Bilingual Being (43 page)

Feeling myself so disconnected from early childhood, I read
Anne of Green Gables
three times to find out how orphans survived and overcame. I read it once around age eight, again at seventeen or eighteen during a depression, and again in my mid-twenties. There was something about Anne, and the blood-red soil on which she managed to find strong footing, that made her one of the most important peers I had, especially in adulthood. With Anne by my side, I orphaned myself psychologically, leaving my mother and mother tongue behind as I got myself adopted by this other language, this other culture. But there was a consequence for disowning myself, for my linguistic crossing over: it was the bond with my mother, my competencies in my mother tongue, and my roots in the land where my grandmothers and their grandmothers have been settled for four hundred years.

«Ah, Kathy, a'erviendra jama' à Québec» [Ah, Kathy, she'll never come back (to live) in Quebec], my mother has forecasted, cursed, around the kitchen table many times. She's been known to speak of me in the third person like this, even as I sit right there in front of her. She isn't
being unkind. It's as though I've already left. As though, in a palpable way, I'm always absent. I am.

I've been gone for decades from «el foyer,» the hearth of my mother tongue. And curiously, while I was away, it changed too, withdrew, yielded to the greater power of the standard French. Its mother? I abandoned my patois just as I did the tiny girl inside me, and in much the same condition too – assaulted, without recourse, rendered mute – for it was endangered as much as I/she was in those years. Strange to think you're so tied up in a tongue that you live parallel lives.

And that's how I became a survivor not only of a complex sexual trauma but of an equally layered psycholinguistic and sociocultural trauma that's even harder to heal. I honestly wonder which is the deeper loss: the dangerous violation of dignity, or the disorienting alienation from home. That I hold these two sorrows as equal, so that I'm unable to choose the main tragedy, says much about the potency of our bonds with the first language we hear and utter. It's a harrowing pain whose words have been taken so that one can hardly even remember or speak of it – an inaccessible, incurable loss.

So what have I concocted from French and English after all? Is it the right balance of heart and mind? It sounds easy to do, like cooking. And easy to verify – just taste it. Have I got it right? How would the proportions have turned out without the trauma? I'll never know. But as I ended the first draft of this text, another of my father's brothers died, just past eighty. We gathered at home from points distant, and between the wine, sandwiches, and family albums, had the most wonderful time together. Folks spoke French to others who answered in English, and vice versa, as listeners joined in whichever language suited them. Others translated lovingly for the aunt from Baie Saint-Paul who's not perfectly fluent in English, or for an uncle's American wife with francophone roots who's lost some, but not all, of her French.

There was no clear line here between English and French, no set mark between words, no rules we consciously followed about where a switch from one language to the other could or couldn't be done. We just found the best way to say what we wanted to say, whatever the language. Tapping into all of our resources like this, we were way past thinking about so-called code-switching. The switch
was
the code as we negotiated meaning within our wide expanse of possibilities in both
directions. Bilingualism still thriving, in all its beautiful asymmetries and imperfections, nearly one hundred years after that young English girl made her first home with a French rail worker in the backwoods of Quebec.

Child of an anglophone war bride and a francophone war hero, my now-deceased uncle, himself a decorated World War II veteran, would have been happy to see his French-dominant children host an Irish-style wake in the heart of Quebec City on this stunning fall day – between seasons, between life and death, between our linguistic worlds. Bilingualism offering its multivarious pathways for living. More than just language choices: rather, a nuancing of being. Subtleties of meaning, tone, affect, belonging, selfhood.

RIBBONS ALONG A RIVER

It was a healing weekend, as I realized how much I enjoy choosing which language to use. It felt like therapy, like I could breathe more deeply. There and back, airline personnel addressed me in English (if they didn't see my last name), or in French (if they did), as I flew between my languages. Yet something tipped my wings a little. Through the tiny window by my seat, the ground below me shifted.

There's an invisible line somewhere around Cornwall as you fly east. It's a place where land shaped like rectangles yields to land shaped like thick, colourful ribbons in greens and browns, embracing each other side by side, dipping one end into the St Lawrence River, el Fleuve Saint-Laurent. It's the legacy of my ancestors, the seigneurial system under which my great-grandmothers lived, land subdivided with only one thing in mind – access to water. From the air, it's breathtaking, defining, transforming. For me it's the ultimate confirmation of my location, my origins.

Every time I fly home, I watch for it, this glimpse of old land grants from the air. And when it's time to go again, that's what I hold onto as my last look as clouds move in. This familiar landscape of multicoloured bands across a stretch of the world where my people have been, and still are, means something to me in a way that the neat farms of Ontario, the Maritimes, the Prairies, or British Columbia – lovely as they are – do not. For after all of my odysseys, risking all that was
known for the safety of the unknown, something calls to me from here in a voice like no other. That's the paradox I experience each day, forging an existence through which what I present on the outside remains in tension with what's broken and hidden on the inside – and through which what draws and eludes me are one and the same. Life as a constant pulse of engagement and withdrawal.

A few weeks after that trip home for the funeral, a card arrived for my birthday from a maternal aunt who wished me «des paniers de ‹je t'aime'›» [baskets of “I love you”]. My losses are still so obvious to everyone that they can be perceived even at a distance. For in every sense, mine is a typical narrative of exile: pushed forward by forces that couldn't be prevented, yet pulled back by forces that can't be dispelled. A tragedy precipitates the migrant's urge to find shelter somewhere, anywhere.

So though there are actually twenty-eight ways to ask “where” in the patois,
*
I don't have any answers. I have no idea exactly where I am, ever, except that I'm continuously suspended somewhere between my two linguistic worlds. Strategically alternating my position within two semantic and cultural fields that never have, nor ever will, overlap precisely. And though I can choose which language I use, I can't fully control the effect my mother tongue has on me. That's a matter entirely outside of choice, in the unspoken depths of the psyche, the prelinguistic self – in attachments nascent in the womb and the earliest days of life, long before identity forms and presents itself to the world.

As for my “troubles,” I'm far clearer now about the “who,” the “what” and the “when” than I ever was – or than it was ever possible to be before. Caught up in silences, events were erased for so long. If a problem is never talked about, the words for it are never learned, never exist. Not spoken, it doesn't happen. It's like a missing paper trail, only it's a missing trail of phrases somewhere between babyhood and culture. Quickly, then, we reach another telling bilingual mismatch
between those semantic fields, different measures of what constitutes a statement. In French, a «phrase» is a whole sentence, but in English, it's only a few words, a partial thought. As for the “why,” that's the single question I've worked hardest to answer, to address, to locate.

Grasping for coordinates, I think about my life and what I might make of the past and future. I turn things over, this way and that, as I strain to see the best of what occurred and who I became because of it. I locate this powerful lens in a box of tools deep within me, in the heritage of my mother tongue culture that I haven't lost. Looking through it, it seems I manage to see blessings even in the inevitable and find grace in even the most ordinary things.

I was born under the promise of modernism that the decade of my birth assured, but I ended up with a profoundly postmodern existence instead. I am, I have, a fragmented, fluctuating collection of traits by which my identity is hybrid and elusive, shaped by acts of agency that have let me appropriate what I can of this world, within and despite it. And though my original identity was obscured – the
sans trauma
person I might have been – I've used language as well as I could to animate a new version of myself. My instruction in English became an education in promise and possibility, one that's endured for a half-century and enabled me to be productive despite a difficult trajectory through an irreplaceable childhood I experienced primarily in French, the reservoir of my soul.

In the end, my story of moving from my first language to my second is a simple chronicle of survival. It's past and present, nothing and everything, private and public, emotional and political, mute and multilingual, trauma and hope. It's both, every time. So I finally realize something as I end this narrative: that I've been perseverating with a critical figure-ground illusion all along. Stuck on one view, again. The flag of my home is four white «fleur de lys» on a blue background divided by a white cross. That's true. But it's not only that. It also has four blue birds cut out, flying free in every quadrant of the sky. From beak to tail feathers, wing tip to wing tip, each one embodies the only genuine benediction I've ever needed: liberty. Chalk up another “aha” moment of my double life.

Closing my tale, I reflect on my favourite photograph of “home.” Another one of those small black-and-white Kodak prints, it's of my
brother and me, aged two and four, smiling ear to ear as we squat in scruffy shoes in the hay outside an aunt's farmhouse in Saint-Isidore de Dorchester. Our hair, skin, noses, eyes and smiles are identical in that small window of years. There's no sign here of what will soon separate us – the injuries and anguish that will propel me to take the languages we were both offered to slowly run away, one word at a time. There's only evidence of what keeps us joined: an unending love of place, even in dangerous times.

So while Quebec remains a home I had to leave, it's the home that never leaves me. I'm woven from these ribbons along the river – forever textured by my mother tongue. And that is where my story begins.

__________

*
«C'est qu', iyou, iyousse, iyousse que, iyousse que c'est, iyousse que c'est que, ouas, ouasque, ouasque c'est, ouasque c'est que, où c'est, où c'est que, où c'est que c'est que, où est-ce, où est-ce que, où est-ce que c'est que, où c'que, où que, où que c'est que, ousse, ousse que c'est, ousse que c'est que, you, yousse, yousse que, yousse'est que, yousse que c'est que, où.»