Read Online Bilingual Being by Kathleen Saint-Onge - Free Book Online

how it is that my story becomes my work and my work becomes my story. My mother’s hope for the past few yearswas that I’d take to painting or drawing again, to «t’changer d’esprit» [change your spirit]. My own hope was somewhat less ambitious: that I’d survive, perhaps even continue in the recovery of a strength I’d lost so much of through some dangerously close contacts with despair. Such close brushes with the edges of things, reality and sanity, were not a new thing for me. But then again, neither was – nor is – my willingness and my ability to survive.
    QUELQU’UN D’DIFFÉRENT
    I’ve always been known as a “troubled person” of sorts, «quelqu’un d’différent» [someone different], my mother puts it somewhat diplomatically. Successful on the outside but problematic on the inside. «Toé, tu s’ras jama’ heureuse» [You, you’ll never be happy], my mother announced one day when I was about twelve, more prophetic than harsh. And so it was that a girl who believed and claimed she’d been sexually abused as a child became a drifter – spiritually, geographically, and linguistically – never finding answers or lasting peace. «Tu cours tout l’temps» [You’re always running], my mother observed on so many occasions. «Oui,» I agreed, «mais j’attéris t’jours su’ mes pieds» [but I always land on my feet]. «Eh, oui,» she sighed.
    I did land on my feet, across four provinces, always making ends meet, successfully married and then even more successfully divorced, three times now. Yet her forecast lingered as a painful truth. I wasn’t really happy except when I was with my children. In every other way, I was often fragile, insistently a loner at heart, «mauditement indépendante» [damned independent], as my mother termed it, not intended as a compliment. «Toé tu cherches t’jours queq’ chose, mais t’sais pas quoi» [You’re always looking for something, but you don’t know what]: my sister-in-law’s verdict, as astute as my mother’s. A cut of the same cloth.
    I certainly had been looking for something. And, right again, I didn’t know what. Spending my life trying to remember something essential I felt I’d forgotten. I don’t know quite how to describe this sensation, and I know it’s logically absurd. If you remember, it isn’t forgotten. And if you’ve really forgotten, then you can’t remember you’ve done that. Yet, so it was. For it seems this curious sense of having, and nothaving, a memory was directly connected to the bizarre timing of my aggressors.
    They first began their machinations in my infancy, when I existed prior to formal language, when the solitary means I had to record things was primitive. So the body kept track below consciousness, as it’s capable of doing. Down but not out, one might say. And as I was moved from place to place, pushed and squeezed, inhaling the associated smells of danger – mould, nicotine, sweaty polyester, latex gloves, dental solvents, dry-cleaning fluid, dirty metal, wood dust, and pine and coal tar – circuits and chemicals pulsed in the hypothalamus and amygdala, old brain matter that nurtures the early senses on which survival hangs: smell, affect, body position, instinct. Meanwhile, the rest of my mind – cortical structures through which I’d later perform the more complex functions of life, including my bilingualism – lay dormant, still developing.
    If my perpretrators had stopped then, I suppose I’d have merely been a child with an overly kindled unconscious. But they kept on going, so that new traumatic material became tethered to my reptilian brain, from which it could occasionally erupt into conscious space when triggered. Fifty years of vague thoughts and waking dreams that couldn’t be erased by