Coping 8: Language and identity

As a Canadian who's lived outside of my citizenship country for a decade (barring a four-month stint back at one point), my connection with Canada is different than it used to be. Suffice it to say that when I lived in Canada, I didn't need to think about whether and how to maintain a connection to it. It was the water I swam in, the politics I read about, and the day-to-day things that were happening around me. Gone for a decade, it is something else. It is over there, abstract, and not happening to me.

I miss Canada when I see territorial acknowledgement statements on the websites of events or institutions. I miss Canada when I see things being done poorly that I think are, for all its faults, done better in my original country. But the oddest thing I miss, as an anglophone Canadian, is French. I miss the strained but equitable relationship between Canada's two colonial languages, and the localisms it causes like the "Hello-bonjour" of government employees. Though I am not Franco-Canadian, I went to school in French and lived in Montreal for a number of years. The complexity of a country that strives, at least officially, for equality between two languages is something not at all universal. Where I sit now, I have to go to Belgium to get a taste again of the fascinating friction that comes from having more than one language on a legally-equal footing.

So, when I find myself wanting to connect back to my Canadianness, I don't watch hockey (or even curling). I don't eat poutine (who needs an excuse, it's delicious all the time). I do things in French. I take a French course, I listen to music from Quebec, catch a podcast from Radio Canada, or re-watch the swearing conjugation scene from Bon Cop, Bad Cop. For me, language is one of the things that makes home and identity, and reasserting the role of French in my life and history makes me feel whole.