other

Sun 1.29.23

I remember when I was 5 or 6, sitting in the back seat of a car with a family whose daughter and I had just participated in an event; they were giving me a ride home.  The family struck me as alien, strange.  Now you must realize, that this little French girl raised in the bosom of French culture in Lewiston, Maine where 70% of the population was French speaking Canadian or of Canadian roots, that it was my first close-up exposure to what my people called “Yankees,” and sometimes “bluenose Yankees.”

I thought the family was inauthentic, saying meaningless things to each other. I remember feeling the tension in that car as they uttered their inanities.  It occurred to me that there was something missing in those people; they were empty.  I was the alien; and who knows what they thought of me?  It was my first close-up meeting with “other.”  There was a world out there, populated by Yankees.  I later came to identify them as “Americans,” the white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant people.  Those in charge were a pompous, severe, punishing lot. The others, i.e., the majority, having lost the connection to their original culture were bland and superficial, rigidly conformist.

In my expanding understanding of “Americans,” I noted that one did not have to be white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant to be “American,” just behave according to their ways and one was swallowed up by that world, a hyphenated American, a Franco.  I was a smart girl and quickly adapted to this foreign world.  I learned to play the game, wear the mask.  At some point I realized that the mask had become a persona, I had developed a double consciousness, with two completely different personalities, even the voice and mannerisms were different. Each had separate functions: the “American” is intelligent, objective, rational, off-putting; the French is intuitive, wise, vulnerable, sensuous, open-hearted.

Did I become an “American” in the process?  Yes, to a certain extent.  Most of us do.  That’s how people are kept docile, obedient.  When you deny who you are, where you come from, or the history of your people, you are acting rather than being, and easily malleable.  She’s still around my American persona and pops up when she’s confronted by the Bluenoses.