My friends at the French Canadian Legacy Podcast asked a few of us to write on this theme: "Why do I tell the Franco-American story?" Here is my response.
Why questions are ambiguous. The question “Why do you tell this story?” can mean “What was the impetus that gave rise to you telling this story?” Or “why” can mean “What is your purpose in telling this story?” I’ll speak first to how I started telling the Franco-American story and then to what might be some purposes in telling it.
Why questions are ambiguous. The question “Why do you tell this story?” can mean “What was the impetus that gave rise to you telling this story?” Or “why” can mean “What is your purpose in telling this story?” I’ll speak first to how I started telling the Franco-American story and then to what might be some purposes in telling it.
I have
always been interested in the origins of things. When confronted by anything from
a style of music, to the X/Y coordinate system in algebra, I would wonder how
it came to be, how it developed, and who was involved. I’m unclear on the
origin of this interest in origins. My mother’s storytelling and her interests
certainly influenced me.
I’ve
been a storyteller since I can remember. I imagined my own stories and was both
the creator and the audience for them. Eventually, I wrote them down. I started
writing when I was 11. I wrote about 100 pages of a sci-fi novel around that
time, believe it or not. My interests turned toward nonfiction in high school,
philosophy and history in particular. I read, researched, and scratched naïve
notes in loose leaf notebooks. I’d write, and I did, when the only one who read
it was me.
As I
recount in the introduction to my book A Distinct Alien Race, it was at age 19, while I was in college,
that my father died. He was buried with my mother’s family in Biddeford, Maine
where there is a vast Franco-American cemetery where almost all of the text, on
almost all of the gravestones, is in French. At least it was at that time. It’s
not just a few gravestones, either, but many thousands, spreading out over
acres. When the priest who came to read the prayers at the burial asked if we
wanted them read in French or in English, I knew I had to explore these
origins.
After
getting a college degree I slowly developed a career as a researcher, writer
and editor for academics, authors, businesses, and consulting firms. I have a
small number of academic citations in some of the areas I researched and wrote
about for my clients. It seems obvious, in retrospect, that I would combine my
interest in Franco-American origins with my profession. But when I started
learning in detail about the Franco-American story, I didn’t conceive of myself
as a public storyteller of that particular story.
Starting
around the turn of the 21st century, I occupied myself at almost
every possible moment at the New England Historic Genealogical Society library in
Boston. I filled notebook after spiral bound notebook with handwritten scrawls
of genealogical and historical information, extracted from the library like
impacted wisdom teeth. My notes dealt with history as much as with genealogy.
On
the Number One bus between Comm Ave., Boston and Harvard Square, Cambridge, I
would pour over what I had written in my notebook that day, often typing up and
organizing the notes once I got home. I was telling these fragments of Franco-American
stories to myself, and then to my sister, and to one or two other people in my
family. I wasn’t writing a book yet.
It was
only when people asked if I were writing a book, or suggested I write one, that
my interest began to go public. I wrote a couple of articles for publications
like Le Forum out of the University of Maine, Orono, and I had a website,
and then a blog. I read every year at the gathering of writers and artists
under the auspices of the Franco-American Center at the University in Orono. It
was the response to these early forays into telling the story that encouraged me
to make my research and writing on these topics public, leading to speaking engagements,
a book, articles in mainstream publications like Smithsonian and TIME, and more speaking.
That’s
a sketch of the series of events that led me to tell the Franco-American story.
But why bother telling Franco-American stories?
Why do
we tell any story? Because stories make meaning of our lives. It looks
as though humans can’t live without making meaning. If anything, we have a glut
of meaning. We tell so many stories about ourselves and others that we populate
the universe with our meanings.
Let’s
not understate the weight of storytelling. The Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad and
The Odyssey, The Bhagavad Gita, The Bible consist, in whole or in part, of
stories. Of such are derived entire civilizations and worldviews. Stories bring
worlds into existence.
I
heard a vague story growing up about my Acadian great-great-grandfather Joseph Doucette and his involvement in the Tenant League Riots on Prince Edward
Island. The story, as sketchy as it was, conveyed volumes. The story situated
my ancestors in a hierarchy and taught me that there was some “we” who had a
prescribed relationship to that hierarchy.
It also conveyed the perception that
our ancestors were the underdogs, struggling against a perceived injustice, and
that the “bad guys” were the English. This was different from most of my
friends in the good ol’ USA for whom the English were friends and allies, as
most Americans in the generations born after World War II regard them. The
story also suggested that there was a difference between what was legally
binding and what was morally right.
Along
with the story came the emotionality of it: we were the ones fighting. There
was conflict, loss, hope, pride a whole set of feelings that came along with
the story.
I’m
also aware of the potentially dangerous limitations of any origin story,
storyteller, and storytelling. No telling is comprehensive, none definitively
true in an apodictic sense or even in an emotional sense. I have no illusion
that my telling of the Franco-American story is complete or definitive.
To
craft a narrative is like carving a statue out of marble, a great deal is left
on the scrap heap. Stories thrive on omission, on emphasis, on juxtaposition of
this detail placed like a diamond in this setting rather than that
one. Their incompleteness – the narrative equivalent of negative space – gives
them form and life.
There
are so many Franco-American stories that I’m unable or incompetent to tell them
all. It is impossible to tell it all and remain coherent. The
truth of Franco-Americans is not the fragments I happen to have told, but all
of the stories, the sum total of all tales – both real and those we imagined to
be true.
So, why do I tell the Franco-American story?
Because my father died when I was 19 and I never had a
chance to have an adult relationship with him.
Because I’m a storyteller from way back, and I’ve found a
juicy yarn, that I thought I could tell well.
Because it makes meaning for me and, it seems, for others,
too.
Because history is for the present. The fact that we never
learn from the past doesn’t mean it’s useless to tell the stories.
Because if we don’t tell the stories the people who
said “it’s the rabble who are leaving” Québec; the people who said we were a “low
and sordid people,” that we had been kept “a distinct alien race”; the Klan,
eugenics advocates, and their ilk, will win. Can’t have that.
Because my forebears lived and died in those mill towns and
their spirits won’t let me not tell the tale.
Because, now, there’s someone out there listening.
Because it’s mine to tell.
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My book A Distinct Alien Race is available here.
My book A Distinct Alien Race is available here.
