Who was Cassandra?
In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters
of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo
loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed
that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow
Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well,
you know what happened.
the cassandra pages
words, pictures, and a life
Thursday, July 29, 2004
BRIEF HIATUS
Blogging will be spotty over the next few days; we're driving tomorrow to see my parents, attend a family wedding, and then go back to Canada via an entirely new route! Very exciting. Report and pictures to come.
Wednesday, July 28, 2004
A few days ago, I wrote about a wide-ranging conversation with a Montreal salesman. What I said was, unfortunately, misinterpreted as disrespectful by a few readers, and I want to try to explain my position better than I perhaps did originally.
In northeastern America, where I have spent nearly all my fifty years of life, we have, to a fairly large extent, a hierarchical society, where people tend to make assumptions about a person's educational level, political opinions, and even lifestyle choices based on their occupation (as well as various other "clues", such as dress.) These categorizations are true often enough to allow people to fall into the trap of stereotyping people. When I go for an appointment at the nearby medical center, I will have a different sort of exchange with the doctor if I wear "professional" clothes rather than jeans. I have a friend who is a stay-at-home mother who deeply resents the fact that she isn't taken seriously by the local university-professor crowd, even though she holds a PhD in English Lit from a prestigious university. I'm sure we all have our own examples; maybe we have even been in that position ourselves. I certainly have been, and it feels rotten.
What I have noticed in Canada is that it seems to be a flatter society. What I mean by that is that there is less economic stratification: fewer people at the top, fewer people at the bottom of the class ladder, and more in the middle. Three times now I have had extended conversations with people in professions that here are, 90% of the time, occupied by people with, say, a high school diploma, yet in Canada they were clearly as educated, as well informed, and as articulate as you'd expect from a US college graduate, and feeling no stigma whatsoever about their choice of profession. This may imply something about differences in basic education, or in pay scales for various professions, or it may mean that people don't care about such distinctions there, or have different economic and social expectations. I could also be wrong, but with more money spent in Canada on social programs, it does seem to be true that a decent lifestyle is within the reach of a larger percentage of the population. (And since qualifications seem to be in order, that doesn't mean there aren't highly educated, articulate, informed people in the US who don't have college degrees, and I don't mean to imply that.)
When we're privileged to move between societies, we see differences, and we see our own in a new light. The things that surprise us point out something for us, hold up a mirror. The fact that I am still startled when I see interracial couples holdings hands as they walk down the street in Montreal doesn't mean I am prejudiced against them - on the contrary. It means simply that interracial couples are not often seen where I have lived before, and so it takes me by surprise. The fact that I was surprised by the conversation with the salesperson doesn't mean that I think all salesmen are uneducated, it means that the people I have known in his particular profession were very different sorts of people in my part of the United States. I don't go into a restaurant and "assume" that the waiters are somehow "beneath me", and I think anyone who has read this blog over a long period of time would realize just the opposite. What I was trying to do was point out some apparent differences between societies, and obviously I didn't do that with sufficient clarity.
How do we talk about "difference" without making an occasional generality, even with the hope that it will be challenged by those who may know the exceptions to which we have not been privy? I neither want to offend, nor be misunderstood; how ironic that a post about prejudice should be seen as prejudicial!
But the larger issue here is not what I said or felt in this particular instance, but the question of what makes a workable society where most people have a sense of self-worth and value. What do we do, as members of a society, to affirm or deny a person's value, or to truly and sincerely meet one another as two equally precious, worthwhile human beings, in all our mystery? I am involved in a life experiment where many of the former "clues" don't work. This gives the possibility of even greater misunderstanding and misinterpretation, but it also opens the door to meeting others, and being met, on a new basis, using different methods of communicating identity and the desire for contact and connection.
Years ago when I was trying to embed myself in the northern Catskills, indignant locals regularly told me tales about insistent or impatient New Yorkers who had gotten under their skins. I never figured out whether they were trying to justify a stereotype or just expressing frustration. I guess you haven't met any similar prejudices -- could it be because rue Mont Royal is experienced in meeting outsiders?
There is definite resistance in Quebec, and in the Plateau Montreal, the historically French area of Montreal that I'm living in, to any forces that could contribute to the dilution or eradication of French culture. The Quebecois are pretty fierce about this, and they are right to have those fears, because it is gradually happening, for a variety of reasons. More than one native person has said to us, sadly, “French culture in Quebec will eventually disappear, mainly because children don’t want to speak French, they want to be like the prevailing culture they see in the movies and on TV.”
When you read the papers or see locally-made films, it's clear that Anglos (their name, not mine) moving into the Plateau because it has "cachet" are, to some extent, resented, but at the same time Quebec society has an underlying tolerance of diversity, and acceptance of the inevitability of change and the need for a stronger economy. As in so many other places, the influx of “foreigners” with the money to pay for what they want drives up housing prices and forces the less-affluent local citizens out. On the streets I walk here everyday, I see constant evidence of this tension: old buildings that have been expensively renovated, next to original ones occupied by, for example, an old couple who spend their afternoon out on their simple balcony reading the paper and tending their window boxes. I don’t know what percentage of the new residents speak French, although many do. Clearly, we represent part of this whole dynamic, which is familiar to me from Vermont’s struggles to deal with “flatlanders” – the local name for immigrants from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey – who are attracted by the local culture and landscape but bring their own values and expectations, eventually changing it forever.
The political issue of Quebec separation is still alive, viewed as a dream or a threat depending where you stand. And with or without a separate Quebec, the political party Bloc Quebecois is committed to representing Quebec interests in the national government. The more subtle aspects of this issue are too complicated for me to fully understand yet, and I certainly can't address them here. One fact is for sure: candidates for the Bloc Quebecois swept this part of the city and won 2/3 of the seats in Quebec in the last election. The party won many seats that had been predicted to go to the Liberal Party. In Westmount, on the English side of Montreal, Liberals won by a large majority. But the Conservatives, who were feared because they had a more conservative social agenda and foreign policy ideas more conciliatory to Washington, were trounced in Quebec.
Personally, I haven't seen evidence of these issues so much in public places, like stores, but the first question various neighbors asked, after saying "welcome", was "do you speak any French?" (The word seemed to have gone around the building that "they're Americans but they're very nice and she speaks a little French"). When I assure them yes, a little, and that I'm trying hard to improve, there is a definite relaxation. If you are trying to fit in, and express an appreciation of the culture that exists here, and don't bring rampaging American culture, speed, and consumerism - the "Toronto effect" - I think you'll be tolerated and eventually accepted. I hope so.
One day when I was out on the terrace tending my own flowers, and talking to a neighbor, an old man came by and started asking me questions in rapid French. He had a craggy, kind face; light blue liquid eyes; and was wearing a short-sleeved plaid shirt. I understood that he was asking me something about this building, which is about twenty years old – how long had it been here, did I know what was here before? – but I couldn’t understand enough to make an intelligent reply. My neighbor did, though, and I heard her say to him, gently and sympathetically, “That’s the way of the world, you know, everything changes.” He smiled at us both, but walked away with hunched shoulders, shaking his head. That was the most painful thing that has happened to me here, and I know it will stay in my memory and be an incentive to my language-learning and also remind me to be as sensitive as I can.
Maybe some of the Montreal (and Canadian, in general) readers of this blog would be willing to add their perspectives and correct anything I've said that's not accurate...
