It’s been
awhile since I’ve written a whiny existential post, so before spring is upon us
and sailing preparations get seriously underway and obliterate the dead time in
which existential crises breed, here it is.
This winter’s crisis began with what should have been a joyful occasion:
buying a new laptop computer. The photo
theme accompanying this crisis is “pathways.”
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| Volubilis, Morocco. |
The problem
is a simple one. French keyboards are
not the same as English (or American) keyboards. Of course the French slip in some funny
characters (é à ô á è ç) but even the normal letters don’t have
the same placement. A French keyboard is
called an AZERTY keyboard because those are the 6 letters on the top left hand
of the keyboard, whereas English / American keyboards are QWERTYs. You can special order a QWERTY keyboard
laptop from France, but it costs about $200 more.
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| Biking trail along the canals, France. |
Patrick offered what he thought was a simple
suggestion: just get used to an AZERTY keyboard. It made sense.
In a few short years I will have spent more than half my life in France anyway.
Maybe it’s time to let go. But when
I actually thought of re-learning to type, I broke down in tears. For short emails or facebook posts, I
sometimes use Patrick’s French computer to peck out a message, but for someone
who used to touch-type 60 words per minute, it’s a real setback. It’s not the process of learning to type
again that frustrates and depresses me, it’s the loss of one of the last links
I have to my mother tongue.
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| Dades Gorge, Morocco. |
Except for skyping with my parents and a few friends a
couple times per week, my only English interaction is reading and writing (and
I read about 1/3rd of the time in French already). If writing now has to be done through a
French veil, I’ll lose a small part of what’s left. I’m fluent in French (although that doesn’t
mean I don’t make mistakes) but even if I live here for the rest of my life and
even if I speak French 99% of the time, it will always be a second language. Maybe
others manage, but I can’t always express myself the way I want in French, or
at least not as well as I would in English.
The searching for words, the hesitancy, the “foreignness” of it all is
like watching a film in black and white instead of in colour, or like cooking
with only salt and pepper instead of a spice-rack full of options.
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| Hiking trail, Guadeloupe. |
My first French teacher was a French woman living in
Woods Hold Massachusetts where her husband worked at the Oceanographic Institution
where I was a graduate student. We would meet for lessons in her beautiful
home, working at the sunny kitchen table overlooking her “French” country
garden. One day, she held my hand in
hers and told me that if I made my life in France, I would never feel truly at
home anywhere in the World ever again. She knew what she was talking about. With
the passing years, the foreign becomes familiar and home becomes a
stranger.
After wrestling with all these demons for a couple of
days, I told Patrick that I absolutely could not accept an AZERTY
keyboard. I would make do with my 7-year old Sony VAIO running Vista Business
until it just wasn’t possible anymore. He was frustrated and I felt like a pouty
child throwing a tantrum, but I’m just not able to let go of this small part of
my culture just yet.
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| Colza field, France. |
And then I turned to the internet to tap into the hive-mind
of Anglo-Saxon expats in France to find out if others had gone over to the dark
side (okay, we’ll call it “the other side”) and how they managed.
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| Tizi n Test pass, Morocco. |
Stickers.
Stickers was the answer. Any
recent computer can change its keyboard input to any other language. The only
problem is that you have to know the keyboard by heart because, while the
computer can speak numerous languages, it can’t do anything about the letters
physically printed on the keyboard.
Several companies make stickers that you can use to convert your
keyboard to a QWERTY. The fancy ones are
even transparent so that you can see the original keyboard markings as well as
the QWERTY ones in a different colour.
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| Desert road, Morocco. |
This solution, besides being simple and elegant, has many
parallels with my life in France. My language is now a sometimes-confusing
sometimes-frustrating mix of French and English. Yes, I do need to more fully
embrace my adopted homeland and its crazy language, but I have so little to
cling to that is still my own that giving up even a small part of my mother
tongue just isn’t possible for me right now.
So like dogs and their masters, my keyboard and I are
destined to look like each other, both a mad Frenglish melange, neither fully French nor fully English and never
really at home anywhere.
