Red Shift and the Language of Patriotism
Iza Bryniarska
I often wonder about the first Europeans who came here – their lives on their backs, careful accents. Perhaps they came in the summer – were seduced to linger by warmth, the thrill of the new, then pinned down whimpering under winter’s lock?
My family’s voyage happened centuries later. Canada existed in my consciousness by way of L.M. Montgomery’s fiction; her red sand was so much a part of my idea of the place that upon arrival in a slush-choked Montreal I searched for crimson ground.
There were many shifts. Words, comforting from the earliest memory in the form of books, some re-read numerous times and each time a new experience, became strangers on the page. The pronunciation of my name was altered to accommodate new classmates’ efforts. My handwriting, differing from the North American standard, was re-taught character by character - I struggled to write foreign words in a cursive style which remained for a long time unnatural. I became a messy, inconsistent writer, but began to feel enjoyment when swinging the language around by its tail.
My pronunciation of “Canada” moved from stress on the second syllable to the first, an inevitable shift during the process of language acquisition. The incomprehensible necklace of “Ohh – ke-nedaaaa, are-hoe-meh-neh-teev-lend,” issuing from our throats at the start of each school day, gradually also separated into the individual word-beads of the now-familiar “Oh Canada.” Full comprehension of the song came one breath later.
I arrived in Ontario already a “native speaker,” the ubiquitous buzz of the new language having relegated the original to a back bench. By then I had stopped translating, though I continue to this day to spell English words using the Polish system of phonetics.
This Canada Day I am once again getting acquainted with language, on the intimate terms which exist when one must examine so closely. At this stage of comprehension, each word exposes roots, ribs; meaning reveals its painstaking construction. The new language gives up ghosts familiar to languages already acquired which can be animated less and less tentatively by the movement of reason and imagination.
This unsure stage is perhaps the reconciliation that happens when one emerges sun-blinded from the plane and registers the ground’s true colour, squinting, grain by grain.