Scar Tis­sue

The ones we got when we were kids: learn­ing to walk, real­iz­ing we can’t fly, learn­ing to bike, real­iz­ing the slope was a bit steeper than planned, learn­ing to play and real­iz­ing that balls are heavy objects that can col­lide with one’s head quite eas­ily. Cries. a bit of blood and a few scratches, a few scrapes. Smell of alco­hol and the eosin that wouldn’t wash out, even after ten show­ers. Ban­dages and cot­ton pads. And a piece of choco­late, mak­ing the small injury worthwhile.

The extra scars, learn­ing to live with. No mat­ter how hard I tried, I was never able to see out of my left eye. Noth­ing but a use­less blurry pic­ture, with a few black spots on the way. The world looks dis­torted in a pretty fun way but it took me years to appre­ci­ate my dif­fer­ence. Kids all want to look the same.

The iden­tity scars. After being lost teenagers, we turn into respon­si­ble grown-ups… yet, the “lost feel­ing” is never that far. A part of the life we work hard to build falls apart and we don’t know where to go or what to think.

I — quite roman­ti­cally — thought that choos­ing a new coun­try to live in was the ulti­mate free­dom. After all, I didn’t choose where I was born, so why not ask for a refund and start from zero, wher­ever I felt like it? That’s par­tially what brought me to Canada. I didn’t give much thought to iden­tity — who needs iden­tity when you believe in Social­ism and think that the Great Leap For­ward could have worked?

And today, I find myself stuck in the mid­dle. Cana­dian with a hint of French, of French with a hint of Canada? Cana­dian in France or French in Canada? Or for­ever a for­eigner in both? Immi­grat­ing means los­ing a lit­tle piece of self, leav­ing a lit­tle chuck of heart left some­where, hav­ing a lit­tle side of the brain that is quite never in sync with the new sys­tem. Am I doing things right? Am I adapt­ing well enough? Am I doing every­thing I can?

I now speak Eng­lish flu­ently enough, but I dream in many languages.My body prob­a­bly adapted to the cold and to the North Amer­ica fash­ion sense (no irony here), but peo­ple occa­sion­ally stop me in the street to ask me for direc­tions in Lebanese, Russ­ian or Span­ish. My stu­dents won­der about best places to visit in France and Napoleon’s role in mod­ern France, but I never got to visit my old coun­try that much and I only know Chi­nese dynas­ties.

Even worse, I’m start­ing to believe in nego­ti­a­tions rather than in rev­o­lu­tions, in people’s right to have ser­vices rather than in the ulti­mate strike that would par­a­lyze a coun­try and I think cit­i­zens should take their respon­si­bil­i­ties rather than rely­ing on the state to solve their prob­lems. Oh, and I put maple syrup rather than salted but­ter on my toast. I don’t under­stand the cur­rent reforms in France and to be hon­est, I didn’t try to: I know that peo­ple protest for the sake of it but that even­tu­ally, the Pres­i­dent will back up and noth­ing will change, like always. Talk­ing about the Pres­i­dent, I didn’t vote for him, nor for his oppo­nent. Don’t get me wrong: I hate his guts. But I didn’t feel like vot­ing: I haven’t been in France for a while, why would I influ­ence my for­mer coun­try where I’m not even liv­ing there?

I though I could just take off my French skin and wear my Cana­dian one when­ever I’d feel like it. I was wrong. I’m an onion now. I have two, three or four even, lay­ers of skins on me, each with it’s own scars, each let­ting the other ones see through, each with its own mem­o­ries and expe­ri­ences. I can act French but think Cana­dian, I can make fun of both cul­ture and call myself a cit­i­zen of the world. That’s the best part. The worse one is never know­ing exactly where I belong, and the con­stant fear of not being good enough.

I will always be some­what French, some­what for­eign, some­what dif­fer­ent. I shouldn’t care about it, should it?

Related posts:

1. Going To…
2. I Belong Here… And There Too
3. 3 Unex­pected Con­se­quences of Immigration
4. The Nos­tal­gic Chameleon
5. Don’t Look Back In Anger (I heard them say)