ABSTRACT
Michèle Lalonde's poster-poem, 'Speak White', reflected the ideology of Quebec nationalists in the 1960s as they sought independence from Canada and promoted the preservation of French language and culture. This chapter examines the function of English in the poem from several perspectives, including textual and official bilingualism, code-switching from French to English, and the language debates of Quebec. The instability created by the negative bilingualism is reinforced through the indeterminacy of the poem's speaker and audience, and the binary oppositions that echo the inequitable binaries of language. Given the political and cultural context and the question of audience, D. G. Jones translation may be unable to provide a polemic poster poem 'equivalent' to Lalonde's source text. In 'Speak White', Lalonde created a bilingual text that exposed and criticized the bilingual reality of Quebec in 1968. In contemporary Quebec, diglossia, code-switching and the hybridization of language are perceived as potentially creative.
