Context, Part 2

My French is very good. And it should be: I started studying French in high school; I majored in French in college; I have a master's degree in French Studies; and I have lived and studied and worked in France on four separate occasions for a total of about eight years, or one-fifth of my life. My French is not perfect--I have an accent, and I make grammatical mistakes, and there are words I don't know--but it is very good, and there are basically no life situations or conversations or reading material that I don't think I could handle just fine in French.

But I still often feel like I only understand a fraction of what's going on around me while I'm in France. Why? Because even after all my studies and all my time there, I still lack huge portions of French cultural context. Most of the background, the subtext, the soundtrack, the footnotes of conversation and posters and the daily noise that make up our interactions with the world around us get filtered out by my brain when I'm in France because they seem to be just noise, with no meaning or importance. I can't even tell you how much I miss, because there's absolutely no way for me to judge how much cultural information is around me that I'm simply unaware of. All I can say is that there are a lot of inside jokes that go right over my head.

When I first moved to France in 2002, I was over at some friends' one night while they were watching Qui veut gagner des millions ? (the French knock-off of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). There was a new contestant who was at the easiest level, and my friends were outraged at how easy the questions were: "Everyone knows that!" "Our five year-old could answer that one!" and so on. I finally told them, very quietly, that I had absolutely no idea what the answers were to any of the questions--that I'd never even heard of the topics. My friends stared at me like I was brain-damaged. They didn't realize how culturally specific the questions were, and how rooted in French history and pop culture. The challenge of living in a foreign country is how very often you feel stupid, just because you don't have the same knowledge, the same cultural context, as most people around you.

There are some examples of insider details that I did understand, but they're few and far between, and I'm inordinately proud of them. A couple that come to mind:

1) The chain of movie theaters that I went to regularly, UGC, had an ad that it ran before most movies. The screen showed a dark blue background, with bubbles floating up, as if it were filmed underwater. Words flashed rapidly across the screen (in French): "Anguish," "Stress," "Anger," "Rushed," "Long Lines," "Movie Sold Out." Then the words "UGC Prompto: The Anti-Stress of Cinema [phone number]" would come up, advertising the way to reserve your movie tickets ahead of time. Okay, fine. I'm guessing that most good French students would be able to understand all the text in the ad with no problem and would probably assume that the underwater bubbles were just some random background graphic chosen for no particular reason. But any native speaker would look at those bubbles and mentally identify them with the French word "bulles," bringing to mind the French expression "avoir les bulles," which literally means "to have bubbles" and figuratively means to be upset or angry about something. The bubble graphic was (subliminally?) underlining the angry, upset words flashing across the screen, and I was always very pleased to "get" that one.

2) One of my co-workers at the office was very plugged in to the French political scene because his mother was mayor of a small town in the South. One day last summer, he was telling me about the rumor that President Nicolas Sarkozy was actually separated from his wife Célia; that she was being paid some specific amount for each public appearance that she made with him; that their divorce would be announced in the coming year, once his presidency was more established; and that Célia was already in a relationship with a man named Marc Lévy. I responded, "Et si c'était vrai !" ("And if it were true!"), which made us both laugh. What was so funny about my seemingly banal expression of surprise/disbelief to all these stories? Well, Marc Lévy is a contemporary French author, and Et si c'était vrai is the title of one his most popular novels (made into the movie Just Like Heaven, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo, in the U.S.), so my response was actually a mild little pun. I love verbal banter, but the opportunities for me to make even this kind of very weak pun were very, very rare in France, just because it was unusual for me to have the context, to recognize the names of all the people involved and rapidly be able to pull in a relevant comment about one of them.

So, after six years of feeling like I'm missing out on a lot of what's going on around me, what is it like for me to be re-immersed in my native context? Stay tuned for Part 3 . . .