"Only later would I discover that most other people simply floated in mossy little ponds labeled 'French and Catholic' or 'English and Protestant', never wondering what it might be like to step ashore. To be out of a pond is to be in unmapped territory." ~ Mavis Gallant, The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1996, 691.
There was a time when I didn't like Montreal. In my self-important, navel-gazing 19-22-year-old phase I was both too Ontarian and too francophile for Montreal. I was living in Québec City at the time, and only traveled through le metropol on my way back to see my family in Ontario, changing trains in Montreal, or visiting some friends of friends from the islands for a party. I found Montreal to be a strange mix of the things I loved about Toronto and Québec City, neither one nor the other. A vast urban centre second only in size in Canada to Toronto, the city of Montreal is roughly half French-speaking and half Other. I found being greeted in English in stores or restaurants in downtown Montreal off-putting (and if someone detected my accent and switched to English in a conversation: downright insulting! I considered it one of my Major Life Achievements when people stopped switching to English upon hearing me speak.)
Montreal seemed to be a mix of too many other things that didn't fit into the image of Quebec in my head. Having always had an intrinsic desire to become bilingual, a life-long love of the French language and Quebec, I wanted to throw myself into Québécois culture. During the two years I lived in Quebec City, the only times I spoke English were to my family on the phone once or twice a week. My only English input at the time was occasionally watching the news on CBC, unless it was one of the rare times my francophone coloc wasn't at her boyfriend's place, and she asked me shyly if we couldn't watch the news in French while eating dinner?
Having lived in Europe for the past nine years, I have loosened up about language. When I first came to Germany, I was shocked - shocked! - to hear English (read: American) music on the radio most of the time. To see English signs and slogans liberally scattered over the landscape. And nobody cared. We're not in language-law-territory anymore.
Montreal is a famously divided city, The Two Solitudes and all of that. I am quite in support of CanCon legislation and measures to protect the French language in Quebec, and I'm not trying to stir the pot today. Living in Europe with its many languages, learning to survive/thrive in my third and being forced to teach business English to pay the rent in our early married days brought me back down to earth. I'm glad I can speak English, it is helpful and I'm no longer too cool or too Québécoise or whatever I thought I was back then to care too much what language people address me in. Whatever the language, it is the heart of the person I want to get to know, and whichever means helps me to do that I'll use.
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| The I'm-back-in-Montreal-and-it's-snowing! face, 2009. |
Somehow, whenever we have visited North America over the past 9 years most of our travels have brought us to Montreal, and my fascination with this enigmatic city has grown. I love Montreal, the diversity, the cold, the pastries; my old friends who have migrated there from St-Jo or Québec or the islands; the crazy, suicidal outdoor staircases; the code-switching mid-sentence and cacophony of franglais. The quote above is from one of the best short story writers on the planet, Mavis Gallant, born and raised in Montreal in the 1920s-30s. Rare for an English-speaking child at the time, she was sent to francophone convent schools, thus resulting in her rather unique perspective on Montreal, out of the pond, in unmapped territory.
Many would say that this contact zone of cultures and languages, everyday bordercrossings and forays into unmapped territories is what makes Montreal such fertile ground for cultural creatives. Today I read that, among its many other illustrious cultural achievements, Montreal has been called "the spoken word capital of North America" (see Anglo-Quebec Poetry 1976 to the 21st Century edited by Jason Camlot and Todd Swift). Cultural geographers have a field day with Montreal, attempting to chart its the depth and width and breadth.
What I love about this international life I've been called to, married to a German, having left chunks of my heart in Quebec and Ontario, Greece and Austria and Uganda and Konstanz, is being out of the pond. Out of breath and laughing on the sandy beach, exhausted but jumping back in again. Sloshing water from one pond into another, disrupting stagnant ecosystems, adding a little fresh water, a little salty. Bathing in alterity and resurfacing with new perspectives, wider range of vision, beyond any one cultural or linguistic group. Crawling back into my kayak and learning to surf the waves.
