walking words montreal

I have lived in Montreal for eleven years. Eleven years. Fourteen if I count the former three years, from my years at McGill.  Enough time to say that I know it well enough. I know the people by name who run the city, who make the decisions for it, and those who write about it, and those who shape it in words — at least the ones who perform this feat in the English language. It is a half picture, in a sense, less than half — for the view cannot in fact truly be measured in the language.  But the things about this city that the people who live here all share is what we see around us when we walk and move through the tableau that is Montreal…for this is OUR city if we live here, and walk about here. What matters is what the city tells us…the people who move their lips and say words and the acts they DO that offer meaning in the larger context that shapes our human world, and how the city does what it does day after day — how it improves the lives of the people living here, or decisively robs from them — robs them of opportunities to grow and to share and to prosper. Whether those words are spoken in French or in English or in Urdu — whatever the language. Perhaps in sign language.

What I have decided that I do not like about this city are the old arguments and the insular thoughts of certain groups…the community at large, particularly the one with the power structure embedded that has a very hard time in taking seriously the sufferings and realities of those who come here from other places to build new lives. Generally, there is not a lot of effort made to make it a swift transition to find their footing, no matter their intelligence or their previous training, education, or experience. Yet they are brought here or allowed to come to pay for the lives of the established citizens who will soon need a supporting population –  a youth, a tax base, at bottom, needed to support the burgeoning population of the aged. People to fill those potholes.

Therefore, when people encounter these difficulties, what do they do? Often, not surprisingly, they decide to go elsewhere, to find lives elsewhere where they will not have as much racism to contend with, nor any language laws, and where without penalty their children may study in school in English like the remainder of the continent, where the taxes are not the highest on the continent, and where the infrastructure of the city is not visibly in a state of appalling disintegration — where they do not fear for their lives when driving or walking to work. Somewhere where the larger voting population (provincial) is not kept in a state of ignorance and uniligualism by those in firm control of political power. For of course, it is actually the French population of this province, particularly the more rural French population, that has suffered far more for the lack of English in their lives — the alienation from the remainder of the continent if not the world — and this virtual enslavement has been caused entirely by the greed of their own leaders, who cleverly manipulate this populace, many of them far removed from any chances to learn English in remote rural areas of Quebec. With the arrival now of the Internet, some 20 years ago, change is in the wind, but not nearly fast enough.

Much of the province has been kept in a state of unilingualism and that is precisely what the provincial government has wanted — they have wanted that anger and alienation to be nurtured to a fine heat to be used whenever it served their political purposes. This province could develop or might have developed in the better economic times much more swiftly without those old arguments and power structures defining the lives of the people who had the confines of only one life to find liberation from those enslaving old themes of hatred. And find prosperity themselves with two languages, rather than merely one. It is not rocket science to know that the likelihood of prosperity is much more likely when you share the common language spoken by everyone else on your continent.  Without English, this means there are 350 million people (a conservative estimate) with whom you cannot speak, share, trade ideas, grow relationships with, invent business ventures, share friendships with, laugh with. GROW. In every way possible.

Quebec could have promoted and inspired and SOUGHT bilingualism for this entire province, but her leaders have actively discouraged and repressed that growth for one reason only: to retain the power structure.  For there is no other reason. It is a lie and a myth that it is to SAVE the French language: it is merely about money and power for those who have wanted these things for themselves. It is, finally, about slavery. A sly, but extremely powerful, joke on their countrymen.

It is not Montreal itself that is to blame. I have grown to love Montreal and I know I always will love this city. Yet, in my belief there is a strong relationship between the crumbling of the infrastructure of this city and the dogmatism and greed – the power-mongering — of the leaders of this state, past and present.

Corruption is of course everywhere, found everywhere in the human world. But corruption flourishes best where there are fissures in trust, and particularly where fissures in trust are developed purposely.

In a province where the politics is built on destabilizing trust, and where actively destroying trust has become the private entry card to power, I blame a manipulation of fear by those in power for the corresponding hatreds which shape the politics. A politics of distrust and paranoia. Introducing change and new ideas and new initiatives takes courage and also requires vision and leadership. Who in this new world is showing great vision and leadership? Not as many as we need and will need.

But here in Quebec, this problem, at least for those of us who came here without any real choice in the matter (I am one of those), find ourselves having to make other choices, and enter other rooms, other worlds. Ultimately, we all have to choose our politics and our languages — and those which we actually have any hope of changing or affecting, influencing. I have lived in enough places to know that every regional community and every state and every country has its blinders — its complacency factor — an innate blindness to the very issues, often, which threaten it the most. I have always despised complacency, for this C word, while not as bad as the other C word, corruption, means boredom and stagnation.

What I have experienced here is a life in words and books and the creation of books in my own private sphere.  And although it is true that the complexity of trying to live here under the circumstances that “govern” one’s thinking does somehow also inspire creativity and ingenuity and makes living in English Canada, or English anywhere look like a cakewalk somehow, it is also true that this innate complexity takes up a lot of room in one’s head and thinking, and yet is not definable (not to me), it is ineffably murky, like a swamp that sucks one under, and there is a resistance in Anglos to talk about it, in depth, how it changes one’s thinking, affects the mind. But it hits home when one hears their artistic comrades articulating how tough things are getting under Harper and the economic downturn, and yet they actually ARE bilingual. This is not a new story but a worsening one. When it gets to that point, one knows the artistic community here – and the first language English community — suffers from a cyclical stagnation and an internal quandary because people keep leaving (as I now must) and this fractures the whole, and causes an anger, or some strange sense of betrayal or restrained anger from some quarters that I cannot quite get my mind around, caused perhaps by a perpetual cycle of doubt and fear, perhaps, fear of the same bloody cage? It is ineffable, unclear. And yet I am experiencing this anger emanating from both Francophone friends, and English ones.

For it is as if they believe I can control the circumstances in which I must operate and create and I cannot — I can grow a business and I have before, but I can do it much more swiftly and successfully in an environment where I do not have to fight upriver in the language realities found here.  I came here when it was already too late for mastery of French, but without true mastery, it did not interest me.  I love French, but I knew it was too late, and the state played its own role also in that — they made it much more difficult, not less, and only because I was English, rather than an immigrant from elsewhere. French deeply interests me for use in my writing, in meanings, in the cadence of sound, in the poetry.  But some battles one to has to recognize as already lost.  However, living here for fourteen years has deepened my love of language, which I already possessed  — all languages — and of diversity. Of sound, cadence, rhythm.  My own speaking cadence has been definitely affected by it.  If I move to Ottawa, at least I know there I also will find diversity, if not the artistic angst and awareness that exists here. Fourteen years has given Montreal to me, if not always her trust. I am her child.

I see myself as a world citizen, moreso than as merely Canadian, perhaps because of a decade spent living outside the country.  I wonder sometimes if the average Quebecer, English or French, thinks of themselves as being free in this environment or, rather, as trapped in a matrix of history, because of language laws. Certainly in my recent experience, I think regardless of how much a person has traveled or how many languages they may speak, an individual’s idea of freedom comes down to how they think in their own mind about relationships and human interaction and trust  — having a willingness or a desire to interact and share without desire for control or for greed, or for a misplaced desire for power, developing a natural curiosity and an open mind to see in another person the seeds and potential of what they often are in the act of becoming — and to encourage others within their own sphere, and particularly one’s friends, to free themselves from tyranny in whatever form it imposes itself. Losing trust in the human race because of tyranny, greed, or from a simple lack of curiosity, or perhaps a lack of human compassion– these are the fissures that grow unabated in a country — a province — where distrust is openly and actively encouraged. Nurtured. Accepted as a given. For one reason: the urge to control.

Perhaps what it teaches you is that this is the truth of politics everywhere.  The fastest way to control people is to convince them that someone(s) is wrong, or stupid, or incompetent, or even evil,  or to believe or to allow yourself to be convinced that you cannot trust certain persons or groups — especially if they challenge your thinking. Our willingness or ability to trust in anything shapes our world every day. My sense of trust has been challenged living in Quebec, I have to say, and this has not helped me to find balance here — and I arrived with any sense of balance thoroughly out-of-whack as I had been an academic nomad for 10 years.  In some ways, I feel raped by Quebec’s history and still ever-present rage — and my own identity forced underground by it while living here.

Now when I must leave, because it makes the most logical sense to leave, I find that it is as if I am attempting to qualify what shaped my life while I was here — during what I would call the defining years, moreso than any other timeframe, of my life. I think I was definitely robbed of much opportunity while living here.  This is a complicated question. What does that say about this province? How should I feel, given what I have experienced here? What other choices might I have made? What is true is that I found my own answers to the problems, but took curious detours which have in turn shaped me into someone perhaps not always easily understood, for I never have taken the common path. The road less traveled has always led me forward. Perhaps my identity forged of difficult circumstances will now become a unique strength as I shape a new future elsewhere.

We all have our inner tyrannies to conquer and only one lifetime in which to succeed at this.  It is a strange realization to discover that for 21 years I have allowed, to a far greater degree than was healthy for me, state laws and state political histories to frame my existence and to exert a stranglehold on my own freedoms, and even my own thoughts about freedom and what freedom might mean, although I never relinquished control of my imagination.  I vow I will never again let anyone, an individual nor a state govern my mind as it has for the past 21 years, while I lived under either visa restrictions or language laws. Whether that might be studying a language or any literature(s) of my own choice, or whether it is the ability to work in whatever capacity I so choose, or in composing the fictions that ultimately tell the stories of those who have walked this earth trying to make sense of what they encounter, and where their walks have taken them.

I did do many things right, even if sometimes that was by accident, or by circumstance, and not even by an outright choice, but moreso perhaps a result of intuition, internal wisdom. I have made some extremely tough choices in my lifetime. And I paid for them dearly, even if they did allow me to grow and to change.  I approach another choice.  Finally, I am free to choose and the irony is that it hurts, it deeply hurts, to leave. Montreal has claimed me as her own child, even if her politics and her destiny have punished me at certain times. She is filled with pain, and right now, so too am I, as I prepare to wish her adieu.

Curiosity and joy in human interaction is what inspires discovery. It is quite interesting but also dismaying to see how people tend to react to change when they witness it, and imagine it is always a completely chosen path rather than one experienced as a tapestry, yes, a wild and complicated tapestry of experiences and circumstances and life-framing events, that carries you forward and governs one’s decision-making and thought process. You flow toward where your words make sense, and where your person, your mind, and your SELF with your language, your very body, is understood and allowed to become, allowed its rightful place. Where curiosity and discovery can become an open and beautiful road, where with any luck, one can become, by the use of one’s imagination and ingenuity, a citizen of the world possessed of a free imagination rather than one entrapped within an old political world with an old idea of itself and its former hatreds, driven forward by tired and now meaningless battles played out again and again, relentlessly, idiotically, while our embattled planet appears to be dancing towards her own tragic end.

Walking down new roads is something we all must learn to do, sometimes at moments when we least expect.  I think about the roads I have walked down, and what that walking has signified to me.  For always I have preferred a meandering road.

As a child of six, in first grade, I attended one of the old elementary brick schoolhouses, and walked from my home to the school with friends and family members, a good mile from the house along a highway. There was no bus in those days. In the afternoons, we first graders were dismissed a half hour early to make the trek home.  Presuming, I suppose, we would take longer at the end of the day to make the journey, and therefore it was supposed that we needed extra time. My friend Sylvia and I took our merry time on that walk home from school, and played as long as we wanted in the streams and roadside ditches, picking flowers, making up worlds of our own, generally having what is known as quality dream time. I remember those walks with great joy. But they came to a crashing halt when one day our teacher espied us in our play, and thoroughly aggravated that we should dare to enjoy ourselves, stopped her car, gave us a harsh tongue-lashing, and bore us promptly home in her vehicle, to tell our parents (in my case parent as my Dad was not alive) that we must not, in future, do this as it was too dangerous.

I suppose she was right, and who am I to know, perhaps there is some crazy out there who missed his chance to kill me (us) because of Mrs. Robertson and her firm view of the matter. After that, we were forced to walk home with family members: no lollygagging allowed.

The next walking I specifically remember was in the countryside around my home, where I would head out, whether summer or winter, on long hikes into the meadows and forests and wander at will, dreaming up all kinds of scenarios and worlds of my own. I remember on one walk making up the world of a family of mice living under the snow, and their purported occupations and calamities.  Those mice enjoyed intricate, and often heroic, lives and were not the devilish mice of Douglas Adams’ imagination.

Often my dog would accompany me, leading me where he would, which, as often as not, was in the pursuit of rabbits or whatever he cared to become excited about.  His escapades were usually meandering in nature.  Those times in the wild, with what I call free range walking, or hiking, were times of vivid imaginings and a correspondingly wild freedom of thought, and were matched by the reading that I did after returning home. Those walks often ended at the cemetary where my father was buried.  I would talk to him. Which seemed a necessary thing to do at the time.

The next walking time of importance that I recall was when I walked down the aisle to be married, and five years later, when I walked into my home with my (our) first child, a beautiful son, in my arms. Walks in those days were less painful, and yes, filled with the work of healing. Walking does heal a person…and feeds the mind. Exponentially. That is what I found, walking through time, with dreams in the mind. Eventually, I began walking through university classes, and many journeys into my own head and the heads of the writers of the ages. And I decided my brain needed more walking.

Eventually, the dreams created by voracious reading pushed aside thoughts of anything vaguely domestic, and I made a decision, a painful one.  I needed  to make another walk into the future and take a different fork in the road. I left for Montreal and McGill. And there I walked those halls, and the Montreal city streets. And I discovered new meandering paths to explore, opening my world further. The world of the interior. The world of literary history. The world of inquiry.

Later, I walked for a while in Toronto…although this was a brief interlude, which further added meaning, more meandering, to the tapestry of the mind — before making a crucial decision to walk into another marriage and yet another life, south of the 49th parallel, south of Richmond. And that decision to make that walk definitely represented a Different Fork in the Road, for there was no way of knowing where that road would eventually lead. This did not matter, I thought, because I was fulfilled with whom I was walking.  And the path I walked through that  forest was a very long, meandering,  and dense one, filled with many revelations, disappointments, joys, discoveries. At the end of it, we emerged from where we began: Montreal.

Here in Montreal, I have walked through much more than I would have imagined I was capable of walking through. I have walked through my brother’s death, my nephew’s death, my husband’s death, a dear friend’s death, and it may, at times, have been closer to a stagger than a walk. But it is, yet again, a meandering and yes, deeply meaningful, if at times extremely painful, road that I continue to walk.

These days, every day,  I walk in my fiction, and in my “real” world, but I also walk forward in my mind, to that next fork in the road. For I know there will be more forks in my road. So far, I don’t believe I have taken — ever — the wrong road, the wrong fork, but I definitely have taken the more meandering path, and the less direct.  Sometimes, as in the past, it is particularly helpful to KNOW that there is a fork there in the road, and to understand, when selecting your path, that it is a decision, and it is for a reason. By this point in a life, it is critical to see the forks and to intuit where they are leading.  Sometimes, organically, we grow to understand the best decision simply because it is where our “minds” are leading our feet. Or perhaps our hearts. Ideally, it is both. And stay well away from those evil mice.

Kate Orland Bere

I will be posting weekly in this blog on the “walking” mind of a fiction writer, as I continue work on a novel and a book of short stories.  -KOB January 29th, 2012