w i n t e r g u i d e 2 0 1 9 5 5 Voices on the issues magazine How Do You Say Benoit? Last name recognition or denial? By Rhea Côté Robbins F rench surnames lead a double life in this neck of the woods. How can I express the sense of relief I feel when I see and hear recognizable last names of the singers on the digital display during my commute—names that channel my child- hood French-speaking world? They’re just like the French last names I’m surround- ed by in my student list at the University of Maine—living, breathing identities all over New England—anglicized on this side of the border, resolutely French on the other. I contact Joan Benoit Samuelson, the first- ever women’s Olympic Games marathon champion. She identifies with her French heritage but says she “grew up with the An- glo pronunciation of my last name.” Still, she happily accepts the French pronunciation. You can almost hear her sweet smile: “‘Ben- oit’ with the French pronunciation was some- times used by my friends as a nickname.” Buried below that, is there an unexpressed cultural dissonance? Who knows? Last-name pronunciations are barbed by the immigrant experience to the U.S. We’ve experienced stark erasure in Maine’s mono- lingual landscape—a mill boss respell- ing French names into English facsimiles, teachers in classrooms re-baptizing their students with, if you think of it, merry-old- English colonialism. This marginalization wasn’t marginal. Did you know there was a state law forbidding the French language spoken in public school settings outside the classroom until the 1960s? A silence that still echoes in the culture-at-large today. A recent Facebook discussion of last name pronunciations produced enough ma- terial for 74 pages of commentary on how people view the phenomenon of French names bastardized across the border be- tween worlds of languages and identities. Immigration and all its baggage hap- pened to each and every one of us in the French heritage, along with an imposed de- nial of the markers of a culture, heritage, language, and ancestors via last name mis- pronunciation. How do we reunite who we are with who we can be? Is a rose still a rose if pronounced in another language? n Boston Herald