MONTREAL - Whether you
see the growing acceptance of French/English
bilingualism on Montreal’s cultural scene as
something threatening or liberating, I’m willing to
bet you’d agree that bilingualism remains a
controversial topic in Quebec.
Example: Last week,
Montreal comedian Sugar Sammy took home two top
prizes at the Gala Les Olivier, the Quebec awards
ceremony that honours French comedy. Despite the
fact that his bilingual show, You’re Gonna Rire, was
the runaway sensation of 2012, the linguistic
criteria for the Oliviers meant that it was his
French-only show En Français SVP that garnered him
the award for Best Comedy of the Year.
Not everyone
approved. Writing in the Journal de Montréal,
sociologist and columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté argued
that “if Sugar Sammy’s Quebec represents the future
of Quebec, then Quebec has no future.” (For the
record, Bock-Côté’s colleague at the Journal de
Montréal, columnist Lise Ravary, had a great
rebuttal to his stance. Worth checking out.)
Melodrama aside,
Bock-Côté’s doomsday scenario in which Sugar Sammy
leads us all down the road to a dead-end
“Canadianized Quebec where bilingualism is the norm”
(this is lifted directly from his article — I’m
taking no liberties here) is just one example of how
bilingualism remains a hotly contested matter here.
To suggest that
Montreal is a bilingual city is to ignite a
firestorm of debate in the public domain. It is
guaranteed to set the media spinning with commentary
from demographers, sociologists, pundits and the
public at large about who we are, where we come from
and how our “culture” should or should not be
linguistically defined.
Given this ongoing
preoccupation with language and identity, it comes
as no surprise that bilingualism was the vehicle for
Sugar Sammy’s extraordinary success this year. It is
also why his win at the Gala Les Olivier was an
unspoken acknowledgement from the francophone
cultural establishment that You’re Gonna Rire — the
show that made Sugar Sammy a crossover star in both
English and French markets — tapped into something
meaningful, whether people want to officially
recognize it or not.
Another example: As
The Gazette’s Pat Donnelly reported recently
(“Bilingualism has gone mainstream,” May 7), the
news conference for the St. Ambroise Montreal Fringe
Festival was launched by mixing a slice of French
toast and an English muffin in a blender in symbolic
homage to bilingualism at the Fringe.
Festival director
Amy Blackmore has said that because the Fringe has
been receiving so many applications from artists who
don’t know which language they want to present in,
organizers are thinking of putting in a “franglais”
category next year.
There are many
reasons why French is codified in law and policy as
the sole official language in Montreal. But the
city’s linguistic duality has always played a role
in shaping its cultural scene.
The new “trend” is
that bilingualism is slowly starting to be both
acknowledged and embraced as a valid reflection of
who we are and how we live.
As Alain Dubuc argued
eloquently (and controversially) in La Presse a few
weeks ago, Montreal is, in fact, a bilingual city.
He suggested that it is Montreal’s linguistic
duality, not necessarily its multiculturalism (which
has by now become a given in most major cities
around the world) that fires its creative character
and sets it apart from other North American cities.
If you are someone who
needs to see the numbers to be convinced: The 2011
Canadian census figures indicate that Montreal has
the highest level of French/English bilingualism in
the country. For example: in Montreal, anglophones
between the ages of 15 and 24 have a 79.3 per cent
rate of bilingualism, francophones in the same age
bracket claim a 50.9 per cent rate, and allophones
are at 67.6 per cent.
How human beings
interact with each other on a daily basis doesn’t
always jibe with top-down institutional explanations
(laid out by government or an intellectual elite,
for example) of how things should be.
But that’s the
whole point of art — whether it be literature, film,
music, dance, theatre, the visual arts, comedy or
any other medium. Cultural expression exists to push
institutional boundaries, to subvert or challenge
the status quo.
Cultural
expression, in other words, is a way of using
creativity to make sense of our social reality. It
plays a role in shaping or defining who we are as a
society.
This may feel
threatening or it may feel liberating. But there’s
little doubt in my mind that it’s the creative
tension between the two that makes Montreal tick.
celine.cooper@utoronto.ca
Twitter:
CooperCeline
