The Democratic candidate for the American presidential election Kamala Harris speaks French thanks to a 5-year experience of which she does not really have fond memories.
Since the publication of an article in the New York Times in April 2019, Kamala Harris would have a fundamental difference with her competitor for the White House Donald Trump, she would speak a language other than English. Indeed, while only 20% of American students learn to speak another language, the Democratic candidate for the presidential election speaks… French! As surprising as it may seem, the Vice-President of the United States knows how to speak a few words of the language of Molière, without being completely bilingual.
Born in Oakland, California, Kamala Harris spent her adolescence in Quebec. It was at the age of 12 that she discovered Montreal, Canada, to follow her mother who had just been recruited by the city’s Jewish General Hospital, to conduct research on breast cancer and teach McGill University. A hard uprooting for the young girl at the time:“The idea of leaving sunny California in February, in the middle of the school year, for a foreign French-speaking city covered in 12 feet of snow (3.6 meters) was distressing,” she explained in her memoir published in 2019 .
Upon her arrival, she attended a French-speaking school, Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, before studying in a bilingual establishment specializing in music and the artistic sector. Subsequently, she joined Westmount High School, an English-speaking public high school where she graduated in 1981. According to the American media, Kamala Harris spoke “conversational French” after her time in the exclusively French-speaking neighborhood school. , Notre-Dame-des-Neiges.
“The senator proved to me that she spoke a little French”
However, it is not mad love between the future candidate for the American presidential election and the city of Montreal. She takes refuge behind a superficial smile, and finds comfort in dancing, her favorite activity in Canada. In reality, she is homesick and dreams of only one thing, returning to the United States and particularly to California. However, “she was very friendly and extroverted”, confided one of her ex-classmates, Anu Chopra Sharma to AFP.“French was a difficult subject for all of us, as we didn’t speak it,” she explains.
In total, Kamala Harris will have spent 5 years in Canada, years during which she was able to perfect her French. “I felt like a duck because all day long, in that school, I was saying ‘what? what? what?'”, relates the principal concerned in her memoirs. His integration was “difficult” by his own admission.
In 2020, the former French ambassador to the United States, Gérard Araud revealed on “had proven that she spoke a little French and that she was warm and charismatic,” he explains. Despite everything, homesickness will get the better of Kamala Harris in Montreal. She “constantly” feels the desire to return home. In 1982, once her studies were completed, she returned to the United States and joined Howard University in Washington, also called the “black Harvard”, with her knowledge of French in hand.