Cora Monroe, UPR-M
Hablando nos entendemos
Tinta regada
1 de mayo de 2024
Adventures… the pursuit of languages is certainly an adventure. Reading Rabeb Touihri’s “From Alphabets to Adventures: My Multilingual Memoir,” and speaking to her, make me realize just how much that is true. Where we come from, and where we go, are actions and states of mind mediated through language.
In Puerto Rico, migration and language are inextricably linked. My mother was the only one of a group of husband-hunting girls in the town square of Aguada who was confident enough in her English to be able to explain to a young, Puerto Rican-looking-yet-English-speaking soldier where to take the público back to Aguadilla. The explanation was brief: the line of públicos to Aguadilla was “over there,” on one side of the plaza. The interview following the explanation was longer: Cándida González discovered that the young airman was not from a familiar family in neighboring Rincón, nor a Nuyorican originally from Carolina, but an americano from North Carolina.
Not long after that first encounter at the Fiestas Patronales in Aguada, began the courtship of James and Cándida. Marriage followed soon after, and a year and a half later, I was born.
English led my mother on the adventure of a lifetime: marriage to an monolingual English speaker, and residence in the US for just under half of her life.
I first arrived in the States around my second birthday. I was already quite the talker. I loved singing TV jingles too, especially “¡Está sabrosa en ‘tidad!”[1] At an Air Force base in Montana, as a preschooler, I picked my daily cartoon show on my own, just by turning the tv dial. Some twelve years later, at a base in upstate New York, just over an hour to the south of Montréal, I instantly recognized the show on Radio Télévision Canada, but I didn’t learn its name until much later, from Québécois colleagues at a French Literature conference somewhere in the Mid-West: Babette. In the days before Univisión and Telemundo, I guess the French on Québécois tv became a Puerto Rican toddler’s new Spanish.
I was the first French-speaker in my home, and the only one for a good while. My mother remembered that I would watch Babette and sing the songs, but she had no idea what I was singing. One in particular had a refrain accompanied by a hand movement suggesting that I was knocking or hammering. A friend of my mother’s, a fellow Puerto Rican military wife, was visiting one day while I sang my song, and was shocked, “¡Ay, la nena dice malas palabras!” to which my mother emphatically answered, “No, can’t you see she’s singing what they are singing on TV?” It took me decades to realize, that the hammering gesture and the woman’s accusation pointed to one verb : cogner. My mother faithfully preserved the memory of my gesture, and I, having become proficient in French, cracked the mystery.
As in the rest of Latin America, French is a prestigious language in Puerto Rico. When I was a pre-schooler on that Air Force base in Montana, my mother rocked me to sleep with what today’s moms would call an affirmation: “Vas a estudiar en la Sorbona.” And even though I didn’t understand what that meant at the time, nor did I ever seriously think of studying at la Sorbonne later, somehow, my determination to learn French was born in Montana. And my mother’s affirmations bore fruit she couldn’t have envisioned at the time: in graduate school, I participated in the Yale / École Normale Supérieure exchange program as an auditrice libre and became a lectrice d’anglais at the ENSAE.
After kindergarten, we moved to an air base in Massachusetts, where in first or second grade I purchased, or rather, my mother purchased the French flashcards I discovered in the base exchange. That was followed by my request to purchase a Françoise Hardy album. I returned to Puerto Rico for most of second, as well as third and fourth grade at Ramey Air Force Base in my hometown. I purchased a children’s record at Ramey’s base exchange that taught French with fanciful songs in English:
Politesse, pretty politesse,
Politesse,
I am so polite.
If I snatch your doll away,
I will first say, “s’il vous plaît.”
Politesse, politesse…
I guess my future teaching vocation was born under a tree that still stands behind the Ramey bowling alley in what was my fourth-grade playground. I remember standing under the tree at recess with a Collins French / English dictionary newly purchased at the base exchange. I was there with my first “pupil”, my classmate, Kelly, who wrote on the dictionary’s inside cover, “Cora, please teach me French.”
At home, in Aguadilla, came further encouragement from my maternal grandmother over the years of periodic return to the house from which I departed as a toddler for my first Usonian adventure, and to which I permanently returned decades later, to teach French at Colegio. Over the years she would proudly remind me: “Mi abuelito era francés.”
My great-great-grandfather, ño[2] Carlos Duprey, who died around 1919, and likely was born no later than the 1840s, belonged to a community of patois speakers in Aguadilla. Besides my family, I know of only one aguadillano like me, partially descended from the community, the beloved Míster Díaz, an industrial arts high school teacher who belonged to my grandmother’s generation, and whose name graces the town coliseum: Coliseo Luis T. Díaz.
Who were great-great-grandfather’s people ? At the Schomburg Center, a Haitian librarian seemed to think that they might have been Haitians, since créole, according to him, was called patois in the nineteenth century. Neither the Haitian librarian nor the martiniquais and guadaloupéens who I consulted during an AATF conference held in Martinique could identify Madame Quédémé, seemingly a folkloric character, that my grandmother fondly remembered from her grandfather’s stories: Madame Quédémé, véngase a almorzar. The granddaughter did not speak patois, and her mother, Juana Lula, who died when she was a small girl, doesn’t seem to have, either. Whatever the ethnic provenance of ño Carlos Duprey was, it has been lost to popular imagination. His ethnic group has been forgotten. At any rate, Ana María, my grandmother, recalled him saying to his friends, something I transcribe as petit salé comme ça, seemingly in reference to her. Ana María loved her grandfather, who died when she was around thirteen, at the Asilo, a sort of hospice for the poor in Mayagüez. She never forgot how he had walked from Mayagüez to Aguadilla just to see her sometime before he died.
In recent years, this thought has crossed my mind: what if ño Carlos was descended from enslaved people transported from Cap-Haïtien after the onset of the armed struggle that would result in Haitian independence? Was my great-great-grandfather the grandchild of enslaved people from Saint-Domingue? Did he descend from one of those sold away from Saint-Domingue as punishment for participating in the insurrection at Cap-Haïtien? I hope to one day fully explore the complexities and contradictions of my “French” genealogy. As a kid, I basically claimed French as my heritage language because of my grandmother’s reaction to my formally studying French in school. I now realize that this “inheritance” is much more complex than the “my great-great grandfather was French” that I proudly annonced to my seventh-grade French teacher.
As a practitioner of French and Francophone Studies, but one fairly ignorant of Tunisia’s educational system and historical relationship to France, I think of an educated Tunisian as a Francophone Maghrebian, but then I vaguely remember Assia Djebar’s writing on the (re)Arabization of Algerian higher education, and realize that Algerian university graduates today may very well not be the “native” French speakers I encountered in mid-eighties France. Reading Rabeb made me realize that her relationship with the French language sounds a lot like the relationship of a university-trained Puerto Rican-in-Puerto-Rico to English. And yet, if I remember correctly, there are contemporary Tunisian authors writing fiction in French, whereas there are virtually no Puerto Rican authors in Puerto Rico writing fiction in English. As our conversation continues, I’m interested in thinking more about the intersection of mastery of a second language, and using it to express identity.
[1] From a Malta India tv jingle of the sixties, “¡Está sabrosa en cantidad!”
[2]” ño” was the courtesy title afforded poor blacks instead of “don”. Poor whites were addressed as “primo.”
