Quebec is a distinct culture

For the past two weeks I have been undergoing francisation. Three hours a day, four days a week, I go to the Centre sociale d’aide aux immigrants on Laurendeau to be transformed into a functioning francophone all at the expense of the Quebec government. This will continue until the end of March. That similar schemes exist in English for immigrants in other provinces is a mark of the importance Canada places on integrating newcomers and how it stands in contrast to other countries which also depend on immigration but refuse to admit this reality. In Quebec, this expensive language instruction is not only about integration. It is also a statement of politics and cultural difference.

Although the constitutional reforms of the nineties failed to define Quebec as having a distinct culture in Canada, the term still resonates. Unlike the other provincial parliaments, the Quebec equivalent is called l’Assemblée nationale and Quebec is referred to as a nation within Canada by the federal parliament. A more nuanced analysis would enumerate other points of difference, but in a largely English speaking continent, Quebec’s distinctiveness and nationhood depends largely on the French language. For me francisation is a question of integration; for Quebec, it is a question of cultural survival.

With such high stakes it is easy to understand why Quebeckers are easily alarmed by the encroachment of English on other totems of Quebec culture. This week it is the discovery that an energy conference hosted by Hydro-Quebec, the government-owned utility which keeps winter at bay through much of the northeastern seaboard, will be in English only. Just as worrisome is that the monoglot head of the Dejardins group, the world’s largest credit union, cannot express solidarity in the mother tongue of most his fellow members, the majority of whom live in Quebec. (“Mutual” and “solidarity”, of course, do not exist in either Anglo-Saxon or the Anglo-Saxon business model.) Most alarming though is the arrival of the monolingual Randy Cunneyworth as coach to the Montreal Canadiens, a scandal presumably on the grounds that it is better to lose the Stanley Cup than lose the right to tell the coach exactly what he did wrong. So that he may better hear what he is supposed to have done, it is understood that Mr Cunneyworth is being francisized.

These questions of personnel may seem laughable. They are not because one exception gives way to another and a functioning, self-respecting Canadian society needs, among other things, electricity, well-managed financial institutions and a hockey team. Anything less would be to have distinctiveness rest on inadequacy

But far more important than the occupants of the boardroom or the bench is what takes place in the heads of bilingual French and English speakers. With French and English having so many similarities – one joke being that English is just bad French – and Quebec being far closer to the English-speaking world than, say, France, it is inevitable that there is a high traffic through whatever permeable membrane exists between the two languages. This means that while “OK” is rarely heard in Paris, where “d’accord” reigns, it is normal in Montreal. My separatist translator friend Luc told me as we sped through the Laurentians that while a Frenchman will automatically francisise Manchester, his fellow francophone in Montreal won’t; Manchester, New Hampshire is too close not to be familiar. The same goes for many other English place and family names, some of which even append to unilingual French-speakers.

But I do not think that this difference between France and Quebec signifies the corruption of the last redoubt of la francophonie in North America by an consuming English. Rather it is the consequence of large numbers of French and English speakers experiencing the delirium of speaking two closely related languages. As a student here in the 90s, I remember one teacher, a Boston-native, who more than once in his classes on the history of the English language would look inward for a moment before asking “Qu’est-ce que c’est en anglais?” In Paris, English speakers more regularly register their files than save them, reaching for the nearest cognate to the “Enregister” blinking on their computer screen. So it is hardly surprising that French speakers might need reminding French délai is not the same as English delay. Fortunately for them, the linguistic advisor Camil Chouinard is on hand with his 1500 pièges du français:

DÉLAI n’est pas synonyme de retard. Il faut retenir que DÉLAI peut vouloir dire deux choses : (1) les temps accordé pour faire quelque chose et (2) la prolongation accordée pour faire quelque chose.

To me, it is in this confusion of languages that the distinctiveness of Quebec culture lies. It makes one alert, to an almost hyper-sensitive degree, of the influence on and relation to of one language to another. Words accrue more meaning than one language can sustain and there are times when after speaking French for a while and returning to English, I find myself speaking English as if through the veil of French. I derange you? Quite possibly, yes. But look at how clearly French makes the relation between naming and magic with appeler (to call, shading into appeal) and épeler (to spell), how plaire makes clear the relation of please to pleasure. My inability to actually spell words such as apartment without hesitating, or indeed making a number of attempts, seems to me a small price to pay for this richness.

The Free World by David Bezmozgis – Review

Stories about migration are often concerned with either departure or arrival. In the first, characters seek to leave problems “here” and get to a promised land “there”. In the second, they find that “here” is not what was promised and that they only have “there” as a guide. This may make being “here” more or less difficult. David Bezmozgis’ first book, Natasha and other Stories, is of the second kind and follows the confusions of the Berman family as they negotiate here (Toronto) guided by their experience of there (Soviet Riga). In The Free World migration is not the plot but a metaphor for life – you can’t go back, you don’t know where you’re going, and between departure and arrival, there’s only confusion.

This confusion is seen through the eyes of twenty-six year old Alec, his wife, Polina, and his father, Samuil, when three generations of the Krasnansky family undertake a similar journey. Chicago is their intended destination, but plans are upset. On the basis of the Montreal Olympics and footage of the 1972 hockey games with the Soviet Union, they choose Canada from the menu of promised lands. “Stateless and directionless,” they await the pronouncements of officials, chiefly on the health of the family patriarch. Technically, they may be in Rome. Actually, they have been cast into the purgatory of migration where the normal prepositional certainty of “in”, “out,” and “across” is suspended. In short, they are neither here nor there and have only memory and motive to contemplate.

It is possible that Alec’s brother Karl, the prime mover in more than one sense, might give a straightforward answer to why the Krasnanskys are moving – the flashbacks to Latvia offer no reason for flight other than the sheer weight of history and the boredom of the radio factory. A pragmatist though, Karl only lifts a finger when he see a profit and is only available to readers through the book’s three main characters.They are much less certain about the move, at times expressing indifference to their fate. This makes for a richly ironic, if largely plotless novel, in which the Krasnanskys come to terms with their decisions while Soviet Jewry bickers and suns itself on an Italian beach which in Samuil’s eyes may as well be on the Baltic.

Samuil’s usual view of his fellow travelers is not so benevolent and it is Bezmozgis’ skill to produce characters in which wild contradictions are plausible. A fervent member of the Party who saw his father killed by White Russians, Samuil believes “the Soviets had wisely managed to rid themselves of the least desirable elements.” Now that he has been bounced into giving up the privileges of a Party official by his sons, he finds himself entering Rome by bus sat beside those same elements. “In his long life he had never had the misfortune of being cast among such a lot of rude and unpleasant people.” His family fair little better. When his wife makes a comparison between emigration and earlier evacuations he demands, “In the war you ran from from the enemy. Who are you running from now?” he demands.

While Samuil’s existence may be the same wherever the Krasnanskys go, it is Polina who feels the collapse of “here” and “there” into hazy purgatory most. In Vienna, she is afraid to enter the shops in case she damaged clothes of unimaginable colors. In Rome, she is afraid to cross the street. More than dislocation though, Polina is aware of what can be lost in migration. “Wherever we go, we shall be among strangers,” she writes in the coded letters to her sister back in Riga. Later she worries that entry to the free world might come at the cost of passing through “life like a knife through smoke”.

Skipping around the worries of his wife and father like a boy with butterfly net is Alec. He is reasonably clear on his motive for emigration, “More freedom for bumbling”. On account of his gregariousness no one is surprised to see him where he does not belong. Oblivious to the feelings of others – it’s not just butterflies he catches in his net – Alec nevertheless is the source of much of the novel’s warmth and he adds levity to the bitterness of Samuil and the sense of loss felt by Polina.

Bezmozgis is helped in this by his three main characters, all of whom are keen observers of their surroundings and the Soviet Jewry that roil around the them: the family who smuggle jewels in a deliberate corpulence and ask for medical assistance for their removal; Josef Roidman, a frustrated librettist, also bound for Canada, who believes that Pierre Trudeau’s greatest concern is “what to do about Quebec and what to do with Josef Roidman”; and Lyova, an émigré of two utopias, the Soviet Union and Israel, who now simply seeks the country with the fewest parades.

In the hands of other writers these stories might have overwhelmed more serious aspects of his novel. Instead, Bezmozgis’ pithy sketches add to the sense of loss felt by his three distinct characters. In this, The Free World, is largely Alec’s novel: a comic revue, but not one without tragedy or wisdom.

Winter’s Harvest, Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth, and Resolutions

The past three years have made me rich in winters. I doubt that this wealth has had any positive impact on my annual resolutions and suspect that they have become increasingly elaborate, and self-defeatingly unmanageable, as the hurly burly of moves, unexpected and hoped for, provoked what might be mildly described as emotional strain. But let us count our blessings.

In 2009 I saw Paris under snow. It never snows in Paris, or at least that’s what they say every year. Nevertheless, I left it on what would be the last Eurostar of the year, hightailing it to the Scottish Highlands for the holidays as lines of communication south shut down behind me.

It's snowing in Paris! Late December 2009

The following year, for the first time in my adult life, I was spared the anxiety of cancelled trains and the slippery chaos of Edinburgh’s Waverley Station, Christmas Day in the family fastness being a mere 40 minutes away by car.

The view from the fastness. Christmas Day 2010.

This year I have exchanged the Highlands for Montreal, where, in contrast to Paris, snow is expected in abundance, and, unlike Scotland, at temperatures which plunge preciptiously below freezing point. I believe we have touched minus 26 so far, but are currently bouncing between zero and ten below.

Montreal in mid-December 2011.

While winter looms large in Canadian consciousness – Margaret Atwood wrote that “There is a sense in Canadian literature that the true and only season here is winter,” anything else is distrusted; Adam Gopnik’s recently delivered CBC Massey Lectures on the topic is a bestseller – the sheer ecstasy of a Montreal winter, implied by temperatures so many degrees below and winds of so many kilometres per hour, is in my reading best captured in Nabokov’s description of St Petersburg.

[T]he pure luxury of a cloudless sky designed not to warm the flesh, but solely to please the eye; the sheen of sledge-cuts on the hard-beaten snow of spacious streets with a tawny tinge about the middle tracks due to a rich mixture of horse-dung; the brightly coloured bunch of toy-balloons hawked by an aproned pedlar; the soft curve of a cupola, its gold dimmed by the bloom of powdery frost; the birch trees in the public gardens, every tiniest twig outlined white; the rasp and twinkle of winter traffic… and by the way how queer it is when you look at an old picture postcard (like the one I have placed on my desk to keep the child of memory amused for the moment) to consider the haphazard way Russian cabs had of turning whenever they liked, anywhere and anyhow, so that instead of the straight , self-conscious stream of modern traffic one sees — on this painted photograph — a dream-wide street with droshkies all awry under incredibly blue skies, which farther away, melt automatically into a pink flush of mnemonic banality.

The manure may have left Montreal, as I presume it has the Nevsky Prospect, but Montreal driving is discussed with despair by those who can get on to the island and exhilaration by those who see no reason to get off – road infrastructure at the moment being more inference than structure. Still, dream-wide streets circle a mountain covered in dazzling white.

Nabokov though, I discovered, is not the original of this account. Inspired by the winter and newly enrolled at Atwater Library, I am reading Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood, Youth. There, as the narrator, Nikolai Irtenev, prepares to enter youth and Moscow University, he speaks of late winter turning to spring:

Not a clot of snow was now to be seen in the streets, and the dirty slush had given place to wet, shining pavements and coursing rivulets. The last icicles on the roof were fast melting in the sunshine, buds were swelling on the trees in the little garden, the path leading across the courtyard to the stables were soft instead of being a frozen ridge of mud, and mossy grass was showing green between the stones around the entrance-steps. It was just that particular time when the season exercises the strongest influence upon the human soul – when clear sunlight illuminates everything, yet sheds no warmth, when rivulets run trickling under one’s feet, when the air is charged with an odorous freshness, and when the bright blue sky is streaked with long transparent clouds.

For some reason or another the influence of this early stage in the birth of spring always seems to me more perceptible and more impressive in a great town that in country. One sees less, but feels more.

In fact, Nikolai sees as well as feels, and as well as keeping a close eye on the seasons, he is he is a keen observer of the complexities of the aristocratic society of which he is a member. He himself becomes conscious of his powers of observation and their implications of earlier in the novel with his second journey to Moscow.

For the first time in my life, I then envisaged the idea that we – i.e. our family – were not the only persons in the world; that not every conceivable interest was centred on ourselves; and that there existed numbers of people who had nothing in common with us, cared nothing for us, and even knew nothing of our existence … As I gazed at the towns and villages through which we passed, and in each house of which lived at least one family, as well as the women and children who stared with curiosity at our carriages and then became lost to sight for ever, and the peasants and workmen who did not even look at us, much less make us any obeisance, the question arose for the first time in my thoughts, “Whom else do they care for if not for us?” And this question was followed by others, such as “To what end do they live?” “How do they educate their children and let them play? What are their names?” and so forth?

This concern with individuals outside his social class is actually somewhat limited but, convinced of his own ugliness and overshadowed by the accomplishments of his elder brother, he has ample opportunity to watch and listen to the goings on in the drawing rooms of Moscow. This is great fun, not least because his powers of observation are not so acute when it comes to himself. It is not in spite of, but because of his insecurities that he earns a nickname, “the diplomat,” and is described by one matriarch as “a monster of perfection”. The ironic voice of the narrator alerts us to the tragic possibility of such a success and one of the reasons for reading the book is the ease with which it moves from one perspective to another.

Where the peasants do feature is in the endless rules that the Nikolai creates for himself, codes for living by which he will be at once virtuous and a social success, these two aims rarely being compatible. He will give regularly and anonymously is one. Another is to pray and live simply. Prayer may be possible, even expected, in the top echelons of Russian society, but to live simply is demand the impossible. Nikolai, of course fails, tripped up by both self-imposed stays and youthful impulsiveness. Where his rules do succeed is in their alliance with his observation of others and if ever you need to know what was cool, or comme il faut, and what howlingly not in Moscow circa 1850, then Nikolai’s your man.

As his struggles are at once both entertaining and instructive they inform my new year’s resolutions. Firstly, to observe others more closely in the hope that if I am not kinder or more successful, I am at least better amused (which may in itself be mistaken for patience). Secondly, not to tie myself in knots over endless rules of my own making. Finally, to finish what has been started for in that hurly burly much has been left in disarray and one of Nikolai’s bitterest regrets is to say je fus un homme très comme il faut.

Running through the birch trees of Angrignon Park pursued by a Romanov complex. December 2011.

Imaging the Bag of Tat

Christmas is upon us. I know this because even the normally sane are unable to resist the festive calls this year’s herald angel, Justin Bieber. Abandoning dignity, Marina Hyde fessed up to her horde of Christmas songs, a trove so catholic that Bieber finds admittance. In Toronto, The Globe & Mail tells me, that Bieber has fulfilled a life’s ambition with a rink side photo op with the Maple Leafs. (This appears to be  routine – the Vancouver Canucks get Bublé, although here in Montreal the Canadiens have descended into a festive dispute over a newly installed anglophone coach, leaving the McGarrigle-Wainwrights, who could probably form their own hockey team, to perform their Christmas concert in more conventional venues). Other intimations include the clearer focus on reapings which a slower new cycle affords, this year’s harvest including Cesaria Evora, Christopher Hitchens, and Kim-Jong Il, and the transformation of my Facebook feed into a series of frontline dispatches from conflicts taking place in the aisles of distant supermarkets.

Overwhelmed by the schmaltz pouring from the radio, it is my normal habit to retreat to my room and examine the contents of the Bag of Tat. Last mentioned during the crazed pursuit of Battenburg cake in the Inverness branch of Marks & Spencer – to better celebrate the royal wedding, you understand – the Bag of Tat is kind of oubliette in which are desposited the documents of our a collapsing civilization.  It should be said that the bag of tat is a kind of grand guignol that is best approached with equanimity provided by the first sip of the second gin. With Atlantic preventing examination, the oubliette will have to be investigated contrarily and from memory.

In it may be found the edition of OK! which previewed the funeral of Jade Goody. (The horror  was signalled on its cover which dryly informed the reader that this was edition number 666.) Alongside this are images, torn from The Face circa 1995,  of celebrities enacting their own demise through the lens of David LaChapelle, in whose direction the opera of terrorism reached its fullest expression. Other gems include a postcard on which is depicted a snowbound a Air France liner as the rescue team ascends the stairs, their success unknown and unmatched by their ability to evoke the glamour of a late 60s Mossad strike.

Since these early images were gathered, some kind of event horizon has been passed. That this was confirmed in August in the window of a Subway outlet in Manchester was only fitting. Blink now and you will miss the replacing of democratically elected governments with former Goldman Sachs executives, the ousted politicians attempting to relaunch their former careers in the music industry. We can only await the day that Berlusconi, upping the ante with Beiber and Bulbé, not only appears with but sings with A.C. Milan. Until that comes to pass there is a delightful Tumblr feed of Kim Jong-Il looking at things, and as I don’t want you weeping at the feast, knuckles whitening around an ill-advised third gin, I leave you with the the merriest greetings from the Bag of Tat and its most festive document.

Better living through renaissance thinking

Can't see the city for the trees?

Driving downtown, my friend said I was like a kid.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Canada’s my new toy. Let’s see if I can break it.”

Welcome to my mind. A place in which the swing from delighted glee to panicked terror is but a sentence away. Such is the anxiety that I wake with headaches make me believe I have slept with my head in nothing less than a vice. But this is normal, I tell myself. It happened when I moved to Paris. It happened to my Canadian friends, whose move I am doing in reverse.

Meeting myself coming back

I met myself coming back. This time last week, in the grey customs hall at Trudeau airport, the border official asked if I would be living on the address on Prince Arthur, a high rise with a view of the mountain. That was nineteen years ago, and perhaps we had not told them of our move across the city, but there on her screen was my teenage self, a ghost in Canadian bureaucracy. He had come to this building, then Dorval, to sign his first legal document, a student visa. For the rest of the week I would not escape him.

Coup de Sachs – Silvio Belusconi Releases New Album of Ballads: True Love

Days after democracy froze over in Rome and Athens with the shotgun installation of erstwhile Goldman Sachs staffers, Mario Monti and Lucas Papademos, the convergence of European politics and celebrity culture reached its event horizon as Silvio Berlusconi trod the path of beaten by European royalty and released an album of love songs. The media mogul-cum-prime-minister-cum-court-dodger also has a history in music; having started out as a singer on cruise ships plying the Mediterranean trade, he released an album in 2008.