Babbling French
I once told a friend that sometimes I feel like my interest for words and literature actually comes from a deep, unfathomable feeling that I am incapable of truly communicating to others what's inside of me. He said "that could be a great beginning for something". So here I am. After having spent a year split between two countries whose official language is not Spanish, my mother tongue, I decided to write again.
Having to express myself in my second or third language adds up to that isolating feeling. So far I have managed to come to terms with my English persona: I like to play and experiment with accents, it makes me feel like an undercover agent. I change my pronunciation depending on my mood, my audience, the venue and how silly and stupid I allow myself to be at the moment. I enjoy listening closely at how people speak and stealing from them small pieces of their inflection, rhythm and stress. I don't care much what people think about my English voice because in a place as diverse as New York City, English feels like a courtesy I give to others.
Speaking French has been an entirely different experience and I don't think this disparity comes solely from the fact that my francophone abilities aren't as developed as the anglophone ones. When I was living in Tokyo, my Japanese skills were fairly poor, but that didn't stop me from enjoying hiragana, katakana and kanji and mimicking the wide array of onomatopoeias I heard every day. Sometimes, I would even enjoy trying to emulate a more feminine tone voice, as suggested by my teachers.
With French I have never felt that childish joy of babbling or performing a character. My experience trying to build up a French version of myself in Paris was, at best, humiliating. Unlike New Yorkers who have learned to embrace the diversity of accents into English, Parisians seem to think that French can only be labeled as such when spoken by the white francophone bourgeoisie. In Paris, I couldn't help but feel that French, more than a means of communication, was a display of class.
The latter is true in other parts of the world. In Mexico the second language people study is generally English and although fluency is still only generalized in middle class families, there's many people that acquire a fair understanding without ever doing more than listening to songs and watching subtitled movies. English is also the language you learn because everyone will tell you it will open you more job opportunities. French, however, is the tongue of the refined. The one people go to not because of need, but just pure luxury.
Going to Paris was a fortuitous event in my life. It wasn't even me the one who paid for my sojourn there. I could have never thought of going to Paris because in my head Europe was really far from the imaginary I could grasp: My family had always made it seem like a financially unthinkable dream.
This time I was moving countries not because of a scholarship, as it had been the case with Japan, but because my husband, the counterpart of my newly formed family, was studying there. I had something now that connected me to that country and yet I kept feeling like a phony each time I was trying to enjoy the Seine, the blue roofs and the tiny white shutters, the cheese, the bread, drinking wine with a friend by the canal.
When asked by a lot of people how I liked Paris, I always used to say it was too fake for me, too pretentious. Now I think I was trying to say that I felt I had to be fake to be part of it, to pretend I was a person I was never supposed to be. To kill my accent, to change my eating schedules, to have an informed opinion of every geopolitical conflict when all I wanted was to call my family and ask them if they knew that one of the companies responsible for the lack of potable water in the north of Mexico was French. To tell them how guilty I felt for exploring the world without them. That I missed living in a place where I could use language to offer others the gift of my bowels. To cry to them that I felt like a traitor and I missed Spanish.
-To Victoria, without whom I could have never fully loved Paris