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DERVILA COOKE
mentions the comfort provided on his first day of school by a kind teacher,
Nicholai Nicolevitch, of Romanian origin, who makes a point of welcoming
all new students by name and of saying a few words to them in their own
language. Twenty years later, Akos is still struck by the fact that Nicolevitch
pronounced his name correctly. Akos reflects on the difficulty of exile, of
having to leave his friends behind and receiving no special dispensation
from his mother due to having immigrated (he left Hungary on a Friday
and started school in Montreal the following Monday). Expecting to be
in a normal class, "une classe normale", he was in fact placed in language
support. Like Marco Micones Nino in the abovementioned autobiographical
hybrid work Le Figuier enchanté, he is a bright student who suddenly finds
himself unable to communicate. The blockage remains painful in Akos’s
memory. Teachers like “Monsieur Nicolas”, who he clearly remembers with
great affection, softened the transition, and no doubt allowed him to feel a
connection between his homeland and school.
BECOMING QUEBECOIS AND THE QUESTION OF VALUES:
GODBOUT AND ALOISIO
As previously shown, Farouk, Ruba, and Akos place greater emphasis on their
adopted “Québécois” culture, whereas Daniel emphasizes his Latin American
legacy. This question of prior culture comes into sharp focus in Aloisio’s film,
which has several key points in common with Godbout’s production. One of
the aims of Aloisio’s film is to show that painful situations have arisen due to
lack of adequate attention by the Québec government to the prior culture, or
in some cases the home culture, of children of immigrant extraction, both in
the past and, to some extent, still today. Aloisio highlights the vulnerability of
children who were among the very first to experience compulsory schooling
in French, such as Tihana, who, as a Croatian-speaking child, was expected
to function with no support in mainstream French class as a small child
in Québec city, in the early years of Bill 101. Likewise, Courtney, who is of
Anglophone Jamaican origin, experienced trauma by being thrust into a strict
and highly monitored French-speaking school environment as a very young
child, with little or no acknowledgement of his difference or cultural heritage.
He went on to find it very difficult to reconcile the Jamaican and Québécois
elements of his identity as a child in late 1970s and early 1980s Québec.
In Aloisio’s film, Guerina (who, like Aloisio, is of Italian heritage) is a strong
counter example to Courtney, as she is more comfortable in French than in
her heritage language, and has been committed since her teenage years to
the Québécois cause of self-determination. We see impassioned interactions
between Guerina and her parents, who are opposed to the imposition of
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