Bilingual Being (33 page)

LIFE IN THE VESTIBULE

In those years it never occurred to me that those shifting grandmothers were such a salient demonstration of my bilingual personas. There was the strong-willed woman full of intensity – exuberant, dynamic,
passionate to the point of danger. She was my freedom, my love, my joy. And there was the upstanding lady full of sensibility – logical, steadfast, intellectual to the point of dryness. She was my compass, my stability, my calm. The balance between grandmothers, between selves, always threatened to tip, like a shallow boat in a November river. But somehow, it never did. Instead, I rowed upon the different emotional currents of my languages, on one side, then another, moving in the unpredictable flow of human life. Language became a membrane, more porous than tight, letting reality in and out, diluting my languages inside a single self, becoming the mess of alternative linguistic identities that I think are “me,” and that I make be “me.”

Book junkie that I am, I began to notice writers along the way talking about their own multilingual messes. I found kindred souls meshed, churned, embodied, exiled, inhaled and exhaled in one, two, even more languages. Memoirs of bilingual lives started to populate my room. And the idea of bilingualism being primarily an emotional phenomenon began to consume me. After a while, I was reading rather than eating – not an unfamiliar pattern by now – hungry to surround myself with people who were hanging between worlds, perpetually liminal, like me.

Of course this liminality is shared not just between me and a few bilingual memoirists but by billions of people around the world. It's because multilingualism is the rule rather than the exception around the globe. My handful of linguistic capital, counting only two tongues, looks meagre indeed compared to the gold reserves of those who function routinely in three or four languages or more. Even so, little is actually understood about bilingual beings. Of course, there's research on where language is located in the brain, most of it based on aphasics, individuals who've lost functions or fluency after an injury or illness. But this work is really the study of language pathology – language damaged rather than language lived. Besides, does anyone really believe that physiology is enough to explain language?

Are there any bilingual individuals in the world who do not realize that language is a powerful social instrument? For example, that employing (deploying?) a dominant language can get them ahead in business? Or that they tend to choose their mother tongue for baby talk or romantic endearments? Or that swear words come out more easily in
one language than the other – sometimes the mother tongue (because it's emotional), and sometimes the new tongue (because it's neutral)? Or that hiding their knowledge of a language can actually help in some sensitive situations? Or that favourite movies, songs, and memories are more poignant in one language than another?

Language encompasses all of that, and more. Of course, language choice includes finding the best word for an object – knowing which language to use, when, where, why, and all of that. Even more important, language represents choice for the user – options about lifeways, worldviews, and tools for thought. It offers communicative systems that are more attractive or less so depending on one's needs, and that are sometimes hard to decide between. That's because bilingualism is complicated and multi-faceted, and can't be reduced to simple frameworks.

Like shifting grandmothers coming over to stay for a while, each language comes with its own baggage, history, and possibilities. That's why the relationship between a person's languages is always ambivalent. The bilingual can exist or not exist on either side, or in between. Bilingual language worlds are separated, but connected too. Language lets the bilingual flow thoughts from one field to another, but language also can arrest the soul and heart to provide grounding. The bilingual is a complicated hyphen. In French, «un trait d'union»: a connection, a line between.

MOP AND NECKLACE

So how does it feel to be a complicated hyphen? The year was 1965, a catechism lesson. We each had our books on our desks, literature in the fullest spirit of modernity so that it perfectly aligned not only with our reading level but also with the designated themes of our English-style Catholicism. The discrepancy with my own brand, staunchly French, would soon become apparent.

In hindsight, the story seemed to be a deliberate derivative of de Maupassant's
The Diamond Necklace
. There were two brothers and their poor mother, a “washerwoman,” and her birthday was near. Each boy thought about what to buy her, given his limited funds. One brother spent an outrageous amount of money to buy the mother a diamond necklace so that she'd feel glamorous and beautiful. The other brother
spent a more modest amount to buy her a shiny new pail and mop. Which was the better gift? There was a teacher-led class discussion on the question for a few moments. For those unfamiliar with Catholic schools in those years, I can assure you that the idea of a class discussion is being liberally applied here. In reality, Sister asked rhetorical questions, made eye contact with a few who could be trusted to nod “yes.” And then she opened her gift to us:
the
answer.

Of course, the better gift was the diamond necklace. It was appropriately special and honoured the mother properly. Every hand went up for her so-called “vote” of who saw it her way. Every hand, that is, except mine.

“Do you honestly think the mop and pail were the better gift, Kathleen?”

Muted snickers from classmates. Tension. Challenging authority in a Catholic school is virtually indistinguishable from challenging an ecclesiastical decree. But my answer impelled from a depth, dark but rich, that overcame the lump in my throat.

My logic was that the diamond necklace was an excessive waste of money that could have been spent on food. Besides, in the mother's social circle, she'd never have had the chance to wear the necklace, and it might even have been stolen because her home was shabby, insecure, violable. Perhaps during the crime she or her sons might even have been injured. The far better gift, I thought, was the mop and pail. First, it was a prudent choice that didn't unduly drain resources from the son's budget, leaving something for a rainy day. Second, every time she used it – which, by profession, would be often – she'd be reminded of her birthday and her loving son's thoughtfulness. Third, no one would want to steal it, so the family would be as safe as they ever were. In fact, they might be even better off if the mother's ability to clean improved the management of her daily tasks.

Three or four heads turned to look at me like I was an alien. Sister's stifled moral dilemma morphed into a venomous stillness as the only sound was the hard, hard thump of books being gathered into a neat pile at the front of the class. The ripples of stress were so acute that a sweet boy in our class wet himself, as he invariably did when anxious. He sat at the back, as he had since kindergarten, precisely because of this problem. As a result, he was my nearest seatmate, year after year.
It was so sad, that yellow puddle forming, winding a slow path around the legs of his chair and his desk as he began to cry. “Kathleen, go get the mop,” Sister ordered. I'm not kidding.

Off we went down the hall, him to his hook in the primary locker room to get the spare pants that hung in waiting, me to the custodial cupboard to get the mop, a stringy thing with a worn wood handle – a skinny, smelly giant. “It's not your fault,” he said, but we both knew that already. The catechism sister was just a mean woman. This would be the same sister who had used me one day in a twisted experiment in classroom management. If two mischievous boys talked, she promised, she'd hit
me
with a ruler. Of course they talked. After all, we were only seven. So I had to place my hands on her desk, palms up, while she struck me with one of those fifteen-inch metal rulers. By the time she counted to eighteen, though, the boys were crying and I was still staring at her in the eye, unmoved. As if this even hurt! I watched her arm swing towards those hands way down on that desk. No problem. That's when she got that look again, the look of someone who's encountered an unanticipated problem. So she stopped.

“It's okay,” I said to him that day as we cleaned up together, taking up our regular routine, calmly as always. I truly didn't care. It was still well worth it to sit at the back. Besides, it gave me time to think, to memorialize the moment. To inscribe it psychically as I strive to do when I think I'm living something significant that I should try not to forget. For here were the two babysitting grandmothers rendered in print. The mop versus the necklace.

I guess that recording mechanism is automatic somehow, a multisensory imprinting of anything particularly potent – formed maybe because of my troubles. But I hear it as a supportive and steady voice, in English only, issuing basic instructions: “Remember this. Now listen. Now look.” I think the non-technical word for it is “hearing voices,” and there are wide-ranging opinions about this phenomenon. It's described in very different ways by spiritual leaders, drug addicts, survivors of near-death experiences, and the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
. But I frankly can't imagine having lived without that help, and I have no memory of myself without it. After all, it was the same source that counselled me to
run!
or to
hide!
– what I regarded as life-saving advice, to be followed immediately.

In any event, here I was running and hiding in the middle ground of my bicultural self – my selves. I was inside one cultural paradigm, my
English
Catholic school, yet even while there I remained inside my other cultural paradigm, my
French
Catholic mindset. I travelled easily from one set of views to another. Chose my allegiances and my values issue by issue, like at a cafeteria. Pretention versus humility? An easy choice. Besides, Sister's English Catholic idea of “scary” was laughable. It couldn't compare with my French Catholic version. So I wasn't afraid of her in the least. And I was beginning to be quite comfortable with my psychological duality, my existence as a
matryoshka
doll, this continuous inversion of inside and outside – my linguistic, cultural, and psychological ambivalence. My life as a human hyphen.

__________

*
As said by Charles de Gaulle, the French president, on a visit to Expo 67, the World Fair; it became one of the most charged political phrases in provincial history, rallying separatist fervour then up to the present day.

Etiology

«En fin d'compte,

c'est juste comme

un p'tit animal.»

“After all, it's just

like a small animal.”

A familiar adult was

recently explaining

the motivation for a

toddler's actions –

the limitations of

not even a baby

but of a good, sound

mind of more than

two years of age.

That's
the missing link

in the absurd causation

of the acts against me.

It wasn't enough to

accommodate
zeitgeist
:

misogyny, patriarchy,

sexuality, oligarchy,

pathology, criminality,

materiality, theology.

There was also a need

for
radical empiricism
.

The child as
tabula rasa
:

capable of nothing but

the feeble needs of flesh.

The child as a
subject
:

understanding very little,

remembering even less.

The child as a
primitive
:

a debased captive in the

rigid empire of adults.

The etiology of the acts

is a deviant philosophy.

18

RUPTURES

DES P'TITES POUPÉES

I headed off to school each day in those years at Marymount dressed like «une belle p'tite mademoiselle,» my hair pulled back tight with fabric flowers all around, a meadow halo. My mother would insist on that hairdo until I was twelve, impressing upon me the importance of always looking one's best. At school, the hemline was mercifully dictated – no more than two inches above the knee, measured on random check days. But out of school, my wardrobe consisted of excessively short dresses with matching frilly underwear well into my sixth or seventh year. From there, skirts remained skimpy (pants disallowed until age twelve), but the frills on the underpants were abandoned in favour of another triumph of modernity, artificial fabric: «p'tites culottes» in unbreathable acrylic or nylon.

It was «complètement normal» [completely normal] in the French-Canadian culture of the 1960s, where young girls were expected to be «des p'tites poupées» [little dolls] or «des p'tits bouts d'choux» [little bits of cabbage]. Both options delivered a compliant, coy female who was sure to make the uncles and father's work friends whistle. Making them whistle was supposed to be a good thing. Being invited to sit on their laps was apparently a good thing too.

That cynical conclusion of mine, according to kitchen table conversations with my mother, is just one more example of my prudishness, my «froideur d'une anglaise» [the coldness of an Englishwoman]. She
means my sexual conservatism – my so-called anglo view of life by which I'm relatively more inhibited, as my granny was, or so I'm told. Her husband, my French-Canadian paternal grandfather, the soldier, apparently thought she was «très froide.» I don't know if my husbands thought me cold. Perhaps they did. But I did stay married to a man twenty years younger than me for seven years – something hard to do, one would think, if I were really repressed. Then again, he came from a relatively conservative Islamic culture. Maybe by his standards I was a wild thing, a sexual beast.

Does my sexuality depend, then, not just on the language I live and speak – with my words and with my body – but also on the language of my listener? Could it be that my sexuality isn't really my own at all, but a kind of product of dialogue? It's a strange idea, but maybe I'm always who – or whoever – I am because of who I'm with. And what I think of as one of my key personal attributes is actually created outside of me – in the space between what I speak (with my bilingual body) and what my listener (in his or her linguistic body) can hear? Is sexuality born on (in) a hyphen, too?