A FRANCO-AMERICAN? QU’EST-CE QUE C’EST?
This essay was written for Two Cent Talks: Franco American Reading and Music and presented on November 3, 2025 at Colby College’s Greene Block + Studios in Waterville, Maine.
A Franco-American? Qu’est-ce que c’est?
I’ve asked myself this for much of my life. I’ve written extensively about it, but I sense that I have never quite hit the mark.
I have had many answers to Qu’est-ce que c’est, un Franco-Américain? over my lifetime. As a child, of course, I did not ask myself that question. We lived in an environment in which the definition was clear and unassailable, but over time, the definition has become blurred—both because of my increasing sophistication that wants a better definition and because the very nature of Franco-America has morphed.
Today, there are probably as many answers as there are Franco-Americans.
Many aspects of culture—language, culture, kinship patterns, reference points—are not as firm as they once were.
But one thing remains: defining a Franco-American is like defining pornography: it may be hard to say exactly what it is, but I know it when I see it.
When in a group, I am frequently aware of who the Francos among us are. It’s like “gaydar” except you’d have to call it “francodar.”
One day, I went out with two other Franco writers after we had done a book talk together. All three of us were mated with non-Francos. One woman reflected, “It’s good to be just Francos together. We don’t have to explain anything.”
Exactly. That’s one definition of Franco-ness: not having to explain.
Issues I have grappled with
Much of my own writing has grappled with four specific issues I sense to be fundamental to Franco-ness as I have known it: language, religion, class affiliation, and the abiding sense of otherness.
The first three can be said to have contributed to the fourth—an abiding sense of otherness which has pervaded my consciousness.
When I was young, that sense was often troubling, pointing to a deficiency, something that had to be remedied. I remember thinking of someone, “S/he is a native speaker.” Burdened with this thought, I gave in whenever there was a difference in vocabulary, sentence structure, or pronunciation. After all, they were real Americans, and…
I was an easy prey to the seemingly ubiquitous presence of the “th” sound. Did we “thread” water or did we “tread” it?
Otherness was cultural, not physical. I had an inhibiting sense of not being “of” the culture I was expected to grow in. This sense of otherness is described in several scenes in my memoir, French Boy: A 1950s Franco-American Childhood. Here is one of these scenes (p. 287):
In school, while our teachers were all Franco-Americans, there was no intellectual affirmation of our identity. When we studied the French and Indian War in our American textbooks, our teachers did not rephrase the text for us to be sure we understood the events of 1756-1761 to be the War of the Conquest of our ancestral homeland and not just the French and Indian War, as Americans called it, not just something distant from us and our pasts…
Only as an adult did I realize the French and Indian War was, for us, the war that changed what it meant to be French in North America. While the War of the Conquest opened up the continent to Americans and led to Americans coalescing into a country, it did the opposite for our ancestors. It locked them in a small territory without any hope of a future that would honor their national identity.
It’s not that I believe the nuns ought to have cast the English and Americans in the role of “bad guys,” but there was no understanding that it was our people who were defeated and that it was our people who had been marginalized. There was no appreciation that the reason we were in the United States was that we had lost that war—or rather that the French of France lost it for us. As a result, the French of Canada lost the future that ought to have been theirs.
So, for me, the otherness I feel as a Franco is definitional. It opens, and it closes possibilities.
Of course, otherness is a function of personal identity. You are the one who defines your sense of otherness. It is your identity, and no one can tell you whom or what you identify with. You are the one who decides that.
You walk into a room and become aware that you are the only Franco there. You feel other.
You walk into a gathering and you are the only man in a group of women. You feel other.
You walk into a gathering, and everyone is wearing a knit mask and carrying guns. You feel other.
You walk into a gathering, and everyone is speaking a language you do not understand. You feel other.
Sometimes, these experiences of otherness have no particular value in themselves. Otherness can simply be a matter of observation about yourself and the “not yourself” without an attached value. This might happen when you are in a gathering, and everyone is wearing a more formal attire than you are. Your otherness can easily be dismissed—but again, it might not.
Otherness, of course, can be negative and often is:
You feel other when you enter a room and you think, “I’m not smart enough to be here. Everyone is more intelligent.” Or…
“It’s all right for them to do that. They have more money than I do. I couldn’t afford that.”
These expressions of otherness can be worked on. Some manifestations cannot.
Here’s another negative sense of otherness which comes from my mother’s memoir, We Were Not Spoiled (p. 78):
My freshman high school classes turned out to be a mixed experience. I did well in the French class, but it was a class that was too easy for a Canadian. The school did not separate the students according to whether they already spoke French or not. As a result, the French classes were filled with students with very different and incompatible needs. Some were learning the language from scratch and required much repetition of very basic material. Je suis, tu es, il/elle est. This bored the Canadian students who deserved more advanced grammar and vocabulary. We were ready to read more difficult texts.
My parents should have complained and seen to it that I was placed in French 3 or 4, for instance, but because they were not educated, they were not comfortable dealing with school personnel, and the result was that I had no one to help me. Perhaps the officials didn’t think we could speak “real” and so we ought to start from scratch, or perhaps it was just laziness on their part, not wanting to put the work into tailoring the program for a diverse student body.
While I got good grades in French, it was a waste of my time, an easy credit that I did not have to work hard at. Perhaps the worst part was that the low education standard did not help me to appreciate school. It taught me the contrary: school seemed a bit of a waste of time.
Incredibly, the class was taught by a Mrs. Coté who was Canadian herself. She should have known better than to keep the class in one group. She ought to have recommended that the school set up a class just for Canadians.
OK, let me offer another moment of otherness from my life.
On October 21, 1969, I was in graduate school. We were a small team of teacher-trainees meeting for a social time at a fellow student’s apartment. The TV was on. Soon, the newscaster announced: “In St. Petersburg, Florida, today the writer Jack Kerouac died.” I was stunned as Kerouac was for me, as for many Franco men writers of my generation, a sort of mentor. We all had stories of discovering Kerouac and being excited and comforted to know that a Franco was in the national literary limelight.
Now he was dead.
That evening, a team member who was an African American said, “Did you know him? You seemed affected by this news.”
I replied, and I remember this clearly, “He was one of my people.”
She replied, “A white man?”
“‘White’ has not been an energy for me,” I said. “He was a Franco-American. I am a Franco-American.”
Of course, Franco-American meant nothing to her, and at that moment, I did not feel any need to explain what a Franco-American was.
In the visual arts, there’s a sort of painting that is called white on white. The first canvas so painted was by a Russian called Kazimir Malevich in 1918. Many artists have since done variations. The canvas has almost imperceptible variations of white—but the varieties of white are there.
You might say, to the outside world, that Franco-Americans are often seen as a white-on-white ethnicity where the otherness is apparent only to the Franco. We know it is there, however. We experience it.
I want to write some more about this otherness that manifested itself that long-ago evening with my colleague.
This woman was imposing her sense of how she experienced my otherness on me. One could support her sense of my otherness with historical antecedents, but that would have been about her and not about me.
She might have asked, “What do you mean when you say, ‘He was one of my people’? I don’t understand?”
Both of us would have been enlarged by that sort of probing question that would have sought to understand a position I had endorsed and which she had found—naturally enough—incomprehensible.
I certainly did not feel she had seen me at that moment. I decided to do what I think was a healthy response. I expressed my own identity calmly rather than let her define me.
Let me continue by offering another sense of how otherness can be disturbing.
Reading from French Boy: A 1950s Franco-American Childhood (p. 133):
Outside the house, most people spoke words that had no meaning for me. Whether they all spoke the same language or used many languages, I couldn’t tell, but I could discern that, for many of them, the gibberish was something they understood.
When we would accompany our mother or our father, I would hear my parents speak to other people in sounds that I could not decipher. Sometimes, I can only presume, I asked my parents to tell me what they had said to these people. I became aware there were people who spoke what was called French and other people spoke this English that was unintelligible.
Thus continued my experience of “us” and “them.”
Now that I am in my “mature” years, as my mother-in-law who was given to euphemisms used to say, I see being Franco as a strength. It no longer confines me. I wear my Franco-ness with pride.
But, many Francos have crumbled under the weight of otherness. They have anglicized their names and have tried to hide their identity. No one is fooled into thinking that Courtway is anything but an awkward attempt to pass as an English name—as is Cowon (Vachon), Pelkey (Pelletier) and (ouch!) Ladew and Ladue.
Other Francos have learned to live with their identity and, being proud of being Franco, have identified with their heritage.
I have written all around my identity as a Franco in this essay without actually defining it. That is because, to some extent, my definition is useless to you.
Only you can define your Franco-ness.
There are many sorts of sparrows and wrens, but we can recognize seemingly different birds as sparrow or wren; so too does Franco-ness vary in many ways that aren’t exclusionary. Franco-ness offers enough similarities that we can identify and group all the varieties as we can group the multiple sparrows and wrens into an avian family.
Franco-ness may be hard to define with precision, but you will know it when you see it.