Polyglot

Synopsis:

Polyglot is an intimate personal account of a life but it’s also much more than that. It’s about the politics of language, exclusion and belonging; how and why people learn languages; and the role of language in reconciliation with each other and with the natural world. Beginning in rural New Brunswick in the 1950s, this book travels to four continents and home again. Along the way we learn how multilingualism can change lives and extend horizons far beyond what we see through the lens of a single language.

This book will interest translators and interpreters, language teachers and learners or people who wish to learn another language, and readers interested in memoir, literary non-fiction, travel, language and culture.

This is a story about travel but what makes it different from most of that genre is the close attention its author pays to the languages of the places she explores—including Innu-aimun, an Indigenous language of her home—and her serious efforts to learn them. Speaking more than one language has many benefits, from enhanced creativity and better cognitive function to improved memory and delayed neurodegeneration to richer cultural awareness and openness to the world. But Polyglot is about even more than that: it’s about the deep connections between language, place and memory, the power of language, the art of translation and the redemptive possibilities of really listening to each other. Most native speakers of English know only their mother tongue. This book shows why they might want to try harder.

Chapter excerpt:

Matshishikuau - It’s bad ice, poor for travel
We’ve been walking for several hours now, splay-footed on bear paw snowshoes, hauling loaded toboggans and facing into a snowstorm. We still have a long way to go, across the frozen Atatshi-uinipeku towards the distant mountains, Akami-uapisku, invisible in the storm but we know they’re there to the south of us and hope to get to them in a few more days walk. The wind is higher now, the snow driving into our faces. People are tired. The worst thing is that the ice under our feet is covered with a layer of slush and we’re starting to see spots of open water. It would be beautiful if it wasn’t so worrying: the alabaster ice, the whirling flakes of snow dancing around us. But, to be honest, I’m terrified. No, I can’t be honest, even to myself. We just have to keep going, there’s no other choice.

A couple of hours ago, as the storm was building up but before the ice began to disintegrate, a man came by on a skidoo and told us we could sleep in his cabin when we got to the other side. At least that means we won’t have to put up the tent tonight with all the exertion that entails: stomping down the deep soft snow to make a firm base, cutting and shaping trees to make the poles, piling more snow for insulation along the sides of the canvas tent, collecting small spruce branches to make a wall-to-wall mattress for our bedding. But that’s small comfort when I’m not at all sure we will reach the other side.

Meanwhile, Tshaukuesh’s husband, Francis, is out there somewhere on a skidoo bringing their little grandson Manteu to join us for the night—I’m imagining, trying not to imagine, the skidoo going over those pools of open water and what might happen.

I’m ahead of most of the walkers, including Tshaukuesh, the leader. In front of me there are only two other outsiders, Jerry, a travel writer and photographer from Alberta, and Ming, a social worker from Singapore who’s going to work in the brand new Innu community of Natuashish. This walk is his introduction to Innu traditional life. My toboggan is smaller and lighter than most and I’m fairly fit so I turn and walk back to Tshaukuesh to ask if I can help with hers. “No,” she says shortly, saving her breath and energy, “go cook.” “OK,” I say, saving my breath too, and walk as quickly as I can with snowshoes and toboggan to catch up with Jerry and Ming.

Jerry is pulling not one but two toboggans, but they’re ultra-modern ones shaped like boats and made of some kind of specialized substance designed for just this purpose. He also seems to know exactly where we’re going. Ming and I follow humbly in his wake, silent and focussed on our goal. Finally we see the ragged outline of trees through the storm—the shore!—and pick up the trail through them until we reach the small one-room cabin, built mostly of uninsulated plywood but it’s an enormous relief to have shelter of any kind.

By the time the other walkers arrive we’ve found wood and got a fire going in the stove, collected snow to melt for tea and instant noodle soup so people can warm up as soon as they arrive. It’s about thirty below. I lay out bread and butter and a side of smoked arctic char I brought. They come clattering in with their bundles of bedding, food, a chainsaw and other tools, and everything else they had on their toboggans, piling it all neatly to one side in the limited space and making tea—nipishapui—digging sugar and tinned milk out of a bundle and stirring it into their steaming mugs.

Tshaukuesh picks up my side of char and throws it into the pot of noodle soup, which shocks me as I’m used to thinking of smoked fish as a delicacy to be savoured as is. But it tastes indescribably delicious in the hot soup when we eat it a few minutes later. Everybody contributes what they have to the meal: a strange assortment of protein bars, muffins, partridgeberry jam, frozen chunks of baloney hacked from an enormous sausage, and some leftover beans from last night. As we’re assembling it all, we hear the whine of a skidoo approaching, muffled by the storm but growing gradually louder. Francis and Manteu have arrived safely.

We eat ravenously, spread out our mattresses, caribou skins and sleeping bags—men on one side of the room, women on the other—and fall asleep in the light and warmth of the fire. I’ve only been in Innusi for two days but already it feels like home, our tiny band of people the only ones I need to worry about in the world. And they are all safe here in this little cabin on the shore of Atatshi-uinipeku, in Innusi, in the vast boreal forest.