I began learning and speaking French as a freshman in high school, and by the time I graduated was somewhat proficient. During my first trip to France at the age of eighteen, I was able to mask the fact that I was American, but people asked where I had learned French, as it was evident that I was not native to The Hexagon. (As this was in 2009, the first year of Obama’s presidency, I didn’t think it necessary to hide my American origins, but that’s another topic entirely.)
I continued my studies of la langue française in university, even spending a summer in France at a university near the Pyrenees between my junior and senior years. In all this time, I carefully cultivated something resembling a French accent, and when I returned to the States, a few people in the French department remarked that I sounded like someone from southwestern France. I took this as an enormous compliment.
It’s not that I’m trying to conceal myself or lie about who I am and where I’m from. My attempt to train my tongue is more an effort to disappear into the crowd, to become anonymous, or more precisely, to become like everyone else. I’ve never enjoyed being the center of attention, and not surprisingly, marking oneself as a foreigner or a stranger (or both) tends to draw attention.
It wasn’t until I arrived in Ebolowa for training that I had to reconsider my manner of speaking. Of course, most of Cameroon used to be a French colony, and while it’s not surprising that many people still have a certain disdain for the French, I had been so caught up in so many other aspects of cultural difference that the possibility of such disdain hadn’t occurred to me. It wasn’t until I watched other trainees (who barely spoke French) interacting with motorcycle taxi drivers that I realized why these same drivers who were genial with my comrades were terse with me: They thought I was French.
And so, once again, I began to train what some call the most powerful muscle in the human body. The process became more intensive when I arrived in Nyambaka and began constantly hearing the specific brand of French spoken by people whose first language is Fulfulde. While the “French” r bubbles up from the back of one’s throat, Fulfulde speakers roll their r’s. Funnily, people here also have the tendency to turn n into ng, not unlike people in, say, Marseille, so tomorrow morning is transformed from “demain matin” to “demaing mating.”
And people here are defensive about their accent. I was recently at a friend’s house for lunch. She was watching TV, a pop culture interview program of some sort, and the interview subject was a choreographer, a young Cameroonian woman with straight chin-length red hair. My friend was incensed. “You think you’ve arrived because you’ve been to France, but you’re still Cameroonian,” she said. She imitated the woman’s French accent and rolled her eyes. “And I bet you’re bald under that wig.” She then changed the channel to one of her favorite programs, a soap opera from India.
Aside from the accent, there’s also the construction of what is said. Cameroonians are frugal, fiscally and linguistically. When interrogating a misbehaving child, a Parisian mother might ask, “Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?” or, “What happened?” whereas most Cameroonian mothers will simply bark, “C’est comment??” which I don’t think has an equivalent in English but translates literally to “It’s how??”
Over months, it happened like osmosis. My tongue grew accustomed to new tastes as well as new words and sounds, until one day, on a bus, an old Cameroonian woman spun around in her seat and brightly told me, “Mais tu parles comme une Noire!” But you speak like a Black woman! I was flattered, and somewhat proud of myself, but the moment was bittersweet. Of course I could never become anonymous here, or part of the crowd.
Even in other parts of Cameroon, I now mark myself as a stranger. I visited my host family in the South about one year after leaving their home, and shortly into my visit, I could see the confusion on their faces. “Tu es un Nordiste!” declared my host mother finally. You’re a Northerner! In the South, this is not a compliment: The northern regions of Cameroon to them are associated with child brides and Muslim extremists. And so my Cameroonian tongue betrayed me, even within the country’s borders.
The Peace Corps literature tells us that one of the things volunteers find most difficult to readjust to upon returning home is a return to anonymity. My time in Nyambaka is probably (hopefully) the closest I’ll ever get to being a celebrity, and apparently many volunteers have trouble with this loss of this recognition. I have no doubt that returning to the States will be difficult, but this will certainly not be an issue for me. Last summer, I went on holiday to Barcelona with my dad and his husband, and the ability to not draw attention to myself, the possibility of blending in with a crowd, was perhaps the part of the trip I savored most. (Just kidding. The sangria was the best part, obviously.)
Now that I have learned to speak with a stranger’s tongue, I wonder how long it will take me to speak like an American. Even now, trying to describe my situation, I sometimes have to look away from the screen, squint at the wall, and ask myself, How do you say that in English? I wonder, how long will it take me to stop peppering my speech with French words and phrases? How will my friends back home react when I accidentally describe something serious as grave? After being rolled and pulled into various contortions that were once strange and foreign, will my tongue remember to speak its first language?
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