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For many like me, growing up here involves, at best, living a disjointed life or, at worst, a large degree of cognitive dissonance.
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Polyrhythms are rhythms stacked one on top of the other, in a way that should be disordered and incomprehensible but somehow makes sense. The rhythms are dynamic, and they create tension and drama. It’s music that moves. For better or worse it rarely leaves the listener indifferent. Some love it; the clash of sounds makes them feel alive. For others, it’s more incoherent noise than music.
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The life of a Montrealer can feel like a cacophonie if it weren’t for the fact that sometimes the noise is appropriate and consistent with the realities of the city.
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For many like me, growing up in Montreal involves, at best, living a disjointed life or, at worst, a large degree of cognitive dissonance. I was born in the 1990s in Côtes-des-Neiges to Rwandan parents and grew up in Outremont. At home we spoke Kinyarwanda and English; at school it was French, of course.
I would eventually leave Montreal as a nine-year-old and return at 16 to go to Dawson College and later Concordia University. At that point, I was both a newly minted immigrant and a long-lost son returning home. Today my social circles are numerous, and they are varied, from the many fragments that make up my life. It’s difficult to keep up. I don’t just speak French and English; I speak multiple iterations of both languages.
When speaking French with someone who casually throws around the term pure laine, I speak in a more nasally voice, drawing out my words and slowing them down to put everyone at ease. Les Canadiens may come up in conversation. If I’m addressing someone who’s had a more colourful life such as myself, I tend to speak from my diaphragm, speed up my speech and make my presence felt with my words. We probably won’t mention the Habs.
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However, people of my parents’ generation also bring up the Habs a lot. They’re familiar with many things that feel foreign to me, like the people who appear on TV and grace our billboards; they know their names and what they do. I know their faces but for the life of me, I couldn’t name them. My elders not only speak different iterations of French but are invested in facets of Montreal and Quebec that seem to have brought them closer to the new environment they discovered when moving here. These cultural common grounds appear to be disappearing fast. But there is always legislation.
The proposed tuition hikes for out-of-province students come up a lot at work. I work at a university, the one the Coalition Avenir Québec doesn’t seem to like very much. It comes up a lot because the tuition hikes would profoundly affect the school, the city, and the province. This always turns into a wider discussion about French and its survival. Some colleagues from outside the city and the province don’t really get it. Strangely enough, I find myself defending the French language. It’s strange because elected defenders of the French language have a long history of trying very hard to preserve the language from people like me.
The city of Montreal is a mosaic, but not by design. We are a whole that has been repeatedly shattered into tiny fragments, pieced back together over time, with great effort on our part. The result is a strange and curious sight. The mosaic looks all crooked if viewed from up close, but if you take a few steps back, you begin to understand it. You might even find it beautiful.
This may not make much sense to those not from here. But something tells me that for my fellow Montrealers, this disjointed, polyrhythmic noise makes total sense. We try very hard to find the melody within the cacophonie.
Nganji Kimonyo lives in N.D.G.
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