Babbling French and Other Blessings

I learned to speak French as a high school exchange student in Quebec. A few years later, with the confidence of that "hands-on" learning experience under my belt, I walked into a drugstore in Paris and, in my best Quebec accent, asked if they sold razors. We'd been traveling for a month or so and I needed a new one.

The shopkeeper just gaped at me with a look somewhere between confusion and disdain. A chimpanzee might just as well have loped up to him and babbled something about wanting bananas. Though I don't know what I said wrong, I learned that day that there is more than just geography separating the French of Quebec and France.

I was reminded of this mis-fired linguistic exchange the other day when I heard a story on CBC Radio about Jean Charest's recent visit to Paris. The Parisian diplomat who was meeting him at the airport, earnest to be a good host, wanted to welcome him with a genuine gesture of linguistic goodwill. He did some research and discovered how to ask him if he was tired (after his long flight) using a unique Quebecois idiom. Unbeknownst to this well meaning Parisian, the particular idiom he used was a slightly crude expression not exactly suited to polite society: as Jean Charest disembarked the plane, he was greeted warmly and asked if he didn't have his "*slang term for female anatomy* dragging on the ground."

The story made me laugh a bit.

But mostly it made me think of the Tower of Babel.

From the illustrated Bible versions of the Babel story I was raised on, I always had the impression that God's original aim was to have one unified language, where we could all communicate unambiguously; and that the linguistic confusion, like the kind heard on the Parisian tarmac that day, was really God's curse on humanity because of their overweening pride.

Today I'm not so sure. Though we often talk about the "curse of Babel," it's important to note that the story never uses the word "curse." J. Richard Middleton points out that in Genesis 10, right before the Babel story tells us there was only one language, we're given this elaborate table of the descendants of Noah, listed "according to their peoples and languages." Middleton then points out that one of the imperialistic policies of Babylon-- a policy, no doubt, that the author of Genesis was well aware of-- was to enforce its own language on the people it conquered. We see this policy at work in the opening verses of Daniel (and, incidentally, throughout history-- from Stalin to residential schools to William the Conqueror, it seems an "effective" way to keep an oppressed people oppressed has always been to silence their language). Middleton argues that the story's vision of a "one-language state" is actually intended as a picture of the distopian structures of the Babylonian Empire whereby it enforced linguistic unity on its subjects.

If Middleton is right, then by confusing the speech of the tower-builders, God is judging the oppressive, imperialistic power structures of Babylon (and every Babylon-like empire since). By affirming and insisting on a rich diversity of human languages, God is actually unmasking and disarming those oppressive, dehumanizing systems that need us to all talk (and think) alike in order to maintain their power.

This would mean that the day I walked into a Parisian pharmacie and left without my razor, as frustrating as it was, maybe I was actually tasting one of God's blessings to humanity. And maybe the day Charest looked askance at a French politician who had just asked him innocently enough if he was "dragging his ass," maybe God was saying yet again: "I don't want human-life-together to ever be so unambiguous that it becomes tyrannical."

Maybe.