Bilingual Being (5 page)

My job in the boat today is to unhook the fish as humanely as possible. I think I'm pretty good at it, though the fish might say otherwise. Later, it'll also be my job to slice them open with a sharp knife, like my father taught me, and empty out the stringy mess onto a newspaper to throw into the fire. They're for supper tonight or breakfast tomorrow, to be fried up with «des oreilles de crisse» [“Christ's ears,” cubes of salt pork about half an inch square]. My tasks are limited, it's true. I don't even have responsibility for the special black tackle box positioned between my parents, nor for the truces they negotiate:

FATHER:
Ça mord' pas bin fort. Passes-moi donc un Royal Coachman.

MOTHER:
Es-tu sûr? Moi, j'ai un Dusty Miller, pis ça mord' pas pire.

FATHER:
Ah p't-êt' bin. Mais pas el Professor. El p'tit maudit d'seize pouces la s'maine passée m'en a volé deux, t'rappeles-tu? Pis là, c'ma dernière. Gard' p'-êt' bin, donne-moi donc el March Brown. On va essayer ça … [It's not biting too much. Pass me a Royal Coachman. Are you sure? I have a Dusty Miller and it's biting not too badly. Oh, okay, maybe then. But don't pass me my beautiful Professor. That damned sixteen-inch last week stole two, remember, and that's my last one. Actually, maybe you could just give me the March Brown. I'll try that one …]

Their business dealings, as my mother co-managed them, sounded much the same – «en bon frangla'.»
*
My mother's supportive input, my father's final decisions. English breaking into French as necessary technology. Bilingualism on the fly, one might say.

My father makes these flies painstakingly by hand at his basement work bench, with slender metal vices clinging by their teeth to the edge, tiny drawers full of feathers, beads, variously sized hooks, and spools of thread mostly in black, silver, and gold. He'll sit here on weeknights hunched over the tiny carcasses of flies, following his Anglo-American do-it-yourself tackle manuals, just as he hunches over carcasses of televisions during the day, using his Anglo-American do-it-yourself electronics manuals. He's not to be disturbed, cardinal rule. Never mind, because we'll hear it upstairs if something goes wrong. But it rarely does during this activity. Making flies soothes him, and his creations are masterpieces.

His hobby stretches over decades, well into the 1970s and '80s. With all those lovely craft supplies, you'd think it would be natural for me to hang around him, to make small suggestions to improve this or that fly, or to play with a few turquoise feathers. But I can't watch him. It makes me ill. I can't bear to see or smell his yellow-tipped fingers, his narrow yellow fingernails, that close up. Just like I'll confuse his sweaty polyester shirts with the Elder's, I'll get the nicotined hands mixed up too. So he becomes, over the curious course of my life, the enemy within. And I become, over the curious course of his life, the same thing. The object you throw your madness at.

My father, with whom I'll engage in a lifelong match for horribleness. After some crisis of his own, he'll talk not a word directly to me from 1969 to 1976 – not one, not even “hello” – unless guests are around. So in 1971 or '72, on another fishing trip, I'll refuse to sing and play guitar for his important business buddies, and never sing again, ever. Children's banter at meals causes him to be virulently nauseous – the infectious power of words again, I guess. Most nights my brother and I
eat without making a sound as my mother echoes his tense comments about «el maudit commerce.» She issues her daily cautions to me right before supper. Pleas for my abiding muteness no matter the provocation, no matter the insult, his fishing for a fight – «J't'el demande. J't'en supplie. A'soir, pas un mot. Pas un. Pour moi.» [I'm asking you. I'm begging you. Tonight, not a word. Not one. For me.] Seems that trusty weapon, silence, is still the only one we've got. And there are timely kicks under the table to remind me to ignore the aggressive taunts he aims across the busy ashtray that separates us. He keeps a cigarette lit through the meal, inhales between courses. What demons of his own is he fighting? What do I embody for him? This'll be my other difficult thinking project.

I'll learn to fear his footsteps and the sound of the front door. And to be especially vigilant about quick pitch changes in his voice. There's no immunity to be had here. But in recent months, I've begun to wonder about his crisis of 1969. Had he learned something about what happened to me? Seen a photo? Heard some dirty story during a disagreement with someone? Or did it, like most things with my father, have nothing to do with me at all?

My first year at McGill, he'd mail me pipe cleaners and feathers – as if he woke up one day and noticed his loss. And I'd hurry to throw them all out. My father, with whom I remember collecting hazelnuts by the roadside in Saint-Férréol-les-Neiges when I was ten, and «des agathes» on the beach in Kamouraska the following year – two hours of my life that stick out from the rest. Then, the record stops. My father, for whom I felt something good and real
once upon a time
, before I took a last breath of him on a day I can't recall at all and then let go forever.

UNE CANADIENNE ERRANTE

“You always speak of your language as being French, and English as being
other
– this thing from outside that you migrated to. But you always had a choice. You had two languages in your home, French and English – your mother's and your father's. It's just that your preference for English was motivated by the trauma, by your need to escape.”

My friend and colleague is an insightful listener, and I'm left to ponder her comment for days, locked in an inability to articulate how
French has always been on the inside and English on the outside. And why I never considered it a choice at all – at least, not until I began to deconstruct my personal history from my professional perspective as a linguist and educator.

My mother was French and my homeland was French – and that just seems to say it all. And my father's tongue? His English was my doorway out. Perhaps this was because he was so psychologically absent from our home and so far from me in particular – pointing to the exit, one might say. Perhaps it was because he skewed his own language ways over time until he was, on his deathbed, a French-dominant bilingual, knee-deep in patois as much as the next «bon bonhomme,» speaking English to only his “mum” and brothers, his mother tongue now become his holiday tongue. Most likely, it was because I so badly needed his language, this other language, any other language I could grab onto from the dirt around me to feel like the language of outsiders – a language that could take me beyond my context, far and away. Up the narrow rope ladder out of my crater.

The funny thing, though, is that in all the opportunities I had to learn other languages over the years, especially Turkish and Arabic, I never wanted to – refused to. It always seemed like English was enough of a separation between my inner and outer worlds, a sufficiently hard journey to travel, relentlessly carrying and hiding my secret self, this tiny bundle, dark and fragile. I could go no further. Not unlike the good-enough mother, English became a good-enough stepmother.

But as for choices, the only one I ever had was to leave. The mother's tongue is the language of home. And to be a stranger in your own home is a sorrow far harder to bear than the pain of departure. Migration often begins with a language choice – a necessary escape. And this choice sets off dominoes in the bilingual's life about attitude, affect, loyalty, home, friends, culture, society, faith, worldview, and goals – all triggering unique possibilities on every level. One language becomes a shelter from another, a vehicle for a variant self.

That's how it's come to pass that a person like me, so deeply entrenched in a French lineage, has lived her entire life without saying «Je t'aime» (though I say “I love you” every day). I can't even write it in a card. And up to now, I've had a firm resolution to date only anglo
or Other men, males my parents would often dislike and to whom I'd never have to speak of love in French. «Je't'aime»: like and love as the same word. Too much commitment for someone who trusts no one? An expression tarred by my aggressors? I can't know for sure. But its inarticulability has been my most consistent symptom.

What I do know is that I am, technically speaking, the product of a mother's francophone hearth and a father's anglophone hearth – a daughter of two solitudes. I've changed my name twelve times in my life: from unofficial shifts in my first name lasting seven to ten years (Kathé, Kath
e
leen, Kat, Katie, Kathy, Kathleen) to legally assuming the surnames of my first two husbands, taking an Islamic first name (Nur) with the third, and then back again to St-Onge after each divorce, to the latest change to Saint-Onge. In word and deed I'm «une Canadienne errante» [a Canadian wanderer], like the famous song says, forever in search of identity. A paradox and a tragedy. A poster child for the language debate.

In the school where I taught in 2010, students assembled in the gym for Remembrance Day and sang “O Canada” in English, four hundred voices from junior kindergarten to Grade 6. Staff, myself among them, looked on in approval and sang with them. But what happened next was something I'd never witnessed before, as it was my first French immersion school in Ontario. The majority, some 250 in the alternate program, then began singing “O Canada” in French. The sound rever-berated through the space, filling every corner to the ceiling and back, again and again, entering my veins with a flush that made my ears hot. I found myself shaking, my voice cracking as I worked hard to catch the tears that formed, then fell, from my eyes. It was among the most beautiful songs I'd ever heard, as mystical and piercing as a Gregorian chant.

And I was entirely swept away by my love of a memory, by a resonance locked in the soul of the child that was, is, me. I saw then what I should have seen so long ago: that I'm scripted into the songs and histories of others, in the daily acts of the times in which I live, and have lived. I exist inside a larger narrative even before I begin to write, or tell, or live, my own tale. Can a story I tell about myself, then, ever really be all that I am?

THE BOOK IN THE CLOSET

In 1961, aged four, I owned one book, Dr Seuss's
The Cat in the Hat.
I still have it after a complicated life in which I've liquidated just about everything, including people, and moved dozens of times across provinces. My family also owned an English dictionary that was kept in the linen closet and became crucial to my personal project of language conquest.

As for
The Cat in the Hat,
it was apparently the first issue of a series being promoted by a door-to-door salesman who was turned away on that first book drop, for my father was notorious for resisting long-term financing arrangements. The book lived in my brother's closet for a decade, on the single shelf. It sat there, alone, next to a woodburning kit, some children's shirts, and stuffed animals that were no one's favourites.

I don't know why the book wasn't in my room except that it didn't fit, evidently, with the French provincial décor. Besides, my closet shelves were full of my mother's stored purses and bags in boxes, and fancy lacy things between sheets of white tissue paper. When I got older and needed to use encyclopedias for research, I had to visit my mother's friend who'd married a Protestant and was raising her children in an anglo style, speaking English to them and pushing their education. She had a set of
World Book
encyclopedias in her home in the same place in the living room where my father kept his collection of hunting guns (locks deemed unnecessary in those years) and my mother displayed family photographs and souvenirs from various trips. Knick-knacks on display, books in closets: it was a proper French-Canadian home in the 1950s.

But true to that first book,
The Cat in the Hat
, the two languages in my life were about to become Thing One and Thing Two – bizarre creatures that would make an even bigger mess of our home and of our lives, and certainly threatened to, and did, completely upset my mother. And whereas the cat let Thing One and Thing Two in by the front door, it was my mother herself who took me to the front door by which these creatures would come to deal their chaos, upsetting the pretty plans of mothers everywhere: that a daughter will be close
to her mother, follow her mother, love her mother expressly. I would disappoint grievously.

MAMIE AND DADDY

The front door in our case was that of my new school, Marymount College, a private English Catholic school for girls in Sainte-Foy, run by an order of sisters from upper New York State. It was located across the back fence from my house, through a tiny stretch of wooded bliss, but accessed by a mother and daughter walking hand in hand by road that cool September morning in 1961. At the ripe age of four, I was delivered for the first day of kindergarten in pulled-up hair ringed by pink and white fabric daisies, tiny patent leather oxfords, ankle socks, a tidy white shirt, and the pleated blue tartan skirt and navy blazer of the school.

The clothing was handed down from the encyclopedia friend, who was two years ahead in this ritual with her own daughter and would always be, ensuring that I lived in hand-me-downs from start to finish, from shirts to books. Nothing would be the same for us from that day forward. But unlike Seuss, we lacked the all-purpose contraptions to tidy up the works. Our mess would be much harder, nearly impossible, to clean, to fix. And it would take a lifetime for us to even have the opportunity to try.

I don't remember feeling different from anyone else that first day of school. I only recall the beautifully clean kindergarten classroom with the ballet barre and the big mirror in the back corner along the south wall, where I'd begin my efforts to be a dancer. It would be a fantasy I'd hold until about age twelve, when my feet would not form into points and my jetés became obviously hopeless, even by my own estimation.