Bilingual Being (34 page)

After all, this is the main analytical frame in the social sciences these days, “social constructivism,” in a nutshell – and it's also what can be explained by it. The idea is that we exist in spaces where what we are and become is critically hinged on where we are and who we're with. Then again, this could be just another example of how my mother is right. She usually is. I'm more English than French in my sexuality, in my gendering. I do not, for example, find myself at all flattered by whistles on the street, though my mother still does. And I still avoid frilly things like the plague.

Years after the frilly underwear days, I found out that my brave auntie – the British one who was, according to the French females in the clan, «pas bin l'fun» [not much fun] – had called my mother after at least one family event to tell her that this way of displaying a daughter wasn't appropriate. Poor uncle, my parents thought: «C'pas bin drôle avoir une femme comme ça.» [It's not very funny to have a wife like that.] So the frilly underwear years went on until I outgrew the largest available size. I lost track of those years and most of those parties, except for memories of being grabbed by the butt by men whose laps I
was asked to sit on, and having tongues forced down my throat when I was asked for a kiss on the cheek, always followed by howls of laughter. «Bin voyons-donc. Y'a rien là.» [Come on, now. There's nothing wrong with that.]

Why did I think my mother was so right if this didn't feel right at all? I suppose I resolved the matter like we all do, delaying a true understanding of our parents until we're old enough to see people as products of their times, no more nor less than we are. In this case, products of times when there was too much tolerated from the heads of households – those dear old patriarchs – and family myths remained relatively unbroken from previous centuries. When sexuality and pleasure were let loose following two great wars and a financial depression, leaving ordinary people in a celebratory mood for decades. And when little credit was given to the selfhood of children – their ability to have bodily and spiritual integrity as distinct beings, capable of learning and remembering from the get-go, even in utero.

At the very least, the paradox that I still consider my mother my main guide, despite openly resisting her guidance, speaks volumes for the myopic politics of the mother tongue. We see the world only through our mothers, and our mother tongues, from the start. More than a tongue, our first language is a set of eyes, a view on absolutely everything. We can't even see our way out except from here – and we can't understand our own stuckness except through this lens. Our near-sightedness becomes both our purported safety and our enforced limit. No wonder, then, that I resist my suffering in the same stroke – engage in a classic passive-aggressive relationship with my mother, and my mother tongue, in one fell swoop.

This is the origin of the sorrow so many others feel, too, when they endure language attrition. There's a profound sense of dislocation at being edged out of your place, even if you chose this alienation for yourself, for whatever reason. There's no stronger pull than a mother tongue, however troubled your life in it has been. It's a linguistic fate from which any effort to escape tempts calamitous outcomes. For if you refuse or reject it, the pain of being excluded will be yours forever. And the constant sorrow of exclusion is far harder to endure than the daily injustice of inclusion.

In a home barely five miles away, four French female cousins who attended religious school at the Ursulines
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while I attended Marymount ran around the house routinely at bedtime while their father threatened to catch them, saying loudly, «M'a't'manger 'es p'tites fesses» [I'm going to eat your little butts]. One of those cousins would join me when we were eight and ten respectively in dressing up as Playboy bunnies, puffy tails sewed onto our ballet leotards, offering and lighting cigarettes at a casino-themed party one night at my home. Around the same time each night, at my British auntie's, three English female cousins got into flannel nighties and were tucked into bed with a story.

Trudeau once famously said that the government had no place in the bedrooms of the nation. But the truth is that in the politics of this nation – and of my family – English and French
have
been in the bedroom together.

HOW IS THIS ALL GOING TO TURN OUT?

I ran into Trudeau once, quite literally, when he was still prime minister. He had a home that backed onto Mount Royal Avenue, behind McGill, and I was in the habit of parking my car there, not really thinking that I was at the rear of his house. It must have been 1978, early spring, because of the boyfriend I was with – my invariable marker along my timeline. Trudeau came out of his rear gate, looking every bit like an ordinary professor up on the hill, maybe law or French literature.

We crashed into one another on the sidewalk, laughing and uttering niceties. I honestly can't remember if we spoke English or French. And there was nothing about it at all that seemed out of the ordinary or memorable. It was just another day in Montreal, where out of a sea of concrete rises more culture than can fit into the densest Mordecai Richler story. Back then, at least, you could easily bump into movie and rock stars while you were just out buying bagels.

Strangely, not more than six months later, the following summer, the collision incident almost repeated itself. This time I was in Quebec
City, and the bumpee was none other than René Lévesque, riding the high tide of popularity, just coming out of a bar on Grande Allée with his entourage. I was with a girlfriend who was easily six foot two, and the top of his head was barely at her chest. He laughed warmly, and again there was friendly chatter. Still, there was nothing unusual about it: just another day in a town where politicians outnumber restaurateurs, and everyone ends up at the bar sooner or later, elbow to elbow.

But the juxtaposition of those two events within less than a year suggests a growing sense of something gurgling, rising. Positions and ideologies about French and English weren't being formed far off in legislative halls in Quebec or Ottawa but on ordinary sidewalks, in ordinary bars, by people who'd grown up only a few miles from each other, knowing each other's languages, bumping into one another each and every day. And yet, they saw their home and heritage in such opposite ways.

And this language debate, as we'd come to name it, would soon shape the daily lives of individuals like me, as our bilingual identities would be re-formed and re-crafted into political entities – turning us into players in a dangerous game of “national vision” versus “authentic ethnicity.” It would add a heavy social layer to the complex linguistic structure in which we already lived at the individual and family level.

In the space of the few short years that followed, we witnessed an earthquake that opened crevasses into which I and many others fell. I remember the October Crisis of 1970,
*
walking home from school to the sound of sirens. One of my English school friend's fathers was whisked off to a think tank somewhere, as if a bit of careful planning by English minds might settle the whole thing quickly – old tactics redeployed, a familiar pattern. But violence continued to pry into our social frames, bringing wave upon wave of civic clashes. Among the most notorious events was the death of Pierre Laporte, the deputy premier and minister of labour at the time, in whose honour the bridge by my home would be retitled. Symbols of discord began redefining, and renaming, the scene around us. Within six years, the PQ was elected to
lead the province, after which many anglo families took their children and their money to Toronto for good.

Changes came quickly from then on. With the momentous sign legislation,
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the Greek souvlaki shop down the street had to be renamed in French only – along with just about every other business in major centres around Quebec where English and French had been trying to coexist until then. And routinely now, a new provincial-national institution, l'Office québécois de la langue française,
†
began issuing proclamations about ordinary language. For example, «une ride en van» – a common expression – was supposed to be «une randonnée en fourgonnette» from now on. It wasn't long, then, before we all began to feel like «des maudits colons» [damned colonists/uneducated subjects of an imperial power] who'd been speaking the improper language all along. Never mind English – even our patois was all wrong.

In the countryside, too, the transformations spread over the course of a single year. Huge billboards for Players Cigarettes and Coca-Cola gave way to signage for the «Zecs»
‡
on the new landscape of the «francophonie.» The Marlboro man's giant American face was edged out by promotions for a local festival. And warnings about upcoming road construction became French only. If you didn't speak French, you'd never even understand about the new detour on the road ahead.

One of the billboards that disappeared in those days was a particularly familiar one, caution against careless campfires. It showed a huge brown bear running, his head turned towards drivers and his butt on fire. It was prominent along highways everywhere – along with his English warning,
Smokey says, “Watch out!”
or
Smokey says “Be careful!”
or something like that. I don't remember the exact wording, just the funny bear on fire. One of my father's brothers, another artist, had illustrated it for the province's park service, and it made a strong impression on me to see a painting I'd seen trial sketches for dominate the terrain like
that. But Smokey's English name, English slogan, and English butt got chased out of town. And within a few years, this uncle, who managed the
Quebec Chronicle Telegraph
for a few years – North America's oldest daily (since 1764), where I had my first-ever summer job at sixteen – took off too, like Smokey, to «les États.» There, he joined another paternal uncle, a Harvard business graduate who also decided to make «les États» his home. Their departure to English worlds was as much a sign of the times as the signs themselves.

There were so many shifts in a decade that at our family celebrations, even non-political types began to wonder, «Comment ça va tourner, toute ça?» [How is all this going to turn out?]. On any day, the situation in the province threatened to rip open, jeopardizing social relations on which we depended. For years we'd spoken the language in which we first made contact: English to bilingual school friends, French to bilingual family friends, French to one parent and English to the other, and so on. We'd never insisted on indivisible loyalties. But here we were now, talking about who was really French and who was English, and why it might matter. It was a strain that tore dangerously at the delicate balance in my own mind. I was walking gingerly, with a foot on each log, in a difficult but predictable river, when «t'din coup» [all of a sudden] the current of our everyday cultural politics changed completely.

My brother's best friend, a francophone, showed up one day at our English public high school (after I'd graduated) with a group from his French public high school. They were inflamed with péquiste fervour, as they staged a protest denouncing English schooling in Quebec. «Pas d'anglais au Québec!» the friend shouted from the sidewalk. As my brother watched from inside the building, his most valued childhood friendship – a decade of precious history – was excised from his heart. It left a deep, unmendable scar.

Meanwhile, one of my best friends for a decade got pregnant at fifteen. She was an anglophone neighbour sent to the French public school that adjoined her property, while I'd gone to the English private school that adjoined mine. Within weeks, she'd moved into the downtown core of Quebec, its most devoutly francophone quarter, with her péquiste boyfriend. A few months later, they set off for the country towards Kamouraska with their new baby. “You and your stupid gang,”
she said to me one day on a city bus, before they left. We wouldn't speak again for thirteen years. When we did, we were both in British Columbia.

In public and in private spaces, the fabric of so many intertwining lives had suddenly become undone, dangerously stretched, and then snapped, in relationships all over the sociolinguistic landscape. All this when, in fact, so little had been said between the people in question. Yet so much had been said around them, and to them. And so many words had died or disappeared in those days, leaving us with less and less to say that meant the same thing to each of us.

The casual discards from joual were immediately replaced with little emotion, like worn appliances, by remarkably similar words that were considered to be much better. Through this massive reno project, «d'la comprenure» [human understanding] was now «de la compréhension»; «une égrafignure» [a scratch] was now «une égratignure»; «un chanteux» [a singer] was now «un chanteur»; «un chicaneux» [a scrapper] was now «un chicaneur»; and «un conteux» [a storyteller] was now «un conteur.» And on and on. Each «nouveau mot» posed shamelessly as «son pareille» [its copy, mate, twin, same], as if the original would not be missed. But it was.

MAUDITDUPLESSIS

I reacted by detaching myself further, leaving the province for good in 1983, never returning except for brief visits. I lived in Manitoba for three years, and then went further west to British Columbia for fifteen years, where trees were as big as buildings and moss as thick as fur, and there was rain in every sky – the edge of the world. Then, just to be sure, I settled across the strait, a two-hour boat ride from the mainland. And even though I'd put myself in the most fragile tectonic region of Canada, where we felt tremors on a monthly basis that threatened to seal off and swallow much of Vancouver Island, I felt safer than I ever had in my life.

Meanwhile, retired since the early 1980s, my father ironically found comfort in little other than television:
Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom
and Jacques Cousteau specials, worlds far distant. He sent me a Canadian passport application, and every time I called my mother (he
and I rarely spoke directly), he prompted her to remind me to send in the application. By this point, his customary rant had evolved beyond «mauditduplessis» to «mauditpéquistes» [damned péquistes]. And he had a deep conviction, an obsession, really, that the province would be lost in his lifetime. I couldn't figure out what he meant. Would I be denied Canadian citizenship because I was a Quebecer? Would I be denied passage through a new Quebec? It didn't make sense to me.