Caught between ‘têtes carrées’ and ‘têtes barrées’
Ilook forward to the new regular Monday column by Celine Cooper that made its debut this week (“Challenging our sense of who we are,” Opinion, Dec. 3) and that proposes to examine how new post-national thinking in Quebec is changing the way we look at language and identity.
Caught in the crossfire between les têtes carrées and les têtes barrées, I am an English-speaking Quebec allophone.
This came about because when I arrived in smalltown Quebec as a 5-yearold girl, a refugee from the Hungarian Revolution, the English-speaking community accepted our family, and collected used clothing and old crockery to help get us started.
My father, who was in his early 30s then, knew a few languages, among them French.
Since the francophones ignored us while the anglophones helped us, I went to an English school and learned English as my second language (my third, really, but I soon forgot the German that I had learned in an Austrian refugee camp.)
My parents learned English slowly and painfully, though French would have been so much easier since my father had studied it and both of them spoke, read and wrote Romanian, which has similarities to French.
When I tell this story to my francophone friends they quickly say: “Well, the English had the money, so of course they helped those in need.” That’s inaccurate. In our small town, Huntingdon, the mayor, who owned the general store, was francophone, a landowner, and soon our landlord. One of his brothers was a dentist in town, while another was a doctor.
The French just seemed not very interested in the foreigners around them at the time, except as paying tenants and customers.
Some years later, when I was in my teens, a Québécois boy who was a family friend let me and my family know that we could no longer be friends since we weren’t Québécois.
He was a nice, sweet fellow; there was no hostility, and he was just giving us a matter-offact explanation.
His parents were also nice, warm people.
I believe we were “unfriended” because this was what was required according to this young fellow’s understanding of the Quiet Revolution, the francophone political imperative of the day.
I had an interest in and facility for languages, at least for the three with which I was familiar.
I loved the sound of French and found myself in positions where I would translate for English-speaking colleagues who had less facility. But as francophones became more militant about language, I felt less and less inclined to use it. Now, when a stranger calls and interrupts my supper with “Parlez-vous français?” as the greeting, I answer in French, “That depends — do you want to sell me something?”
I have always thought that French-speaking society was so used to being controlled by priests that when citizens quietly revolted in the early 1960s, they substituted politicians for priests. Priests: “We need more Catholics; otherwise, we will disappear.” Politicians: “We need more francophones; otherwise, we will disappear.” Bill 101 is like a biblical commandment. But Bill 101 is discouraging bilingualism among francophones, and erasing the one large comparative advantage that francophones, including poor francophones, have traditionally held over the têtes carrées, many of whom were historically too arrogant to deign to learn French.
The oppression that French-speaking society remembers was real, but one can’t blame the têtes carrées entirely. Class structure within French-speaking society (there was always a wealthy francophone elite) and clerical control of civil society were also to blame. The truly oppressed in Quebec, from my point of view as an immigrant who escaped the Hungarian Revolution, are the aboriginal peoples whose cultures and languages have been eroded over time by European immigration.