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the bilingual’s life about attitude, affect, loyalty, home, friends, culture, society, faith, worldview, and goals – all triggering unique possibilities on every level. One language becomes a shelter from another, a vehicle for a variant self.
    That’s how it’s come to pass that a person like me, so deeply entrenched in a French lineage, has lived her entire life without saying «Je t’aime» (though I say “I love you” every day). I can’t even write it in a card. And up to now, I’ve had a firm resolution to date only angloor Other men, males my parents would often dislike and to whom I’d never have to speak of love in French. «Je’t’aime»: like and love as the same word. Too much commitment for someone who trusts no one? An expression tarred by my aggressors? I can’t know for sure. But its inarticulability has been my most consistent symptom.
    What I do know is that I am, technically speaking, the product of a mother’s francophone hearth and a father’s anglophone hearth – a daughter of two solitudes. I’ve changed my name twelve times in my life: from unofficial shifts in my first name lasting seven to ten years (Kathé, Kath e leen, Kat, Katie, Kathy, Kathleen) to legally assuming the surnames of my first two husbands, taking an Islamic first name (Nur) with the third, and then back again to St-Onge after each divorce, to the latest change to Saint-Onge. In word and deed I’m «une Canadienne errante» [a Canadian wanderer], like the famous song says, forever in search of identity. A paradox and a tragedy. A poster child for the language debate.
    In the school where I taught in 2010, students assembled in the gym for Remembrance Day and sang “O Canada” in English, four hundred voices from junior kindergarten to Grade 6. Staff, myself among them, looked on in approval and sang with them. But what happened next was something I’d never witnessed before, as it was my first French immersion school in Ontario. The majority, some 250 in the alternate program, then began singing “O Canada” in French. The sound rever-berated through the space, filling every corner to the ceiling and back, again and again, entering my veins with a flush that made my ears hot. I found myself shaking, my voice cracking as I worked hard to catch the tears that formed, then fell, from my eyes. It was among the most beautiful songs I’d ever heard, as mystical and piercing as a Gregorian chant.
    And I was entirely swept away by my love of a memory, by a resonance locked in the soul of the child that was, is, me. I saw then what I should have seen so long ago: that I’m scripted into the songs and histories of others, in the daily acts of the times in which I live, and have lived. I exist inside a larger narrative even before I begin to write, or tell, or live, my own tale. Can a story I tell about myself, then, ever really be all that I am?
    THE BOOK IN THE CLOSET
    In 1961, aged four, I owned one book, Dr Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat. I still have it after a complicated life in which I’ve liquidated just about everything, including people, and moved dozens of times across provinces. My family also owned an English dictionary that was kept in the linen closet and became crucial to my personal project of language conquest.
    As for The Cat in the Hat, it was apparently the first issue of a series being promoted by a door-to-door salesman who was turned away on that first book drop, for my father was notorious for resisting long-term financing arrangements. The book lived in my brother’s closet for a decade, on the single shelf. It sat there, alone, next to a woodburning kit, some children’s shirts, and stuffed animals that were no one’s favourites.
    I don’t know why the book wasn’t in my room except that it didn’t fit, evidently, with the French provincial décor. Besides, my closet