Bilingual Being (27 page)

On the right-hand side of the frame, there's Gérard Policarpe Dumont and Cécile Marie Blais on their wedding day. My maternal grandmother wears a white shirt with three buttons below the simple neckline, highlighting a tiny chain with a cross. Around her head, there's a ribbon tied with a loose bow – in the Charleston style of the 1920s – and she wears a pair of plain round glasses. My paternal grand-father leans in towards her, but not too much. His hair is stylized and hatless. The look on their faces is serious, worried even.

These frozen moments in the lives of my grandparents on either side of a thin piece of wood, captured on their respective wedding days, perfectly render not just their present but their future along the socioeconomic arc. The first couple spent life at the top of the middle class, while the second spent life in the middle of the lower class. The first
took trips around the country, to the United States and occasionally back to England, as time and busy lives allowed. And while my grandfather worked away from home much of the time, my granny performed her role as an educated homemaker dedicated to raising children and a proper garden, occasionally travelling by bus to the city to the best shops or an occasional restaurant.

The second couple took infrequent day-trips within a two-hundred-mile radius, to aging family members in need of urgent care, or to pick strawberries, apples, blueberries, or «les têtes de violon» [fiddlehead greens] in season. My grand-papa juggled odd jobs that eventually turned into a small business, as my grand-maman managed her home and everyone in it, including the boarders. She baked for local priests and nuns, purchased only a minimum of basic goods from the shops on her block, and considered a restaurant meal a scandalous waste.

Time would wear differently on each one, on each image, as photographs of them taken decades later, in colour, tell well the comparative stories of relative affluence versus manageable hardship. Yet even in the black and white of the original wedding photographs, the contrast couldn't be stronger between my French and English family in terms of money, standing, and promise. And by putting them side by side like this, my grandparents are reduced to their features – noses, eyes, smiles, shirts, hair, skin. I study their faces intently. Where am I? Whom do I most resemble? And how has time worn on my image?

I look at a few of my own frozen moments. They're pictures that mean enough to me to have been culled from the collection at my mother's house, put into recycled frames, and placed on my bookshelf in Toronto just last year. I lived through more than fifty years of denials around the sexual abuse, and all that time I displayed not a single picture of my youth, nor did I even bring any into my home. Erasure: just one of the ways I lost a sense of ownership over memory.

But now that I'm on the other side of that mountain, with truth in hand, it's time to work hard to reclaim my past, to embody it. To consolidate one part of my life and self with another. It's a tall order, but it's one that's helped (painfully so) by tangible reminders. The most powerful of these memorials are three black-and-white Kodak prints, each about three inches square, on the narrow bookshelf by my window. When I look at them now, I remember that this child that was wounded was me, and I affirm that she/I lived after all – that she/I survived.

SON APPAREIL

In the first picture, which I've named “Old World,” I'm two, and the setting is Christmas in the primary neighbourhood of my childhood, the locus of “my troubles.” I'm between two other children, an eightyear-old female cousin and a male cousin who's about six. We've clearly been posed. The piles of presents on our laps are far too heavy for our young bodies. A fake Santa lurks behind me, his right hand pointing at my pile. I'm looking right at the camera, eyes popped wide open. No smile at all. Not even a pout for having to wait to open all of those gifts. Rather, just an abject absence of expression. My female cousin isn't smiling either, appearing sad and distracted, refusing the pile entirely. But my male cousin, happily hoarding, has a broad grin.

We're being recorded inside every paradigm we have here. Small family females marked by trauma – males clean and clear. Aspirations of upward mobility made patent in the volume of gifts abundantly displayed. My mother has explained the background of that image, as she saw it, numerous times: «Nous aut, on ava' des oranges dans nos bas d'Noël. Pis si on ava' un seul cadeau, comme une p'tite poupée p'têt, ou bin un p'tit jouet, bin c'ta' beaucoup.» [Us, we had oranges in our Christmas stockings. And if we had a single gift, like one small doll maybe, or a small toy, it was already a lot (more than we could expect).]

The times are changing for the family during this race to the middle class, and yet not changing much. More money – but the same liabilities. At least the costumed Santa in this photo isn't the costumed Santa that infects my dreams, that to this day causes my confusion (curiosity and repugnance in equal measure) with a particular male body type: visible pores on hands with translucently white skin where tiny orangered hairs erupt, a round and bulging shape of eyeball, a distinctive angle on the nose – a “red-white man,” as I've named it. Here's another problematic confusion of reality and fantasy, joy and chaos, trauma and tricks: Santa as a ruse. But no matter. This time it's my cousin's father – I recognized him then as clearly as I do now – who's relatively harmless.

Unsurprisingly, then, the well-intentioned accumulation of material goods on my lap seems to mean nothing to me. «Bin voyons donc. Pourquoi tu fais pas un beau sourire? Vous êtes jus' gâtés, vous-aut', la nouvelle génération.» [Come on now. Why can't you make a good
smile? You're just spoiled, you kids in the new generation.] Not strictly text from that day, though. My mind is entirely blank about the dialogue within that image. It records only the smells, the affect, the tiny cracks inside my skull, a persistent click, click, click, as if something serious and fragile is breaking.

It's the feeling that happened at the most difficult moments, after which my inner world became absolutely peaceful and my sense of time and space felt bathed in warm water, or released in open flight. The monologue here is admittedly a creative composite of what I heard hundreds of times as I was called to witness the benefit of the bargain – social gain for social silence. Women moving up in the world by accepting the price men charged for passage in that
zeitgeist
. Their trade with the devil.

In the second image, which I've named “Woods,” I'm entirely alone, aged about four, on the grounds of what seems to be some sort of a petting zoo. My chubby arms hold the waist-high log railing of a small enclosure. Behind me, there's a lone log bench. The path I stand on is sandy, about six feet wide, and turns in an obvious circle around the enclosure. Behind the path and bench, along the outer edges, is a forest. My hair is fine and light-coloured, just reaching to my ears, and I'm squinting in the sun.

There's no smile, but my mouth is open, as if I were going to say something. My skirt barely reaches to the bottom of my butt. It's precisely as my mother would explain it in my baby book that same year: «Elle est la plus adorable des petites pitounes.» [She's the most adorable of all the little girls (alternately, «pitounes» means little dolls, little sluts).] Of course, my mother intends her comment well, but the connotative ambiguity speaks far more than I could ever say with my half-opened mouth.

Yet there I am, immortalized as a little girl/doll/slut, with the peace of the open woods behind me. It was a physical refuge I didn't enter that day, but a landscape that would become mine in treasured fantasies, when I let myself happily enter there, or was safely carried. “Dissociation” may be the technical term, but “living in the woods,” which is how I remember it, was so much more beautiful than that clinical hook. So I choose the idea of the woods. I appropriate language, not just English or French, but the vocabulary of “hard science” too. Why shouldn't I?

I don't remember what I thought of the animals in their enclosure as I stood there with my hands on the walls of their pen. There was nothing much to think about, really. It was just the way of life for everything – fences, limits, entrapments, inevitabilities. But where were the crowds that day? Why does it seem as if there's no one but me in this place, on what was obviously a lovely summer day? There's not a single person walking in any direction, and no one at all in the background. It's as if I were a solitary soul on an empty terrain, a cutout pasted onto reality. Perhaps that's close to the truth.

In the third and final image, which I call “New World,” I'm ten. My thin, pale hair is in the «chignon» that in my mother's books was the only allowed hairdo for a girl, aged four to twelve. I'm wearing a tank top – it's summer, after all – and I'm posing in our back yard in the suburbs. The photographer cuts my body at the waist, and since my arms are straight by my side, my hands are gone too. Artistic genius: a perfect correspondence to reality.

For in those days, I was long past my capacity to act on my surroundings, and the purely physical aspect of my troubles had stopped. But those events had left me with a profound disconnect between my head and the lower half of my body that would take a far longer discussion to explain. Yet in my face, the results are clear: I squint for the camera on what looks like a cloudy day, unable to open my eyes for flash photos, as always. My brow shows deep distress, almost pain, the weight of the world. The forced smile could hardly have satisfied anyone. If I ever had a student with this expression in one of my classes, I'd be terribly worried for her, for what might be wrong in her life.

This picture, for all of its ordinariness – the grass behind, the roofline of the neighbour's large brick house, the swing set, the lawn chairs – is more than any other able to provoke my rapid, seamless transit from conscious to unconscious. My waking dreams. One minute, I'm looking at her, wanting to hold her and tell her it's going to be okay. The next, I'm inside her forehead looking at that male photographer, and the roofline of my/her own house. The most powerful sensation in here is the quiet. It's so, so quiet in my/her head at that moment. Complete stillness.

The closest analogy I have is of an airport control tower where only one operator is working and the building is closed to public access. Look around and there are shiny floors, clean machinery, dials and
knobs of all kinds, control panels and monitors. Look ahead and there's a giant window, wide and high, a full wall through which she/I view(s) the world, intellectually detached, functional, efficient. Clearly, the performance self on which I've relied through all of my adult life was comfortably at the helm by then.

I set the three photographs back on my shelf. Take a deep breath. Grab another coffee. Appreciate the grace of age and time. “Don't you wish you could be a kid again?” adults ask each other in typical conversations at work, in stores, everywhere. I never wish that. In fact, I remember clearly as a child wishing so hard to be an adult, to grow up.

I leave the last reflection to language here again – one thought – and it's the expression «son appareil.» That was the customary name for a camera in the patois of my childhood. Literally, the word means “his tool,” or “his device.” The noun was a witness to the Kodak camera being the instrument of choice for the most popular male trade in my culture. Here was my mother tongue, then, providing its own irrefutable evidence of exo-Darwinism – the human embodiment of mechanical extensions. Meanwhile, the blurred line between the two pursuits – kiddie porn and communal record – was dissembled, as always, inside language, in another single word, the masculine posessive adjective, «son.» Gendered for the masculine noun, «appareil,» it became accidentally, but most auspiciously, gendered for its primary user – men.

Women never took photographs in those days, in my world. When I recall the cameras of my childhood, a woman was never behind the lens. The women had their shiny black «cuirette» purses, the men their stiff leather «sacs à caméra.» And the finger on the trigger was always male. So it was that in Quebec, in the 1950s and '60s, world history and the dominance over females continued their mutual course, entwined like barbed wire. An enclosure of an entirely different kind.

UN GRAND POISSON

Somewhere in the life behind that sequence of three photographs, I transitioned through layers or phases of self, a bit like an arthropod. Not at all like a butterfly – the dramatic metamorphosis, huge changes everyone can see. Really more like a snail – same fragile being, slowly growing, finding shelter in progressively larger, sturdier outsides that
looked much like the previous versions. And in that dangerous progression from infancy to adolescence, I guess I shed a few elements of identity along the way. That's the way it is with shells. I left a «Petite Fille» behind and replaced her with a “Little Girl” – so effectively that the latter would, in time, pretty much forget about her first shell and move on with her life.

Only seldom would memories of that early embodiment come to mind as curious interruptions in ordinary days that slipped backwards into no-space as easily as they arrived, caused no visible disruptions whatsoever in the new, perfectly managed exterior. I moved from one language to another as I moved from one state of existence to another. Kept and lost things along the way. Lived and died.

I realize that my psychological revisions – my self-editing, quite literally – greatly complicate the reason why I feel like I don't quite belong in either language. I misunderstand everything, or I understand everything only partially. As a case in point, my parents graciously registered me in a painting class at nights when I showed an interest. The French painting instructor's studio was a short walk away, and I was to be a part of a group of four, the rest francophones. On the first day of class, the instructor asked us to paint «un des grands poissons» [one of the big fish] and went off to do something, who knows what.