LILLE, France -ÿI could not ask for a clean spoon.
It was a windy Sunday morning at the Lille city market, and I sat with friends at a tiny café, watching the crowds push past with their baskets of yellow roses and tomatoes. "Cuill?re," the French word for spoon, momentarily escaped me amid the chaos. Certainly, I could have gestured to the waiter. Surrounded by tables of the very French, I did not want to confess that I was not fluent in their language. I wanted to pretend that I belonged, even if that required silence.
Admittedly, drinking my café without milk really isn't much of an obstacle.
The morning presents, however, little ways in which struggling with a foreign language makes me helpless. I've come to learn how fluency shapes my sense of belonging.
Before I left for France, I expected the language barrier to be challenging and constant. However, I knew that I could ask for direct train tickets to the coast and make sure that my apartment came with Wi-Fi. But I could not have predicted all that I would miss. Language relies on subtext, but I never imagined how frustrating it would be to communicate without texture, nor how this would sharpen my sense of alienation.
France is not a country completely different from the United States; our cultures overlap. Our languages share the same roots, as though both countries checked out the same ancient novel from the library, but left their own notes in the margins.
From a distance, I look and act as though I could belong in this northern French town. Their culture and language are ones I largely understand.
The subtleties I miss in communicating are small, but nonetheless powerful in deepening my status as an outsider. I cannot complain, contradict or question: pretending to belong requires acquiescence. I feel as though initiating conversation in my strongly accented French crosses over some cultural line - my language skills are neither casual nor complete enough to act as I belong.
My first few days in Lille, as I stared at all the chic people and stunning architecture, I had a tendency to walk right into oncoming traffic. The roads here are barely roads - cobblestone sidewalks demarcated as streets by tiny metal poles that come up to my hip. Communicating in French evokes a similar feeling of never really knowing where the lines are. I'm afraid I'll start talking with confidence, only to look to my right and see a lime green Smart Car careening towards me.
The people of this northern French region known as the Ch'ti (yes, I know what it sounds like) are incredibly friendly and understanding: everyone I've met has made sure that I feel welcome. There is even a saying that the sun that doesn't shine in the gray skies here blazes in the hearts of the people.
Despite this, I cannot escape my vulnerability or my helplessness. I have no choice but to trust strangers to speak slowly and truthfully, and my dependence on the goodwill of others overwhelms me. I miss my independence, and my certainty that I'm not being taken advantage of.
The questions of belonging that I've grappled with here, however, are not unique to France. Language and culture differences have only made more obvious my search for community and understanding.
One Sunday, I sat outside the neighborhood laundromat in the pink afternoon sun, next to a French couple drinking beers in their motorcycle jackets as they waited for their laundry to dry. For a moment, I felt a part of the community, and at peace. I intuitively knew the rhythm of the poetry I'd been written into, even if it was not my own.
When I stop thinking of all that I cannot say. I find true belonging in moments of connection and clarity. I open my eyes, and I find myself struggling for resonance in a world both foreign and familiar.
You can reach this columnist at thescene@theeagleonline.com.
