Why I love being French, and speaking French!

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Mon héro!, originally uploaded by Cody La Bière.

Well Journée Louis Riel is now officially over here in Manitoba, which is the Manitoba equivalent of "Family Day" in other Canadian provinces. Thinking back, Louis Riel is probably my biggest political hero in my life, not only for having the courage for standing up to the Canadian government, but also as him being a Francophone/bilingual person.

I love speaking French, and every day of my life I'm proud to be a French Canadian. My French isn't perfect by any means, but when I get to speak French, I get excited and all nostalgic.

Whenever I go to a local shop or a restaurant and hear someone speaking French, my ears start tuning into the French conversations. Whenever French musicians come to Brandon, Manitoba, I always have a chat with them after the concert.. they always are ecstatic when they realize that there's another person who speaks French in the room, which is rare in this part of the country.

Yeah, of course it gives me a reason to trash talk about someone without most people knowing what the eff I'm saying, but I don't trash talk anyways. But I do love to Franglais it up, which is a mixture of French and English.

Living in Quebec City, people would automatically notice my obviously anglo accent, but they never hated me for it, they would ask me questions like where I was from, what I think about the community, "have you gone to... yet?", stuff like that. In any other city in Canada, particularly anglophone communities, I have never had this happen. Not once has anyone ever said this while in Ottawa or Edmonton, or even Winnipeg.

Also, I consider myself a bit of an expert on Franco-Canadien music, I'm not a professional at it or anything, but thanks to taking a "Popular French music" course back in university, it gave me a grasp of Québecois musical history and what to look for. Now I have dozens of different Francophone musicians on my iPhone. I probably know more about French music than most listener friends of mine on Radio 3, but I don't hold it against them, they're just anglos, they don't know any better! ;)
While musicians like coeur de pirate and malajube are great and all, they're are in NO WAY the best that the province has. Give me Jean Leloup, Marie-Pierre Arthur and Radio Radio instead!

Also, what I love is that my absolute closest friends, most of them are French speakers, I don't know how I ended up with amazing friends who all speak French, but it happens!

But on the bad side of things.. here in Western Manitoba, Francophones/"Frenchies" are constantly discriminated on a regular basis. On a local message board, every single time the word "French" is mentioned, there's a heated debate (well one sided debate) about how Francophones need to STFU and how this should be a unilingual country, it's no wonder why said same people vote Blue each and every election like clock-work. It's embarassing to be in a community that is so discriminatory(?) against any cultural groups. I even got made fun of, in public for wearing French tshirts, although THAT'S rare. Usually it's just glares, rude looks if they see me speaking French, it sucks, but that's life. Also, while there are a few thousand French speaking people in the region, it seems like all of them are hiding, I never can find them, so I never get to really speak French in the first place!

Anywho, I'm proud of being French Canadian and proud of speaking French, I've had the pleasure of spending St-Jean Baptiste Day on the Plains of Abraham before, and felt like I belonged there with the other 250,000 attendees, it was a night to remember! Drinking with random strangers, singing en Français and having a great time! Ah.. those were the days!

Vive les Francophones!