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The following is excerpted from The Gazette review of Bilingual Being: My Life as a Hyphen:
Bilingual Being is a hard book to classify. Its publisher calls it a memoir, but this hardly does it justice. Besides narrating the life of linguist and teacher Kathleen Saint-Onge, it examines Quebec’s history and ethnography, explores linguistic theory, and recounts the trauma of early childhood sexual abuse. It resembles a novel in its dramatic scenes, but it also features 24 original poems. And at its heart lies a mystery: How could une fille d’la souche (i.e. an ethnic French Canadian) who grew up in Quebec City and from whose family the regional patois (Saintongeais) takes its name have ended up living an English life in Toronto, raising three children who speak no French?
Bilingual Being is Saint-Onge’s attempt to answer this question. Although she spoke French at home, Saint-Onge was schooled in English. There was also an English strain in her bloodline: her paternal grandmother was a British war bride who never adapted herself to the local language and culture.
In the late 1970s, Saint-Onge left Quebec City to study linguistics at McGill. After graduating, she left the province for good, living in a succession of English Canadian provinces with a succession of English-speaking men. “I shunned my mother tongue and my French Canadian heritage almost all of my life,” she writes, “leaving my mother … and my home behind as I othered myself, bit by bit, into English.”
What was behind this “othering”? Why the compulsion to leave? The answer came unexpectedly in the summer of 2010, when Saint-Onge returned for a family gathering. Champagne flowed, tongues loosened and someone told a story. “The ground split open right under me,” Saint-Onge told me in a recent interview. Early memories suddenly surfaced, confirming a suspicion she’d held for years that she was a victim of childhood sexual abuse.
To learn more about Bilingual Being, or to order online, click here.
For media inquiries, contact MQUP publicist Jacqui Davis.
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