Sunset On Political Correctness
There are eight of us, including the kids, and we’re sitting at an oceanfront restaurant on France’s Atlantic coast, watching the sun go down spectacularly over the pounding waves. I’m thinking that it’s possible to set water on fire, and I let my mind absentmindedly characterize the colours I’m seeing with a painterly vocabulary. “Magenta, vermillion, ochre, cerulean…”
We’re getting to know each other, and we’re talking about the past, about future plans, and about things we have in common, in this case, wine. We’re sharing a bottle of Champagne, which sparkles in our clinking glasses, raised every few minutes to signal our bonhomie and our gratitude to be sharing this moment. It’s perfectly civilized.
We get into the dynamics of couples, and offhandedly I mention that my sweetheart likes to get a rise out of me by occasionally saying offensive things. “He doesn’t mean what he says,” I specify to allay what I imagine to be my auditors’ growing fear that they are sharing a basket of fried calamari with a bigot. “He just likes to rile me up.”
I wait for a reaction, giving my partner a sheepish grin, as though I’ve exposed a deeply secret facet of his personality.
“That’s nothing,” says the female constituent of the French couple we’re dining with. “He’s a nun compared to me.”
She then proceeds to rattle off a litany of hair-raising proclamations about an assortment of delicate subjects in such a way that my wine goes down the wrong pipe and I cough, with maximal moistness, into my napkin. It seems I’ve underestimated the French.
My Canadian palate has been conditioned to receive and spit out phrases of the most correct and sensitive nature, to avoid words and images loaded with bias, and to quickly identify and reject the flavour of thoughts oppressed by the pall of discrimination. Suddenly, I’m confronted with the indiscriminate vociferations of my neighbour to the left, who’s pummelling me glibly with off-colour remarks and contentious jokes like a 7-foot tennis player hammering balls down the “T” at a Grand Slam.
My eyes widen with what I expect is satisfactory shock and my mouth clamps shut. I’m not sure how to ingest what I’ve just heard, so I take a handful of calamari and cram them into my mouth to avoid a riposte. I feel like if I were to look into a mirror, I would see my hair blown back from my face. It momentarily occurs to me that I should develop an app called Mouthtune, designed to put a filter on speakers’ mouths to make the candid words that spill out of them prettier.
The conversation moves onto other topics and my brain splits between listening to what is being said and ruminating over what just happened. Eventually, my consoeur to the left starts to talk about her daughter’s current boyfriend, about how the young man in question had a difficult upbringing, about how she took him in and gave him the first Christmas gift he had ever received, about how he now calls her maman. She is visibly moved, and the poignancy of her story is punctuated by the swell of tears in her eyes.
She pulls a recent picture of her daughter up on her phone. I lean over, politely, to have a look. Behind the curly-dark-haired white woman stands a tall black man, whose arm is wrapped around her waist and whose smile is directed at the camera. I struggle inwardly to resolve the juxtaposition of the photograph with the offensive onslaught that left scorch marks on my ears a few moments earlier. I think the kind of “what?” that has sixteen consecutive “A’s” and no “t".” The phone is put away and I hear an audible and unmistakably gratified sigh.
We finish dinner, leaving crapulent. I reflect on the evening during the ride back home, and have to admit we’ve had a very good time. Our hosts were affable, acute and generous, extending that generosity to our children by including them in (most, thankfully not all) of the conversation. There is, I surmise, some anthropological or sociological lesson to be garnered here.
A few days later, Waze sends us down an improbable dirt path toward the teepee we’re going to be glamping in for the next couple of nights. We bounce along right up to an impressive conical structure, handmade and erected by a lanky, middle-aged white Frenchman with a tired look in his hooded eyes. He shows us around the impressive facilities, his chest expanding, rightly, with pride.
We settle our things around the teepee’s circumference, lift the flap of our lodging and wander out to get better acquainted with our surroundings.
The common area consists of an eating space designed to look like the saloon of a Hollywood Western. There are wooden Chief statues standing guard at the counter, and other Native American collectibles scattered around the premises. Above a leather settee, I read a quote by a certain “Chief Joseph” that starts something like “if white man want to live in harmony with nature…” The text goes on to gently sermonize the reader in a Disney Pocahontas Colors of the Wind kind of way, only with approximate English.
I wonder what our host was thinking when he was shopping around eBay for his decor. Was I witnessing the insouciance born of deeply cultivated, calculated ignorance? Was he maybe thinking that he was going to appropriate whatever he darned well pleased, untroubled by the poncy problems of North American correctness? Was it nothing like what I was thinking it was, at that precise moment, arms crossed sanctimoniously across my GOTS-certified-cotton-clad chest?
For the second time during our holiday in France, I feel intensely priggish1. This time, however, the recent insurrection which has swept North America in the face of social injustice carries me in its swell, and I feel massively justified, which shuts the inner demons up.
It occurs to me, though, that the French are not more or less prejudiced than their enlightened, not-so-distant neighbours across the Atlantic. They simply value liberté above all, and refuse to constrain the freedom of their speech. What they say, what they think and what they feel may be at odds, or stand out at odd angles. The crux of the matter is that they refuse to be fettered to doctrine, popular public opinion, or occasionally even common sense. The spirit of contradiction is strong, and any precipitous judgment is flung with spectacular verbal flare back into the faces of those who furrow their brow in disapproval.
For the second time during our holiday, I wonder if I’m envious2. I decide I’m not, but have resolved to stop squirming like a worm on a hook in a very small pond with disproportionately large fish when my partner makes his next incendiary comment. Even if I think it’s possible to set water on fire.
The first time involves my contending with the eroticism of French beaches, which you can read about here.
See previous footnote.
Really interesting, Lianne. I'm up against a deadline so I'm going to read this again later to digest a little more. It brings up a lot of different areas for consideration/debate. Thanks!
I've often wondered if the European (and particularly French) disregard for PC niceties was a sign of greater prejudice or simply the sign of a more relaxed and uninhibited attitude towards such things as race (and gender) relations, to the point that they can joke about them more freely. So many times, however, I've been told by visible-minority individuals who have lived in France of the much greater levels of racism they experienced over there as compared to here. So that pretty well settled the matter for me, even if I suppose it's just anecdotal evidence.