So French accent is sexy? Ours, nko?

I was already head over heels in love before I took my first French lesson. One of my older sisters had a t-shirt with Je t’aime boldly splashed across its chest. I knew the proper way to pronounce Paris. Paree. Like they did in the musical, Gigi, which was shown on TV at least once a month, and which I gorged on every time.

All of the movies I had seen, Gigi included, presented Paris as the centre of elegance and all things shiny and bright. The people were beautiful; the weather — even when it wasn’t good — was something magical. And everyone acknowledged that the accent was sexy. If there was ever anything I wanted so badly as a child, it was to be all grown up in Paree, perhaps under the Eiffel Tower, immersed in the glitz and glamour of the city, speaking to real French people in their language. I loved Paris first, but that love was so tied up with the language that they were one and the same.  

My first French teacher was a tall, striking woman who had studied French in the Republic of Benin (or was it Cameroon?). At my school, one of the top schools in Nigeria at the time, we did not have lessons in any Nigerian language for most of my six years there (and when we did, we were only taught numbers from 1 to 10 and a few stock phrases). But French — French was compulsory. I learned to count, learned the days of the week, learned to sing cocorico cocorico and write short letters. Chère maman, tu me manques. I imitated the way my teacher enunciated each word when she spoke. I watched her intently as if I hoped to catch the words falling from her lips before they hit the ground and crashed.  

In the years since I had my last French class, I have become critical of my internalised partialities towards this language and the role of cultural imperialism in my bias. Why did I think it was sexy? The only reason I did was because Hollywood told me it was. The French aspirated their h’s and swallowed their r’s the same way the Yoruba did, but no one thought that the Yoruba accent was sexy. I did not. In fact, I remember kids at my boarding school making fun of a schoolmate who pronounced “rice” with the guttural “r.” 

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To exacerbate matters, on my first visit to Paris, the city splintered my heart. J, my husband, and I drove down on a Sunday morning. I expected to recognise the city I knew from movies, but I saw none of the glitter, the shine, the glistening, dazzling beauty I had spent a lifetime anticipating. The cafes were jam-packed and overpriced. Its streets were littered with dirt. Its traffic was unbearable. I saw the Arc de Triomphe from the windscreen of our van.

The one redeeming feature of that first trip was the Louvre, which stopped me from completely collapsing in disappointment. The residue of enchantment that had survived my critical questioning of my French infatuation did not make it past that trip. In the years I lived in Belgium, I returned several times to Paris, often with my overseas guests who wanted to take pictures under the Eiffel Tower and buy key ring souvenirs from the many vendors around the site to testify to their having been. I never learned to love it.. 

These days, I find myself wishing I had persevered with French in secondary school. Or had persevered with learning it as a young mother, but not for the reasons I had wanted to learn it initially. Of course, I no longer think the accent is desirable — certainly no more desirable than my Igbo accent, or Yoruba or Hausa accents. I’m not compelled by the narratives pushed by global culture, or because I harbour dreams of reading entire novels in French, but because I am an advocate of learning new languages. I am glad that my children are multilingual. There is an enrichment in every additional language one learns; a new window into a different world. 

However, I wish my school had expended as much energy on making Nigerian languages available to us as they did French. I wish they had given us options. I might have left school proficient in another Nigerian language other than mine.