"Speak White" intro

Last May/June, I started doing calligraphy with the grade 8s at one of my schools. I showed them one project, a few ideas I had for other projects, and they all had one overwhelming point in common: the language of the writing was Hungarian. This was kindly pointed out to me by a student, who stated that she would "have to learn Hungarian, so [she] could understand [my] calligraphy." She was dead on, and I realized that I knew considerably more Hungarian poetry than Francophone (or, more precisely, French-Canadian) poetry. So I start looking for poetry, but I realize I'm shooting in the dark; I don't know who I'm looking for, I don't know what I'm looking for. I don't know how I came across it, and as corny as it sounds, it's like it found me. I read it once, and just went "Yes. This will be the one." The poem's called "Speak White", and was written by Michèle Lalonde back in 1968.

I don't know how to explain the premise of the poem, but I'll try. As recently as a few decades ago, the French-Canadian community was looked down upon quite a bit. 'Speak White' was a common slur, used by English-Canadians, to tell Francophones to speak English. (My late grandfather, though being French-Canadian, and living in a mainly French-Canadian town, had to attend school in English, because teaching in French was made illegal by the Government of Ontario in 1912, with the exception of religion and French classes; the law was only repealed in 1927, and it wasn't until 1968 that French-language schools were officially recognized in Ontario).

The poem, as I read it, is a voice of protest against this attitude of superiority of a culture that believed itself to be a bringer of civilization, and had an empire. And we're not just talking about the British Commonwealth, which had given up its 'Empire' only 20 years previously, but also the U.S., which at the time was heavily involved in Vietnam (the Tet Offensive was earlier that year). And also against other regimes that were oppressive--U.S. Segregation in the South (Little Rock was only 14 years previous, and Martin Luther King had been assassinated earlier that year); French and Belgian control of Vietnam, Algeria and the Congo; The Soviet Union's satellite states; Germany's attempted extermination of the Jews. The poem ends on a note of solidarity, that though their circumstances are different, the repressed peoples of the world have each other. As the last lines read, "we know / that we are not alone."