Bilingual Being (38 page)

Potter breathed new life into Aesop's wondrous characters and rendered them in the most exquisite images of gentle nature. She painted watercolours where tiny, logical, sensible, polite characters managed their lives in a dignified, self-respecting fashion. And when Town Mouse and Country Mouse switched places, tried out each other's worlds, Beatrix showed me how to perform the skill that would most make a difference to my survival – to imagine myself in another frame entirely.
I owe her my life
.

I can't count how many times I saw myself with a red-and-white kerchief, tied in a tidy knot on the end of a decent stick, slung over my left shoulder. And I'd be on my way, outta here. That hobo gear became the single most prevalent image in my dreams for the duration of my childhood. I was still thinking it in waking dreams at age nine or ten. Sometimes a white mouse was my companion, and sometimes he was me. It was Beatrix who showed me how to be my own best friend
and
a character in my own story. And it was Beatrix who taught me to believe in a world full of loving, reasonable souls with a peaceful life, where threats were manageable and simple foods prevailed.

In fact, Beatrix showed me a perfect community of practice, and she invited me warmly to walk off the pages of my own life into her painted
world. She taught me to believe in the possibility of being somewhere else, and she populated my imagination with illuminated pastel scenes of nature where I could lose myself as I befriended the kindly lot of animals living at the benevolent boundary of reality and fantasy. In this beautiful place, I let myself fall into silence, until all I could hear were crickets and birds, drowning out human words that faded easily into nothingness. Her stories let me reshape the sound of the harsh, insistent
Ssshhh!
in my ear until it was just a summer river trickling by, tall grass moving in the wind, a kindly rabbit hushing another.

Now here's the
really
crazy part: Beatrix Potter didn't exist in French. Of course, I understand that
Pierre Lapin
is alive and well today, along with about forty other multilingual clones. But when I needed him and his friends the most, they were completely untranslated, invisible, unborn, never even conceived in my mother tongue.

My second language, English, opened up not only the world of Beatrix Potter, Dr Seuss, and Lewis Carroll but an entire universe of authors. It multiplied without measure my access to literature I would otherwise never have known. And this new body of writing introduced texts that let me play with language, and play between my languages – the only games I ever enjoyed – seeing the nonsense of words and the worlds they inhabit. In short, my second language opened up new possibilities for my imagination: new constructs of reality, new points of view, even new fantasies.

It also showed me it was possible to have a wonderful life with entirely different kinds of people – friends, real love, even happiness. After all, here were my other perennial favourites, the Owl and the Pussycat, two divergent species who were so joyous together as they sailed away in their beautiful pea-green boat to places where life was so unlike home – a world full of bong-trees, piggy-wigs, and runcible spoons. Bilingualism took the narrow limits of my self and blew them wide open.

SSSHHH!

A broad, open door was precisely what I needed. A way to see, feel, and hear far beyond the harsh, insistent, male
Ssshhh
in my ear. Ah,
Ssshhh!
Where I begin and end. Not my first word, though. That was apparently «Papa» at six months, according to my baby book. It's an unusual first word for a baby to speak in my mother tongue.
Statistically speaking, I should have said «Mama.» Maybe I did, and my mother was fudging the record a bit, to please my «père.» Or was I trying as hard as I could to snitch back then? Who knows. Another of my little clues went by, perhaps – just one more feeble and inadequate attempt at being understood.

Being unheard was just another kind of
Ssshhh!
And when I finally got to revisit the earliest sites of injury fifty-four years later, during the deepest psychological digging I've done to date, I found no words there at all. No sounds of any kind to go along with the weird snippets of pictures, bodily orientations, smells, sensations, and feelings. There was only silence except for one word, each time, in every scenario:
Ssshhh!
That
Ssshhh
was everywhere! Just like in the Bible: first there was the Word, and the Word was
Ssshhh
.

Here it is, for example, in 1959, on a day I spent with my older cousin.
I'm waving bye-bye with my right hand. Clown is in my left hand. In the car, my parents drive away. Snatch! I'm picked up fast. Clown drops. I'm up in tight big arms, crying. And Clown is down, far away on the grass. I'm carried in the big door, up the big stairs. I'm crying more now. «Ssshhh! Tu vas déranger 'es voisins!» [Be quiet! You'll bother the neighbours!] The door clicks. There's time and more time. Then there's hard laughing because I'm running now! I'm down the big stairs, around, around, out the big door. But there's no sun now. It's grey and dark, a different sky. And there's no Clown. I'm looking, but there's no Clown. I'm alone, with no Clown now.

This moment defines sorrow for me – makes me weep in ways I can't easily stop. My grief is entirely contained in the constant shadow of that soft green clown with the plastic face who was about as tall as a wooden spoon, who disappeared from the front yard of our apartment building in the course of an afternoon not unlike many others. His loss is so intrinsic to my soul that it's immutable. His absence, my linchpin memory, my witness – the most loyal breadcrumb. As for that
Ssshhh
, it became permanent too – in my silencing, my forgetting, my being sworn to never tell anyone what I'm telling now.

And here's
Ssshhh
again, in 1960.
My downstairs neighbour and I sit on her bed. We face her kitchen doorway. My left ear is in her lap. Her right hand is on my right ear. I cry softly, on and on. She says Ssshhh, over and over. She pats my head slowly. I feel kindness in her palm. We crouch in
front of a wide brown dresser. The top right corner has a big chip missing, from a dog bite, she says. She opens the bottom drawer. Look at that! Tiny coloured flowers on soft, white cotton. I can borrow one pair for today. I can change …

That moment defined mercy for me early on as an old woman, five foot three-ish, with short brown hair and a round olive face, who was a bit plump and had an accent (was it Polish? Russian?). Her permanence became my inner Angel, my Saviour, my security. And that particular
Ssshhh
? It became lodged forever inside me too, as comfort, guidance, healing, love. It would provide everything I was missing so well that I'd change nothing of the past, to be honest, if it risked losing what I received from her. My mother on the inside.

That
Ssshhh!
Not even a word – a non-word. But with so much to say. On board the human adventure from the start of our lives. Archaic. In fact, it seems that oral language – and that
Ssshhh
especially – is one of baby's first clues (along with light, air and temperature) that passage out of the womb has occurred. Baby's first reality check, one might say.

Then, in the months that follow birth, each bit of input from the outside world pulls us awake as adorable parasites completely dependent on our mothers into the world of family and society where we'll try to live as successful symbiotes, giving and receiving in complex webs of relationships. From our first cry, our need, and its first soothing response,
Ssshhh
, we begin language learning and learning about life too, simultaneously. That primary dialogue not only answers our call but also tells us that we're distinct beings – something we didn't know before and could only dream about, floating as we were in our pre-birth oceanic feeling. From here, the mother tongue enters like a Trojan horse, bringing culture along with milk. Making it seem equally essential to our existence.

Either our cry works and we're soothed with food, or it doesn't. Then, evolutionarily designed for development as we are, our cries become more complicated, varied for different needs. As they do so, we notice that the
Ssshhh
response becomes nuanced too – sometimes more or less patient, quick or slow, soft or loud, and so on. Our archaic language quickly gains a broad vocabulary of tone and pitch. And we learn by repetition how it serves us. It's a connection that never goes away, no matter how many languages we acquire. That's why the
relationship between language and affect can explain things that the relationship between language and thought can only dream about, literally.

Did bilingualism change that primary relationship between language and emotion for me? How could it not? My pain and fear were embedded, embodied, in French. It was a powerful association of injury to the prosody of language so that the speech of key voices, then of voices that merely sounded like them, then of voices that used similar words, then of voices that spoke in similar places, became a spiralling vortex that gathered more and more momentum around it until my entire mother tongue was pulled into my trauma. I was living at the eye of a devastating storm, where all was quiet except for
Ssshhh
. And what about English, my new language? It was a perfectly sunny day over there.

CRYPTOMNESIA

I have a confession to make at this point. It's that sometimes I feel like I've stolen everything that I am. Maybe it's just one of those survivor complexes, something with a negative motivation underneath it, like guilt or aggression. I'm not sure. But everything about me seems to be second-hand, from somewhere else, like it's not entirely mine. After all, I made my Clown into my witness, and my next-door neighbour into my guardian angel. My understanding of my trouble came from story blocks and magazine covers. My imaginary friends, from books. My key self-concept, the twinning, from blue whales and white mice. My values, from nonsense rhymes. My emotions, from an archaic language. My origins, from French. My possibilities, from English.

My world was, is, a fabrication, a «bricolage» of half-truths, interminable hopes, random texts, convenient fugues, and magical thinking. I'll admit to that. I was a real little thief, a tiny perpetrator of cryptomnesia. Stealing memories from everyone and everything – recalling thoughts from everywhere as being my own. It was persistent, unabashed unconscious borrowing by which I fulfilled the single, solitary wish I had: to survive. For unlike older victims, I had no “pre-trauma” self to run back to, no life to “own again,” no conception of myself at all before this trauma. I began my existence
in
it and
with
it. It was like starting from scratch after a catastrophic natural disaster – starting back at zero. I know zero. Zero is a solitary instant when there's no light, no
objects, no time, no here. Zero is a single cognition-emotion-intuition-conviction – a death pulse. A buzzing silence loud enough to blow out your eardrums that says only this:
No one comes
. Then, somehow, something comes from inside you. Unspeakably mysterious, it's there. You continue. You should die, but you don't. That's the death-birth of zero.

I found my working models where I could. So be it. I fabricated an identity, hope, values, and faith not just inside both my languages – but beyond, before and between them. I collected resources not only in words but in non-words, too – emotions and their symbols – as I pulled in and transferred useful bits from people and their worlds to form a whole. Blended the phenomenal and the mythical, like stirring paint, concocting. The result? A whole that moved easily between English and French – and between the conscious and unconscious. A unitary being that monitored reality and fantasy to sense when it was time to cross – just like monitoring English and French to know which language to use. That attended to context and read input back and forth to register the tipping point, the moment requiring a choice of which mode to use. After a while the psyche became as porous as a cell membrane, words and symbols flowing in and out as needed. So passed my first decade – in the necessary crime of stealing my own story from my own life, and vice versa.

Maybe that's how my bilingualism really saved me. Maybe it gave a sense of normalcy to my inner duality, my sense of shifting – fuguing – between being and not being fully present. Maybe I thought that everyone with two languages felt like this inside – that it was a normal human business, this oscillation of valences of self. If so, that would have turned every bilingual human being I met or learned about into a model of normalcy. It would have entirely removed the stigma of my peculiarity. Bilingualism would have delivered the most life-affirming message ever: It's okay. Maybe that was it after all. Because somehow, I got stronger, despite everything, despite regular ups and downs. I became independent and increasingly secure inside, regardless of the insecurity outside. And in that gracious envelope of a growing sense of ordinariness, I developed some early beliefs, like any child does, that sustained me to my core.

One of these rushes in still – a conviction perhaps born in a forest I walked along, or on the page of a treasured book. An easy trigger?
My first home on Boulevard René Lévesque (formerly St-Cyrille) at Holland Avenue. It still stands, second from the northwest corner, the sixplex with the angled door and narrow staircase window. A beautiful tree grows in the front yard where there used to be only grass.
Trees talk among themselves. You don't hear them, but they watch everything down below from up above. And if they see a problem, they tell each other to tell the angels to come and fix it right away.
I'm glad I learned to steal sense from the world around me – not just from English and French, but from the language of nature, of life, and of texts near and distant. For that tree thrives on the precise spot where once my Clown and tears were planted.