Not too long ago, a certain media manager said to me: “Have you thought of moving to Toronto?”
Well, yes, as a matter of fact, I have. Every anglo-Quebecer has thought of it. And since 1976, about 300,000 have uprooted and, with a stone on their heart, headed west on the 401.
I have not. I came the other way, dispatched by my vieille souche Lagacé mère and my bloke Dowson dad to Rimouski, to sink or swim in my last year of high school, or Secondaire 5.
I grew up on a street like the one I live on now – that street was in North Toronto, this one in Mile End. My dad loved Quebec, but didn’t speak French, to his great regret. My franco mum loved English and was from Quebec City. She spoke French to her father, Ernest Lagacé, who lived with us and watched “les Canadiens” on TV while letting me puff on his cigar. So when the chance came to finish high school in Quebec, in Rimouski of all places, I grabbed it.
“Maudite bloke!” they said laughingly when I first arrived. “Damn English Canadian!” “Elle habite le quartier anglais” they said to gales of laughter, since I was the only anglo in the city. Some suggest “bloke” was a franco payback for decades of being called “peppers” and “pepsis.”
No one really knows where the usage comes from. According to Wiktionary, “bloke” was first used in 1851 and may come from the word “ploc,” meaning large, stubborn person in the Celtic language. Being a rather large and ever so stubborn person, I choose it as the title of my first ever column.
This space will mirror my love of our language and literature, and, equally, my passion for politics.
IN THE INTEREST OF FULL DISCLOSURE
In 2008, I had the once-in-a-lifetime chance to run as a candidate in a fully funded federal election campaign for the New Democratic Party. It started as a by-election, and the Tories tell us we appeared to be winning when Harper pulled the plug, triggering a general election. We still finished a strong second in Westmount-Ville-Marie, and in the mysterious alchemy of politics, we seemed to have made a mark. Since then, all three progressive parties have approached me about running. My political career is on ice.
Right now my joy is getting wonderful work as an analyst and all-around “expert” on things bloke for the French network – radio and television – of the CBC. La Presse calls me a hyphen between our two worlds. On Saturday afternoons I host a three-hour block on CJAD, between 1 and 4. It’s a bistro of a show, lots of good talk about all the important things. One listener says it’s magic, and even a bit subversive.
Lots of blokes are gone forever, but lots of us, some 800,000, are still here for the long haul. And this column, I hope, will reflect our presence and passions. The thing of it is that the language thing never really goes away. It fades somewhat, but is always there under the surface.
The great thing about Montreal is the blokeness and pepsiness of the place. The mixed-up heterogeneity of the people. The urban and urbaneness of them. Les enfants de la loi 101 all party on the Main, and are equally and loudly obnoxious at 2 in the morning in English and in French.
My really bloke husband, documentary filmmaker Brian McKenna, is in fact of mixed Irish and Scots descent, and born here. Our two kids, Emma, 10, and Tess, 7, are vraies Montrealers, wonderfully bicultural, and amazingly bilingual. We are witness to a “bloke survivance.” Law 101 changed all of us.
Those who stayed are part of the mix, part of a large experiment to protect French in North America, and reconcile with English, the international language.
So this column stakes out the terrain of an anglo francophile, a half-French anglo who chose Montreal, with its bad roads and heartbreakingly lovely mountain, the fantastically disparate houses, the history, the complexity.
I hope you’ll find it interesting and stick with it. And tell me what you think. Within reason!
7 comments
Sounds great. I am looking forward to your comments. I am a guy from Toronto who moved here in 1979 with my then French girlfriend- now wife of 30 years – to vote Yes for Rene Levesque in the 1980 referendum. I have stuck around and am now retired after working for access to health services in English for 20 years in the health system. Being a life long NDP supporter makes me think I will enjoy your comments.
It could be worse: I was referred to as a “maudit ‘stie d’anglais” by a colleague in one of the French schools in Laval where I was trying to teach kids how to speak English – in blocs of one hour a week! I had voluntarily given up my teaching job in an English high school to go to work in the French system. Wny? Because I’d run for the National Assembly with Bob Keaton and Nick Auf der Maur in 1976, and had been frustrated by my lack of fluency in French when speaking in public. Recently, I was asked to speak to 500 Franophone school administrators at their annual “Rencontre nationale’, so I guess that issue is resolved. I could go on at great length, but let me share one short story about the results of my immigrant wife and me deciding to send our kids to French schools. The other day, my younger daughter was complimented by her Francophone boss for the quality of her . . . English!
Graham Weeks says Hi! to his old YMCA colleague, John Britton
Gilles Duceppe is also a bloke and admitted that fact during the English language 2011 Federal Election Television Debates. Thus many francophones with English ancestry can be considered to be blokes though a considerable number can hardly speak any English. I am not an anglophone by birth like Anne Lagacé Dowson but one by adoption since my parents had to learn English as a second language before they were able to teach it to me. I already knew how to read and write English before entering elementary school. Having no traces of English blood I do not consider myself to be a bloke. I lived for a short time in Quebec City and except for a minor incident the francophones there were very courteous and respectful to me. For the most part they were indifferent or in a small way envied my English language skills. It was nice being treated just like a regular guy. I look forward to future columns.
I’m pretty sure I’ll enjoy your column as much as I enjoy hearing you on Christiane Charette and on french speaking television. I guess my english is not as good as your french but I know I’m fluent enough to be understood. I always say that I have no idea what it is to be a Canadian and maybe I’ll start understanding by reading your column and the comments lol
[...] (April 16): The new Hour is out, with its new website, new Facebook page and new columnists Anne Lagacé Dowson and Kevin Laforest. The announcement is here. Tags: Hour, job cuts | Short URL for this post: [...]
Read more on The end of Hour – Fagstein
‘Those who stayed are part of the mix, part of a large experiment to protect French in North America, and reconcile with English, the international language’
Dear Anne:
This morning, on August 17th, at ‘c’est bien meilleur le matin’ you related an anecdote about addressing yourself in French to a store clerk in the Mile-End, whose every day life, one could correctly deduce, was audibly expressed in French. He however engaged the conversation in English when you persisted to reply in French. This annoyed you to some degree.
I may reason that the Québecois was eager to accommodate you while showing off his English. I see this event however with a pessimistic eye: the consequences of bilingualism on the French minority, embattled with the overwelhming North American English idiom, is normalization, that is assimilation. No society lives in more than one language: its elite yes, but not the average normal guy.
MY conclusion is that French-Québec needs still yet more collective autonomy, and more personal ambition to promote its national identity.
The general state of bilingualism is largely transitional in nature, favoring one idiom over the other. It is not a stable social equilibrium.
Paul-André Dupuis
The only problem with the above observations is that a so-called “English blood” or “British ancestry” has never existed in the first place : is is pure fiction. This is biological determinism (Z. Sternhell), or “biological superstitions” (G.A. Borgese) : the very root of racism. No one was ever English-Canadian or French-Canadian at birth, nor was it ever hereditary to be one of those two things or both. It is on the contrary a CULTURAL fact : i.e. acquired by each individual after his or her arrival in the world. Long before the additional delirium of so-called inferior and superior races, racism consists into believing in race, that is applying to human diversity a pattern that was wrongfully borrowed to the animal regn. Thus the racist is the one of mistakes for hereditary what is in fact acquired, who mistakes civilisation for a physical phenomenon.
Even Roberto Farinacci, the most delirious and the most philonazi of all Italian fascists, was not delirious enough to believe in theories of blood – to the difference of his allies up north, who believed as hard as iron in a so-called “german blood” that has never existed, a so-called “jewish blood” that has never existed, and mistook Jewish Germans for a “mix of bloods” that has never existed.
Benedetto Croce : “How arbitrary, fantastic and inconclusive are theories of race”.