Bilingual Being (7 page)

__________

*
«Franglais»: an expression denoting the liberal mixing of French and English that was so common prior to the provincial language initiatives begun in the 1970s, and is still recognized locally as an idiom for bilingual slang.

Pirouette

«Pirouette en salopette
*

petit merli, merlot!
†

À la galipotte, à la galipotte,

plus haut, plus haut, plus haut!

«Champignons, cornichons,

alli alli oop, là là!

Petit merlot, petit merlot,

vas-t-en pas!!

«Pirouette de cacaouette,

Pirli, pirli, pou,

Sauvignon, petit cochon,

mange-en pas!»

That's one of the pretty songs I lost

when I came out of the cultural ocean

of my great-great-grandmothers.

They use different words on land.

Instead, they talk about a Golden Goose and

some birds of a feather that flock together.

So it is when you learn another tongue:

you trade the lovely bird in your right hand

for strange species in a linguistic bush.

__________

*
First verse: Pirouette in overalls; merlot (repeated as a play on sound); off on an adventure (repeat); higher, higher, higher. Second verse: mushrooms, pickles; [nonsense line for sound effect]; little bird (repeat); don't go away. Third verse: Pirouette of cashews; [nonsense line for sound effect]; sauvignon, little pig; “Don't eat it!” – in other words, this wine is not fit for pigs. It's a classic children's rhyme I was taught in my earliest days, I believe by my grand-grandmaman Blais dit Raisin. It has a loose
ABAB
rhyme scheme, the sort a child would skip rope to.

†
The same word designates a small bird and a type of wine.

3

A NEW LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE

LIBRARIES

In that first kindergarten classroom, as in every classroom, I discovered an easy rule for my orientation in this new linguistic terrain: the
SRA
box
*
with its cards and multiple-choice questions. It was my North Star, and I wanted to sit by it in every class. I was lucky because, as a good student, I was seated at the back of the classroom, the closest you can get to an
SRA
box since it's never put on window ledges (the sun, after all) but always on the back shelves. Perfectly aligned in their crisp, pretty-coloured covers, the readers were organized by increasing difficulty, with accompanying checklists – everything a competitive little social climber like me could want. I admit I was greedy for cultural currency in this foreign territory of sentence parsing and spelling bees.

Then, as if this building wasn't already my version of heaven, my school opened a tiny store in the basement, in the locker room across from the chapel. It sold pencils and pens and proper school notebooks, and there was a revolving black metal rack about four feet high where a relatively new author was being featured: Charles Schultz. I turned into a
Peanuts
junkie on the spot – orange cover, brown, green, yellow – looking forward to each new issue and becoming, as much as my small savings permitted, a book addict then and there.

More and more, school served as my private refuge, my sanctuary, nurturing my love of the English language. It was a marvellous place where I could be successful and forget what was troubling me outside of school, where my so-called private life was becoming ridiculously public thanks to my sexual predators, whose game was far too complex for me to grasp or stop.

Tellingly, I was caught hiding at school twice after hours, refusing to go home. Once I was found in the closet of my Grade 3 classroom, sleeping on the top shelf after a strategic climb over boxes of supplies and a winter coat on a hanger. Another time I was found in the library, sleeping along a lower shelf by the big front window, my head propped against some books, and my knees bent, fetal-like, to fit. I don't know if my parents were told at the time because nothing more was said of it. I arrived home late from school those days, that's all. Not so odd in those years when children walked outside on their own and often played far from home.

Through later years my additions to my English library – never French, no, thank you – would only grow. I'd go about collecting the
My Old Bookhouse
series from the 1920s that had been scattered amongst my English relatives, one book at a time, until I had them all. I'd keep them through every move over the next two decades until the late 1980s when they were consumed by mould and insects and I was forced to part with them.

I became a discard sale expert, lining up two hours before opening time at Victoria Public Library's biannual book sales, with a floor plan and a strategy, amassing enough children's books to supply a small town library – forty-two boxes at last count. Friends who helped me move joked that they'd circulate my photo and have me banned from the sales. Then, to my delight, I discovered online bookstores, everything at my fingertips. My personal library grew and grew until books surrounded my walls, ideas filling the empty spaces in my life and thoughts. When every wall was covered with Ikea shelves full from top to bottom, I was finally able to sleep with the lights off.

From books to safety – a familiar journey. That's something I should make clear about myself before we go any further with these disclosures, with this telling of how it is that my story becomes my work and my work becomes my story. My mother's hope for the past few years
was that I'd take to painting or drawing again, to «t'changer d'esprit» [change your spirit]. My own hope was somewhat less ambitious: that I'd survive, perhaps even continue in the recovery of a strength I'd lost so much of through some dangerously close contacts with despair. Such close brushes with the edges of things, reality and sanity, were not a new thing for me. But then again, neither was – nor is – my willingness and my ability to survive.

QUELQU'UN D'DIFFÉRENT

I've always been known as a “troubled person” of sorts, «quelqu'un d'différent» [someone different], my mother puts it somewhat diplomatically. Successful on the outside but problematic on the inside. «Toé, tu s'ras jama' heureuse» [You, you'll never be happy], my mother announced one day when I was about twelve, more prophetic than harsh. And so it was that a girl who believed and claimed she'd been sexually abused as a child became a drifter – spiritually, geographically, and linguistically – never finding answers or lasting peace. «Tu cours tout l'temps» [You're always running], my mother observed on so many occasions. «Oui,» I agreed, «mais j'attéris t'jours su' mes pieds» [but I always land on my feet]. «Eh, oui,» she sighed.

I did land on my feet, across four provinces, always making ends meet, successfully married and then even more successfully divorced, three times now. Yet her forecast lingered as a painful truth. I wasn't really happy except when I was with my children. In every other way, I was often fragile, insistently a loner at heart, «mauditement indépendante» [damned independent], as my mother termed it, not intended as a compliment. «Toé tu cherches t'jours queq' chose, mais t'sais pas quoi» [You're always looking for something, but you don't know what]: my sister-in-law's verdict, as astute as my mother's. A cut of the same cloth.

I certainly had been looking for something. And, right again, I didn't know what. Spending my life trying to remember something essential I felt I'd forgotten. I don't know quite how to describe this sensation, and I know it's logically absurd. If you remember, it isn't forgotten. And if you've really forgotten, then you can't remember you've done that. Yet, so it was. For it seems this curious sense of having, and not
having, a memory was directly connected to the bizarre timing of my aggressors.

They first began their machinations in my infancy, when I existed prior to formal language, when the solitary means I had to record things was primitive. So the body kept track below consciousness, as it's capable of doing. Down but not out, one might say. And as I was moved from place to place, pushed and squeezed, inhaling the associated smells of danger – mould, nicotine, sweaty polyester, latex gloves, dental solvents, dry-cleaning fluid, dirty metal, wood dust, and pine and coal tar – circuits and chemicals pulsed in the hypothalamus and amygdala, old brain matter that nurtures the early senses on which survival hangs: smell, affect, body position, instinct. Meanwhile, the rest of my mind – cortical structures through which I'd later perform the more complex functions of life, including my bilingualism – lay dormant, still developing.

If my perpretrators had stopped then, I suppose I'd have merely been a child with an overly kindled unconscious. But they kept on going, so that new traumatic material became tethered to my reptilian brain, from which it could occasionally erupt into conscious space when triggered. Fifty years of vague thoughts and waking dreams that couldn't be erased by the passage of time. Memories that were untouchable and undiminishable precisely because they were pre-experience, prelanguage, pre-self. And that muddle of mine between what was and was not – the boundaries of language and thought – would have huge repercussions for my way of looking at the world and my way of thinking about myself. Profoundly confused, I'd end up looking on the outside for what was lost on the inside.

MOTHERS' WORK

That's how, during the first week of May 2010, when I'd just finished two years of course work for my master's degree and needed to come up with a research topic for my final paper, I took myself where I often go when I'm trying to hide or to think: a public library. I paused a few minutes to flip through the discards in the pile by the front door, three for a dollar. There's always something useful.

I was eminently comfortable in my home away from home that day, calm behind the countless shelves, my barricades, and anonymous among random readers, hoping for inspiration. Four hours in, I'd read the front pages of the dailies and given up on doodling. I meditated, staring at the walls, and let myself fall into emptiness. It was then that I heard it – the conversation that gave me standing whiplash.

It was between a Chinese mother and a boy aged four or five. “What book you want?” she asked him in a sweet voice, in slightly hesitant English. No answer. “Ah, you like ah-the book like this one?” No answer. She continued in English, “How 'bout video? You want some ah-video? You want some this one? Look, it's ‘Solly –'”

But she couldn't finish the sentence, couldn't name the video, because the child spoke out suddenly, in almost perfect English, rude, loud, and impatient. “Mom, it's not ‘Solly,' it's ‘Sally.'” There was clear disdain in his voice. “Oh, okay, ‘Sally,'” the mother agreed, hurt and pride weaving a sorry cloth. I shuddered. “Run!” I wanted to say, “Run! Take this child with you and never look back! Speak Mandarin to him today and every day until he's yours to keep! You're losing him, losing him. I know, because I'm him!”

Yet I stayed silent. Don't I always? I tried to go back to my own thoughts, mind my own business. But there was more and I couldn't help but listen, here in the public soup that is the library. A few feet away, a Russian grandmother read a dual-language book to her grandson, around seven years old. She sounded out the words, beautifully, lovingly, the Russian rolling from her tongue like soft currents.

The child was looking at the other page, the one in English, and blurted out “birthday party!” She replied in Russian, calling him back. “I don't like this book,” he spat and hopped off her lap. She sighed.

“Run!” I wanted to say to the grandmother, too. “Run, run, run!” And all of that. But she was too old to run fast. And I was too weak to speak. I was caught between what I justified as a gesture of privacy but what was actually a colossal failure of courage on my part. For I knew something that needed telling.

Instead, I said nothing. Again. I felt furious, torn, but I kept my panic to myself. I've learned how to do that. There are stories no one wants to hear. And there are times when too much has been lost already – a
child who'll never be as close to his family as he could have been in his own tongue. I know: I'm living proof of how a mother's work, of her place in a child's life, will forever be compromised, lessened.

In the social sciences this kind of listening in harmlessly to sample the field is sometimes called “botanizing.” It's a term that sounds earthy and good, but I felt like I was touching thistles, then falling headlong into them. For here were mothers and grandmothers – and, I'm sure, fathers and grandfathers, too – caring enough for their children to bring them to the library, to the door of the language they'd need to be successful here – the mainstream, dominant tongue. Witnessing their children's linguistic gains, their investments, in the new language. But also witnessing their own and their culture's losses, and the child's diminished loyalty, in the old language. For losses these surely would become. Learning a new language is a gamble.

WE DON'T TALK LIKE THAT HERE

Among the circle of newcomers to Canada I was close to for years through work and personal preference, there were so many examples of language risks that I could pick a day at random and relate at least one. Mothers telling their children that dinner was ready, in the mother tongue, to have their words returned by “Yeah, whatever, lemme finish. I need to beat the level.” It's muttered so fast that the mother misses it and innocently asks, “What's that, honey?” Another day a parent calls for help with a daily chore as the child whispers under her breath in perfect English, “Shut the hell up.”

I witnessed much in those years that I never shared with these parents either. It seemed too hurtful and hit too close to home. But I
did
speak, off to the side, to those numerous sixteen, fourteen, twelve, ten, eight, and even six year olds. “You shouldn't talk to your mother like that,” I reproached. “It isn't right. You shouldn't use your English like that, to be sneaky and rude to your parents.” “So sorry, Abla [sister, a common greeting]. I won't do it again,” they replied, contrite for a few minutes. Caught out. The outsider – me – now deep within their halls, kitchens, and living rooms, monitoring a dangerous game of power reversal inside the household. A difficult play where the new tongue is
used to engage independence, as the mother tongue, slowly diminishing, struggles to maintain the appearance of normal relations.