreed, the vowel sounds are different, but vowels are the most unstable between people and dialects, moving like oil slicks inside an accent. Can a vowel be trusted? What can you make of a childhood where a single
sound
made with lips and tongues not even touching means everything from your favourite toy to feces to sleep to an insult? Of a world where your feelings hang on fine discernments of context and pragmatics? All this when you're barely able to take in the limits of your own body?

Of course, babies get used to sounds quickly through their pre-school years, sort it all out, and become abled in many tongues. But what a curious few years they must spend while they're exposed to conflicting input but can't even formulate a question yet. Was that «doudou» or doodoo? «Dodo» or dodo? A bilingual baby's small, centred world easily becomes a wide, complicated communicative space, a domain of double meanings.

INÉGAL

On a visit home to Quebec in summer 2011, I woke up to find
Le Soleil
, as usual, in my mother's mailbox. It's been delivered to her every day since we moved to this house in 1961, a kind of fifty-year anniversary. My mother likes her routines, prefers the least change necessary. Of course, the paper has been altered considerably over the years. Like most dailies, it used to be on huge paper, but now it's the size of a tabloid – much like the
Toronto Star
has shrunk. It's one of the common points in recent cultural history, perhaps one of the few, this superficial commonality in the appearance of the most influential language dailies.

Yet the covers are entirely dissimilar. While the
Toronto Star
has a mix of international and national news, a veritable collage of images and headlines on a dozen stories or more,
Le Soleil
typically has one huge colour photograph with a single, overpowering headline, along with a
handful of sub-headlines pertaining only to local or provincial issues. A different audience, with different needs and interests, is assumed and served. Inside the writing of the two “official” languages, then, it seems that there are variant unwritten codes about values, concerns, and ideologies. You can't walk between the two languages, or even meander inside them, without noticing. Trouble is, once you know that – once you have a kind of objectivity about each linguistic community, a bit of distance, and your own perspective – you'll have acquired, well, distance.

I never read
Le Soleil
as a child. It seemed it was crucial not to disturb the perfect alignment of the pages for its adult readers. So I approached it that morning as I do all things before my first morning coffee – lightly, without much commitment, as I might glance into the refrigerator for breakfast ideas. The massive headline read “Ben Harper inégal.” It was a reference to a concert that was part of the annual «Festival d'été» the previous night, the one I missed as we were just driving into town.

My brain had not quite adjusted to the surroundings, I guess, so I read it in French and filtered it into English. I worked with the words as they wormed their way through my second language, the conduit of my cognition. As a result, I concluded that the performer's show was “unequalled,” in short, amazing. I'd never heard of him before, but it sounded like it would have been well worth the crowds. “Too bad,” I said to my kids, “we should have tried to get here a bit earlier. We could have caught the show.”

I flipped a few more pages. In Ontario, the “Will and Kate” visit to Canada had been ridiculously big news for days, consuming the print and television media. But not here. Here, there was a small photo with a three-line caption buried inside the paper – maybe a tenth of a page in all – of the newlyweds at the Calgary Stampede, and no story whatsoever. It seemed the royal visit did not register on the public radar. There was a complete absence of information about what was billed in Ontario as the most significant national current event.

It spoke volumes about the gap between the perception of the world in my mother's kitchen in Ste-Foy at that moment and in my own kitchen in Toronto less than twenty-four hours before. Somewhere around Cornwall, it seems, between the “Ontario Welcomes You” and
the “Bienvenue à Québec” signs, something unseen snaps in the public consciousness – on or off, depending on your viewpoint, depending on the issue. The provincial border isn't just the halfway point between Toronto and Quebec City. It's a sociological fulcrum, a powerful pivot. Something changes dramatically. Something is different here. Or something is different there. Take your pick.

I flipped a few more pages and eventually found my way to the story about the concert, a full page. That's when I realized my colossal error, my embarrassing lack of comprehension. I'd seen the right word but that bilingual engine of input and output had let me down, again. The word “inégal” technically
does
mean “unequal.” But it turned out that the show had been “unequal” as in “uneven.” It was a sense I hadn't thought of. The exact translation had popped up first in my head, like a dictionary entry, secondary meanings further down the list, perhaps after my second cup of coffee.

So having been home for less than twelve hours, and on reading my first word in French on this trip (other than road signs), I was reminded of the crux of my problem: I think in English. I hear or read my first language and process it through my second language first. Does that even make sense? My languages become like one of those reversible figures where it's so easy to ignore one image, to get completely stuck on one view and miss the other. To see the profile and miss the chalice. And if I can make that much of an error with one word, what harm might I do to a whole sentence? A whole conversation? A whole culture?

It was meagre comfort that I could still read the
Toronto Star
online every day from here. I didn't. I'd come face to face with the hard evidence that I was
not
a good audience for words that reached me in my own tongue. It wasn't just that I'd lost my voice in French because of my curious life trajectory, compromised my capacity to produce in my mother tongue. I'd also lost my eyes and my ears, my capacity to comprehend, to receive information accurately. Never mind that I could still translate easily back and forth: I wasn't engaging real meanings. I was at a communicative impasse of my own creation. How had I got here?