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general interest in faith anyhow, so I took to reading and finding out more from him and his friends who lived nearby, and from their wives and children. * At the same time, I was teaching night school English in Toronto, to groups where at least two or three students in every class were in hijab. I remember sitting at home on September 11th, 2001, watching the horrible tragedy unfold on television. Riveted like millions of viewers, I recall one single feeling piercing my being – that the world had suddenly become much more dangerous. Not just for those poor victims and for North Americans in general, but for all those women I knew in hijab who’d be blamed in reactive racism.
    Wouldn’t it make a great act of feminist solidarity, I thought, if all kinds of women put on scarves? That way, Muslim females would be safer in anonymity. As soon as I had the idea, it seemed hypocritical not to act on it. After all, I was already on a cultural bridge myself. So I bought one and put it on during the weekends for a couple of months. It was uncomfortable at first, but it grew on me. And by Ramadan that year, I wasn’t just wearing it full time, even at work, but I began fasting too. Exalted anorexia – another a good fit with the pre-existing, troubled self. Religion as pure emotion, as raw sensation.
    Over the years to come, I’d be ignored at shop counters while people addressed my husband (who was a language learner), assuming I spoke little or no English. I’d be yelled at through the open windows of passing cars and spoken about derisively in English or French in bank lineups. As I entered a grocery store after work one day, someone exiting accidentally triggered the theft alarm. “Shoot her!” a man in the produce section yelled, pointing at me. “She’s a terrorist!” Fortunately, everyone ignored him.
    I was in hijab in the summer of 2004 when I visited a new museum in Place Royale honouring the Saintonge region and the Sieur deChamplain de Saintonge, who built the first settlement in New France and the first Catholic church on the continent. I kept silent about my name that day, paradoxes crashing, but months later I told my Grade 7 students in Toronto about the exhibit. A student asked me, “Was Champlain a Muslim too?”
    Â«On voit p’us tes beaux ch’feux» [We don’t see your pretty hair anymore], my mother said, grieving inside and out in those years. My scarf made it impossible for her to give me the highest compliment she ever gave any female: «A’est-tu belle un peu, mon Dieu!» [Isn’t she beautiful, my God!] It seems my valuation had become immeasurable, been lost. The span grew. Few relatives came onto my horizon through it all, and my mother kept «c’t’affaire-là» [that business] underground as mounting evidence that I was not only estranged but strange. Yet symbolic of my origins again, I’d conducted my own «Révolution tranquille» [Quiet Revolution], * effectively removing myself from the purview of the Roman Catholic Church and using English to enter another faith. I was engaging in what was viewed at the family and community level as a grave act of cultural heresy.
    So we remain, French mother and English daughter, with a void of misapprehension between us. Such is the life we’ve co-created. «C’pas d’ma faute si j’ta’ n’bonne élève pis j’ai bin appris l’anglais. J’aime bin l’école, t’sais,» I tell her in my own defence. [It’s not my fault that I was such a good student and I learned English well. I love school, you know.] «Eh oui,» she whispers, her voice breaking.
    And so it was, and is. The damage done, fifty years lived. Two women at a kitchen table, both past their prime, and it’s nearly midnight now. The moment lingers. Silence again. A life spent in linguistic tension. A love spent in psychological tension.