Falling in love with the foreign

As an allophone and as someone who has lived a good chunk of her life abroad, it's sometimes hard for me to explain to others how I feel about Montreal --the place of my birth and my earliest childhood memories-- and why I love this city so fiercely.

Reading Linda Leith's explanation of why someone such as herself (born in Belfast, Northern Ireland and subsequently living in London, Brussels, Basel, Paris, Budapest and finally, Montreal) feels most at home right here in la Belle Province, made me shake my head in fervent agreement. Finally! Someone had articulated my feelings and had done so in such an eloquent and true fashion, that it made me want to cry. "Montreal is human in scale while being a real city, a city big enough to support theatres and orchestras and festivals and good restaurants and all the other things you want to have available to you even when you have no immediate interest in going," she says. "It has a sense of its place in the world, and a recognizable personality, diffident and ironic. It's human in its contradictions, its mix of peoples and languages, and in its acknowledgement of people's frailties and of their desire for fun. And it's a French-speaking city. That is not incidental. I love the fact that the city will always remain in some ways foreign to me."

If that paragraph is not a love letter to our city, I don't know what is. And those who fall in love with our vivacious, bizarre, downtrodden, manic mess of a metropolis are usually the ones who've travelled and experienced other cultures, norms and ways of life and have come to appreciate this marvelous mix, these clashing cultures we know as Montreal.

Not having one singular place to call home, is both a blessing and a curse. It can be lonely always being the 'outsider'; never quite feeling "de souche" enough, not having (or knowing) of a family tree that has roots that extend deep into a city's makeup. But, being an outsider also frees you up to be who you want to be, to define yourself and your surroundings on your own terms, to associate with who you want to and discover that you love the place you call home, not because you have to, but because you want to.

A rootless past can make for an insightful vagabond, someone who's empathetic to people's --and a city's-- frailties and mysteries, someone who consciously chooses to fall in love with the foreign.

If, as they say, "familiarity breeds contempt" living in a place that will always feel a little foreign and a little unfamiliar, might perhaps have the makings of a life-long love affair.