Dwelling

Une courte nouvelle sur les complexités du langage et de l'identité culturelle québécoise... Dites-moi ce que vous en pensez.

Just as I was seeing him out I started picking my nose. Furiously, like a man in is right mind trying to act, or to look, I don’t know, like some kind of freak. Like someone who exaggerate a movement to explain to everyone present (or absent) that he perfectly grasps the oddity of his behavior. And then I felt the urge to write. I was looking about, left and right, no one was there. I was utterly alone in my basement, safe for a picture of me looking right back, pinned on the wall. And I wanted to write in English. This was absurd: I was francophone, from the same part of the world as Céline Dion. They had just named a boulevard after her near Montreal. Like two years ago. I felt exhilarated, and looked for the exact meaning of that word in my dictionary. In my head there was no “h”, but on paper there was, for sure. I tried to think in English, tried to enter a kind of dreamy state of mind where I could start to summon English sentences and associate them with realities. Some ran in this fashion:
Don’t misunderstand me, I love French. Or:
It’s just about being able to express some feelings in a new and meaningful manner. Or:
It’s all about the deconstruction of the clichés that I’m sick of using, like “mother tongue”. Or:
“Or” is a French word, it means “gold”. Or:
The only thing I want is to be published in McSweeney’s, have a chat with Dave Eggers, talk with him about "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" in exactly the same way a Georgian woman would talk to Margaret Mitchell about Scarlet O’Hara. Already I was trying to justify my choice, or rather my impulse. No one would understand me. My father would be devastated. And what about my mother, what with her involvement in the FLQ in the sixties. She had dropped bombs in mailboxes in Westmount for Christ sake. She had been tried, I mean, prosecuted, put in prison for twelve months. I had grown up in an atmosphere of complete anti-English rhetoric. My mother had been there, in '67, when De Gaulle, that otherwise rightwing bastard, screamed “Hurray for Montreal, Hurray for Quebec, Hurray for frreeeeee Quuuueeebbecc!”, at the balcony of the city hall. She would say “maudites têtes carrées” which was French slang for “damn square heads”, which was what we called the English kids and the English men and women and the English businessmen, even if we drank their beer and bought their food. Molson. Labatt. Steinberg. The list was so long in Montreal in those years that you were automatically inclined to think that every francophone was working class, apart for the prime minister, who was francophone because most people were francophone and they were voting for a francophone, which is an obvious thing. But even him, we were suspicious about, his head was not so round anymore. “They” were surely buying him. Just as “they” were trying to suffocate us, assimilate us. My mother would put her long finger upon my forehead: “Don’t you be naïve, they’re just smiling because they have the upper hand. For now.” And then she would transform into Shakespeare, or the Bible for that matter, exchanging “will” for “shall” and “you” for “thou”. But in French. The first word of English I heard was maybe “fuck”, only because we were using it indiscriminately in every possible situation, in high school. I was, say, “fucking fatigué”, which means “fucking tired”. In Montreal, we were always “fucked up”, and every little thing out of the ordinary was “fucké”. This was the verbal form of the word, we were conjugating English words all the time. The only parallel I could think of, just when he was leaving and I was closing the door and finally putting my finger up to my nose, was this one: some dude in Pasadena (I don’t even know where Pasadena is) always saying I have a rendezvous, I have to go, I have a rendezvous, Oh my God what time is it, I’m gonna be late for my rendezvous. And you would knock him down. But you couldn’t knock down everybody. I remember the first time I used the word “fuck” in front of my mother. She what. She drew a blank. She stared at me for a minute. She didn’t give a damn about the vulgarity. It was something else. It was the oppressor entering her household, standing on her doorstep, uttering, breaking the rocks of her defenses, shattering the walls of her whole conception of what life and the meaning of resistance ought to be. First, I didn’t understand her reaction. Second, my cheek was purple. Third she said:
Do you know how many people are in Quebec?
And I replied:
Something like six or seven million.
And she said:
And do you know how many people are in North America?
I touched my face, muttering:
I don’t know. Many. A lot.
And she said:
Yes. A lot. Something along the line of five hundred million.
My cheek was pumping blood.
She continued:
And do you happen to know how many of those speak French, even among the six millions of Quebecers?
I said, keeping with her:
Not a lot. I mean, not a lot.
She kind of smiled. Her lips went down. She smiled that way sometimes:
No Mr. Fuck. Not a whole lot. A tiny grain of sand in a nameless desert. And would you rather be one of those proud grains or a nameless infinity?
This was a tough question. But she didn’t need me to answer. The subject was closed. She put a record of a Quebec folk singer, some kind of protest song and that was that. The guy was singing about the Patriots, those guys who tried to overtake the English government in 1837 and who were the heroes of the terrorist movement she so overwhelmingly embraced when she was a young woman. She used to tell me how the papers of the tracts they were sending to the media were printed with an image of a Patriot, pipe in the mouth and gun in the hands. How would she react, knowing I was set to write a story in English? She would disown me, repudiate me. She would what. Be rendered incapable of speech. A concrete statue. I lit a cigarette, bewildered by the complete lack of common sense of what I was about to undertake. I was gazing in the distance, some two or three meters away, staring at the white wall of my basement. I was asking myself some serious questions and giving myself some fastidious and laughable responses. The prospect of an easy way out of the self-denying mood he had just left me in was absolutely comforting. Two seconds ago he had just crushed me like I was some kind of, you know, insect, and there I was now, completely rejuvenated, ready to set myself free of the barriers of language and culture. Two seconds ago I was a Fisher Price toy, ready to be boycotted by an army of angry women, now I was a young Quebec writer on the verge of discovering the true value of communication: to be able to translate your thoughts for the others. I suddenly thought of my girlfriend. There was somebody who really loved me. There was somebody who was proud of my accomplishments. There was somebody who had really read my novel, understood the depths of it, genuinely felt the talent hidden in it. There was a girl who was not there only to remind me that exactly thirty-four people had bought it. Why would you tell somebody something like that? Why would you come to this somebody’s basement to tell him that? I thought of Charlotte and rejoiced. My nose was still itching. I pulled on one nostril. I said to myself, formulating slowly, in English, slowly, to start a sequence of ideas, of possible odds and ends, of ends and means, I said to myself: But Charlotte is the worst anti-American that I ever heard of. She has burning flags all over her notebooks. She has a fucking subscription to Noam Chomsky’s website. I mean: she fucking pays to read him. She doesn’t talk to me for days when I refuse to come and march with her at those peace rallies. We argue all the time about this. She tells me I’m a proto-fascist, whatever that means, just because I wrote my thesis on the concept of the Great American Novel. When I met her I was reading Theodore Dreiser in a French translation, and she was so pretty, and God, I was so deeply moved by her braids and by, I don’t know, the very form of her breasts, that I was happy the name sounded German, because she was already known in our circle to be involved in socialist and antiwar movements. In her head it always meant the same, it was a perfect equivalence, a perfect gradation: America equals capitalism equals ignorance equals fundamentalism equals war. She was the perfect example of a person who would say Venezuela for Venezuela, or Palestine for Palestine, but Bush for U.S.A. I started to feel dizzy. I knew she loved me, even if I was a bit less one sided in my views of our southern neighbors, even if I sometimes irritated her with some completely out of the point interjections, like: what about that crazy asshole in Teheran, screaming at the top of his lungs that Israel should be wiped out of the map? She loved me, even as she would discard me with a movement of the hand, saying something along the lines of: oh, go read your Christopher Hitchens crap and jerk off with him and leave me alone. I had to take this chance. I knew she loved me, alone in my basement, my eyes fixed upon my own eyes on the photography, noticing for the first time a subtle yet kind of charming spot of brown in the overall blue. A kind of tiny brown spot in the blue of my right eye. Maybe she loved me for that, in spite of our political quarrels. I, for one, loved her for a number of reasons, ready to pass over the misgivings, the righteousness, for a single second of perfect recognition. Ourselves in bed, her feet at my head, her beautiful butt framed in pink cotton, me reading a Croatian novel, she reading my novel, the book that I wrote, her legs suddenly moving, thumping on the wood, suddenly agitated, placing a finger on the bottom of a page, ready in advance to turn it, turning it, reading further and stopping all at once, immobile, at the end of the chapter, my throat dry, nervously swallowing. Me waiting, she raising her eyes up to the mirror on the opposite wall, looking at me inside it, saying finally it’s good. I like that. It’s you. It’s sincere. It’s not fake. It’s not you trying to be something you’re not. It won’t sell but it’s good.