When I got my ears pierced at seven years old, my dad gave me little fleur-de-lys earrings. I scrunched up my nose and asked, “The boy scout symbol?”
“No! That’s the symbol of France! Your heritage! It’s a beautiful flower. The Iris.”
Chastised, I looked at the earrings in a new, more lovely light, but I also wondered if boy scouts were French. (They did wear colorful neckerchiefs?)
Dad later had a fleur-de-lys tattooed on his arm. When I asked him about his grandparents, he said, “Grandma’s maiden name began with an M… what was it? Something French.” A pause for pride, “I get it from both sides.”
Our dog was named Fleur. Yet, when my dad introduced himself, he pronounced his last name “Vi-burt” not “Vi-bear.”
Fun fact, originally spelled “Vibert” my last name is a patronym, a last name derived from a male first name, a regional variation of “Gilbert” first used in Saxony in the 12th Century. (Citation: names expert friend Talon said so.)
(Another fun fact, my great-grandparents burdened my grandfather with the name BURT VI-BURT. I’d have moved far away, too, Grandpa.)
When I learned that my last name began its life with a silent T, I felt cheated. I also felt that trying to switch back to the original pronunciation would be a form of fraud, a put-on.
Frenchness does not exist in a vacuum, and beyond every joke about cheese-eating surrender monkeys, there is a quiet inferiority complex. Our Eurocentric schooling taught white Americans to revere our mother continent: origin of art, culture, cheese. Therefore, to attempt to appear more European than you are is to pad one’s resume, to lay claim to unearned sophistication.
Despite this sensed but inarticulate shame, when I started college, I attempted a rebranding and introduced myself as “Marie Vi-Bear.” None of these people knew poor white trash me before. I was starting life clean over with a new wardrobe that included four store-bought outfits, a felt hat, and a brand new pair of sneakers. I hung a poster for a band I didn’t care for, that I’d fished from a dumpster, because it was something a teenager should have. I… am astounded at who I thought I was fooling.
One of the first people I introduced myself to at college immediately perked up and asked, “Parlez-vous Français?” I replied, “Je ne sais quoi,” the only phrase of French I had memorized, “I do not know,” given to me by my twin, who had studied French in High School. (I took Spanish.)
I expected my response to result in a laugh, and an understanding that we’d move on to other topics, but he took it as an invitation to patter rapidly in Gallic joy. I had to interrupt and explain the joke.
I digress. I couldn’t keep my pronunciation campaign up. I’d forget, revert, and confuse people. So I let that go along with my dreams of befriending my first, viciously irascible, roommate.
One of my friends in college was Doug Jeanblanc. Pronounced the French way. I loved to say it, and Doug was a kind, quiet, unpreposessing boy. (Still is.)
At his wedding, a mutual friend whispered to me, “His father pronounces it Jeen-Blank!” Her tone clearly indicating that Doug was to be mocked for having pulled this one over on us.
I recalled my freshman year and tried to feel nothing at all, either way, but what I was thinking was “Thank god I got away with it and no one remembers.”
There’s something pathetic in my family’s Frenchness. It’s a word, not a culture. My spouse knows more about French cooking than I do, (though I like to think my family’s propensity towards consuming lots of butter comes honestly?)
We had a family dictionary, a proud possession which my father laboriously re-bound in white paperboard when the cover tore off. The page edges bore a thick sharpie rendering of our name… with an umlaut. “Vibbërt.”
“I don’t know,” Dad mumbled, “I wanted it to look more foreign. I was young and dumb.”
We want to be more foreign. My dad’s best friend, Stosh, flew the Polish flag over his front door and named his dog (Fleur’s litter-mate) Polack. Everyone in our working-class white world had some claim of ethnicity. Homemade Italian wine. Irish flags. Slovenian vs. Croatian social clubs. We wanted some of that. A yearning after legacy, after a longer story than, “Dad grew up in this suburb of Cleveland and Mom grew up in that one.”
We weren’t kidnapped from France and forced here. We didn’t even have our T stapled on at Ellis Island. Our heritage was lost in benign neglect, disowned sons crossing borders and young couples seeking jobs another state over during the depression. My dad met one of his great-grandfathers at the man’s funeral. I was there, and it was when I learned there was such a thing as great-grandparents.
I am no longer young, but perhaps still dumb. I dutifully introduce myself with the childhood pronunciation of my name, but never correct anyone who pronounces it in the French way. Hell, a Francophone hotel clerk gave me a discount once because when he looked at my name and with enthusiasm pronounced it extra-frenchily, I responded, “Oui.”
“Pathetic” comes from “Pathos” which means emotional, especially eliciting sympathy. There’s a positive reading there. I am sympathetic with young Dad, young me, and with the Jeanblancs.
Recently (like, right now, talking about this blog post), I found out that Doug has never pronounced his name Frenchly … we the other students were the ones Blonking Doug, and he, like me, simply didn’t correct. For this lie of omission he was mocked at his own wedding! (Or do I remember this completely wrong, and I was the one being corrected having just blithely said something like, “I love to say ‘Jeanblanc’?”)
Despite an equal fondness for the French pronunciation, peer pressure has kept Doug Jeen-blank. Fear of looking “snobby.”
Why is it snobby? Would it be snobby to ask your German or Italian name be pronounced in keeping with those languages? Polish? Chinese? And why ask a person how their name is pronounced if it is up to pubic consensus?
Part of my heritage is the disappointed look when I explain the Americanized pronunciation of Vibbert. Part, also, is when Mr. Logan, my seventh grade social studies teacher, asked us all to name our heritages to make a chart on the board. He was teaching us about, like, graphs, I guess. He looked over the many columns with tick-marks and asked, “Have I missed anything?”
I raised my hand VERY high and proudly declared, “Americans.”
He laughed, condescendingly. (Mr. Logan was an asshole.) “There’s no such thing as Americans, we all came from somewhere else.”
“No, I mean NATIVE Americans.”
His face turned ugly. I won’t repeat the horrible words he said, but they ended with, “The only people who would have anything to DO with them are the FILTHY FRENCH.”
The man had put my tick mark under “French” without a question not ten minutes earlier. Just saying.
We are taught to identify our origins, no matter how little we know of them. My father knows maybe twelve French words, but after Fleur, our next dog was Blanche.
My mother, after the divorce, before remarrying, despite being herself mostly German and Polish, called herself “Vi-bear” and it made me cringe, but last week a person on instagram posted a video praising my work and I was as flattered by his “Vi-bear” as his review.
…
Which is all to say, darlings, I have thought way too much about the pronunciation of my name. I want it to ring with la belle langue. I want it to also reflect the real sounds of my Midwestern life. So I accept both. Both is good.
“Veye-bear” however is right out. My ancestors put a second B in so youse knuckleheads would know it’s a short i. GEEZ.
