Seite 181 [181]
OCR
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 wartorn 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. + 179 +
