Mixing it up by marrying up HEATHER DAVIS
Nothing mixes cultures and languages together like falling in love.
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In Vancouver, I saw interesting medleys of married people: Scottish-Chinese, Korean-English, and Welsh-Japanese to name a few. In Quebec, however, I saw that marriages were mixing up languages, too -- mainly English and French.
My family has been mixed-up for a few generations now. It started when my Quebecois grandfather married my Irish grandmother. Most of their children went to school in English, but my mother, the seventh and last, completed hers in French.
She learned French in kindergarten from strong-minded, forceful nuns, and after that spoke French to her father and English to her mother.
My mother married English and when I was three our whole family moved out to Vancouver, where we lived a typical West Coast life. Even though we ate more fondue than the rest of my friends and poured our maple syrup onto snow, I grew up in most ways a true Westerner.
Yet I knew something was missing. I wanted to speak French, but I couldn't. I wanted to be French, but I didn't know how.
But now I am putting the French back into my family.
The first step was moving back to Quebec. The second will be marrying Ghislain. And the third will be when there are children running around our house calling each other names in both French and English. (Just not 24 like Ghislain's great-grandmother had!)
From what I hear it happens all the time. French marrying English. English marrying French. It's like a language-aeration-system.
Okay, so we only speak English at home. But one day when I become more proficient, we'll speak French as well, won't we? And I know our children will speak both languages as naturally as they breathe Canadian air.
I think about these things as I walk down my hallway at home and glance up at the pictures that grace the walls. I am captivated by my ancestors these days. The picture of my English grandmother, just married in 1922, heading off to live at Lac St-Jean for four years so my grandfather could work on various engineering projects. Living in an area that was historically very isolated. An area so stubbornly French it produced Lucien Bouchard.
Luckily for her, there was family living nearby. My great-grandfather had been born in the area and shipped off to school in Montreal at a young age. Later he became editor of a Montreal newspaper. But in the next village his brother -- my grandfather's uncle -- lived nearby in a house that served as the post office even into the 50s.
I wonder -- if I look hard enough into my grandmother's eyes, can I read her secrets? I wonder how different it was for her than it is for me now. Did she feel isolated? Did she have any regrets?
I have none. In fact, I can honestly say I am having a great time. Friendly people all around. Culture en masse. Surprise encounters with other English folks. A feeling that every day is an adventure.
I hope she felt like I do. I hope if she could speak through those hallway eyes, she would say, "I'm glad I mixed it up. Have fun sorting it out my Irish-English-French-Canadian grand-daughter. Have fun sorting it out."
(P.S. The wedding will be next Spring on Saint Paddy's Day at a Québecois pure laine historical site with lots of maple syrup on snow!)
Copyright © 2000 Heather Davis/Log Cabin Chronicles/06.2000 |
