A Reflection on Chabot: An Open Letter

Monsieur Grégoire Chabot:

I read with great interest your book Un Jacques Cartier Errant. You have given a valuable gift. I read three or four lines of the first of your plays and realized that this, at last, was what I had been looking for – my grandparent’s French. You write in the Maine French of my grandparents without apology. I have never seen such a large helping of this language and now I have a rich resource to study. I expect that you never imagined that your plays would be used as a language-learning tool, or that the Maine French would ever be a target language for anyone. Like a shovel, turning recalcitrant soil, your book dug into my earliest memories, to bring to the surface the language I heard only in very brief snatches.

You present not only the language, but also the attitudes and mores of our parents and grandparents with no apology, and with a critical eye, and keen humor, and for this, too, I am grateful. How you snuck that tape recorder into my mom’s family’s house to produce material for your play Chère Maman I’ll never figure out.

As valuable as were the plays, of equal usefulness was your introduction presenting their raison d’être. One passage in particular struck me.You write:

“La génération de mon père (et celles qui l’avaient précédée) savait qu’elle était plutôt franco qu’américaine. Les générations qui suivraient seraient clairement plus américaine que francos. J’avais l’impression que moué pi mes chums, on était perdu dans le milieu en quèque part.”

I’m afraid that things did not go as clairement for the generations qui suivraient as you might have expected. Some of us are still lost in the middle – although most of us can’t write about it in as beautiful and as natural a French style as you. How could we Anglophones, we assimilated Francos, the Bonhommes (pi Bonnefemmes) Sept Heure’s of the old-guard Franco-American elite of an earlier generation, still have not made it to the other side, wherever that is? Perhaps the following story will make it clearer.

It was the summer of 1970. Our family was on its way to Montreal on vacation, one of the only genuine family vacations we would ever take [I'm the little guy in the photo above, in Montreal, July 1970...three months before the October Crisis]. I was still six-years-old that summer when I witnessed an event I will never forget. We were staying in Northern Vermont at a small motel before making our way across the border. My father asked the motel clerk if she would take a check. “Yes, sir,” came the reply. “It’s an out-of-state check,” my father cautioned, “are you sure that’s going to be O.K.?” “Sure.” My father wrote the check and handed it to the woman. She took a look at it and her tone and her face changed. “I’m sorry. We can’t take this,” she said curtly. My father didn’t even need to ask why. He had seen this before, but it had been long ago. Further uncomfortable probing suggested (if it did not reveal) the truth. Out-of-state-checks. Yes. Out-of-state-checks-with-obviously-French-names-on-the-top. No. I had seen my father angry before, but I had never seen this. At the epicenter of the anger was hurt. And embarrassment. He let his displeasure be known, in no uncertain terms, to the manager and found a way to pay his bill.

Later, when he didn’t think the children were listening, he said to my mom the words that ring in my ear to this day: “My parents had to put up with this s--t, but I didn’t think I’d have to!” I wasn’t accustomed to hearing my father use “bad” language. He used it on occasion, to be sure, but, if he could help it, not in front of his kids.His statement, spoken in a hushed but angry voice to his wife, spoke volumes.

“My parents had to put up with this s--t, but I didn’t think I’d have to.” Why not? Why didn’t he think he would “have to”? Because he had done everything he was supposed to do in order to assimilate, to belong to the land of the free. He was a native born American. He spoke English with no discernable accent, save a New England lilt; he served in the U.S. Navy in World War II; he found a way out of the mills and the shipyards of his father and grandfather by learning a useful, skilled trade; he had a good job; he paid his bills on time and saved his pennies; his family had moved from the mill town to the metropolis of New England and, finally, he was able to afford a small house in a suburb where, so he imagined, he could raise his kids in relative safety. He did everything he was supposed to do to fulfill the American Dream of his generation, the one that’s been called The Greatest. With all that work – both his work and his parent’s work – he still had to put up with, in his apt phrase, “this s--t.” All that work, and we still had the stigma of the “dumb Canuck,” hanging over us. No wonder, long ago, so many Racines became Roots and Leblancs became Whites!

Each generation bears its cross, but like the Stations with which we all grew up, the cross remains the same in every portrait, although its situation changes from one to the other. Our station along the way, is the almost complete absence of the French language. Sure, I can take a course in French, and, in fact, I did, and I continue to study it, but I will never speak French like Mémère did.On a deeper level, though, our cross is a loss of access to our history. We were influenced by a history the evidence of which has been all but erased. It’s like experiencing a trauma and then going out into a world that treats you as if it had never occurred. Those of us who are yet another generation removed from our French language and history, have all of the beliefs and attitudes and lifestyle peculiarities of nôtre ethnicité, both those that are “le beau pi le fun” and those that are limiting and stifling, but minus important possessions which identify us as anything but Americans sans hyphen.

What is a Franco without his or her French? Is he or she is like the Chimera of ancient mythology – a monster, part one animal and part another? On a trip to Prince Edward Island, the home of my maternal grandmother, after my sister had a run-in with a somewhat surly Francophone Acadian, I asked her, “What are we doing here? Are we just frauds and poseurs up here?”I went on a trip to Québec last summer, to my father’s ancestral parishes, to find out what my relationship was to this place.How would the Québecois view me? Am I just another American tourist, despite the fact that eight or nine or ten generations of my families are buried beneath the soil of Québec. Do they recognize that I, too, have a connection, and a right to a connection, with this place? On that trip, the one thing I discovered is that I couldn’t yet communicate with people well enough to answer the question sufficiently.

Language is important and I feel the loss of the language acutely. But the other lesson to be learned from our generation is that language is not synonymous with culture, even though that belief of the old Franco elite still holds sway over many of us. The culture of everyday life (as opposed to the so-called High Culture one finds in universities and museums) is incredibly persistent and, I’ve discovered, transcends language.

Perhaps a subtler mind than mine could discern the difference between…

“Bon Dieu, y a marié une Protestante!”

and

“Oh my God, he married a Protestant!”

…but, for all intents and purposes, they are the same. Sans doute, there are certain things that are better expressed in one language than another, and I observed distinct differences, in places, between the French and English versions of your plays, although the same author produced both, but there are some broad strokes that are so broad that they cannot be lost in translation. A great deal of life is lived in the broad strokes, although our most sublime and memorable moments slip through them.Perhaps the lesson of our generation is that attitudes, aptitudes, prejudices and lifestyles cross the language barrier, because one adopts them and absorbs them non-verbally. Question: How does one learn how to be?Answer: By absorption.

There’s a photo taken at my uncle’s 25^th wedding anniversary the same year as our vacation in Montreal. There I am in the photo, dressed as they are dressed, at my dad’s elbow while he talks with my Uncle Paul. There’s dad, there’s Uncle Paul, and then there’s mini-me. Doing what?Absorbing. I am looking up as they discuss whatever it was they were discussing that day and as I do this, I absorb what it is to be: to be a man, to be a father and an uncle, to be a human being, and, yes, to be a Franco in all of those. I hear the words they say, but, I absorb their postures, the attitudes inherent in their movements and expressions, the way they say what they say, their orientation toward their speech and toward the world and toward one another.Whether we’re speaking French or English or Swahili the process of absorption – the fact of absorption – is the same. What my experience teaches me is that ten or eleven generations of French North America cannot be effaced by two paltry generations of Anglophonie – because it is not possible. My dad, who had two Franco parents, and I, who had two Franco parents, can’t possibly be anything else but Franco. We had no choice but to be that curious, chimerical being: The Anglophone Franco.

Like the Chimera, we are mysterious creatures who seem now one way and now another, depending on which end you happen to be looking at.Even my closest friends of other backgrounds, cannot fathom how a guy who grew up in a suburb, speaking English, who had a middle-class upbringing, with an advanced degree and a white collar job could conceive of himself as anything but a son of privilege. Do I hear a note of resentment in their incomprehension? “Why can’t you accept that you’re just another ‘one of us’?Why can’t you claim your white, male, middle-class privilege and stop this nonsense that you’re some kind of ‘ethnic’.”This is the same devil that sits on my shoulder and says, “You’re a fraud and a poseur with all this ‘Franco’ stuff! Just forget all about it and find something productive to think and write about.” Well, here’s a new brand of “s--t” that my parents probably did not have to put up with, but I do, sadly.

How do I answer these friends? Do I tell them about my research into the hellholes that were the mill housing in the Franco town my great-grandparents inhabited when they first came from Québec? Do I tell them about the totally avoidable diphtheria and typhoid epidemics that raged through these places killing children left and right?Do I tell them about my grandmother who wrote in her scrapbook about a contest she wanted to enter but could not because they were on “the welfare” (as she put it) and didn’t have enough money to buy a single stamp – in a time when a stamp cost three pennies? Do I tell them about my dad’s hurt and anger and shame about the check he couldn’t write? How do I explain my chimera-like relationship to French North America, without being one of those touchy whiners who make people feel uncomfortable simply because they happen to be comfortable? How do I explain that I’ve discovered something, at age 40, that explains so much – that fills-in the deleted information that hung over our family like smog…an Ariadne’s thread through the labyrinth of experience?

I don’t expect you to answer these questions. That’s my job, I suppose, and the job of my generation. In any case, thank you for the mirror, for the reflection, that allows me to see myself a little clearer. I am in your debt, mon vieux.

Yours,

David Gerard Vermette

January 11, 2004