Bilingual Being (22 page)

With only that single paradigm of identity available, the technical discourse of illness – in another piercing irony – became an inadvertent, malicious second tongue. Bilingual, there was a doorway. Bilingual, there was a means to get away in thought and life. Respite and resilience. No more need to be reminded, confused, shamed, worn down with every word and sign. Our horizons of meaning were wide open.

Tragically, I think back to social gatherings where more than one of us girls of the clan were present, and how we shared (and yet did not share) our hideous truth – a common horror we kept unspoken, mutely
trading an odd feeling of something sad, something missing, something wrong. Surely we each could have used a real friend to supplement our kindly imaginary ones. This is the single thought by which I'm brought to the limits of my ability to control my sorrow and my anger. And now to think – though we couldn't know it – that
semiotics
were the antidote, the cure.

But we hadn't discovered it then. We knew only what we knew, and we spoke only what we spoke – small, shy girls, charming for our silence and polite compliance. It's as if we mingled in French at those countless events without any hint that while we'd all been exposed to the same disease – acute sexual deviance – only some of us had been, quite accidentally, innoculated. Sent to English school by our ancestrally French mothers, divergently acculturated. And that the mere administration of an alternative language education would cast us in completely variant lives on either side of a deep, dark linguistic border. Monolinguals on one side, as psychologically more vulnerable, deeply encultured locals. And bilinguals on the other side, as psychologically more immune, sufficiently de-cultured exiles. As much as we were crafted “in the rough” by others then, it seems our fates were really in the hands of our tongues.

BODY COUNT

In a recent phone call, my mother shared her belief that while sexual abuse was my trauma, hers was English itself because of how she felt «d'm'êt' marié dans c't'a famille-là» [to have married into that family], and because it introduced such a schism between her and me. «On en a perdu bin des bouts» [We've lost many threads], as she puts it. There's irony in her analysis of which family was the most dangerous one to marry into. Then again, we're all too familiar with the idioms of hindsight.

The truth is, though, that language and trauma are often uttered in the same sentence these days when she and I talk: «C'pas moé qu'y a choisi d'aller à l'école en anglais, t'sais? C'est toé qui m'a mis là.» [I'm not the one who chose to go to English school, you know. You put me there.] I make myself sound innocent of the charge of cultural abandonment, and of my self-inflicted cultural attrition. But I did plenty to
push myself along and away. I appropriated and used my agency to cut the hold of language through culture, and vice versa. And when I did, I predictably experienced the grief and disorientation that accompanies mother tongue losses: I became hooked on school, hid my successes in my new tongue, packed away memories bit by bit. I slowly shifted my values and worldviews, distanced myself progressively, and eventually acquired outsider status. I othered myself.

It's worth taking a minute to see how the body count in this linguistic battle played out over the years. Following my matrilineal line through three generations, there were five siblings (four females, one male), all of whom married francophones except for my mother, who married my bilingual father. Between them they had fourteen children. And while some of my cousins have moved around because of employment, all but two (myself and one other) speak French at home with their own families, wherever they live. On this side, I believe there are twenty-three living grandchildren at present: fifteen francophones, six bilinguals, and two anglophones. Following my patrilineal line through the same period, there were five siblings (five males), three of whom married anglophones, and two (my father and one other) who married francophones. Between them, they had thirteen children. Eight live out of province and speak English at home, while five have stayed and speak French with their own families. On this side, I believe there are twenty-two living grandchildren at present: four francophones, two bilinguals, and sixteen anglophones.

A total of forty-five young people have issued from the times I'm describing – the tossing winds of English and French in Quebec in the 1950s and 1960s – and the final numbers show them almost equally divided as a collective linguistic outcome, a linguistic estate: nineteen francophones to eighteen anglophones – with eight straddling the bilingual border, cultural emissaries within the family about what goes on here and there, with one or the other, translating not just messages but worldviews.

Of course, I can't tell you that my family is definitively representative. This is not a controlled experiment yielding valid, reliable, repeatable quantitative data. In fact, this life of ours has been a completely uncontrolled experiment. But I can't think of why we wouldn't be at least somewhat typical of the larger whole. The forces that pushed and
pulled us, from within and without, in those decades of the triumphant merger of church, language, and society, affected the entire population of Quebec.

In other words, I don't think I'm special in the least, and my trauma is neither exceptional nor unique. It doesn't define or distinguish me in any disproportionate way. Furthermore, my extended family in itself has nothing to differentiate it socio-economically, politically, or intellectually from any other. We were (and are) an ordinary clan at an ordinary point in history, and what happened to the lot of us was, in fact, quite “normal” too. The human race is actually not racing at all. Rather, it's walking, meandering its way on a winding path between pathology and normalcy, crime and mercy, bad and good.

What I
am
stating is that this is how it turned out for us in the end. After all that cultural carnage, the tug of war between tongues and lifeways, the whirlwind of swords working their way into fragile bits of flesh, and the countless toxic secrets passed through the battle lines, this is how English and French ended up: dead even.

__________

*
A reference to the fact that the residents of the province of Quebec hold a variety of opinions about whether the province should separate politically from the rest of Canada.

*
The Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec, located at the northwest end of the Plains of Abraham.

Thankful

If I understand the research correctly,

I should be thankful for the fact that

no one who laid a hand or body part

upon me was particularly sadistic:

the prognosis for that is far poorer.

I should also be indebted that another

language, English, offered its variant

spaces, faces, words, views and loves –

opened up schemas and attachments by

which there was respite and possibility.

And I should be thankful I can hold on

to a sense of self even when I am apart,

away, depersonalized – and that I grew up

among some spiritual women from whom

I learned a flexible perception of reality.

I am.

12

BECOMING OTHER

MY LITTLE PROJECT

Eerily, perhaps, I remember my first formal step on the linguistic battlefield, my first gesture in the process of “self-othering,” as a deliberate and conscious act. One morning, almost fifty years ago, I woke up feeling a horribly familiar bodily and spiritual disorientation. I looked in the mirror and was conscious of saying to myself that day, “That's okay. I'll just learn this other language and be better at it than anyone.” And from that day forward, at age five, I came home every night from my English Catholic school with a plan to which I adhered religiously, devotedly. I first changed out of my school uniform into a house dress, pants not allowed. Then, while my mother was busy cooking dinner, I snuck over to the linen closet to remove the precious object that my mother kept there, hidden between the towels. I had to be quick and quiet. My mother knew the sound of the closet, and she'd call me to help out in the kitchen if she heard it.

The treasure was an English dictionary, sort of flesh-coloured with two green-gold horizontal pin stripes on the cover – Gage, I think. I'd be in graduate school studying bilingualism before I'd understand the sheer symbolism of my mother, francophone to her core, hiding the English dictionary, resisting in small ways the anglicization of her children. Back then, I knew nothing of domestic, political, or linguistic incongruities, only of those weird mornings: the physical sensation,
sore throats, nightmares, and fogginess of a morning-after feeling. It was something unnamed that propelled me into English. I knew only my own promise to myself to “learn five new words each day.” That's how I inadvertently became the perfect example, for my own particular reasons, of the key role that personality, attitude, values, and motivation play in learning language. It makes all the difference in the world if you assign it a chance for a variant identity, one that taps into entirely new opportunities.

I began on page 1, and like a marathon runner determined to cross the country, I did not miss a day until I reached the end of the word list, some two years later, perhaps. I grabbed the book ever so quietly and went into my room, leaning gently against my door but not closing it completely – too noisy. Sometimes, I even took the book into the washroom. I read each word thoroughly, and I read the definitions carefully. I covered the words and ran the spelling through my head. I tried tricks to remember the order of the letters and made an effort to think of what other words I'd learned that each one reminded me of.

Then, as quietly as I'd brought it out, I returned it to the laundry closet, placing it perfectly between the towels. Alignment is everything if you don't want to be found out. I closed the door silently, waiting for a moment when pots and pans were clanging, cloaking my evil-doings. And as I stirred soup and set the table a few minutes later, I went over the words in my mind.

Of course, as we prepared supper together, my mother wanted to talk about my day and hers, like mothers and daughters around the world. But in her asking these questions, I felt pestered, hounded, invaded. I was straining so hard to remember the words, reviewing them over and over in my head, and she was interrupting the thinking process with her French «bavardage» [chatting]. I tried to lose her conversations, answered her abruptly, vaguely.

Our separateness grew, as did her sadness. But I didn't care much, my English mindset at the helm, because all I could think of was that there was no point in gaining five words and losing five. It was already a difficult job to master this language, and I had words to learn and places to go. She'd just have to be ignored for the “greater good,” as I saw it. Thus I became fluent in English but increasingly absent in French.

I'm not a political person, or at least I don't think I am. But can someone ever be bilingual and bicultural without becoming a political being – composite, polarized, like this? And have I, in fact, lived a quite political life “incidentally,” as my granny was so fond of saying?

A “REAL” QUEBECER

Almost fifty years forward from that project, I was thinking in French again for part of the day. For more than thirty of those years, I'd been hundreds or thousands of miles away, living in the shadows about my heritage. I passed myself off as being loosely from points east and didn't come out of the closet about my heritage for decades at a time. I hid being French.

I put up with distortions of my family name in virtually every community I lived in – seldom thought of it as anything at all, just took it for granted. I spent years being called Mrs Sponge or Mrs Stong, occasionally Mrs Sennon. I feel for immigrants who have trouble recognizing their own names in the mouths of others. With this much trouble with a French name, I can only imagine the distortions that would afflict beautiful names in Russian, Thai, Chinese, Korean, Urdu, and in the thousands of languages on the Canadian landscape today. How easy it is to stop being, or feeling, or sounding like the “real you” when you step away from your native soil.

I made a bold move a few years ago and decided to return to the ancestral spelling of my family name, Saint-Onge. To work against the tide of diminutives. To resist the alien's obligation to accommodate. The pronunciation improved with all of the letters present and accounted for. Maybe names in other languages would also have a better chance left as is. We'd get used to it eventually, especially here in Toronto, where there's more cultural diversity on a city block than in entire towns west or east of here.

My ability to teach French, and my identity in my mother tongue, have become a commodity in the current social and economic climate. French language instruction is becoming the favoured option of newcomers where I now live. It shouldn't surprise anyone: most children from overseas are already bilingual or trilingual, for there are few
countries in the world with a monolithic tongue. So parents reach an uncomplicated conclusion. What's one more language? Better options for the future.

Immigrant families typically approach French without any of the political baggage around official bilingualism that prevails in the national discourse – only enthusiasm and determination. In turn, young allophones – who speak neither French nor English at home – become some of the most successful students. Why not? By the time they reach school age, they already have metalinguistic skills to rival the most dedicated adult learners, and not a speck of embarrassment about taking risks in the new tongue. It's dazzling to witness. And their zeal is precisely how French has become my “golden ticket” in Ontario, opening doors and opportunities by which I've been able to support my three children.