FROM THE EDITOR
BAD
FRENCH
by Laurie Meunier Graves
Not long ago, when
I was having lunch with a woman I’d just met, the topic of “ bad French”
reared its ugly head. She was telling the story of the time she hosted some
students from France and took them to Lewiston, Maine, a mill town on the
skids, like most other mill towns in the state. Lewiston has a huge
population of Franco-Americans whose forebears came from Québec during the
late 1800s and early 1900s, and it is a place where French can still be
heard in the stores and on the streets. But the French people speak in Maine
is not the same French spoken in France, anymore than the English we speak
in Maine is the same English spoken in England. Apparently, the students
were appalled by the French they heard and considered it barbaric.
I can’t say that
this story surprised me. If I had a euro for every time I heard my mother or
one of her Franco-American friends say that they spoke “bad French,” then
I’d be a rich woman indeed. “Oh,” they state, shaking their heads, “we don’t
speak good French, the way they do in France. That French is so pretty. No,
we speak bad French.”
Why wouldn’t they
think their French was bad? After all, France hasn’t been the only one to
look down on them. In the 1920s, the Maine legislature passed a law that
forbade the teaching of subjects in any language other than English. At the
time, Maine had many schools that taught in both French and English, and,
hard as this might be to believe, so many students spoke French and English
that the state came pretty close to being bilingual, at least in certain
areas. After the law passed, children were forbidden to speak French on the
playground or anywhere else at school. Those who did were punished, and a
friend of my mother’s remembers a student being expelled for having the
audacity to speak in French on school property.
There was,
however, one place where French was allowed, and that was in French class,
where teachers taught “proper” French, Parisian French, as opposed to the
“low” French heard on the streets, in the churches, and in the homes. Then a
funny thing happened. French dried up in Maine. As Michael Parent observes
in his play One More Thing, “We were taught to bite our tongues.” And
bite them we did, until English grew to be the only language we could speak,
and French became something akin to a distant memory that tugged at our
minds when we heard elders speak or when we traveled to Québec and the
language, familiar yet unfamiliar, swirled around us. We had lost something,
and we knew it, and my generation was the first to lose it. As more time
passed, some of us even forget where we came from, and, as Yvon Labbé put
it, many became “ignorant of [Franco-Americans’] contributions” from
“literature and folklore” to “history” to “cultural and language assets.”
Many months ago, I decided the topic for the July/August
issue of the print journal would be “Where We Came From,” and it couldn’t be
more timely. On a local level, Franco-Americans are still dealing with the
notion of bad French and the shame brought about by that point of view. On
the national level, conservatives are having spasms over immigration and
illegal immigrants, all eleven million or so of them. Indeed, the
conservatives are making such a fuss that it almost seems as though the
illegal immigrants had suddenly appeared in this country overnight,
teleported by a band of malicious genies bent on plaguing red-blooded
Americans. But of course eleven million people don’t just suddenly appear
anywhere, and the same is true for the current group of immigrants, who,
over the years, have been coming to the United States for the same reasons
that immigrants have been coming to this country for hundreds of years. They
want a better life for themselves and their families.
Perhaps we should have a national “Where We Came From
Day,” to remind American citizens that like the illegal immigrants, most of
their forebears once came from someplace else. They might learn that their
great-great-grandparents were never invited here. I expect mine weren’t.
And, maybe just maybe, the idea of bad French or bad
Spanish or bad Mandarin could be put to rest.
For more about
French and Franco-Americans, check out the following:
http://fanset4.blogspot.com/
http://www.michael-parent.com/
http://www.poolyle.com/
