The odyssey of the Franco-Canadian identity
Over the course of the past month I spent overseas, and especially upon returning home to my small Canadian hometown, I’ve been contemplating what exactly the intersection of my Franco-Canadian heritage means. As a child growing up in the French school system, I was rooted in strong traditions of Franco-Ontarian slang, music, recipes, and literature. My school was planted in the middle of a quaint farming community, where there was very little spoken English. Surrounded by a distinct Métis (Indigenous and French) and Franco-Ontarian culture, students had no choice but to use this language and expression. My childhood memories of playing hide and seek around the apple trees on the perimeter of our playground, learning Métis words from my friend as she explained how to wrap a ceinture fléchée, and my uncles teaching me to play the spoons while keeping in time with the fiddle were crucial to my understanding of just how complicated—or even endangered—this culture is.
Although my maternal family is of French-Irish descent, their spoken French is completely attrite. My mom recollects her grandfather offering her /“des bons bons”/ (candies) as a little girl, or bedtime stories being told by her father, my /“papa”/ (my grandfather), in French. However, the usage of French at the farmhouse was strongly discouraged by my late grandfather’s Irish mother. Though the Irish and French who settled in Ontario usually shared the same Catholic faith, their rivalry in the early eighteenth to nineteenth centuries as distinct cultures desperate to survive in a foreign place is embedded into Canadian history as well as the fabric of my family. Losing a language meant that recipes, stories, jokes, and traditions were either naturally forgotten, or grouped into Anglophone or Irish family sentiments. Strangely, Franco-Canadian culture survived in the music and jigs, where the fiddle, silver spoons, guitar, and piano still echo conversations and cultural memory without using language at all.
Reclaiming language was, for my parents, the first step in allowing my siblings and I to reconnect with this heritage and rebuild what was lost. We endeavoured to immerse ourselves in an environment where French grammar, pronunciation, dialect and vernacular were everyday practices. There are still many days when I feel like I live in between both worlds, unable to express myself fully without using both languages. Once, an old schoolmate and I joked about the struggle of doing math in English. When her teacher told her to use the Pythagorean Theorem, she was terribly confused before realizing that it was “le Théorie de Pythagore” that she was meant to use. We laughed that I still had trouble pronouncing “equilateral triangles,” and frustratingly would refer to them as “triangles équilatéral”/ around my teachers throughout high school.
Though seemingly small examples, this dizzying mental exercise is something most individuals using their second language suffer from. Even something as miniscule as differing pronunciation between French and English, or even different French dialects, can feel isolating. While in Europe, I was eager to get away from Toronto—where most have to compromise their first language to speak English—and be immersed in a place where French was not only spoken everyday, but lived. I was delighted to talk politics, sports, and history in a language I felt at home in. But something still didn’t feel right. As I was lightheartedly teased in most settings for my Québecois accent, I felt ashamed, like my vocabulary had to better reflect the ‘French from France,’ which most French colonies have been told is the ‘proper’ form. Academia now tells us that there is no ‘best’ French dialect; in fact, the French that exists in Québec is perhaps the purest and most well-preserved form, since it has not been subject to as much change as French in France. So why did I feel so compelled to toss out my Franco-Ontarian vocabulary, why did I feel so guilty every time an “ain” sound slipped out rather than an “ent?” It wasn’t until I got home and heard that sweet sound of “en’tous cas”, rather than “d’qoup”, when I felt like I could fully understand and be understood. I, for a long time, felt like I was too French for Canadians, and too Canadian for the French. Like I can’t belong to the Québecois national identity, despite descending from there and having been taught by Québecois teachers, because I was not from there, nor have I ever lived there. Like I can’t fully call myself “Franco-Ontarienne,” despite being raised in the dialect and the traditions, because my family is disconnected from the language.
Home means more to me now than ever, because of all the places in the world, it best encompasses this context. I feel proud knowing that there is no Canada without its French influence, and that the French North American resilience is not possible without Canada. I, like my old classmates and enduring French communities, am only a small piece of this evidence, only a small part of this tapestry. French survival in Canada has not been an easy journey; in many ways it is a miracle when we consider our nation’s history. Today, French culture and language dissipate rapidly. But the odyssey of this identity continues and we find ourselves here; we find its vitality in its uniqueness and importance to our nation. After all, it belongs to all of us who call Canada home. Canada, a wonderful kaleidoscope of identities. No matter who you are, or where you’re from, let us protect our individual and collective heritage. In the words of the pioneering father of our Confederation, George-Étienne Cartier: “avant tout, soyons Canadiens.”