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GROWING TOGETHER OR APART?...
and learning in classes daccueil for students who have just arrived, and also
in classes for more established students. However, no students from the
majority population are present. As such, the young students of immigrant
extraction appear cut off from the Francophone or indeed the established
Anglophone populations. Indeed, the schools are almost entirely made up
of immigrants. When asked how “integrated” into Québec culture he feels,
one of the boys makes the point that there are no Québécois of his age to
interact with in his immediate environment. For viewers, including those of
non-immigrant extraction, Godbout’s film gives a chance to reflect on this
segregation. As a type of exclusion, it may explain the resistance of some of
the students to considering themselves Québécois.
Another point made by Godbout’s film about the classes d’accueil system is
the need for heightened sensitivities in the teacher-child relationship. We see,
for example, the vulnerability of teenagers who arrived in Québec in the early
years of the millennium into Québec’s classes d'accueil. We get a glimpse
of their journey of learning French, which is clearly sometimes a struggle
for them. Early in the film, a young Libyan boy, who has been in class for
only four weeks, makes a great effort to respond but hangs his head sadly
when he cannot understand what he is being asked by his classe d’accueil
teacher (Quel est ton pays d'origine? D'où viens-tu? [What is your country
of origin? Where are you from?]. His inability to respond is of course partly
due to his new arrival in Québec. However, the idea of belonging to a war¬
torn country, or painful memories of his experiences there — or indeed the
pain of exile — may also have blocked his response. Many of the teachers in
this school are of immigration extraction and the teacher in this instance is
an immigrant who came from France via Bulgaria, with a degree in French.
We learn that she herself experienced linguistic confusion when she arrived
in France to spend five years at the lycée Moliére. By including this scene
early on, albeit only as a fleetingly, Godbout seems to be calling for a better
appreciation of the vulnerabilities of others. Yet as Hirsch reminds us in
“Vulnerable Times”, this should not be a commonplace empathy but rather
an understanding that bears in mind one’s own context and privileges, and
the fact that the experiences of the other person are unique to that person: the
other is “decidedly not me”.!®
In “Vulnerable Times”, Hirsch speaks of the “threshold moment” of
arriving at a school with a new language in America, having left behind
Romania and the German-speaking community where she grew up."
Everything was alien, down to her very name. She became Mary Ann (which
she could not pronounce) instead of Marianne. Early in Godbout’s film, Akos
1 Hirsch, Vulnerable Times, 84.
16 Ibid, 79.
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