by Matthew Tétreault
NEWEST PRESS
2023/$22.95/248 pp.
Matthew Tétreault’s first novel, Hold Your Tongue, follows Richard, a French-Métis man at loose ends. His girlfriend is in Winnipeg—he declined to join her—and he has a job emptying rural septic tanks. When his beloved great-uncle Alfred has a stroke, Richard reckons with his identity and family history, wondering where he goes from here. Grappling with themes of language and the land, this linguistically complex novel offers no easy answers for Richard or the reader.
Tétreault, also French-Métis and originally from southeastern Manitoba’s Ste. Anne area, now lives in Winnipeg. (Both locales are settings in the novel.) He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Alberta and previously published a collection of short stories, What Happened on the Bloodvein. Hold Your Tongue starts with an Author’s Note preparing the reader for the multilingual text, which primarily employs English but also three different “registers of French—Standard French, French-Canadian and French-Michif,” a language specific to the Métis people.
The dialogue (and occasionally the narration) slips effortlessly between these Frenches and English, a fluidity common for those on the linguistic border. “La game ’tait tight,” says Richard’s uncle Alfred in one of many stories. “Y’ont loadé les bases, et tout d’un coup, bang! Une flyball que t’on père attrape et jette à Homeplate.”
The virtuosic language switching is a highlight of the book, but it could be challenging for those who don’t both read and have an ear for French, given the many phonetic renderings that differ from Standard French, like moé and toé for moi and toi, for starters. Readers unfamiliar with French shouldn’t be dissuaded, but they may need to do extra work to keep up.
Tétreault, whose dissertation was on Métis literary history, is an expert on Métis stories, and the novel contains many tellings and retellings. The story of what became of the family’s land is central to what unfolds in the wake of Alfred’s stroke. After so much loss of land and culture, Richard is ambivalent about the prospect of leaving Ste. Anne for Winnipeg to be with his girlfriend. He feels a pull to stay put even as others around him move. “Turns out, c’pas facile vivre en français en ville,” his sister tells him. “You gotta be bilingue, t’sé.”
After generations of dispossession and linguistic and cultural oppression, there can be no single, right way to be Métis. In the end, Alfred’s lesson for Richard is that stopping the march of loss is demanding work, with advances and retreats, but there’s a role for everyone—and family, loved ones, matter above all.
Karen Press is the author of Exquisite Monsters (Turnstone).
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