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Language and Self
Reaching fluency: only part of the ex-pat experience
Nancy Huston, a Canadian writer who moved to France in 1973, compiles some of her most poignant ex-pat reflections in Nord perdu. As with most of her books, Huston wrote both a French and an English edition (Losing North). I originally decided to read the book after a specific passage from it appeared in class reading, and it remains one of my favorites. In it, Huston’s recollections on recrafting her identity in a foreign country, and in particular, in a foreign language, are perhaps at their sharpest.
The section begins with a story of a Scottish woman who married a Corsican and settled there. She confides in the author that French, though she speaks it fluently and constantly, fails to “touch” her. I translate: “When I hear bracken, leaves, fog, I see and I feel what they are, the colors of ochre and brown, the smells of autumn, the humidity… while if someone says to me fougère, feuilles, brouillard, it leaves me cold. I feel nothing” (62). Huston relates to this woman’s frustration, and makes a series of observations on her own life in the French world.
I found much in these paragraphs to mull over, even when my own experience differed from Huston’s. We often think, as study abroad students, of how our increasing language skills will allow us to integrate, communicate, and live fully in our adopted countries. But even with perfect fluency, would we be “ourselves” in a second language? Can words that have been taught to us carry the same power as those we defined ourselves in as children? I know little about language acquisition as a discipline, but I’m fascinated by these questions of feelings and identity versus words and language.
Clearly, we can reach a point in a foreign language where it’s easy to say what we’re thinking, to describe an event or a feeling, or to tell a story with the proper comedic pauses and punch lines (still working on all of those, for sure!) But Huston beautifully articulates real differences she perceives in her French self, as compared to her English self. At the time that she learned French and moved to France, Huston coincidentally began learning the clarinet, so that “the abandonment of [her] mother tongue was accompanied by an analogical abandonment of the piano” (65). The result, in the years that followed, was a very striking distinction between her former and her new self. English and the piano she classifies as “maternal instruments, emotional, romantic, manipulative, sentimental, vulgar…” while French and the clarinet are “neutral instruments, intellectual, linked to control, restraint, delicate mastery, a form of expression more subtle, more monotonous, discreet and refined.”
I think I latched onto Huston’s writing because of how she intertwines personality and spirit with language and location. I could write a whole second blog post relating my experiences in France to hers, but what’s most remarkable is how universal her very personal and introspective reflections are. Living in a foreign country is inevitably an exploration of self and identity, and as Huston proves, each of us carries that awareness forward into our lives (wherever we end up). Her writing, as well as my time in Paris, have made me aware that our self-definitions are not born only of intrinsic attributes: the way we spend our time, the particular qualities—both physical and cultural—of our surroundings, and the language that we are speaking become woven into that identity as well.
*Note: sorry for the lack of italics for titles and foreign words... can't seem to get them to appear in the blog formatting.
