Bilingual Being (31 page)

When I reflect on those years in
ESL
, I realize that teaching produced – and fed off – another one of those transferential bonds that needed no language. After all, my students and I were all seen as black sheep at home just for wanting to learn so much about the Other. And we were also all sheep made black on arrival, experiencing our difference at our new location just for having our origins elsewhere.

KITCHEN TABLE PHILOSOPHY

As a result of my own shifting, it seems that I remain in the accounts of my family an odd blending, a weird mix. I'm like one of those
children's books where the cardboard pages are cut across, and you can flip the head of a donkey onto the hind quarters of a lion. And here's the evidence, as my family observed it around the table quite recently – kitchen table philosophizing. We aren't talking linguistic relativity here, or anything approximating cultural theory or anthropology. It's about a mother's lore, a mother's instinct, and this is what it said after a drink or two.

First, there are still signs of my francophone heritage. I haven't lost my oral language one bit, at least, even after thirty-odd years «au loin» [far away]. And I have, after all, come most of the way home now that I've resettled from British Columbia to Toronto – and «p't-êt' Ottawa dans l'futur» [maybe Ottawa in the future], even closer someday? Furthermore, I'm working in French, teaching French immersion. Even better, I'm wearing heels sometimes, and «même un peu d'rouge à lèv' des fois, non?» [even a bit of lipstick once in a while, no?]. Well, muted shades. At least it's a start. Or so the story goes.

Then again, as the kitchen talk also notes, there are ample signs of my rejecting my francophone heritage. I have a stronger vocabulary in English because I read (too much) and love studying (too much) in it. My skirts are still (too) long and West-Coastish. And I still resist anything tight, low-cut or high-cut. My children don't speak French at all, except for the eldest, who's quite recently learned it for work, without any support from me. Or so the story goes.

And then, there are signs that I belong to no one, to no one familiar at any rate. I have an enduring penchant for East Indian clothing and a Chinese shirt collection, with clever frog buttons on hand-embroidered silk. There's also the fact that I'd gladly sell a pig (the French staple) or a cow (the English staple) for a handful of olives and some figs. I won't dance or sing, and I don't care for drinking. A nomad from neither here nor there – more often from there than here. That's their obvious conclusion. Then again, maybe being from neither here nor there is as good as it gets.

In Quebec, for example, the word «immigrant» is used differently than in standard French. In the standard, an «immigrant» is someone who arrived relatively recently, while an «immigré» arrived some time ago. But locally, the word «immigrant» captures both meanings. It's
apparently a borrowing from English, which has only the one word, “immigrant.” «Immigré» is edged out here, no longer used. Seems that when languages collide, concepts change.

We can imagine the two versions of the word meeting on a semantic field – maybe very near the Plains of Abraham. As the languages make contact, one happens to push harder than the other. Today, the English meaning wins the day. Part of the French contingent, our «immigré,» is lost, buried quietly, like other war casualties. But when it comes to «embarrassant,» French takes the victory, with two meanings (embarrassing or burdensome) to one (embarrassing).

It's an uneven and wavering battle, this duel between languages and their words, one that's repeated around the world wherever languages coexist. Some languages gain ground, others lose. Concepts are traded, stolen, and borrowed like spoils of battle. Others become dead words that disappear from memory. It's never an even match-up, word for word. There are always misalignments in the ranks.

At stake is far more than the names of things. Words affect our dialogues, how we speak about ideas to others. They alter how we refer to ideas in our minds, how we think. When two French speakers meet nowadays – let's say one from Bordeaux and one from Montreal – they won't agree on «un immigrant.» They share the same tongue, but their words don't mean exactly the same thing. And it's unclear if they'll ever understand each other perfectly, just because of their different language histories. Language contacts have complicated consequences.

AH, C'T'ASSEZ!

That's how I made matters worse at home, or so it seems, as I developed a philosophy and a set of values that bothered both of my parents and pleased neither. For example, when they returned from their bi-annual promotional trips sponsored by Admiral and Zenith – my father's television business was thriving by then – I was always struck by the colonialism of the enterprise, obvious to me from about age ten. Here they were, middle-class French Canadians spending a week in Hilton Hotels in Nice, Monaco, La République Dominicaine, and a dozen other sponsored locations. It was a lobby tour of the world. Insulated.
Artificial. Perfected for western consumption. And when they came back from la Côte d'Ivoire with a carved elephant tusk – «C'tu beau un peu, ça?» [Isn't it beautiful?] – I wept openly.

For my father, of course, the acquisition was a logical outcome of the anthropological education he'd received himself from his
National Geographic
magazines. For my mother, it was just a «p'tite aventure» [little adventure] of the sort she was so fond of. They'd apparently gone off to the distant edges of the hotel compound, to the farthest market stall, to buy something under the counter from a shady character: «J'ai voulu prend' sa photo, mais y voula' pas.» [I wanted to take his picture, but he wouldn't accept]. Dead elephants. Poacher economies. Living spirits turned into ornaments. «Ah, c't'assez!» [that's enough], they both exclaimed when I protested. And the tusk still sits on the fireplace mantle today, outlasting me in that house by three decades.

At home, we feasted on «tourtière» [pork pie], «cretons» [pork paté], «cipailles» [baked, layered wild game pie], «crépinettes de perdreaux» [partridge meatballs], «soupe au pois» [pea soup with ham], and «pudding aux atocats» [rustic cranberry pudding]. But I took great delight, as I got a bit older, in being invited to English neighbours' houses, tasting delicacies like cheesecake, roast potatoes, and lentil loaf. My poor mother, in her broken English, actually called a neighbour once to try to find out what it was that I'd eaten the night before that I'd loved so much. It was corned beef. Miracle food.

And even though I could eat a half-pound of bacon at the age of two, a matter of some pride in my French-Canadian culture, I insisted on it being really crispy, almost burnt. Worse, I ate the blackest part of the roast, apparently, «c'qui est dur comme un sabot» [what is as hard as a wooden clog], just like my English granny did. This was not the way meat was supposed to be eaten, in my mother's eyes – it should be fresh, bloody, barely cooked. «Prends juste une p'tite marche à côté du poèle» [Just take it for a little walk next to the stove], she'd say when asked whether she wanted her steak well done, medium, or rare.

What's the end result of this being neither here nor there? Is there an end result? Should there be? Linguists talk about bilinguals living in neat categories, as “subtractive” and “additive” bilinguals: those who lose part of a language when they gain a new one versus those who
somehow manage to hold on to everything. But the truth is that you always win and lose when you become bilingual, because language is laden with cultural values. No one gains without losing – there's always a cost being felt somewhere. And no one loses without gaining – there's always a new opportunity or some kind of change to be had. The gains and losses of bilingualism always coexist. The winners and losers share the same soul.

One evening, aged about fourteen, I was helping my mother hang wet dishcloths on the wide log railing of the fishing camp at the edge of dusk. Suddenly the sky turned grey-white, then darker. There was a light wind and a flurry of movement, like a minor dust storm, as the lake directly in front began taking on an entirely new texture. It was marked with a few tiny prints at first, like raindrops. Then more and more clusters of imprints lit upon its surface. On our soaking cloths it was the same, as this curious material kept falling from the heavens in soft, thick drops, covering everything before our eyes. What in the world?

After about ten minutes it stopped, as seamlessly as it began. The normal haze of dusk returned to the sky. The lake stood perfectly still, covered in a strange grey shadow, irregular, vaguely fluffy. There was stillness for an instant, and then trout started jumping out of the water, attacking the material like starving sharks. Sixteen-inch fish, huge for that lake, worked their way from the deep where they eluded fishermen to pierce the water boundary, arching their muscular spines to grab what they could. Younger trout, their backs arching in between the larger ones, came up for the feeding too. It was like a Roman cathedral forming and unforming, arches large and small, interlacing then dissolving against a sliver of a moon. I could only gasp.

«Ah, c'est d'la manne, ça. Ça vient du Bon Dieu quand'es poissons ont faim. Ça descend comme ça pis ça'es nourrit toute. Pis apra' c'est fini.» [That's manna. It comes from God when the fish are hungry. It comes down like that and it feeds them all. And after, it's over.] I share this, like so much else, through captive breath. For I've never seen anything more inexplicable – disturbing and magnificent – and I never saw manna again. When I tried in later years to research it, it seemed that it was only a myth, partially biblical. But with absolute certainty, I
saw those clouds of dead insects fall all around us that night. My whole family and neighbours spoke of it later too.

My mother still remembers that evening. And she considers «la manne» to be an accepted if unusual phenomenon, one with a frequency somewhere between «el grand verglas d'quatre-vingt-dix-huit» [the great ice storm of '98] and major winter blizzards. I recently asked a friend who as a youth spent time in the woods of Quebec if he'd seen manna. He had, he said, every few years, even in some cities. He recalled it being reported in the local paper in Lachine one year, as the short-lived insects spent their entire lives above ground, bloomed, and died, then fell in thick layers onto the streets in a near-cataclysmic onslaught.

The manna on that special day of my youth fell on the same lake I occasionally walked into for a dip to encounter dozens of leeches – slimy, thumb-sized, purple-red creatures, flacid yet firm, with pore-sized dots all over them. They clung to my inner thighs and swelled to a larger size when they sucked blood. I leave to the imagination how those leeches eroded the thin barrier between consciousness and unconsciousness, becoming devastating installations that were repressed for decades. But on that familiar body of water that opened onto an inner darkness for me, here was food falling from above, mercy for starving fish.

Blessings while you do the dishes. Grace as humble as a dead bug. Dusk as hope. Eternal nature as fleeting. Unconsciousness as consciousness. Archaic symbols as objects. Myth as reality. Existence in all its blurriness. There are no fixed definitions, no solved equations. The gains and losses of living always co-exist. The good and the bad share the same world.

A LINGUISTIC SEESAW

How is that linguistic balance held, even today, I ask myself? I confess that when I paint and draw, I do it in English: the names of colours, the techniques, the paper, everything. Cooking, I count measures only in French, even if the recipe is in English. And I only know my social insurance number in French. If I want to tell it in English, I have to recite it in French, write it down, and then read off what I've written.
I can explain the fine points of pedagogy far better in English, but I'm more supportive of colleagues in French. I scan the Internet in English, but my internal monologue when I'm driving is usually in French.

I watch television virtually always in English, but the songs that fill my head when I walk are French folk tunes – «À la claire fontaine, en m'allant promener …» In turn, my fables and legends are split down the middle. For instance, I remember «El p'tit chap'ron rouge» [Little Red Riding Hood] in French – a familiar panorama of wolves, woods and grandmothers. But Sleeping Beauty existed only in English for me – “Just get up already,” I thought every time, “What's wrong with that girl anyhow, just lying there, waiting?” What's wrong, indeed.

I sew and I strip furniture in French, but I tend to my small garden in English. I'm an opinionated social commentator in English, but my only real hero is a fourteenth-century French feminist and critic, Christine de Pizan. I speak to dogs and cats in English, but I care for stranded bugs and snails in French. I'm more efficient in business in English, hammering out handouts, marking at lightning speed and processing reading quickly. But I'm more relaxed and informal in French, even with my students – «Eh, les amis, savez-vous que … ?» [Hey friends, did you know that … ?] instead of my customary English approach – “Yes, sir, how can I help you?” – even to a ten year old. I'm more easily angry in English, likely because this is where most of my adult life is situated. And I'm more easily tearful in French, probably because this is where my more innocent self resides.

My writing style varies too. In English, I hedge, producing sentences replete with “maybes” and “seems.” In French, I'm more decisive, infusing my texts with «très» [very] and «vraiment» [really]. And my emphatic tone seems completely opposite. In English, I have a chronic problem with overusing the word, “important.” In French, it's «petite» that's too frequent in my writing. It's as if I don't weigh things at all the same way in my two languages, so that things mean too much or too little. Goldilocks again.