No stories

A lot of my articles start with the phrase "I remember," or something like it. That's because a lot of my articles are my recounting of things that literally happened to me, at some point in time, and what I've learned about myself and the world in the time since they happened.

Here's one: I remember a time all the way back in middle school, when I was maybe 12 or so, when my French teacher asked us to write a story (in French) about our family history. So, I went home, booted up my laptop, and I wrote the story of my great-great-great-great grandfather who fled the Iberian peninsula at the onset of the Napoleonic war for the so-called New World, where he married an Acadian woman, starting my branch of the family tree.

I remember that story so well because it was entirely made up. I remember that feeling of coming home after school and realizing that I really didn't have any stories about my family. Like most people, I come from a long line of peasant farmers; many people who lived complete lives, presumably with thousands of their own stories to tell. My family doesn't have a strong tradition of oral history, so none of those stories are "mine" to tell, if they still exist at all, as anything other than a generational trauma or diffuse echo of lived experience.

Here's another: I remember over the winter break, I had the opportunity to visit my parents and grandparents. As an amateur archivist, I always like to spend some time while visiting to preserve old family media. A long time before I was born, all the family recordings on microfilm made between the 1950s-80s sat in a cardboard box in the basement. The microfilm was seriously damaged in a flood, and actively disintegrated as you tried to play it. This collection included the weddings of my grandparents, all their siblings, and videos of their kids as babies and young children. So, in a last-ditch effort to conserve decades of family history, they brought the film upstairs to migrate it to a new medium.

My grandfather and his sister put the film in a projector, pointed it at a white sheet, and set up a VHS camcorder to tape a new copy of it before it was gone forever. The tape should have no audio because microfilm is a silent medium, but my grandfather didn't think to turn off the microphone. So, in addition to it being a slightly more durable record of my family's history on tape, it may also be the longest consecutive recording of my grandfather and his family speaking in their native language.

Today the family microfilm tape sits on my hard drive as 350MiB MP4 digital video file where, assuming my backup strategy is effective, it will outlive the now decaying VHS tape. But these things are hard to tell without the benefit of hindsight.

Watching that tape with my grandparents was pretty surreal. Nobody owns a VHS player these days¹ so nobody had seen those recordings in decades. People so young you wouldn't even recognize them if you hadn't seen them at the time, now that they're all in their late eighties. A once tightly knit family now scattered, with no more stories to tell.

At some point my parents decided to leave my peasant farmer grandparents in the country side to join a growing segment of the population that made the switch to urban living in search of a better life. In the process, some things were lost. My mother, who grew up in the French parts of the province, tried to raise me bilingual but struggled. I went to school as an anglophone, joining a growing segment of the Acadian people² who never learned French. In school, I would eventually enter the French Immersion program, where we were explicitly taught to speak the way French is spoken in Paris.

Here's a third one: I remember when I was in high school, I got really, seriously into learning French for the first time. All my life leading up to that point I was dragging my feet, but possibly in part due to the realization that I have few if any stories about where my family comes from, I wanted to change that. I started reading in French. I started watching television in French. I started learning about the history of francophones in Canada. But the thing is, the "history" of the francophones of Canada is by and large the history of Quebec, which is a place I have very few connections to. These still weren't really "my" stories, in a sense. I was still having other people's stories projected onto me.

Today, I am Acadian in as much as I force myself to be. By all conventional definitions, I am White. Acadia is a nation of White people. It doesn't really mean anything to "be Acadian" within the context of modern racial politics. It's extraneous.

Here's a fourth, and I promise this is the last: I remember way back when, my father was watching The Crown on Netflix. At the time, he was really into the history of the British royal family, and so I asked him why he cared. He told me that this was our heritage, our stories. I found this really strange because he knew as well as I did that his part of my family isn't British; we're Irish.³ But if I'm looking at it through the lens of Acadia, it makes a lot more sense to me why he felt that way today than it did back then. We're white, and we're anglophone. As far as the Anglosphere goes, England kind of won at being English. The Crown tore up large swaths of the Earth to make the people who lived there look, act and speak like them. I mean, in a sense, the Crown stole both of my languages: Irish Gaelic and Acadian French. The effect of this is that we are neither "Irish" nor "Acadian." We're undifferentiated subjects of Empire. We're the kind of people who identify as "American" in the census. We're White. We're a long line of peasant farmers broken up by urbanization with no stories to tell.

Obviously there's a huge gulf of experience between the people who watch The Crown and the people marching through the streets of Britain today praising the king and decrying South Asian immigrants, and my father has never been the latter type, but I do think both are informed by the same nostalgia.

There's something inherently problematic about identifying with "our heritage," as I'm essentially trying to in this article, because our heritage is stained with enough blood to cause the Little Ice Age.

In the end, my family and I got a pretty good deal out of White supremacy. Someone decided that we were White and others weren't and because of that we get all the rights and freedoms and others don't. We were lucky, I suppose. But that's obviously not something I feel grateful for.

In my very personal and very White opinion, the place where a lot of White people go wrong with revisiting and "upholding" our heritage is the misdirection. I'm not a Windsor, and so I don't really consider the Crown to be a part of my heritage. They're just the assholes who robbed my peasant farmer ancestors for generations and gaslit us into believing they had the divine right to do so. The average White person who gets really into their heritage and starts voting for far right politicians has basically just been lied to about who they are, and/or are unwilling to accept that they, like pretty much everyone else, come from a long line of peasant farmers, and that that's okay.

It's not something I can really blame people for on a population level, because there's a lot of money going into manufacturing this fascist nostalgia for the empires of the Great Powers, but I do think I and all other White people have an individual responsibility to unlearn this story that's been projected onto us. You can't cease being White, because it's not something that you get to choose, but I do have a theory that if we stop trying to convince ourselves that we're all Windsors and look back to our actual ancestry instead (namely, the ones who lived in small villages, grew staple crops and died of cholera) we might be able to learn something about how to live in reality, rather than the fascist mythology that seems to be consuming the Western world.

One day I'll finish learning French.

Footnotes

¹ Except, of course, me, now that I've gone through this

² As an aside, who are the Acadian people? Acadia is a trans-provincial and trans-border nation that primarily exists around the north end of the eastern seaboard. They are the descendants of French colonizers in the Acadia colony of New France who were abandoned after France ceded the territory to Great Britain in the War of Spanish Succession.

Acadians have a distinct cultural identity from Quebec, which I would personally attribute to the fact that while the histories of Upper and Lower Canada and the provinces that are known today as the Maritimes are intertwined (namely, they are all the histories of British and French colonialism in North America), they were, at this point in history, relatively distinct.

A big part of Acadian identity is shaped by the history of the Expulsion of the Acadians, where Acadian militias allied with the Wabanaki Confederacy to resist the British colonial occupation of Acadia and forced deportation of Acadians who refused to swear an oath of allegiance to a new king. Those who were deported make up a large part of the Acadian diaspora, which is part of why you've got a large number of French- (or something like it) speaking people in unusual places, like Boston and Louisiana (though the case with Louisiana is a little more complicated, because there's multiple francophone nations within the state.

In as much as Acadians are famous, they're famous for talking funny. The Acadian dialect of French has been heavily influenced by English and various Indigenous languages the Acadians have come into contact with over their history (the English influence being especially obvious in Chiac, spoken in south-eastern New Brunswick, which incorporates a lot of English vocabulary). Acadian french sounds really funny to English and French speakers in the same way Dutch sounds really funny to Europeans.

³ Ireland, its colonization and the effect colonization had on the Irish language is a whole other story.

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