As an allophone and as someone who has lived a good chunk of her life abroad, it's sometimes hard for me to explain to others how I feel about Montreal --the place of my birth and my earliest childhood memories-- and why I love this city so fiercely.
Reading Linda Leith's explanation of why someone such as herself (born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and subsequently living in London, Brussels, Basel, Paris, Budapest and finally, Montreal) feels most at home right here in la Belle Province, made me shake my head in fervent agreement. Finally! Someone had articulated my feelings and had done so in such an eloquent and true fashion, that it made me want to cry.
"Montreal is human in scale while being a real city, a city big enough to support theatres and orchestras and festivals and good restaurants and all the other things you want to have available to you even when you have no immediate interest in going," she says. "It has a sense of its place in the world, and a recognizable personality, diffident and ironic. It's human in its contradictions, its mix of peoples and languages, and in its acknowledgement of people's frailties and of their desire for fun. And it's a French-speaking city. That is not incidental. I love the fact that the city will always remain in some ways foreign to me."
If that paragraph is not a love letter to our city, I don't know what is. And those who fall in love with our vivacious, bizarre, downtrodden, manic mess of a metropolis are usually the ones who've travelled and experienced other cultures, norms and ways of life and have come to appreciate this marvelous mix, these clashing cultures we know as Montreal.
Not having one singular place to call home, is both a blessing and a curse. It can be lonely always being the 'outsider'; never quite feeling "de souche" enough, not having (or knowing) of a family tree that has roots that extend deep into a city's makeup. But, being an outsider also frees you up to be who you want to be, to define yourself and your surroundings on your own terms, to associate with who you want to and discover that you love the place you call home, not because you have to, but because you want to.
A rootless past can make for an insightful vagabond, someone who's empathetic to people's --and a city's-- frailties and mysteries, someone who consciously chooses to fall in love with the foreign.
If, as they say, "familiarity breeds contempt" living in a place that will always feel a little foreign and a little unfamiliar, might perhaps have the makings of a life-long love affair.
Falling in love with the foreign
Falling in love with the foreign
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- Published on December 8th, 2008
- Published on Febuary 9th, 2010
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Toula Foscolos
This past weekend, I finally finished reading Montreal author Linda Leith's autobiographical new book, entitled "Marrying Hungary". I started reading it for the purposes of a review (Leith resides in NDG and therefore makes for a perfect Monitor article), but became engrossed in it for reasons that had nothing to do with my editorial duties and everything to do with the feeling that I was being treated to the musings of a kindred spirit.
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Comments
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- Ulrike Hirschfeld
- - February 17th, 2010 at 14:18:05
I haven't read the book (yet!) but reading your review definetely wants me to buy it today. I have spent 5 months in Montréal as an international visiting student at Concordia and I never wanted to leave again... I felt so much at home and even though I returned to Germany (for the one I love did not want to leave Germany) I have to come back again and again. And every time I am not in Montréal I am just a little homesick. Friends in Germany as well as in Montréal keep asking me what it is that I love so much about the city, and I just never could explain it properly. It is just this feeling that I have whenever I am there. Just content, happy, at peace with myself. The paragraph that you cited from the book is just the explanation I always wanted to give but I never could get the words right. Thank you for these words, thank you also for letting me know that I am not the only one who is feeling about Montréal like that!
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- Linda Leith
- - February 17th, 2010 at 14:18:03
Thank you, Toula.
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- Ulrike Hirschfeld
- - February 10th, 2010 at 12:55:35
I haven't read the book (yet!) but reading your review definetely wants me to buy it today. I have spent 5 months in Montréal as an international visiting student at Concordia and I never wanted to leave again... I felt so much at home and even though I returned to Germany (for the one I love did not want to leave Germany) I have to come back again and again. And every time I am not in Montréal I am just a little homesick. Friends in Germany as well as in Montréal keep asking me what it is that I love so much about the city, and I just never could explain it properly. It is just this feeling that I have whenever I am there. Just content, happy, at peace with myself. The paragraph that you cited from the book is just the explanation I always wanted to give but I never could get the words right. Thank you for these words, thank you also for letting me know that I am not the only one who is feeling about Montréal like that!
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- Linda Leith
- - February 10th, 2010 at 12:55:33
Thank you, Toula.
