Bilingual Being (8 page)

In these situations, the mother typically failed to register the impolite remark, asking innocently, “What?” She knew she'd heard a string of sounds, but it was too quick, too speckled with colloquialisms the child had picked up organically and she'd never encountered. And as she tended to assume the best intentions from that incomprehensible utterance, English became the secret code of children, idioms flying past parents at dazzling speed – the source of transitory humour soon becoming an instrument of distance, then defiance. If monolingual, long-settled parents think their adolescents are slipping away from them, they should try spending a day in an immigrant's shoes.

The examples need not be so brutal. There's ample evidence, even among the young, that language is a barrier, a breach between worlds, one you cross at your own peril. My textbook example of this dates back to a dinner event I attended in 2003 or 2004. I sat with the women in a large living room, while my much loved then-husband sat with the men in a front sitting room. The conversational flow throughout the home was in Turkish, and a few women were becoming quite bilingual. As I chatted with one on the couch, her four-year-old son came out of the men's area to ask her if he could have another cola. His mum gently indicated with her hand that he should wait until I finished my sentence.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye as I talked to his mum in English. His face turned from me to her, and back again, several times. Then he interrupted me, matter of factly, as if he urgently needed to instruct me about something substantial, to correct me about a meaningful oversight about which he had critical knowledge and I, quite evidently, did not. “We don't talk like that here,” he said. He then repeated what I'd just said. “Here we talk like this”: he then gave a sample utterance in Turkish of about the same length, perhaps a direct translation.

In other words, this was not the right place, or person, to be speaking English to, he was kindly explaining. As he properly understood it, this was a home, an occasion, and a listener for which I should have been speaking in Turkish. Trouble was, while his mum was doing her best to learn my language, I was entirely failing at learning hers. She
was seeking to acquire my tongue, presumably for better economic opportunities for the next generation of her family. But I was actually seeking the opportunity to hide inside hers, to
not
learn it so that I could let its prosody alone be my safe shelter, a songlike sea of voices where I was, and was not, addressed. Where I could be both present and absent, engaging and withdrawing at once.

I didn't say all that, of course. I just looked at him in amazement. For he'd crossed a bit of a breach himself, bringing linguistic theory right into my face over baklava and chai. “You're right,” I said to him. “I should be speaking Turkish to your mother, but I don't know Turkish. Your mother's English is getting pretty good, so we're speaking English to each other.”

“Oh,” he replied, pensively. A bit more silence, then a smile. “Well, you should learn it. It's easy.” He made his request to his mother, in Turkish, and skipped away to get his drink from the refrigerator. And why wouldn't he see it that way? After all, he was fluently bilingual, years before and more perfectly than his parents would ever be. It was just one more symbolic snapshot of how easily children play in linguistic fields and then run quickly beyond view.

While his mother had been a bit embarrassed at his rudeness, his interruption, I frankly thought he was a genius. In fact, though, he was a fairly typical immigrant child. Using expert English acquired from six months of pre-school television programs and community daycare – while his newly arrived parents struggled in
LINC
classes
*
as they tried to recertify their professional credentials – he'd figured out that language is a system deeply connected to context.

He'd understood that there's such a thing as a mother tongue: that's what you speak to parents. That there are places where you speak only the mother tongue because outside tongues belong, well, outside. And that you can switch between these different communicative systems as a straightforward choice, each having its own meaning and purpose. Not even five himself, and before even entering the school system, he
understood that language demarcates space and time, self and other, inner world and outer world. That language divides.

UNE P'TITE RÉVOLUTION

I've always believed so strongly that language can break a family apart that I'd trust my own children to no language other than the one they were born into: English. The father of all three is an Anglo-Canadian originally from the Toronto area. We met in Manitoba and throughout our married life lived on the West Coast as best friends and isolates. Sufficiently distant from my francophone roots that it was easy to accomplish an English focus from the start, I taught myself English lullabies and songs to expose my children to literacy in ways I'd never known. The growing collection of
My Old Bookhouse
was pressed into use, as were recycled English picture books, courtesy of the discard sales.

I endeavoured in every way to give my children the childhood I never had: a conservative, child-centred world of play dates, parks, and storybooks. And while it can be argued that childhood is necessarily an imagined community – a play-driven place where the currency is games, sleep, snacks, and fictional characters – my children's world became my own imagined ideal, a reliving of youth as innocence. I found genuine healing in this reinvention as I watched my children become what I understood to be English-Canadian youngsters – children who knew nothing of French other than the fact that their mother occasionally talked on the phone in a strange tongue.

As they grew, I chose to home-school them, their education becoming another personal act of resistance. I was determined that they'd learn to read before I sent them to school so that they could be critically distant, reflective, independent. I was living out an instinct that the odds are much better in this life if you can stay alert and keep a mindful eye on what and who's around you. And I wanted them, above all, to hold foremost the values of home. I was unwilling to let the language and visions of school get between me and my children, or between each of them. I'd seen the damage in my own life, in the abyss between my family and me.

Of course, home-schooling was a radical move that infuriated my family in Quebec: children first being denied their heritage and then
schooled like hippies! But we were, thankfully, in a community of likeminded souls, wounded Easterners reacting to our separate histories, all gathered on the edge of the country living out alternatives, grounded in a kind of neo-Pagan-Buddhist worldview. Across this expanse of geography, in an English-only context, I felt strangely safe – far from all that was French, «mon enfance» [my childhood], and everyone familiar. It would take fifteen years of this deep healing, nursed by the smell of the ocean and the Douglas firs, before I had the courage to come back East in 2001.

That's how I came to be lost along the timeline that is my curious bilingual life, and I remain so. All of my life I've run from my mother tongue and from my heritage, seeking shelter in English. I'm able to teach other people's children in French these days because the French I work in at school is a pleasant, neutered, decultured French spoken only on some days, with some students, for some purposes – and shared with colleagues whose fluency is not always assured and who are distant from its heritage. A tongue stripped of emotional saliency and discharged of affective ties, like a stale image of a poignant scene that can be observed safely, detachedly.

But on that Saturday in May, while I tried to hide in the safest place I know, a room full of books, my deepest fears found me. Rattled me to my depths, laid bare my linguistic wounds. So how does someone who loves libraries and learning so much take half her known linguistic knowledge and deliberately put it on a shelf high out of reach for thirty years? And how does a girl who finds so much comfort in words and texts become a linguistic runaway?

__________

*
The
SRA
box was a “reading lab” produced by Science Research Associates.

*
Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada, a federally funded, countrywide initiative administered by Citizenship and Immigration Canada that provides free English (or in Quebec, French) language instruction.

Mouse House

We're the victims of

forgotten birthdays, you and I:

Cousine A, Cousine B, Cousine C,

Cousine D, Cousine E, and how many

others among us? We were there, they

tell us, these mums of ours, these

ones who passed through their

own forgotten birthdays too.

Apparently, we played “pin

the tail on the donkey,” where we

stumbled blind in the dark, and other

pleasant games – like “musical chairs,”

moving our butts from place to place,

never knowing when things would

ever stop, and “pass the parcel,”

shifting prizes hand to hand.

We ate cake and candy in

profusion, accompanied by pop

and handmade sandwiches stuffed

with eggs and ham, pickled onions,

radishes shaped like roses, and countless

visions for every oral desire – our bellies

always filled up to the brim, packed

tight like Cousin Gretel's.

We wore our Saturday best,

pretty dresses, cute and short, as

we posed for all those men with their

cameras, and for the Elder. And that's

how we know now that we were there – the

photographs – because we've forgotten

countless parties. Seems like only the

boys there remember them well.

That's all right. Never mind.

I have a party to invite you to at my

new friend's house – Sarah M. I met her

in Grade 5, when her father (a reporter) was

transferred here from Ottawa, and her lovely

parents are making bread and soup, and

have invited us for a mouse party

today at 4. Can you make it?

What's a mouse party? That's

when we play house with Sarah's fourteen

mice, “little cousins,” she calls them, who

live in the huge doll house that her father made

for her, with the sweetest cotton beds her mum

sewed for them, munch bits of cheese on tiny

tables, climb up and down the elfin stairs,

fast and free, and even eat the walls.

It's hilarious, pure delight, to watch

their Lilliputian selves run around their

own house, doing what they please, eating

when and what they want, making up their own

games, escaping easily. Plus there's not a single

frilly dress or camera in sight. Imagine! And

when their spirits die, at least someone takes

the time to bury them outside with dignity.

4

CULTURAL BORDERLANDS

LINGUISTIC JOINT CUSTODY

I don't remember learning English. I don't remember learning French. The years went by with both my languages alternating like a game of leapfrog. Logistically speaking, there was one parent for English – my bilingual father who wanted (or felt obliged) to make it possible for his children to interact with his culturally anglophone family and his English “mum.” And there was one parent for French – my virtually monolingual mother who believed in children being natural extensions of their mothers, as she herself was, and as her own mother was, and so on. But since my father was a workaholic who withdrew psychologically even when he was home, and spoke only French with my mother or in her presence, our entire household effectively ran on French «essence.»

Besides, all the neighbours, local clerks, servicemen, and salesmen spoke French – everyone from the whistling milk delivery man, to the pop delivery man with his big tins of «des chips au vinaig',» to the bread man who brought green and pink loaves sliced horizontally for our party sandwiches, to the Chinese food delivery man who came on so many Friday nights with his local version of «des nouilles chinoises, pis du chow mein, pis des egg rolls, pis des p'tits spareribs.» Everything one needed was brought to the door. The mothers I knew seldom left home except to visit family, see the doctor, or buy a gift – and most
French mothers, including mine, didn't drive a car. Groceries, medicine, dry cleaning, and everything else just showed up. Fathers went to work early and came back late. As a result, there was usually one place for English – school – and one place for French – home. This also meant that there were typical days for English: Monday to Friday, business hours. And days for French: Saturdays, Sundays, weekday evenings, and summers. The whole thing, in retrospect, sounds more like a cell phone plan than a family.

There was one family for English, the St-Onge side – and one family for French, the Dumont side. As a result, the yearly calendar was also divided. Christmas Eve was spent with the French side at an aunt's house, rotating from aunt to aunt each year, including midnight mass and the «réveillon,» the party after the mass, lasting until four or five in the morning, featuring pork in every conceivable dish, egg and tomato sandwiches, sweet onions, jellied salads, «des têtes de violons» [fiddlehead greens], and too much champagne.

In turn, Christmas night was spent with the English side, at my English granny's home, complete with turkey dinner and “all the trimmings,” an expression for which I have no French equivalent. «El jour de l'an» – New Year's Day – was spent with the French side, at my French grandmaman's home, with more pork, more sandwiches, more champagne, and a special treat, buckets and buckets of strawberries, kept frozen from the previous summer. The children were allowed to drink the juice in the emptied plastic bowls, my favourite treat. Thanksgiving Day, not properly celebrated by French Canadians, or so the story went, was spent with the English side, at one uncle's or another, rotating year by year. And then there was «les Pâques» [Easter], which it was generally agreed was not adequately celebrated by the English side, or so the story went, so that after prayers on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and abstinence through Lent, Easter was spent with the French side at my French grandmaman's.