Bilingual Being (40 page)

So it's my internal narrator that's off somehow, causing me to misread cultural memory. Making me stand up and say, “Hey, wait a minute!” It's not the early sex or the secret that makes me unique. Like I said, there's nothing special here. It's that it feels to me like something to be explained rather than forgotten. That I still need to talk about it.

POUR TOI QUE J'AIME

In Montmagny each year, countless people come to see the geese fly overhead along their traditional flightways. It's known as the “snow goose capital of the world.” Most people take photographs or have picnics as they watch. In season, some take out their guns, permits in hand, and kill a few. I remember on many occasions my father, accompanied by my brother or mother, dragging in three or four by the neck. There were also days with five or six dead ducks from La Beauce; a bag full of bloody rabbits from Baie St-Paul; and dead partridge, my mother's
favourite, from around the cabin in the Parc des Laurentides. I hated it. Hunting remained one of the great ethical discords of our family – «On est une famille qui colle ensemb', pis qui fait toute ensemb'. Mais toi, bin évidemment, ej sais qu't'as d'aut'idées.» [We're a family that sticks together and does everything together. But you, really obviously, I know you have other ideas.] My mother, right as always.

I really shouldn't be so sure about holding the moral high ground, though. I have my own guilty handling of my obligations to the living. For I let my children grow up without any connection to the French language, French culture, or Quebec. They looked at me between 2008 and 2010, my nose in a book by de Montaigne, or working on my side project, a 180-page description of the patois and its grammar,
El Patois Saintongeais à Québec astheure
– and wondered what I was on about. They took to calling it “Mom's
patois
book” with a forced, pretentious sort of an accent, in regular displays of good-humoured teasing.

After all, why should they care? Having had only the prescribed forty minutes of French per day (or less) from Grade 4 to Grade 9, between British Columbia and Ontario, years ago now, they can barely read the homework I bring home from my elementary students in French immersion. And the blame is entirely on my shoulders.

For I demonstrated a clear distancing from French – an open refusal of my home language and culture – during the most formative years of their lives, in the 1980s and '90s. I have almost guaranteed that any dear little grandchildren who might come along in the future will be raised in anglophone homes by my children and their (highly likely) anglophone partners. As a result, they will likely know and value virtually nothing of the French roots that, in a strictly genetic assay, would amount to at least 75 per cent of my own origins. In the short span of barely one generation, I've managed to asphyxiate French inside my own family line.

Language death is a serious concern around the world, with researchers tracking how many become extinct each year. Like endangered species, hundreds of languages have only a handful of elderly speakers left, and local newspapers chronicle the tragic day when the last one dies, ending a linguistic lineage that was vibrant for thousands of years. In hindsight, then, it might have been more ethical for me to get a
hunting licence and right along with the rest of my family chase down those geese, ducks, partridges, and rabbits. Instead, for those two key decades of my children's collective youth, I took up a much deadlier kind of hunting against my own heritage: I became a language killer.

One of my maternal aunts who lives in Montmagny has achieved considerable fame for herself as a painter of the magnificent geese. She creates astounding images of these birds against the sky, canvases of light and grace that sell for a thousand dollars or more. I own a small one she gave me many years ago, with a tiny brass plaque on the frame: «Pour toi que j'aime» [For you whom I love]. Words that have never felt like me. How could she have known my angst even then? But there's something in the flight of those birds against the sky that's completely me.

There's something special about this aunt too. Dignity incarnate, she's well over six feet tall, mannered like an aristocrat. She has clear opinions that she articulates in immaculate French, to match her political inclinations. She was well known for resenting my father's being «un maudit anglais» [a damned English person] – and he always resented her for being «une maudite séparatiste» [a damned separatist]. But between the champagne and trivialities, and his frequent abstentions, family events went off without fists flying.

The other memory I have of her is a complete contrast. One evening she came to our home, popping in to say hello on her way through town, and she needed to use the washroom. I was in the bath, about ten years old, but she came in to use the toilet anyway. «Y'a rien là,» she said [There's nothing to worry about here]. «On est toutes des p'tites filles. Pis c'est juste un p'tit pipi en fin d'compte.» [We're all little girls. And it's just a little pee, after all.] And while I couldn't see her body across the half wall between us, I was aware of her Frenchness there on the toilet, chatting me up – unpretentious, disarmed, unself-conscious. I, on the other hand, struggled to gather bubble bath to hide my body – shocked, scandalized, my Englishness showing through the vanishing foam. I felt so embarrassed that she'd come here to do this while I was there. She laughed at my awkwardness, not unkindly, and left.
I must remember to lock both of the doors to this bathroom next time
, I told myself – in English.

A GOOD GAME OF SLINGSHOT

When does it begin, this gap, this chasm, between language worlds? Between language selves? I'm not sure exactly. But it seemed that for the longest time, my two languages were just like children, good friends, playing side by side. Yet somewhere along the way they stopped “playing nice” and started living by different rules. Then they took to separate playgrounds where they could barely observe each other's games from a distance, and eventually they didn't bother to look.

Most days of my early childhood, for example, my next-door neighbour and I went for walks in the woods behind our homes. There are too many anecdotes to share, so I'll stick with one. One afternoon when we were both seven, she shook an apple tree hard so a few would fall for us to eat. But something more than apples came loose from those branches. In an instant we were covered in bright green caterpillars that worked their way into our ears and noses, strands of hair wrapping around squished carcasses, leaving bits of legs here and there, and sticky sap.

It took our mothers hours to pull them from our hair, longer because they were both laughing about it, and we almost were too. But within five years of that memorable day, my best buddy and I would no longer even be talking. She'd become sensitized to nationalistic politics, and she stuck to her friends from French school. I stuck to my friends from English school. There was less than fifty feet between our front doors, but it might as well have been fifty miles.

Another favourite early game was for a group of us to walk the block from our street to the railroad track. We'd travel a mile or so in either direction alongside it, looking for pussywillows, cattails, frogs, and random treasures. We might be three, or six, on bikes or not, ranging in age from about four to twelve. If we went west, we could step off the tracks near l'Aquarium du Québec. It was almost new back then, just built. We grabbed and clawed our way along about a hundred feet of cliff, a sheer rock face right by Le Pont de Québec, so we could sneak under the wooden railing near the outdoor fish tank and get onto the grounds for free. We checked out the marine life for a while, and we watched from our vantage point as they built the new bridge alongside
the old one. Then we walked back home and had dinner. That was the substance of an ordinary life in the undeveloped suburbs.

We enjoyed this activity from about 1961 to 1970. After that, it seemed that we never went to the tracks anymore, and no one could look even at that bridge, Pont Pierre Laporte, without remembering the October Crisis. It was a gigantic, stark memorial with a 360-degree vista.
*
And when we did talk about it, or about anything around it, or about what defined «péquistes,» or what defined our families, or our grandparents, and so on, we were always getting into some kind of heated disagreement. Flags started flying on everything from cars to brasseries – flags of Quebec or Canada, as though a language choice entailed a national choice automatically.

Many bilingual francophones began refusing to speak English on principle, a tension that was palpable even at the corner store. Meanwhile, bilingual anglophones began refusing to speak French on principle, just to show they weren't buying in. Daily, weekly, old friends parted from each other essentially forever, cursing the ground the other had walked on. Francophones appropriated English just long enough to yell, “Yankee go home!” to bilingual former friends whom they knew perfectly well weren't Americans. And bilinguals yelled back, “Damned frogs!” though their own mothers or fathers were French too. It was patently absurd – a dangerous game in the hands of children.

But on a typical day, in the earliest years in the suburbs, I joined a dozen kids in a far safer game of war. Weapons usually included slingshots, and toy bows and arrows. We had two fields and the woods behind to divide and conquer. These weapons and lands were already firmly written into the folklore of the neighbourhood. The only thing up for grabs each time was the make-up of the teams.

At this point in Quebec's history, an average street like ours included two or three anglophone-bilingual homes to about fifteen monolingual
francophone homes, although a few neighbourhoods had more anglophones – especially where there were «des bin grandes maisons» [really big houses] – and many neighbourhoods had none. Ours was, then, a typical street where the patois was the lingua franca. English kids had to work their way into groups, asking permission to play, as parents were beginning to filter their political convictions down through their children. The «pure» francophones were dominant in number, and the two or three oldest got to pick their members and allegiances for the games.

My younger brother had a reserved seat on the francophone team. I guess he was deemed less indoctrinated by school, but it could also be because he was best friends with the ringleader's brother, and a hell of a fine shot besides. His French team chose to be the Americans every time. This meant the bilingual kids, including me and anyone who spoke any English at all (other than my brother), had to be Germans, along with whoever else they put on our team – usually the terribly unspartan toddlers. And no matter how much we argued that this didn't make sense because we spoke English and they didn't, the francophones wouldn't budge. Because it was also written into the folklore that the Americans would win every time.

One day, when I was seven or eight, we were preparing for war, as usual, but that day there were no other bilinguals. There was only me and seven or eight francophones, and an innovative strategy involving a different battlefield on some adjoining streets. The ringleader had made up the two teams, as he always did, and I wanted to play, to join them in this game. But everyone was beginning to disperse already, and I was the only one who hadn't been picked. I stood on a patch of grass between this triangle of streets – Valmont, Matapédia, La Rochelle, names that haunt the soul for centuries, as if war had never left, as though the land of the past and the present were the same. I called out in French, «Eh, moi aussi j'veux jouer» [Hey! I want to play too].

Everyone stopped. Time stopped. The ringleader then turned to me and said, I swear, «Bin, dans quelle langue tu penses, toé?» [So, what language do you think in, you?] It didn't even occur to me at the time that this was an incredibly sophisticated idea for a child aged no more than thirteen to articulate. Still a decade shy of the Official Languages
Act, it seemed that its unofficial enforcement had already begun.
*
But ever lacking the confidence of the bold, I couldn't return a snide remark and run to join them anyway. Instead, I remember pondering this question for the first time. I thought a few thoughts (about what, I can't remember), then I asked myself honestly what language I'd just done it in. I took his instructions seriously enough to realize, in that moment, that I was thinking in English – something I wasn't aware of doing until that point.

«En anglais,» I finally answered.

«Bin, tu peux pas jouer dans c'cas là. On veut pas d'anglais dans c'jeu-là.» [Well, in that case, you can't play. We don't want any English people in this game.] And off they went to play war, in French only – a re-enactment of the Second World War in which half were Germans and half were “Americans.” The irony struck me even as I watched them fade into the horizon, my brother with them. A group divided unto themselves. Playing roles they actually hated equally. It wasn't even fantasy anymore. It was a toxic soup.

That moment changed things between my brother and me. It was an otherwise ordinary day, but it became the precise instant in history when paths diverge. Poor soul: he was only six and he just wanted to play. But I was no less devastated than if I'd seen all those I loved the most get on a boat and sail away without me.

L'ACCORD FÉMININ

What happened that day is that I'd suddenly been made conscious of my difference in a way I hadn't been before. The verdict: I was culturally impure. From then on, I retreated from the land of common ground to where I was banished, and I built myself a new castle there. That's just the way life is. Some things just happen. Like caterpillars falling on your head, and other things beside. But if you believe in some kind of
solution, however odd it might seem to others, your prognosis is much, much better. So I empowered myself with the tools I had.