Eleven years later it is not such a pipe dream.
* * *
I don't know how to describe my abilities with languages other than the fact that they are natural, innate. Woven into the very fibers of my being. At six months old, I started speaking my first words. My mother drove me to the Stanford campus where I was a test dummy in language labs. We still have the certificates of appreciation they gave us, embossed with the university seal, at home in California.
By the time I reached four, I was reading. I memorized the books my mother read to me nightly and soon enough I was reading them back to her. Recall, I can, the summer afternoons thick with heat spent in our garage, in the house we lived in before my parents separated, tracing invisible letters in the air to form further invisible words that I leapt about writing with the tips of my fingers.
When I entered first grade, I could already read, and this just plained pissed me off because I was obligated to "learn" to do so amongst all the other children, so I faked paying attention, and was bored out of my mind. A year and a school transfer later, I would be sent to other classrooms for higher levels of reading and literature and math, finishing up one teacher's work and upon return to my own teacher, undertaking and completing her work as well. By third grade, I was reading voraciously, everything and anything I could get my hands on. I'd exhausted Road Dahl and childhood classics like The Phantom Tollbooth.
I lasted one more year at that school before transferring to another one for gifted and talented programs.
* * *
My first year in France, a mere three months after arrival, I started receiving "No Accent Comments" from native French speakers with whom I was conversing. The first of these came from one of my host mom at the time's friends, Valerie, who had stopped by briefly and was on her way out the door to run errands.
" You have no accent!¨ she exclaimed.
" I don't?" My mouth was still lumbering to get used to the jaw gymnastics that any anglo-saxon who is developing immersive fluency in this language will describe: it is pure and utterable fatigue. Holding the necessary tension in the mouth in order to pronounce vowels and nasal sounds is a workout.
I then explained to Valerie that I found her comment bizzarre but accepted the compliment, but that yes, this was my first time in France and I'd never been before, so I found it hard to believe I had no accent.
* * *
Not only are languages my thing, but it seems I'm rather musical too. I played the violin as a child, sung in the shower all the time, and don't have a terrible voice. I'll thank childhood choir for that. But this musicality thing, I suspect, might have something to do with my accentless-itis.
One round of vacation in my now past life as a nanny, I was on the island of Mauritius with my two girl charges and their professional musician father. The younger of the two was decently far away as I was drawing a bath. I heard her call and I responded, at which point dad walked by and said to me:
¨You have good ears.¨
At other points, I've been out in the backyard of his country home and sat around the pool while he and friends strummed out strands of Oasis on their guitars. I joined in singing.
¨You have a nice voice,¨ they added, telling me to lower the key on sections of Wonderwall. ¨ There you go. Not so high.¨
¨Yeah, I'm a soprano," I replied.
¨Not bad at all.¨
We continued singing as I watched the kids in the pool.
* * *
Last evening I was at a French housewarming, also called a pendaison de la crémaillère, which translated means the hanging of the hook necessary to hold a cauldron over a fire. Back in the day, it was the last thing one did when moving in. Now a days no one really hands pots anymore, so the thing is just called a pendaison.
A this particular pendaison, I met more Frenchies. One was a young woman about my age.
¨ Wait...are you French or American?¨
¨American.¨
¨Not possible! You have no accent! That's crazy."
I smiled. Then explained I've been studying this language for eleven years, three of them in France.
¨Still, that is NOT NORMAL!¨
This was the general theme of the night. I met a pair of gentlemen my age.
¨C'est DINGUE comment tu parles français!¨
And it has been two years of comments like these. A few weeks ago I was out on a Saturday morning run with friends from a running group. R is one of them and she brought F, her French BF. I hung back to get to know him better and speak French with him. Apparently, he told R afterward that I have no accent. That it's crazy. She relayed this to me one Monday and it made me smile wide.
This genre of comment does not stop. I suppose it only took eleven years, but I can finally pass for French.
* * *
Is my Accentless-Itis a result of my language abilities, my musicality, or something else? My second year in France, my family and I discovered we are French. On my mom's side of the family tree, I have a credible amount of ancestors, a chunk of them Parisian, who left France under Louis XIV to go to modern day Canada and found Quebec. They eventually found their way south and ended up in places like New York and Michigan.
This was slightly eery, as a few years prior I had decided to devote myself to study of 17th century literature after having fallen in love with it. I felt chills roll up my spine and into my throat when we discovered this. I study the very period, feel a strong affinity for, the century in which they lived.
And every time someone tells me I have no accent, I wonder if these are just my genes and heritage playing themselves out. Or if I am a reincarnation of one of my ancestors back here to take care of unfinished business.
Whatever it is, this Accentless-itis makes me believe that there is more than meets the eye about my Frenchiness, that there are higher, more mystical forces at play.
* * *
French is musical and beautiful, elusive. Hardly phonetic, as scribes and clerics decided as the language evolved to gard the Latin etymologies and spellings in the written form, so words hardly sounds as they look. This Girl Without An Accent ( GWAN ) knows that Accentless-itis is a non normal phenomenon. Any professional linguist will tell you that after the age of 12, language acquisition is harder because the brain's ability to hear and register phonetic sounds and reproduce them is exponentially more difficult once puberty hits. I started at 14.
My being the GWAN used to make me feel mixed: fabulous because it meant all my years of hard work were paying off, sad because it also made me feel like a linguistic refugee. Having an accent means having the firm and irremovable impression of one's native home, traces of one's roots and culture, imbedded in one's very voice and ability to express oneself. If I have no accent, have I lost that trace? Have I lost my culture? This thought, two years ago, was distressing because I thought it meant I was unbound, unrooted, transitory, and I was uncomfortable being nebulous.
Now being the GWAN is a source of pride. A sign of assimilation, pure and unadulterated. A queue to me from the heavens and powers above that I absolutely belong here. A reminder to put my head down, keep my faith, stay the course, and figure out a way to make this work, because another good French friend texted me yesterday after reading my post about my job rejection:
¨ Don't give up on the job hunt, you are French!¨
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