Comments
given at the Franco-American Women's Institute
site:
--"Si quelqu'un a du respect
pour les traditions, on peut prendre ces traditions et
creer des traditions nouvelles. Je garde les traditions
avec mon metier de bibliothecaire et avec ma poesie."
--"I was born in Quebec in 1958 and immigrated to the US in
1979, all by myself. I wanted to go to California..so I did
and I married a Californian. My husband, two daughters and
I came to Maine in 2004 and discovered its amazing French
heritage. I had come to Maine on vacation every summer as a
child, and knew there were some people who had immigrated
to Maine from Quec. But when I took a class at UMA on
Franco-American culture... I was blown away at the history,
and at how much I can relate to it..having been raised in
an environment where the French were considered inferior...
back in Quec. So this is why I now consider myself a
Franco-American."
--"I have lived in the US for 20 years and taught American
students for 35 years. I was raised in Europe (Germany,
France and feel totally bi-cultural and am bilingual. My
daughters have both gone through the US school system and
are now in American universities. I teach French culture
but preach for open-mindedness, tolerance and acceptance of
the "other" culture. I take American students to France
almost every year and work daily on preconcieved ideas
about America when in France. I will be getting my US
citicenship in 2 years and feel very good about it. My
family history during WWII is also filled with interesting
stories linking US soldiers to French and German members of
my family."
--" Hello! First of all, I am so glad that this
organization exists and would be absolutely delighted to be
a tiny part of it, thank you so much for this opportunity!
A little background: I took a class with poet Robert
Viscusi of The Wolfe Institute for the Humanities at
Brooklyn College a few years back, and he talked about why
he started the Italian American Writers' Association
(www.iawa.net)- he said, "write or be written." I thought,
I wish their was something like that for Franco-Americans,
and here it is, FAWI, a brilliant undertaking. I offer many
thanks and applaud the creativity, emotion, and hard work
that sustains FAWI.
I have been to several of the poetry readings that IAWA
holds regularly in Greenwich Village...and the poets'(some
of them my classmates)pride! It is a beautiful thing to
witness the washing away of pain and ethnic subjugation
through art and fellowship. The readings were always packed
with palpable energy and good will- and not just from
Italian-Americans! I also took a class with a linguistics
specialist, Professor Roy, (a proud Franco-American from
Fall River), and was prompted to look into my own history
while writing about the loss of the French language and
culture in Maine, and the subsequent pride-filled,(if
bittersweet in honest criticism of past treatment),
reclamation of both. I thought of one beautiful Acadian
lady who touched my life, Mrs. Betty R.-S. who had grown up
in Madewaska, Maine.
I was with her son from 15 to 17.(I had dated one guy right
before him,Robert, and his WASP mother didn't want to meet
me because of my low-rent neighborhood and my last
name-unbelievable). Betty's son became my first real
love,and he insisted that I meet his parents in the first
week of our dating.We had plans to elope the day I turned
18. Betty thought that might be a good idea-and made us all
go to Mass together. She was a second mom when I needed
one, a genuine and kind woman trapped by difficulty at
times with English, and an unfulfilled desire to work
outside the home. She sang beautifully and easily in
French, often alone at the kitchen table after her
Portuguese-American husband had gone to sleep. As she sang,
she'd be lost in something magical I wanted to know more
about.Unfortunately, my boyfriend was just 22, gorgeous,
and desired by every girl in town, he wandered,and I
refused to take him back-instead I left at 18 for NYC
without any plan-living a bit of a voy
ageur dream.
As life goes, he found me Palm Sunday 2 years ago as I was
learning all about Italian-American literature in Prof.
Viscusi's class. The old boyfriend held some regrets. He
hadn't married, and had struggled, at times,with addiction.
He remembered how much promise I had always seen in him. I
understood the motivation he had to say hello, and will
always consider him family. It hits you in mid-life, what
is left behind:loyalty, class, knowing, maybe a cultural
and ethnic heritage that could have been continued
together. After reading his note, I immediately remembered
the smiling eyes of Mrs. R.-S. and my story-weaving father
during a long chat they had that led to a passionate
discussion of the nuances of being New England
(working-class)Franco-Americans. I knew then that I had to
write my thesis about it, although I had reservations about
whether anyone would be interested. I was going to research
Kipling's Kim, or Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, when I
read in the school n
ewspaper during a thesis preparation class that the newly
appointed, and first female president, of BC was Karen L.
Gould: a researcher of contemporary Quebec literature and
francophone women writers. I took the news as a beautiful
omen.
I started to remember more, all of that past I once thought
I could walk away from in the American pursuit of a bland
nothing. My great-grandparents worked in the shoe mills of
Massachusetts, both my father and grandfather were born in
Worcester. Grandpa P. said his father came from France,
however, hints say otherwise may be possible. My sister,
who lives in NH, tested positive during pregnancy as a
carrier for Sandhoff Disease (a French-Canadian Tay-Sachs),
so somebody came from Quebec, even if that wasn't the
history my grandfather wanted. It was my great-grandmother
who had- but the shame Grandpa P. had about being (raised
poor, an only child of divorced parents), French! His
father might have been part of the Quebecois exodus as
well, but saying that one was "European" came off "fancier"
back then. Of course, Grandfather P. married a
Franco-American woman, a second gen. French Swiss-American,
her parents having hailed from the Alps. Grandma P. was
raised on a farm in
California, the oldest of 8 children. My grandparents
married young, they eloped 6 months after meeting on a
cross-country bus.
I perceived his shame at a very young age when we would all
visit at the little shoe store he and my grandmother ran
together in Littleton, NH. Little things gave him away. He
dreamed of being...accepted. And to think, they lived so
close to the Quebec border, his ethnicity would have been
celebrated not too many miles away. A border existed of
virtual, rusted barbed wire on the American side!
Nonetheless, his demeanor was entirely Franco-American, and
the fiddleheads, dandelion greens, homemade blueberry jam
Grandma P. so lovingly made... I was on the receiving end
of a lot of prejudice growing up in North Reading and
Reading, Massachusetts: poor, shy, French name, and that
was during the 1970s and 80s!I can only imagine what my
grandfather had to endure growing up.
Ultimately, I think the Franco-American experience is a
beautiful story of a beautiful people, and my inner Viking
would dare anyone to fathom otherwise! It never fails to
astound me how "real" New England Franco-Americans are.
They have no pretensions, instead they have talent,
sociability, and courage in surplus. They are afraid of
nothing, and I love that. I may be the only one of my
closest girlhood friends (Franco-American, Irish, Italian,
Greek, even English), all working-class, to go to college,
but not the first one to leave town alone. My
Franco-American friend from the Lawrence projects, did just
that at 18, traveling cross-country on a bus with a bag of
sandwiches, Kerouac-style. She left Massachusetts for
California to marry a local Lawrence boy looking for work
out west, and they are still together, their oldest
daughter just graduated college.
There is something to the Franco-Am. spirit: knowing what
you want right away and not being afraid to live, and,
also, sadly, there is some truth in the multi-gen.
institutionalized shame that holds too many back, and/or
makes one leave their hometown. Both myself and that old
boyfriend thought that we were "too stupid" for college way
back when. Why? An excuse to stay close to home? Or years
of "training"... old stereotypes last...until one realizes
that they exist for a reason that has nothing to do with
your heritage but myriad outside forces!
Although my thesis is on class and ethnicity vis-a-vis
Metalious and Kerouac, I am most fascinated by class and
ethnicity as a whole, and how it intertwines with and
dictates so much in American experience and literature. My
humble story is one of many, and hardly atypical, but, with
perspective and time I have come to realize it might offer
something, and Franco-Americans have been silent far too
long. No, I'll rephrase that. They have been speaking, but
not enough people have been listening.Well,that's going to
change. Thank you so much from the bottom of my heart for
reading all of this. I hope it makes some cohesive sense,
and, again, thank you so much for the wonderful
Franco-American Women's Institute, I can't wait to share
this resource with my Franco-American home girls!"
--"I am a writer. I taught for over 30 years, mostly in
Adult Education in Portland, Maine. I've published one
book, City of Belief set in New York City during the
Vietnam War era. I am currently working on a second novel
based in Nova Scotia, Belgium and France. I speak a le
francasi Tarzan but I persist. Moi voisins et famille dans
Pubnico sont tres gentil avec moi et mon melange de le
francais et anglais. I make many mistakes but I love the
language.
I will post the membership fee tomorrow and look forward to
making connections. I will be in Pubnico from
July-September. Have any of you visited the Village Acadien
in West Pubnico? It is a gem. Au revoir pour maintenant."