Bilingual Being (17 page)

Ironically, I was personally quite pleased with myself through these relationship journeys. I thought I was unethnocentric, multiculturally inclined, religiously open-minded, all-embracing, genuinely interested in learning from the Other – a real Renaissance Woman, in the modern sense of the word anyhow. Perhaps. But what if, instead, I was only performing my own spoiled identity, my body bound in replays of faint, familiar echoes along a predictable arc – an inadvertent Repetition Woman? No matter. It was the adventure of a lifetime, and I wouldn't have missed it (even if I could have) for the world. And that's why I don't put much stock in apologies at this point – or in apologetics.

My parents' own union, however, began with considerable more planning and organization. They imposed on themselves methodical precautions and delays that prevented the sort of impetuousness driven by instinct that was the hallmark of my own existence. They were engaged for two years, just to be extra safe about who knows what – as if the inherent risks, despite the obvious benefits, remained palpable. Marriage followed, and a life that would cast my brother and me into the dual role, the dual life between languages and cultures that is experienced by so many children around the globe.

Purple

In this house,

this childhood,

I am allowed one colour

for my own: pink.

Not even yellow or green.

«El rose, ça c't'une bonne couleur

pour une p'tite fille.»
*

I dream of blue things.

Blue – the colour of the sky,

the sea, the whales, me.

I have a dream some day,

to make blue my own –

wear a blue skirt or sweater,

or maybe even a blue coat.

But then a small boy

is born, Bébé,

and blue is given to him

by inheritance:

«Bin voyons-donc.

Lui, c't'un p'tit garçon,

pis l'bleu c'est pour les gars.»
†

It will take me thirteen years

to secure my dreams.

Wearing blue jeans as an

act of defiance that gets me

grounded for three weeks.

Blue tie-dyes, my new uniform.

Hippie girl.

From blue to gray,

to black and only black,

moving forward: twenty, thirty, forty, fifty.

I was in mourning.

Seems my choice of colours

was a momentous clue

I did not read.

Then out popped purple

as the colour of recovery

health, remembrance –

the work of therapy.

A holy colour of Catholicism?

A compromise of blue and pink?

Not at all.

A best friend's mother

from South Africa

taught us how to play

“Purple People Eaters”

one summer day –

dressed up, chased us,

made gobbling sounds.

She showed us how to run

from insipid monsters

that changed shape

and ate small children.

It was “Hide and Seek”

with a really twisted edge –

incredibly instructive.

It did not matter

logically, grammatically,

if the predators were purple

(I knew they were),

or the prey were purple

(blue-pink children) –

because both were true.

Like “Ring around the Rosies,”

it was laughter chasing death.

I took her as my prophet,

took purple as my emblem.

Not sweet pastels, but bold,

brave colour that dominates,

devours its components.

__________

*
Colloquialism for “Pink, now that's a proper colour for a little girl.”

†
Colloquialism for “Come on now, he's a little boy, and blue is for boys/men.”

9

MY BROTHER: MY FLIP SIDE

BECOMING DIFFERENT

Only two years my junior, my brother has brown eyes whereas mine are blue, and brown hair in adulthood whereas mine is muted blond. He has light brown skin where mine has always been freckly white. By his teens, he was already tall and gaunt, taking after my grand-maman and maternal aunts, many over six feet tall, while I was a child of average height, with the slight plumpness of the females of the anglo clan. My brother was and is «un vrai bon gars» [a really good guy] who settled only a few miles from my parents, attended Laval, partnered with a French girl, and lives in French. He spent his youth hunting, fishing, dancing, drinking, and basically performing all of the expectations of our mother tongue culture to perfection. Even as children, we were different by our choices, he and I, and we became only more different because of them.

Most of his out-of-school friends around the neighbourhood were monolingual francophones, including his best friend, a boy whose family were militant «péquistes.» Meanwhile, mine were mostly bilingual anglophones, including my best friend, a boy whose dad was Scottish and whose mum was Aboriginal. As my brother became older, his girlfriends and lovers were virtually all local French girls, while mine were anglophones from a range of subcultures and cities.

My brother has, like my mother, kept the same friends all of his life, maintaining them like a precious garden, still calling people he met
in Grade 4 to have a beer or congratulate them on a new baby. I have a crash-and-burn approach to friends, the love-them-and-leave-them pragmatics of a born traveller, leaving behind in far-off cities people whom I loved and miss but feel distant from now. And it's the same with homes. He's spent the last decade renovating a two-hundred-year-old home, windowsill by windowsill, careful to attend to the most minute details of the period. I've lived in rental property after rental property, a few times purchasing a home just to flip it for profit a couple of years later, finding the newest ones I can, with the least mold and dust, the least history.

He learned to make my mother's favourite Christmas sugar cookies and her famous cornflake pie, because they're the taste of home. I learned how to make spanikopita so that it's not too greasy, and to cook with spices and recipe books from places far from home. I performed in ballet recitals for a decade while he learned how to make a dovetail joint and use a soldering iron. He was sent to survival camps in New Brunswick to hunt, fish, and swim, while I was sent to religious camps on l'Île d'Orleans to learn small May Day marches and how to glue pretty patterned tiles onto clay plates. As we grew older, he listened to French music, mostly rock and disco in French nightclubs, while I listened to English music, mostly folk and blues in pubs. He formed his political opinions from the
Soleil, La Presse
, and
Le Devoir
, but mine came through the
Montreal Gazette
, the
Globe and Mail
, and the
Toronto Star
.

He mastered the best way to cut through provincial bureaucracy to get a permit to build a porch or an addition – quite a feat in Quebec – while I learned how to say hello in languages he's never heard, and how to time a trip across Canada to avoid traffic and boredom. He became an expert on which wines go with each kind of food, a topic I can't understand. And I learned to love mango shakes and bubble tea, drinks he's never tried. He's been settled for thirty years with a woman who speaks almost no English, and I've been unsettled forever, marrying men who spoke little or no French. Dinners over the holidays still can't be managed without a whole lot of gestures. A sense of humour is essential to make the talk go round when there's such a wide expanse to be covered.

EL LIÈV' PIS L'ARGILE

We've become, my brother and I, the flip sides of a bilingual coin. We both speak both languages, but in writing, his French is stronger than his English, while the reverse is true for me. We both started at the same English Catholic elementary school and attended it for a similar length of time. He transferred after Grade 3 when they stopped accepting boys, and I transferred after Grade 6 when the sisters went bankrupt and headed back to «les États,» never to be heard from again. From there we both went to the same English public school, the same English high school, and the same English CÉGEP (a two-year college prior to university).

My father showed my brother, in English, how to shoot a gun and clean an engine; and my mother showed me, in French, how to bake bread and sculpt «l'argile» [clay]. My father showed me, in English, how to collect stamps and clean a fish; my mother showed my brother, in French, how to skin «un lièv'» [a hare] and make «des crêpes» [very thin, traditional pancakes]. Same parents, same metal. Same educational system, same furnace in which to temper the substance of our selves. Same one-parent, one-language philosophy working on us both. And yet, such contrasting constructions of the self emerged.

My brother is «un francophone» both culturally and functionally – while I am functionally and culturally an anglophone. What else but agency – however motivated, engendered, or achieved – can explain the difference? For my brother absolutely draws from his francophone roots more than his English roots, in his choice of foods, entertainment, and friends, while I draw far more from my anglophone roots. And in a strange juxtaposition of identities, he works full-time appraising homes and part-time as a teacher, while I work full-time as a teacher and parttime unofficially appraising homes, relocating twenty-seven times since I left my mother's house.

We also have a distribution of traits in opposite proportions. He has a very French look to my rather English look. But he has an inherently anglo-scientific, rational approach to life and business, compared to my inherently franco-spiritual, holistic views. Add to that the fact that my French-dominant brother has an English uncle for «son parrain» [his
godfather], but English-dominant me had my French grand-maman for «ma marraine» [my godmother]. We're a mash-up of genres, but a balanced mix as a whole. Neither language, neither culture winning or losing between us – if we're taken together rather than alone.

Trouble is, we're rarely taken together. We've lived in separate cities since 1976, and I can count on a single hand the times we've had real conversations – not those impersonal greetings over enormous dinners on visits home. Both over fifty now, we only recently shared a few secrets about our lives. They were precious moments on a front porch when a lightning storm stopped the flow of an ordinary day, and we both took refuge for an unforgettable hour. Our fleeting symbiosis was stolen from divergent agendas that grew more incompatible with every mile and year of distance. The devastating blame, worn unevenly: mine alone.

For while he stood still, within a stone's throw of where I last left him, I became a moving target across the Canadian landscape. This isn't my narcissistic distortion about controlling family outcomes through my intentions, or some grandiose delusion about being the vortex of responsibility. I didn't leave home, or him, as part of a master plan to accomplish magnificent things. I left home as part of a haphazard series of coincidences, part of a non-plan to attempt only one thing: to survive.

It was the pattern of escape I'd dreamt about back in those dark days when predators were choosy about their prey, and also why my younger brother – merely tagged as «Bébé» in my buried memories – is remembered as always being out of sight, out of range, unavailable, absent. It's no small blessing that he was spared because pedophiles manifest preferences for particular bits of flesh. That in this case, we weren't taken together.

That's the only comfort I derive these days from the fact that my memories of his earliest childhood are so few. But it's no big wonder, either. Because for years, inner voices beckoned me to
run!
– when all I could really do was
hide!
(or, rather, at least imagine satisfying scenarios where I did). And when I got older, I just managed to listen better, to act out those directives concretely, at last: to flee to nowhere.

That's how my brother and I ended up on opposite sides of the wide gulf that characterizes our relationship and strains our efforts, to this day, to recover what we've lost: our potential, our possibilities, and our time as a pair of siblings in a difficult world. It's as if we stood on
opposite shores of a small river when a set of earthquakes began and left us, each time, with a bit too far of a distance to undertake with our immature bodies. Until, years later, we found that we were standing on opposite shores of far-distant continents.

We aren't a tidy coin where two sides are held in balance by a perfect theory. Rather, we're an entirely unbalanced set of wings on the flip sides of a tired bird, strained symmetry that would shame an albatross. And so the challenge, the near impossibility, of crossing back.

TWO CAKES IN A BOX

Yet the difference between my own and my brother's life shows how the language divide can also be thin indeed. It's like one of those crazy scenes in a movie where a national border runs through a person's living room. For here we stand, well into our adult lives, barely two years apart at birth but with cosmic lifetimes between us. We actually just began an effort recently to try to email each other more often – and to remember, at least, each other's children's birthdays. We're like a couple of recovering amnesiacs getting to know each other for the first time after decades – “Really, you did that then? Seriously? I had no idea!” We inadvertently spent more than forty years forgetting each other, after all, and going completely separate ways. We barely recognize one another.

I believe the last joint undertaking he and I ever had was in 1966, when we were seven and nine. We'd convinced our parents that it wasn't fair to have Mother's Day and Father's Day, but no Children's Day. They responded with the usual counter-argument at first, saying that “every day is children's day.” But we pushed the issue, I guess, and they conceded, for just one year, to designate a Sunday between the other two dates as just that.