La petite anglai
“Encore de retour, la petite Anglaise!”1 The familiar greeting is leveled at me by my paternal aunts, uncles, and cousins everytime I return to the little corner of the Hexagon my father still calls home. There she is, the little English girl, back again from her travels across the Channel, and now across the pond. As a teenager still trying to understand my identity, I found it condescending — I viewed it as a denial of my Frenchness, of my relation to them. But when I hear it today, as an adult, the phrase envelops me like a warm embrace, reminding me of where I came from, of the language and culture I knew best up until I was thirteen.
Now, French sits differently within me than it did when I was young. The words feel a little less sure of themselves — always drifting a little too far out for me to catch them. I sometimes have to go looking for them now. The long trek I must make through my neurons to locate the space reserved for my father’s language has felt longer every year since I came to college. My little cousin giggles as I struggle to understand the new slang she uses, or as I stumble over my explanations of what I do in college.
Every summer, when I return to see her and the rest of my family, I feel myself return to another version of myself. I shed the underlying anxiety of a semester at U.Va. and the darker colors of my London garments, instead donning the relaxed, unfazed attitude of my teenage years. I wear white button-ups over my swimsuits, and long flowing blue skirts, to blend in with the sea. French summers in the South emanate ease — the beaches and old narrow alleyways fill with sweaty locals and tourists. Their accessories include a towel, a drink, and a cigarette. During the day, people lounge outside cafes and restaurants for a short reprieve from the scorching sun, their light-colored summer clothing clashing with the red-orange of the old alleyway walls. When the night comes, the families go home, and the young adults take over the beaches and the town square in droves. They sit in circles, a speaker in between them, playing endless amounts of JUUL, Aya Nakamura, and KobaLaD. The cicadas sing their season-long song, and the youth chatter about their days. They all wear long jeans and dresses at night, to avoid the mosquitoes. On these evenings, with the French rap blaring, the loud gossip, and the sea in its endless to-and-fro, I feel incredibly young.
On nights like these, I often find myself smiling at the humor of young French people. It’s understated, full of pointed banter—its edges are sharp, often revealing calculated observation. Their well-crafted jabs and quips ricochet across the beaches, their laughs drowned out by the sea. That subtle honesty is one of my compatriots best attributes, though likely enjoyed a lot less by those not accustomed to it. You see evidence of it all across their media, from more recent shows like Dix Pourcent and Mortel, all the way back to the classic 1962 film Cléo de 5 à 7.
French will never really leave me, but every year I feel it fade from me just a little. And I feel this ache for the language I called home for so long. What if the rest of my connection to my father’s country fades with it? What if I stop talking to the French girls I’ve known since early childhood, their smiles, their habits, dissipating in my mind like smoke? What if I forget the recipe to my aunt’s taboule, or my uncle’s secret stories about his rebellious youth? The language slips through my fingers like sand as I talk to my father on the phone, thousands of miles away, and I wonder if he will someday too.
But then, my Spotify playlist will shuffle onto a song from my childhood, like MC Solaar’s “RMI” or Lomepal’s “Regarde-moi”, and I am overwhelmed with thoughts of my elementary school friends and of my father’s city. Memories flood behind my eyes, and I feel at home, for a moment at least. As one grows older, many memories become obscured, and thinking back to them often feels like deciphering shadows in the dark. Though the memories may dim, however, I have found that much of the language stays, ready to greet me, hesitantly, like an old friend unsure of how long I’ll stay. I rejoice that this connection only frays, it is never severed.
I often feel that a piece of myself resides perpetually among the pebble beaches and the narrow colorful streets of that seaside town in which so much of my family resides. To them, I will likely always be “la petite Anglaise”, the little English girl who stumbles across conversations and reaches longingly for words she has forgotten. But they will always call to me in that language of my childhood — it will always be there for me, waiting, when I return. And I will always return.
1 Back once again, the little English girl!