I have been somewhat struggling in this class as to know whether or not what I want to discuss here is relevant or not. That being said, a particular topic discussed last week particularly interested me and I have decided to just write in relation to it, whether or not my experience and what I feel like I need to share is relevant.
I want to speak of trauma that is passed from generations on. NourbeSe Philip, for example, writes that "the fact that the loss of language didn't happen to [her] personally in no way means that I don't remember that loss." This sentence has resonated with me immensely, for many reasons, both related to society and to my own personal experience with loss.
First of all, the loss of language is something that I feel like people in Quebec can somewhat relate to. Indeed, we are in an enclave of French-speakers, surrounded by Anglophones. Now, in 2017, I am perfectly able and allowed to speak my mother tongue in my daily life, where ever and whenever I want, it does not bar me from practising any job or choosing any career.
However, it was not, of course, always the case. As everyone who has set foot in a high school in the last years can tell you, "French-Canadian" was once synonymous with the lower poorer class in Québec's society, the high paying jobs and titles being reserved for protestant Anglophones living in Québec. In part because of this, I have often felt as if I had to hang on tight to my language and speak French whenever and where ever I could, in order to give back to the people who once fought tooth and nail so that I can have this right. Paradoxically enough, I chose to go to an English-speaking university, which has time and time again felt like something of a treason to my language in my mind. I did not feel the trauma of not being able to speak my own language in my own city, however, I feel the effect of it quite often.
I do not wish to equate this experience with Philip's, however, I wished to tell why this sentence resonated with me.
Furthermore, I feel like the trauma and combats of women past is also something of a trauma to me, and I am sure I am not the only one. Reading about the fights for equal rights for all, for example, reminds me of course that there is still a lot of work to be done, but it also makes me reflect on the past. I was born in a time and a place where any parents can expect the best for their daughters and rightly think that they can accomplish as much as their sons. The fact however that this has not always been the case - and still is not in many corners of the world, affects me deeply, like an open wound in my body. A trauma that leaves its mark.
I want to speak of trauma that is passed from generations on. NourbeSe Philip, for example, writes that "the fact that the loss of language didn't happen to [her] personally in no way means that I don't remember that loss." This sentence has resonated with me immensely, for many reasons, both related to society and to my own personal experience with loss.
First of all, the loss of language is something that I feel like people in Quebec can somewhat relate to. Indeed, we are in an enclave of French-speakers, surrounded by Anglophones. Now, in 2017, I am perfectly able and allowed to speak my mother tongue in my daily life, where ever and whenever I want, it does not bar me from practising any job or choosing any career.
However, it was not, of course, always the case. As everyone who has set foot in a high school in the last years can tell you, "French-Canadian" was once synonymous with the lower poorer class in Québec's society, the high paying jobs and titles being reserved for protestant Anglophones living in Québec. In part because of this, I have often felt as if I had to hang on tight to my language and speak French whenever and where ever I could, in order to give back to the people who once fought tooth and nail so that I can have this right. Paradoxically enough, I chose to go to an English-speaking university, which has time and time again felt like something of a treason to my language in my mind. I did not feel the trauma of not being able to speak my own language in my own city, however, I feel the effect of it quite often.
I do not wish to equate this experience with Philip's, however, I wished to tell why this sentence resonated with me.
Furthermore, I feel like the trauma and combats of women past is also something of a trauma to me, and I am sure I am not the only one. Reading about the fights for equal rights for all, for example, reminds me of course that there is still a lot of work to be done, but it also makes me reflect on the past. I was born in a time and a place where any parents can expect the best for their daughters and rightly think that they can accomplish as much as their sons. The fact however that this has not always been the case - and still is not in many corners of the world, affects me deeply, like an open wound in my body. A trauma that leaves its mark.
I don't think anything is irrelevant, and certainly not intergenerational trauma, which requires of us that we think and learn from what is not necessarily actual (but virtual, or in potentia) and yet affects us deeply. It reminds us that experience is shaped as much by that which vibrates across it than that which is most clearly delineated. In this context, Glissant's words on Creole seem especially important (see my notes on his text) in the ways they help us to think through the idea of "having" a language (or being a language). As someone who comes from Quebec, speaks French as her mother tongue, but was born from one Anglophone and one Francophone parent, has an anglo-sounding name, and happens to look more Irish than Québecois, there have been many times when I have been told that the langage I speak is not mine to be (this happens through the othering that occurs regularly in Quebec that manifests through switching language - speaking English to Francophones who don't register as Quebecois enough - and this "lite" version is nothing compared to what visible minorities who are not read as francophone suffer). As I recently went back to the debate about "les nègres blancs d'amérique" (Vallières) and thought through the ways in which we Québecois asserted our oppression in the late 1950s and through the 60s and 70s (a real oppression, that I do not doubt - my great Aunt, Claire Martin, penned important books on the subject entitled La joue gauche/La joue droite and Dans un gant de fer) without properly registering the extraordinary short-sightedness of allying blackness to being québecois (especially as the movement for liberation from the anglophones held onto its tendencies for ethnic nationalism), I feel even more certain that the intergenerational trauma must include what we couldn't hear and didn't know how to listen to.
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