ANGLO QUEBECER ON LINE
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I had been
I went to the
shabbily-dressed lady at the desk and boldly asked for service in English. She
I had waited
As I left I passed that
little sign and knew why people should "fear" asking for service in English. I
resolved myself |
"Un anglais, er…an American in Quebec" by Daniel Allen Kinsle I t was a cold, crisp December day when my plane lifted off from little Epply Field in Omaha, Nebraska. Christmas was just five days away and all the passengers aboard the plane were excitedly bantering to one another about their final destination for the holidays. I looked out the little plastic porthole and silently watched the Missouri River meander like an earthworm through a land of brown corn stocks dusted with white powdery snow. The ground below was like a metaphor for my life there. Just as it had once served as fertile soil for the growth of crops which had matured and were harvested, it had also served as the place for my educational growth and eventual maturity.An older-gentleman seated next to me asked in an air of typical mid-western familiarity, "Where are you going for the holidays, young man?" I kept my eye on the farmland for another moment. I then turned and replied, "Montreal." "Oh," he said in surprise, "in December! You’re brave." I wrinkled up my nose a bit and asked where he was going. He said, "Minneapolis." I responded, "In December! You’re crazy!" We both chuckled and he wished me a good trip. I quickly retorted, "I’m not coming back." "Oooh," he mused. "Now why in heavens would you want to do a thing like that? There’s not a war going on is there?" I smiled politely, shook my head slightly, and went back to looking out the window. I took out a picture of my fiancée and smiled as the man`s words reverberated through my mind. "Why in heavens would you do a thing like that?" When we landed in Minneapolismy contact with Nebraskans was finally terminated. I looked for my connection to Toronto. My trip there was uneventful and after a brief stop at Customs to finalize my paperwork, I departed for Montreal. Once again I was next to the window and as our plane approached Dorval I carefully observed the city below me. In contrast to the flat, wide-open, treeless expanse of cornfields dotted here and there by a lonely farm, I saw a snow-covered city; a concrete wilderness congested with traffic and buildings. Every bit of open space was filled. The little block homes all arranged neatly in lines. The continuity was broken only by the towering facades of neighborhood cathedrals. The plane touched down in Montreal and I was met by my fiancée. Within days of arriving the great ice storm descended upon the city. The storm was a great paradox. The hefty ice formations hung menacingly from power lines and the broken corpses of trees and other structures. It was, however, impossible for me not to marvel at the natural beauty of Mother Nature and her total disregard for humanities attempts to organize itself. It was a few weeks before the city got back to normal. When all the damage was cleaned up, I began to explore the city in order to make some observations on my own. As an historian, I have been trained to understand that every people view their history through lenses tinted by their own culture. I had really not understood the reality of that statement until I viewed my new society through the lenses of my own culture. The contrast was profound. Bellevue, Nebraska had been my home for the nine years prior to my coming to Montreal. The place was tiny and singularly insignificant when compared to the city in which I now dwelled. The only thing they seem to have in common is a past connection to the fur trade. The town, situated along the Missouri River, was a frontier fur trading outpost in the early nineteenth century. More than half of its present-day population of 30,000 residents are descendents of farmers and agricultural merchants. In fact, a large number of the population still earn their living from the land. The culture there is saturated in conservative, mid-western values and curiously in tune with the agricultural cycle of life. The people work tirelessly in the spring. The enormous tractors slowly, yet methodically, sweep across the ground simultaneously carving the familiar long horizontal lines and seeding the earth as they go. By the end of July, the swaying tassels of corn are blowing rhythmically in the prairie winds and the people themselves are in full bloom. There are picnics and festivals, and always the familiar County Fairs and rodeos. The days become shorter as winter comes. Everybody becomes involved in their favorite winter sport, television. The cold air descends upon the land and all falls dormant. The strong ties to the land make the weather a constant topic. Violent thunderstorms and the threat of tornadoes are common in spring and summer. With few trees to block the winter winds or to shade the land from the summer sun, the weather is often extreme in both summer and winter. Winter is cursed as a vile plague upon the land. Those who can flee its wrath, the others suffer until spring arrives. Bellevue is a homogenous place. It is filled to the brim with mid-westerners and a hodge-podge of transient military personnel. Language and culture are not omnipresent issues. There is no hesitation as to which language one must use when meeting a person for the first time There is never a thought as to whether or not the person with whom you are speaking comprehends what you are saying. Indeed, it is the kind of place where the sound of voices speaking French would undoubtedly cause a curious crowd to gather. Speaking of the French language, there is one person (roughly approximated), who speaks it fluently anywhere near Bellevue. That would be the chef at a tiny restaurant in downtown Omaha, the French Cafe. The eatery is a pretentious little spot where the blissfully ignorant, unable to read the menu, pay a fortune to dine on cow brains, garden snails and horse steaks. The fine subtle flavors of the expensive wines are all but lost on pallets unable to discriminate between a 1986 Chardonnay and a 1999 Mountain Dew. In Montreal, things are curiously different. As far as the weather goes in Montreal, there are only two seasons that I have thus far been able to ascertain, winter and summer. Each season abruptly ends before the other begins. The winter snows are not an excuse to cover the windows in heavy industrial plastic and go into virtual hibernation. On the contrary, its a time for people to polish up their skis, tape up their hockey sticks and sharpen their ice skates. Unlike Bellevue, there is very little about Montreal that is homogeneous except for the milk. In one square mile one might guess that all the nations of the earth (including the over 200 different linguistic groups of India) are represented, that is of course, with the exception of an American citizen. Here people from Nebraska are about as rare as French chef’s in Omaha. People sporting multi-colored hair and pierced in every orifice eat cow brains because they like them. Dining on wild mustang chops is considered a delicacy and not an act of near-cannibalistic barbarism capable of making Gene Autry do flip flops in his grave. When I first arrived in Montreal, I was attracted to all the strange people doing strange things. In Bellevue, the ability to observe strange events, and communicating them to others is seen as a gift. Of course, strange events were often rare in Bellevue, so it required a bit of the ability to manipulate events to suit your purposes. In Nebraska the ability to tell a good story over a piece of gooseberry pie and coffee was viewed as "haute culture." What was a "gift" in Nebraska, was viewed as a curse in Montreal. I tried to interest people in my stories of odd events back home, buty it seemed these stories were all too familiar scenes in Montreal. While one could amass enough material while riding the Metro to keep any American Legion post in stitches for the next thirty years, it was of no interest to anybody I knew in Montreal. Being as my observations of bizarre events was neither appreciated nor profitable I set off on my job search. I was eager to work in my field. Having heard so much about the great "brain drain" from Canada, I believed that my nine years of university education and five-years teaching experience would be very marketable. I walked down to the government Employment Office near my home in order to get a Social Insurance card. I was greeted by a large sign that read: "Please don’t have fear to ask for service in English." I had been totally ignorant of the reality of linguistic politics in Quebec. I wondered why they would feel the need to forewarn me that I shouldn’t "fear" asking for service in English in a Canadian governmental office. I was soon to find out why. Although I was prepared to practice my French, the little sign compelled me to do otherwise. I went to the shabbily-dressed lady at the desk and boldly asked for service in English. She said nothing. With a stubby tobacco-stained finger she pointed to an empty waiting area in the opposite corner of the room. I went there and sat down. Across the room I saw another waiting area filled with people. They looked like immigrants and they all were sitting around chatting in French or some tongue other than English or French. I wondered why I was alone in this waiting area. "It couldn’t possibly be. . ." I thought to myself, "because I asked for service in English?" The crowed on the other side of the room slowly diminished as the hands of the clock raced around the hours. Finally, after more than two hours of waiting, somebody called my name. "Daniel Allen Kinsley" I jumped up and said, "That’s me!" A short rotund woman sneered at me and demanded my passport. I followed her to a desk that was devoid of anything that looked like work. In the middle sat a bottle of clear fingernail polish and a nail file. I gave her my paperwork and she started to speak to me in French. At first I thought about responding likewise, but I held back. I simply pretended not to understand. She tilted her head to one side and I innocently pointed to my American passport and said, "I don’t speak French." It was a lie. But I had waited for two hours in a kind of English-speaking "holding pen" for service in my mother tongue, and I was going to get it. She sighed heavily as if the weight of the earth had just descended upon her shoulders. She asked me my name and I said, "Daniel Allen Kinsley." I watched carefully as she wrote down my name as "Daniel Kinsley." I immediately inquired, "Why did you leave out my middle name?" She snapped back aggressively, "We don’t use that here!" I politely replied, "Madam, I know that this is not my country and you do things differently here, I respect that. However, you can’t change my name on a whim." I’m not sure if she knew exactly what a "whim" was, but she got the point. She looked at me in utter disdain and scribbled "Scott" between my first and last name. She asked me a few more questions and it was over. As I left I passed that little sign and knew why people should "fear" asking for service in English. I resolved myself to never to do it again. I set about scattering CV’s all over Montreal. Of the nearly fifty CV’s that I sent in the space of three months, I received a single call. The job was to teach English as a Second language for a few hours each week. It was certainly not a job that I could live on, but I had some money saved, thus I could view my work as an opportunity to meet many new people in my new home. I had never taught ESL before, but the person who hired me was open minded enough to realize that with a Masters degree in History and my teaching experience, I should be quite capable of adapting. My first class was very revealing. I was aware of the tension that sometimes existed between the two main linguistic groups in Montreal. Thus, wanting my students to feel comfortable speaking English with me, I informed them that I was a U.S. citizen. My revelation had the opposite effect that I wanted. They immediately began to speak freely to one another in French, as if my birth below the 48th parallel ensured a genetic inability to learn any language other than English. One older lady said, "Lui, il est un vrai anglais!" The others simply giggled. Not wanting just yet to let them know of my ability to understand French, I asked the student to try to repeat what she had said in English. She turned a little red, and the others prodded her. She repeated in a thick accent, "You are a real English." Everybody giggled once again. Something inside of me was unable to let that pass. I stated boldly, yet kindly, "Excuse me, I’m not English any more than you are French." They all looked at me with a strange dour face as I quietly explained that over two hundred years ago, my ancestors, fearing the centralized power in London was conspiring to take away their liberty, revolted. They threw off the yoke of "tyranny." Or, rather, the British lost the war. And, thus, we stopped calling ourselves, "English." I was sure that they understood perfectly what I had said, but I was equally sure that it didn’t matter one bit to them. I spoke English, therefore, I was an "anglais." Curiously, this was not the first time that someone had called me an "English." Being raised to adulthood in northeast Ohio, we lived on the outskirts of one of the largest Amish communities in North America. My family and I had occasion to visit "Amish" country quite often. I enjoyed my trips to there to watch these curious people who had renounced technology as sinful. I wondered how the little children could live without so much as a zipper, let alone Nintendo. For these people the hands of time had stopped moving around 1642. To my youthful eyes, they were nothing more than living relics in one huge outdoor museum. Like all children I couldn’t resist getting closer. On one journey with my grandparents I made an attempt to do just that. I saw a boy about my age, dressed in a simple blue shirt with blue pants held up by suspenders. A straw hat sat perched easily on his head. He stood leaning innocently against a whitewashed building that housed a souvenir shop selling hand-made "Amish" quilts and Swiss cheese. I wandered over, stuck out my hand and said, "Hello." The boy smiled. Not quite sure what to do. Had I extended my hand to an unknown stranger on the Serengeti I would have gotten the same response. Yet, this boy lived only a few miles from my home. He replied in German, "Guttentag," just as his mother exited the shop. Like a well-trained museum employee protecting some priceless shards of broken Egyptian pottery she took the young boys hand firmly in her own. She looked straight into my eyes, then turned to her son and spoke these words: "Don’t talk to the English." They got on their horse and buggy and drove off. My grandmother soon came out of the shop with a piece of fresh "Amish" cheese. I shoved it into my mouth. It was a treat from the gift shop. Of course, things from the gift shop are the only things in the museum that you are ever allowed to touch. The memory of that day combined with my student’s comment caused me to draw some interesting parallels between the Amish and the French-speaking inhabitants of Montreal. Sure, the Quebecois have no aversion to cellular phones, nice cars, or other adornments of technology and luxury. Neither are they bound to the land in reverence to an all powerful God. Yet, there some similarities that are worth looking at. They both see themselves as a unique culture and both of their cultures are infused with a stubborn defensiveness born of self-preservation. Thus, one of the most visible similarities is xenophobia. Members of both groups seem to harbor a constant disdain for a an outside world rapidly closing in around them. Outsiders, thus, are viewed suspiciously as agents of some vast conspiracy seeking to destroy their world. As a young boy, I often wondered what it would be like to run away and join an Amish community. Of course, such an idea was absurd. You cannot simply put on black clothes, grow a long beard, trade your Acura in for a horse and buggy and suddenly become an Amish citizen. You must be born there to be a member of the community. I have recently begun to wonder if it is equally absurd to think that one can become a member of the community in Quebec. I never for once believed that learning French and eating poutine would earn me acceptance. I will always have an accent and will always prefer ketchup to gravy and cheese curds on my French fries. Nevertheless, I have tried my best to integrate myself into my new society. With the help of my wife and a great deal of persistence, I’ve learned French well enough to have friendships uniquely in that language. I have worked conscientiously to keep an open mind to the cultural, religious and political differences. Considering that I was raised in a religiously conservative Quaker family and brought up in culture of mid-western values, I believe that I’ve done very well. In other words, in the two years that have passed since I’ve arrived, I’ve tried earnestly to see through the lenses of the people around me rather than allow myself to be be influenced by my own personal perspective. Montreal is very different from Bellevue, Nebraska. Bellevue is quiet, conservative rural-agrarian society. Montreal is large liberal city far removed from the agricultural hinterland that it depends upon. It is intellectually stimulating to live in such a cosmopolitan place, to meet people from diverse cultures with unique experiences. Most importantly, I am excited to be a part of that heritage because I too bring my own unique experiences, namely a prairie friendliness and a small-town rural perspective. . Despite all of that, I have been unable to find employment in my profession. At the language school where I continue to work a few hours each week, I am constantly referred to as the "American" teacher. It is just another factor that adds to that omnipresent feeling that while I may be welcome to stay, that I can never truly belong. Each time that I stick out my hand and to greet someone with a heavily accented "Bonjour," I feel the presence of that Amish boy’s mother, who looked at me disturbingly and said, "Don’t talk to the English." I nevertheless remain as willing as ever to integrate myself into a new society and a new country and to contribute my skills and experiences to it. Yet, at the same time, I will continue to wonder if anyone will be willing to give me an opportunity to do that. In the meantime, I can only draw upon my own experiences living in a country where being of German, Italian, African or even French-Canadian descent is subordinate to simply being an American. I will remain optimistic and hope that time will eventually permit me to be viewed as something more than just "un anglais," er, an American, no make that a Canadian in Quebec. |