MY QUIET REVOLUTION
I grew up watching Radio-Canada shows from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Where I am from in Maine, we would get one station from Quebec: channel 2. It played all sorts of Quebecois and dubbed cartoons, but I always preferred the crackling, sepia-ed DVDs my dad bought when we went to visit our family in Montreal. The sets of these shows were modest, the characters always a bit off-color but with all the warmth and humor that my dad had when we spoke in French. There was something more complex about these shows than those on channel 2. It was as if they had been underpainted with a color that only showed through in the breaths the characters took between jokes. It was the same complexity I felt in the songs of Felix Leclerc, whom we listened to on long car rides through the Cantons de l’Est on the way to see my grandparents. Whether he sang of the arrival of spring, his favorite shoes, or a train up north, there were notes where his otherwise smooth baritone became strained.
By the time I could recognize this as a certain cultural melancholy, it had already become a fundamental part of my identity. As someone who grew up in the small Franco enclave of my family within a largely Anglo town, I often struggle to separate what is my personality versus my culture, but I always knew that it was being French Canadian that taught me how to be nostalgic. I was a sappy kid and have grown into an even sappier adult. I cried when I turned ten years old, knowing I was leaving the carefree single digits for good. I was the only senior at my high school graduation with tears streaming down my cheeks. I have always had a keen sense of things that couldn’t be replaced once they were lost. In this way, Quebec’s motto of “Je me souviens,” “I remember,” lived within me even before I knew what I was remembering.
It was only in college that I learned these shows from the 1960s and ‘70s were asserting Quebecois culture against an Anglo majority. Or that Felix Leclerc retreated to the Île d’Orléans to die, in solitude, after a life of separatist activism. In my public school in Maine, a four-hour drive from the Quebec border, my teachers spoke to a class of Lerouxs and Bergoignes and Charpentiers and one Gignac, and told us that French Canadians were factory workers who scattered Catholic churches across Maine before assuming their real identities as Anglos with funny last names. The fact that Quebec had recently attempted to become its own country for the second time never came up, and there was certainly no mention of the cultural revolution that had taken hold within the province.
The only space at school in which I found something resembling the culture I knew and loved was in French class. And yet even here, teachers with Parisian accents gradually ironed out the accents circonflexes in my speech. From “Daphne la québécoise,” I became “Daphne, la francophone.” As Daphne la francophone, I became very proficient in French, perhaps even achieving that grammatical perfection I had always dreamed of. I became a French major at Yale, wrote pages and pages of literary analysis on the works of Victor Hugo and Patrick Modiano. I adopted the French expressions I heard my classmates use, filling my speech with senseless “du coups” and “vachements,” which felt a little comical in my mouth but that I grew used to over time. When I went to visit my grandparents, they told me what a beautiful French accent I had, and even though I spoke with them as I had never been able to before, this comment caught in the back of my throat, where those guttural sounds of my Quebecois accent had once lived. And I felt further from my culture than I ever had.
But then, in the fall of my sophomore year at Yale, I came across a course I did not expect to see: Quebec and Canada, from 1791 to Present. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I hardly even knew what could be said about the history of Quebec, besides maybe stories of the trappeurs my dad always told me when we walked in the woods in winter, or the religious revolution that I was told brought about our unique assortment of curse words.
I walked into the room to find Professor Jay Gitlin in wide framed glasses and a maple leaf tie who spoke of Quebec with an enthusiasm I had never previously seen brought to the subject. He put a video on the screen. It was the heart of the Quiet Revolution, 1968, and Michele Lalonde was delivering a poem: “Speak White.” Another sepia-ed scratchy recording, but this time, all the tension rising up to the surface. And she started:
Speak white
Il est si beau de vous entendre
Parlez de Paradise Lost
ou du profil gracieux et anonyme
qui tremble dans les sonnets de Shakespeare
The non-French speakers in the class sat there, squirming in their noncomprehension, but my eyes were locked with the screen. And as I watched, goose bumps on my arms, I remembered. I remembered the sound of my dad’s voice as he cursed the TV during hockey games and words to Gens du Pays, I remembered Felix Leclerc and the Radio-Canada shows and the struggle that seethed beneath the jokes. And I thought to myself, “When had I lost my culture?” After the poem ended, Professor Gitlin spent the remainder of our class discussing how the oft-forgotten cultures of the Quebecois, the Acadiens, and their diasporas complexified our histories of North America and how the traditions they carried close to their hearts contained their stories of survivance. When class concluded I called my dad. I barely got a word out before I started to cry. He asked me what was wrong, and I explained it was the first time I had heard someone say something kind about Quebec in a classroom.
Over the course of the semester, I realized that I had been starving for the whole story all my life. This tale of Quebec and French America was contradictory and rough around the edges: some parts brought a knowing smile to my face, and others made me sick to my stomach. But all of it was unapologetically real in the way that I knew French Canadians to be. It inspired me to stage a Quiet Revolution of my own within my French courses at Yale. I replaced my “du coups” for “faques,” and I found a version of myself that finally felt at home in the way she spoke, hearing the voice of my grandparents in my own. I hoped that representing this new perspective in the classroom would inspire some interest in French Canadian culture, as well as the perspective of la Francophonie outside of France.
This was, however, not the case. I had students tell me they preferred “real French” over the way I spoke. And even on the days where there were no side eyes or cutting remarks, the sound of my boisterous French Canadian speech grated against the measured accents of an entire classroom that had formed their view of the French world around the same set of voices. And I grew culturally exhausted. I vowed in the next semester that I would only take French classes at Yale that mentioned Quebec in their syllabi. But, when the next semester came, I sat in on the first day of French classes focusing on translation, post-colonial dynamics, and literature. And not a single one mentioned Quebec or Franco-America.
So, j’ai sacrer mon camp, and got the hell out of the French major. And after some floundering I ended up somewhere that is not surprising. I got into the business of remembering as a history major, and I fell in love with a field of study that, when done right, reveled in the sound of different voices.
From my studies as a history major, I have decided that empires feed on simple stories. Franco North America only makes sense situated within its colonial context, a colonial context the American education system has worked for centuries to bury in endless recountings of the Revolutionary War and the Gold Rush. In this way, Franco North American studies is one part of a larger process of working towards a retelling of North American history that strives for the justice that only nuance can provide. Telling our stories can have an outsize impact on the ways we reckon with imperialism in North America, if we do so in a way that provides support and space for other minority ethnic groups in what are today the U.S. and Canada. Through this effort to remember, we can begin to transform high school curricula into places where students can find their own names, French classes into a place where many “real” Frenchs come to meet, and memory into a place where we can all gather.