Pas de quoi

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting cooler, and that means I am back in school: I am a teacher of English by day and a student of French by night. On campus, I am immersed in the linguistic grammar of English. Many of my students are planning to become English teachers. They are anxious about their own knowledge of English grammar (“I know what’s right but I don’t know why it’s right”), and they’re surprised to learn I am not about correctness. That I am in fact about the opposite of correctness. I am about the infinite variability and flexibility of language.

I tell students if they learn one thing from me ever, if they take nothing else away from their time with me, I want them to learn—deeply, truly, durably—this one thing: No one’s English is broken. No one’s English is broken. There is no such thing.

I grapple with the identity of English professor. It has never quite fit. I will not in a million years fix your grammar. I probably haven’t read (and I don’t intend to) that classic literary text you guiltily admit has been gathering dust on your shelf since college. I don’t think the dominance of English (in the US or anywhere else) is a net gain or an unqualified social good. The global spread of English is historically and inextricably linked to terrible colonial violence and, importantly, it still is.

While I could not have put it so succinctly during my early career, I have always been troubled by English—and English was often trouble for me, even as a very successful student of it. My accent wasn’t right, my “y’all” was a regional class marker, my efforts to tutor toward Edited Standard Written English were often flops. It wasn’t until I took a Politics of the English Language course in graduate school that my struggles began to feel productive. In the class, we read Elspeth Stuckey’s book The Violence of Literacy, a book that changed my life. I began to understand literacy as a proxy for all kinds of violences suffered and English as a particularly blunt force of trauma.

We can all understand how English functions as a proxy for the exercise of power, control and potential violence, because we all have some experience with the bureaucracies of literacy, business that is expected to be conducted in English in the US. If you’ve ever signed your name to a contract you weren’t sure you 100% understood, if you’ve ever argued with an insurance company over whether coverage extends to a loss you’ve suffered, if you’ve had to hire a lawyer to help you navigate a legal process, you will get it. 

It's harder to understand that schooling is a primary mechanism by which the stage for this kind of dominance is set. Families, students, and teachers celebrate the perfect scores as unqualified gains, with little thought to the incalculable losses. My own trajectory in English was shaped by the anxieties of my home communities re: correctness in English and corresponding erasure of French as a language. French was an identity we celebrated but not a language we were supposed to use (except in French class), the result of assimilationist education policies passed by the Louisiana legislature in 1921, making English the official language of instruction. My parents and their siblings, both in the 1920s and early 1930s, were the first generation of students schooled in this English-only context. Textbook English was a point of pride and economically valuable, especially for women of my mom’s generation, whose written communication skills in English transferred readily to the occupations primarily available to them: secretary and teacher.

Growing up, I lived with a Louisianais double-consciousness outside of school. Terms of endearment and sympathy, as well as expressions of emotion, the ones my mom learned from her mom, were often French-inflected, passed down generationally to convey intimacies. Who will ever call me a minou or minette again when I say I feel a little cagou, or when they notice a bouder on my face. Who will try to make me feel better by asking me what I have an envie for and picking it up while they’re out rodaying? No one, that’s who. And yet, when I added playground French lexical items to my vocabulary—honte was a schoolyard favorite—I got corrected at home. I didn’t understand the objection was not to the the language so much as the context, especially the social class markers of the friends from down-the-bayou who were teaching it to me. It didn’t make sense. I understand the objection now, but it doesn’t make any more sense than it did then.

So in my evening French class, when Madame le Professeur asked us all the different ways we knew to say you’re welcome, I offered the one I used growing up: Pas de quoi. “What?” she said. I said it again, like I always said it, running the words together so that it sounded more like pahd-kwah. She tilted her head and scrunched up her face so I repeated what I had said, making the distinction clear between the words. “Ah,” she said. “Pas de quoi. Pas de quoi. Yes. Very informal but yes, you could say that,” in a way that let me know she would really prefer we wouldn’t say that.

“Growing up in Louisiana, we used that expression a lot,” I said.

“Ah,” she said again, “But not like that. Not like you just said it.” And she drew her face down long, rolled her eyes up in her head, and mocked the expression back to me. “That’s ugly,” she said. “You hear that?” She mocked me again. “That’s ugly.” And then she started to laugh the way people do when they try to diffuse the offensiveness of something they’ve just said by making it seem like you must be in on the joke, you couldn’t possibly be bête enough to not be in on the joke.

I wish I could say I schooled her in linguistic prejudice right then and there in front of the rest of our class. Or that I just logged off of our class Zoom and never returned. Maybe sent her an email message letting her know why I was finding another class, a better Madame le Professeur. But I didn’t do any of that. Instead, I repeated it back to her, her way. Because I can, even if I don’t want to.

“Beautiful!” She said, “You hear the difference?” I hear the difference. Yours in my head, mine in my heart.