Bilingual Being (45 page)

I'm especially indebted to Sigmund Freud. For most of my life, I confess I held the usual stereotypes about Freud. But during months of working through the mysteries that secretly steered my existence for half a century, I revised my opinion entirely. In the legal field, a “chain of custody” denotes the chronological flow of evidence – its possession, transfer, seizure, disposition, and (in)security. Testimony hinges on it, especially when the goods are susceptible to trickery. As I conducted my “personal investigation,” Freud explained the convoluted transport of memories, affective shards, and personality formations from the past to the present. He provided the instruments I needed to become a reliable witness in my own life and to begin to account for the whole of my story.

On a more personal note, I thank T., for everything, as well as my Granny St-Onge – Gladys Louise Garland. In her dying days, she entrusted me with her memoir, from which I've drawn many references. And John L. St-Onge, my father's brother, a retired professor with a penchant for history about my Grandfather St-Onge. But more than anything, I'm thankful to my three children, Sarah, Jacob, and Peter, for more than I can put into words. They're unique, kind, brilliant and successful adults who offer everything from love to feedback to comic relief. I hope that I've not embarrassed them and that they'll be a little closer to understanding the questions they ask of themselves as anglophone Canadians, such as “Why does Mom care about her French heritage so much?” And its companion query, “Why didn't we go to French school?” Good questions indeed.

In fact, I shunned my mother tongue and my French Canadian heritage almost all of my life – leaving my mother, Thérèse Dumont, and my home behind as I othered myself, bit by bit, into English. My mother considers this the trauma that changed everything for her, much as a different trauma changed everything for me. I thank her, for every child's story is also a mother's story. In relating family narratives, I render all of my mother's words in the so-called joual of Quebec City, my hometown. I can't fathom trying to capture her world without using the authentic tongue into which I was born. This often disparaged (yet still ubiquitous) patois, rather than standard French, is my real mother tongue.

This book is a series of narrative essays around common themes. But the French rather than the English meaning of the word is the one I intend. «Un essai» adds the sense of “an attempt,” and this is nothing more than my effort to tell a story – one necessarily infused with my point of view. It's a «mélange» of ethnography, reflections, and secrets that can be told anywhere now, but for more than fifty years could be told nowhere at all. Yet a single drop of water falls, again and again, and a mountain eventually crumbles. Silence is a weak pact against the forces of nature.

The twenty-four poems are crafted from the therapy journal I wrote in the months following the confirmation of my trauma on 29 August 2010. Each has travelled an arduous journey from the unconscious to the conscious, to a formless sea of more than five hundred pages of
tiny-fonted print, to poetry, to here. I hope you'll forgive their intrusion from another mental space entirely, and allow the child reporter to have a word inside the story the adult writer is trying to tell. My tale wouldn't be complete (or mine) without them.

I offer this book in loving memory of my deceased maternal cousin, Sonya Poulin, who was my elder by about two years. I further dedicate it to my sister-in-law, Julie Blouin, whose astute listening on the bridge between my brother and mother throughout the summer of 2010 broke my personal history wide open, delivering air. And to my brother, Richard (Rick) – my only sibling. Were it not for his keen memory of odd details and his willingness to indulge annoying questions from a sister who'd long felt estranged, I'd still be in the dark about why I traded language ships and sailed away. Siblings surviving diaspora: a tale of hope. Or so I hope it is.