dépouillé

I have a friend here who loves words. He talks about the French language as if it were a woman he’s loved for years. This isn’t uncommon among the French; they have a rich history of nurturing and protecting their beautiful language, such that, over the course of centuries, the French language has taken on a persona, a character.

When I hear my friend talk about French, I forget my own stammerings and mis-speakings. I remember how much I love it, too. At home, I would get hungry to speak French, in the same way as I might crave a certain food with a pleasing taste and texture. It scrapes and fills the mouth, activates lips and cheeks, and vibrates the nose and throat. English is like white bread; French is like a mouthful of red wine. It nourishes and pleases in a different way than English.

One of the unique blessings and challenges of bilingualism is this moment when you realize that you know a word in one language that absolutely doesn’t translate into the other. Sometimes, it’s because it would take lots of words to compensate for just one. At other times, the whole concept is just alien: brain and mouth fumble and run in circles around the thing trying to put a finger on what seems like a simple idea. It’s very bizarre.

There’s a word in French that has become like a friend to me lately: it’s like a presence that knows and validates my experience, gives it meaning and pushes me forward.

Friends, meet DÉPOUILLÉ (anglicized: day-pooie-YAY).

dépouiller /depuje/
I. transitive verb
1. (dépecer) to skin [animal];
2. (dénuder) to lay [sth] bare [champ, région];
3. (déposséder) to rob [voyageur];
hum to fleece (familier) [contribuable];
~ qn de ses biens to strip sb of his/her possessions;
4. to open [courrier];
to count [scrutin];
to go through [documents].
II. se dépouiller vpr
1. (se démunir) [personne] se ~ de to shed [vêtements];
to divest oneself of [biens];
fig to cast off [morgue];
2. Zool (muer) [serpent] to slough;
3. (se dénuder) [arbre] to shed its leaves;
[style] to become spare.

This word has been converted into a sort of French religious term that describes the process of taking up one’s cross, that kind of thing. But I like it because it’s so tactile. Wow, what kinds of discomfort, big and small, are implicit in terms like skinning, laying bare, robbing, stripping off someone’s clothes, shedding a skin! My skin crawls to think of it.

There’s also this element of nakedness: when a sort of exterior is eliminated, something else emerges. It might be one’s inner organs, in the case of a pelted rabbit, or bare branches. It could be one’s pale tummy or private parts. What is revealed is raw, tender, vulnerable—even unsightly.

I’m not going to launch into a description of every thing I feel has been stripped away (by my own choosing or not). Suffice it to say, I feel this word echoing in me every day as I feel the deep ache of missing. Over and over, it names the ball of grief in my gut, the frustration of my closet, and the subtle cultural faux pas I commit. In moments of difficulty, my heart utters “dépouillé” like a cuss word that at once diminishes and gives weight to a stubbed toe.

At the bottom of the sensation of being dépouillée, there’s something delicious and real. It’s like the branches of a sycamore in winter: stark and stately, honorable. They’re bare and yet their form is lovely.

A little poem from a children’s book I brought expresses this well:

The stripped and shapely
Maple grieves
The loss of her
Departed leaves…

And yet the world,
Nevertheless,
Displays a certain
Loveliness—

The beauty of
The bone. Tall God
Must see our souls
This way, and nod.

“November,” from A Child’s Calendar, John Updike, 1965