Bilingual Being (4 page)

A QUIET REVOLUTION

«On s'comprend pas, ma fille» [We don't understand each other, my daughter], my mother states so clearly, so perfectly, early last year on one of my visits home. «T'as raison, on s'comprend pas. Mais on peut essayer,» I say. [You're right, we don't understand each other. But we can try.] «Eh oui,» she sighs, the difficult possibility of understanding one another suddenly laid out before us like the gulch that it is – that it's always been.

There is, in fact, compelling evidence that French was the first language to my ears – and my heart still reverberates with French children's
songs like «Alouette» and «Frère Jacques.» My mother is a hereditary francophone whose family has lived in Quebec without exceptions or departures for four centuries, and who speaks English with a heavy «haccent.» She once gave her neighbour, a white South African who was the only anglophone friend she'd ever have, a birthday card that said, “May the bluebird of happiness crap all over your birthday cake.” She bought it because the bird was pretty and she assumed “crap” was a synonym for “swoon.”

Her innocence was genuine. And the more excited she became, the worse her English got, conversations sprinkled with asides – «Ah, comment qu'on dit ça?» [Darn, how do you say that?] These questions were purely rhetorical, and they'd inevitably bring their own responses in minor excuses, “Ah, you know me an-my-Hanglish.” More canapés, a bit of champagne, no problem.

Meanwhile, I became an academic, counting four university degrees and still enrolled – a teacher who earned her living with «les étrangers» [strangers, foreigners] in
ESL
for fifteen years and made friends inside cultures my mother looks upon with grave suspicion. I then drifted further into the realm of the Other, learning about Islam and wearing a hijab for seven years. I felt at peace with the desexualized self in the mirror in those years. Comfortable fading into incomprehensible tongues, a barrier of silence. Not only that, but at prayer times I was oddly reminded of the haunting rhythms of the equally incomprehensible ecclesiastical Latin mass of my youth.

Besides, the hijab made my life so much easier. I finally had the visible difference that had been screaming inside me for decades, submerged and invisible. A marker that could be discussed – instead of one that wasn't admitted. And when people didn't like me, I could console myself easily: they were simply being racist. Not like being rejected without a hijab. That was pure, stabbing pain, confirmation that I was unwelcome in someone's heart. A reminder I wasn't good enough – dirty and damaged. I couldn't even blame them, because I was sure that if anyone ever knew my secret, they wouldn't want to have anything to do with me. In hijab, I was humanely identified and disguised all at once. A handy solution. Without it, I had to behave so impeccably, make sure I was entirely above criticism and irreproachable, just to avoid rejection. With it, I could at least relax a bit.

I started wearing the hijab right after 9/11. Back then, I was just another disaffected Catholic, spiritually drifting. Under this banner I'd married a moderate Muslim some months before. I had a general interest in faith anyhow, so I took to reading and finding out more from him and his friends who lived nearby, and from their wives and children.
*
At the same time, I was teaching night school English in Toronto, to groups where at least two or three students in every class were in hijab. I remember sitting at home on September 11th, 2001, watching the horrible tragedy unfold on television. Riveted like millions of viewers, I recall one single feeling piercing my being – that the world had suddenly become much more dangerous. Not just for those poor victims and for North Americans in general, but for all those women I knew in hijab who'd be blamed in reactive racism.

Wouldn't it make a great act of feminist solidarity, I thought, if all kinds of women put on scarves? That way, Muslim females would be safer in anonymity. As soon as I had the idea, it seemed hypocritical not to act on it. After all, I was already on a cultural bridge myself. So I bought one and put it on during the weekends for a couple of months. It was uncomfortable at first, but it grew on me. And by Ramadan that year, I wasn't just wearing it full time, even at work, but I began fasting too. Exalted anorexia – another a good fit with the pre-existing, troubled self. Religion as pure emotion, as raw sensation.

Over the years to come, I'd be ignored at shop counters while people addressed my husband (who
was
a language learner), assuming I spoke little or no English. I'd be yelled at through the open windows of passing cars and spoken about derisively in English or French in bank lineups. As I entered a grocery store after work one day, someone exiting accidentally triggered the theft alarm. “Shoot her!” a man in the produce section yelled, pointing at me. “She's a terrorist!” Fortunately, everyone ignored him.

I was in hijab in the summer of 2004 when I visited a new museum in Place Royale honouring the Saintonge region and the Sieur de
Champlain de Saintonge, who built the first settlement in New France and the first Catholic church on the continent. I kept silent about my name that day, paradoxes crashing, but months later I told my Grade 7 students in Toronto about the exhibit. A student asked me, “Was Champlain a Muslim too?”

«On voit p'us tes beaux ch'feux» [We don't see your pretty hair anymore], my mother said, grieving inside and out in those years. My scarf made it impossible for her to give me the highest compliment she ever gave any female: «A'est-tu belle un peu, mon Dieu!» [Isn't she beautiful, my God!] It seems my valuation had become immeasurable, been lost. The span grew. Few relatives came onto my horizon through it all, and my mother kept «c't'affaire-là» [that business] underground as mounting evidence that I was not only estranged but strange. Yet symbolic of my origins again, I'd conducted my own «Révolution tranquille» [Quiet Revolution],
*
effectively removing myself from the purview of the Roman Catholic Church and using English to enter another faith. I was engaging in what was viewed at the family and community level as a grave act of cultural heresy.

So we remain, French mother and English daughter, with a void of misapprehension between us. Such is the life we've co-created. «C'pas d'ma faute si j'ta' n'bonne élève pis j'ai bin appris l'anglais. J'aime bin l'école, t'sais,» I tell her in my own defence. [It's not my fault that I was such a good student and I learned English well. I love school, you know.] «Eh oui,» she whispers, her voice breaking.

And so it was, and is. The damage done, fifty years lived. Two women at a kitchen table, both past their prime, and it's nearly midnight now. The moment lingers. Silence again. A life spent in linguistic tension. A love spent in psychological tension. One history erasing another. Talk about trouble – «En veux-tu, en v'là,» as they say. [You want some? Here's some.] Traumas too thickly knotted to separate – or to solve.

__________

*
The “Great Darkness” was the complex postwar period from 1945 to 1959 marked by social upheavals and also by the illegal confinement to mental institutions of countless orphans who are known in the collective memory as «Les orphelins de Duplessis» (Duplessis's Orphans), after the reigning premier. The children endured physical and sexual abuse at the hands of religious administrators and other staff.

*
The Parti Québecois: a political party in Quebec advocating separation from Canada and the revisioning of Quebec as a nation with a distinct society. Supporters are commonly referred to as «péquistes.» The 1995 referendum was to decide whether or not Quebec should officially separate from Canada to form a distinct nation.

*
Le Charte des droits et libertés de la personne was passed in 1975 and came into effect in 1976.

†
The patois known as Saintongeais is referenced widely online and in print as originating in northwestern France in regions formerly known as Saintonge, Aunis, and Angoumois – and as being the tongue that has fundamentally shaped the current dialect of Quebec, while also influencing both Cajun and Acadian.

*
In the years that followed, I'd contribute articles and editorial support to a small Turkish-American publisher, and I even wrote a book,
Bridge to Light
(The Light, 2006), about Islam in an interfaith context.

*
A period that began with the death of Maurice Duplessis in 1959 and continued throughout the 1960s, wherein Quebec society shifted towards secularization, most notably with the provincial government taking control of health and education away from the French Roman Catholic Church.

Landslide

Between the erosion of my faith

and a few males' «dégorgement,»
*

I lost my foothold in my culture –

suffered a quick slip of the tongue

and fell hard into English.

But it was a good-enough landing,

so I was able to steady my feet,

head off in a different direction,

and reinvent myself as someone

born on solid ground.

__________

*
First, to release water under pressure (such as that held back by a dam); second, in making wine, the process of removing the cork to let out the air pressure; third, to remove the water from a fruit or vegetable.

2

UN BOUBOU

FLY FISHING

The year is 1967 and I'm almost ten. I'm on a lake in a rowboat with my parents. My brother is in another boat accompanying some family guests this weekend because, even though he's not quite eight, he's good at this stuff. I'm the one you have to take along because everyone will be out all day, after all, and there are bears around, you never know. Near my feet there's a cooler with a couple of Molson or O'Keefe beers for my father, some egg or tomato sandwiches with the crusts cut off, some celery and carrot sticks in Saran Wrap, a store package of chocolate cookies, a Coke for my mother, and a 7-Up for me. Next to it, an old cane fish basket with leather straps my father's owned since his youth, and a short-armed green fish net with a tear near the metal rim.

My parents are both proud of the fact that they're fly fishers, not trollers «comme 'es touristes pis 'es américains.» My father stands at the stern, casting his fly line way, way off. Tall and thin with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth, he's an oversized boy right out of a Norman Rockwell painting. He's got a timeless look on his face, and sometimes I wonder what he's looking at, what he's thinking. But I'm shut out already – his choice or mine. Hard to say by then. Once in a while, he shoos away a mosquito with his other hand or pees over the edge. Mostly, he just stares, neither smiling nor serious. This is happiness for him, I can tell. Being far away – gone.

My mother is seated in the middle of the boat, casting in the opposite direction. They have to coordinate quite a lot and watch the wind if they cast at the same time so the lines won't get tangled. If they do, my father's fury is unleashed with the most menacing surprise. But my mother's very good at this sport – an award-winner among their friends for being able to land a fly inside a target – and she knows my father better than anyone. Besides, she's learned from the lessons of her heritage to negotiate the difficulties of men and survive on her own terms. So most of the afternoon is pleasant enough. Of course, unlike my father, who wears a sensible checkered shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a fishing vest pricked with lures, my mother is topless. «Pourquoi pas?» she says. «El Bon Dieu a d'ja vu toute ça.» [God's already seen it all.] No doubt her breasts do much to prevent my father's fury, to tame him like a savage baby. But like I said, she's an expert, much better at this game than I'll ever be.

Unlike my father, my mother's hardly silent as she chit-chats with the fish, calling them silly or handsome, luring them with her promises, «Viens-t'en, gard' donc si c'-tu une belle mouche, ça!» [Come on, look at what a beautiful fly this is!] It is, like all things for her, an opportunity for festiveness. And she thinks nothing of the mosquitoes that land on her. «Y m'ont tellement piqué d'ja qu'ej goûte p'us bon. J'ai d'l'immunité.» [They've stung me so much in the past that I don't taste good (to them) anymore. I have immunity.] I actually think she's right about her hard-won immunity – and that there's a dark truth here.

For myself, I have a disgusting sense of those big breasts. My poor mother. She's got a beautiful body – generously top-ended, in the style of her rivals for my father's admiration, Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren. In town, her look is surprisingly like my Barbies, with identical proportions and hair-dos. And here she is just being free and sexy, after all, a real woman of the Sixties. Yet all I care about is that those breasts won't come near me, that they won't accidentally touch me. I try to keep my face turned away so I won't notice when my father touches them “accidentally” when he reaches for the tackle next time. The giggles give the gesture away, though.

Meanwhile, here I am with my knees crunched up at the bow, keeping company with the Javel container, top cut off and filled with
cement, that I can barely see twenty feet below us at the end of a long horsetail rope. I'm reading again – Nancy Drew, teaching myself to be a detective. Or else I'm running my fingers in the water to make rows of tiny Vs. By this point the Elder has moved to the country, the Priest and the Cousin are living near Montreal, and my neighbour has left for post-secondary studies. But it really doesn't matter to me what they're doing because I've already forgotten almost all of it – or else given up thinking about it. And as the years pass, what faint hold this material has on my reality slips further into the watery depths of my unconscious. Nothing comes of it except at the absolute back of my mind and in my dreams. Then, from about eighteen to forty-two, I'll recall
nothing
– not a thing – about being younger than nine or ten. I'll become a quiet girl, withdrawn and studious, as the true self recedes and goes to sleep somewhere deep inside. Sleeping Beauty with no prince.