My So-Called French Heritage

It can be a little tough
sometimes
to know a lot of people
don’t have this problem.

They know exactly
where they come from
and what that means.

I don’t mean to suggest
that I don’t.

I know both sides of my family
come from French-speaking
Canada, that they were lured here
on the basis of a better life,
same as pretty much
everyone else.

I know that the generations
including my parents
spoke French regularly.

I know that my grandfather
spoke it exclusively.

I know that because every time
we would visit, that was all he would speak,
and that was just another feature
of what it meant to visit him.

I knew French as a secret language,
something my parents would use
when they didn’t want us to know
what they were saying (mostly
when they argued, I think).

We learned to pray in French,
but that was it.

I struggled through several years
of French in school, rebelling
against learning it, catching just enough
for middling grades.

On 9/11, I skipped French class
and that was the only happy memory
from that day.

I’m not going to use any French here,
a strictly unilingual poem.

I don’t know if that’s out of shame
or relief, because I don’t
have to bother with it
anymore.

We grew up Catholic,
so that’s as much culture
as was practiced in the household,
and there’s nothing much French
about that, except maybe
immigrant faith
(I don’t know).

I never knew what it was
to be French, what my ancestors
thought about it.

Mostly, I have gleamed
what I know
from popular culture.

I am supposed to be a romantic.

That’s as much as I know.

Somehow I feel a little robbed,
but at the same time, I find
that I don’t really care,
except when I’m wondering
what I may be missing.

I think that’s the kind
of experience that
will be more common
the more we progress
along the world of homogeny,
which I don’t say with denigration
but with a kind of admiration.

If I wanted to, I could learn
everything I wanted to know
tomorrow.

Everything that’s French
still exists. I still have family,
even in Canada (with a kind of saint
somewhere back there, maybe
looking over me, as he opens
the doors to prayer without fail).

There’s France, obviously,
which left such a bad impression
on me this past decade, leading a charge
against global reason, isolationism
(which is about as opposite of French
as I can imagine, from all that
I have gathered) its apparent
rallying cry.

Well, it certainly
left me in tears.

I’ve talked with my mother
about a lot of things, a lot
of her experiences growing up,
what she knows about her
family, but I wonder if
I shouldn’t start there,
ask more questions,
be more curious.

Hey, having a counterfeit
French connection
is curious enough already,
isn’t it?

I might as well continue.

The more people try
to differentiate themselves,
the more they discover,
possibly,
somewhere in the end,
that they’re not all that different
after all.

I wonder if that’s what
I’ll find out.

I don’t know what it means
to be French,
I have no practical
understanding,
no sense of the culture.

I live in a void,
and make things up
as I go.

Really, I’m not so different.

But I would like to know
some ways that I am
the same.