Bilingual Being (35 page)

Then again, in a profound way, my father understood perfectly. Deeply troubled himself, he'd absorbed and fused the disturbances around him, including the language debate. For even in those early years, it was becoming a convoluted mess. Irreconcilable linguistic selves, French and English had become like twins bound in too much history, engaged in a timeless metaphorical duel, holding selfhood for ransom. And using his own inimitable logic, my father had stumbled upon an emerging fact of considerable magnitude: language, identity, and location could be easily lost inside, and because of, one another.

Around 2006, at Pearson Airport in Toronto, I watched a family return to Turkey. They'd been here for about five years and we'd become close friends. The husband was kind and good-humoured; the three children, two girls and a boy, got along well with my three; and the wife was among the warmest, most sensitive people I've ever met. I cried as I watched them leave. I knew it would be forever. Why were they returning? Because somewhere in that confabulation of language, identity, and belonging, they felt they were losing their children. Increasingly fluent not just in English but in the lifestyle that accompanied the new language and country, these children – who were popular and happy at their public school – were becoming so different, too different in their eyes. They seemed to be diverging too much from the cousins back home, from the kind of people they'd been themselves as children, and from the children they'd hoped to raise: young minds and souls who could and would embrace their values.

They weren't the first family I knew that made the same choice. In 2004, I entirely missed the chance to go to the airport to do my crying because the departure came so suddenly. Another lovely family of five, Turks again. The father was a soft-spoken, moderate imam with a doctorate in religious studies and a full-time job as a taxi driver. The mother was a homemaker with a sprinkling of English from the few
LINC
classes she attended when she wasn't tending to community work or teaching her heritage language.

The three children, two boys and a girl, were charming A+ students who were into soccer and social clubs at their public school. But there were too many days when the mother, a humble soul, was overwhelmingly sad that so much of the dialogue in the home among her children was moving out of her reach. She could hear it, but she couldn't understand it. Fast English, idioms flying past her – even the most polite ones – left her feeling edged out of motherhood. The decision was quick, taken over a weekend, a testament to the painful passion, the urgency, that informed the choice.

Two families not unlike my own. Not in the obvious way – considering the three children, or the co-location on the geographic and social panorama. But in the less obvious way, in that these parents were playing out right before my eyes, with their children, the decisions that had affected my parents and their children – my brother and me – so much. They were feeling in every cell of their bodies that their children were drifting away. That their children were changing from unwilling to willing exiles, adjusting to their new linguistic worlds by co-opting new psychological worlds. In the quiet purchase of five airplane tickets and a few second-hand suitcases, these parents resisted the drift. They sought and strained to pull their families back towards cohesion, collected the scattered pieces of the family image before it spread out too far to ever be mended.

EL MIROIR CASSÉ

In the mid-1960s, a popular art form invaded our home: broken mirror art. I don't know which matrilineal aunt started it, but it soon supplanted as the craft in vogue the spraying gold and silver of tree branches and driftwood. Re-casting a woman's power against religion and superstition, our households took to making something out of a broken mirror – «el miroir cassé» – other than a seven-year curse. If we didn't have any, we just broke a couple, putting them in a pillowcase tied with an elastic band, and smashing them with a hammer. Then we took the pieces and glued them tastefully onto black velvet stretched tight over plywood.

Sailboats and flowers were the customary themes. But far more consequential than the picture assembled by the shards was the picture broken by it. For everywhere around my home hung a piece of pre-postmodern art that, when I tried to look at it, made me see only my own face broken in a hundred jagged, uneven pieces. This was not at all like the sensation I had from time to time in front of mirrors, where I wondered if the face I saw was really mine, or whether that was really the colour my hair (wasn't it browner?). Those reflections on selfhood were internal – symptoms of fragmentation that could, at least, remain private. Instead, the reflection on the state of my self made by these mirror fragments – pieces deliberately broken and stuck with crunchy glue onto velvet banged hard onto stiffness – was brutally public.

In 1958, aged one: the first shard on the velvet landscape.
In the beginning, there was only darkness. There was no air and no animals. There was lots and lots of nothing. Empty. Then came liquid fire, pouring out of the earth. It was spitting up everywhere in that lonely darkness. And when it did that, you could see hard dry land between the cracks of red liquid fire. And the crusty dry land was broken up in deep cuts, scarred up with big earthquakes everywhere. Fire was coming up all over, like giant flame fountains, and the land was dead and empty. Nothing grew and no one was there. Only the fire was there, and the constant shaking of the ground, always breaking. And there was only heat and the spitting fire. The ground shook so hard. That's why the animals didn't come yet, I think. I don't know for sure. And that's how it was in the beginning.

See how the Elder taught me well, taught an infant girl about the beginning. There, while he sat on the edge of the bed crying and quivering, and I lay there with no body, except a face, and no feeling of anything except a memory of
his
feelings – scared and regretful – and his sorrowful whimpering. He read bedtime stories to himself then. I got to listen – Genesis and Revelation, I know that now – his tears plopping on well-worn pages of his Old Testament. He was pious and pathetic.

But I liked stories then, still do. So I heard what he said and built a picture in my head, coded it as a kind of map of the world. It was an ordinary case of the primitive brain curiously recording an unconscious tracing in coloured pictures, printing it all to some place in the mind between the sense of smell and the sense of fear, in some ancient lobe that lets infants put away things that don't make much sense at the
time, or at any time. It let me keep things that stayed buried in my psyche until my head broke open fifty years later. Dry and wretched, my memory spat sorrow like flowing fire as the deepest vacuums of my consciousness shifted, yielding a careful construct, mine from a time of absence. I found my old blueprint, this precious template of my life on which much was added from that first image, when the nothingness of empty space turned into living hell on earth. He was right. It was just the beginning.

In 1978, aged twenty: the final shard on the velvet landscape. «Bonne Année,» as they say. He has asked me to drive him home. Why me? It would take me fifty years to figure out why these events made me so tired. Why the Rivière Chaudière, there outside, called to me to jump in through the cracks of ice, head first, to start again downstream somewhere. Inside, voices were muffled as if through skin and thick dust. I should have been enjoying myself, but I couldn't. I saw accordions, laughter, singing, words. But something wouldn't let me relax here. (Do I ever relax?) A few canapés, pinched cheeks, «Bonjour ma belle.» I was done for another year. Four cousins gave me an apologetic look as I got my coat from the bedroom where they chatted, comparing lipsticks, adjusting minor complaints about a bra strap. I gave a quick kiss to all, and I was off to take this old priest home from the New Year's party.

Driving, twenty or thirty minutes passed. Silence mixed with questions about schooling. McGill, second year, biology, honours. I skipped the parts about the risky men, the drinking, the anorexia, the nervous breakdown, the amenorrhea, the recurring thoughts of suicide. I drove along the Trans-Canada, “the 20 East,” from the party in Saint-Lambert-de-Lauzon towards Quebec City. Together we crossed over Pont Pierre Laporte – the bridge named after a soul caught up in a cycle of social violence. Myth and society merging with self, indissociable – the story of my life. A bit more driving from here, through the heart of the suburb of Sainte-Foy, right to the house where people like him live. People like him
do
live, you know: old priests with old housekeepers to cater to their old feet, their old sermons, their old pretensions.

It was a plain red-brown brick square, two storeys high, an ordinary house, 1940s style, absurdly normal. I'd never been inside. I stayed on the outside of everything, remote. I watched my life go by, just like now.
So I watched myself that day reach the front of the house and stop the car, a model I can't remember, with an interior colour I can't remember. Grey sky? Blue sky? No idea. My coat? I don't remember it at all. His coat? It must have been black. Everything about him was black except the thin white collar around his throat, a starched noose, and the rigid wrinkles under his thin-framed glasses. His look? Feigned nobility textured with self-absolution: arrogance, certainty, vanity, impunity, calm. His long right arm extended – gloved or not? I can't remember.

I just remember watching the breast below my left shoulder come under his large right hand, feel a squeeze, a hard squeeze. That's technique, I guess, going through layers of winter coat like that. I remember watching that hand on that long arm, and the breast, and seeing his eyes, fat bullets in a self-assured face, cold and confident, coming closer and closer. And then, his face stopping suddenly, a sharp change in affect. Surprise. Disappointment. Disabled rage in some faint register. Confusion, disbelief. Twisted amusement – almost.

If he said something then, I didn't hear it or don't remember. I watched myself sitting in the driver's seat. I watched myself say nothing. I watched the hand come off the breast, there on the left side of the body that is mine, and return to the right side of the body that is his. I watched him gather a bag on the car floor, shifting sideways. Then I watched him open the passenger door and get out. And I watched myself drive away.

I told no one about this except my Jewish boyfriend, a few days later, over sex and pot, when we had a good laugh about a decrepit Catholic pervert. It remained an isolated incident in my mind and my story, entirely disconnected from the shadowy memories I struggled to hold and understand – and, so often, to forget. But something deep inside tripped me up a bit, wouldn't quite let me settle on this version of things, of just a creepy old man trying his luck. I began to feel that I was lacking a critical piece. But what had I eclipsed here? Where else, when else, had I seen this man before, one of many of his kind appendaged to the family? The moment scratched its count on my prison wall.

Over time I cared less and less about the hand, the breast – and more and more about the eyes, the face, the tone, the look of presumptuous familiarity. Not a question, but a taking-it-for-granted conviction. A clear anticipation, as though I'd never think, nor even want, to deny
him. As though sometime in a past I'd lost but he'd kept well, I had never denied him. As though he knew me as more than one of many who could have driven him that day. A day that seemed to be about something other than a hand, a breast, and a man obliterated for years who'd be filed in psychic oblivion for thirty more. A day about more than Père «Nom,» another completely forgettable man.

The broken pieces of my self, disjointed reflections scattered against a dark background, were hard to gather, challenging to reassemble into a whole. I heard but didn't listen to my father who, like other parents, worried about the fragmentation, the increasing irreconcilability of the emerging person. The dangerous rupture. Instead, I clenched my bleeding hands for decades around the shards I carried with me everywhere, hoping one day to reconstruct. With every breath I had left, I defended my ownership of those fragile, piercing bits of memory locked in the combined code of mother tongue and primal fear – that often threatened to become just a random bunch of bits.

__________

*
The Ursuline Convent in Old Quebec is organized by the French Roman Catholic Ursuline order. Founded in 1639, it is recognized as the oldest educational institution for women in North America.

*
A social uprising centred mainly in Montreal, but with effects province wide due to the resulting imposition of the War Measures Act and the political backlash that followed.

*
La Charte de la langue francaise [Charter of the French Language], also known as Bill 101, passed in 1977.

†
The OLF is a language monitor and an agent of francization in Quebec – the most visible arm of Bill 101.

‡
Zone d'exploitation contrôllée, a provincial system for managing ecological resources since 1978.

Installation

It's a rough bath.

Two voices talk

beside me, dry –

away then closer –

not in the water.

One: slow, low, hoarse.

One: fast, quiet, bossy.

Scrubbed in a big rush.

Head, eyes all splashed.

Smoke round the tub.

Two sounds: La – Chine.

Again, again, again.

«Lachine? La Chine?»

«Vagin? Vagine?
*
»

Another one, too.

A funny song?

Two step-counts.

Ends in «oune.»

«Baboune?
*
»

«Minoune?»

«Moumoune?»

«Toutoune?»

«Pitoune?»

«Foufounes?»

«Guidoune?»

«Zouzoune?»

«Bizoune?»