Teaching English to Refugees

ibidem-Press, Stuttgart

For Amy and Max

Table of Contents

Part One: The Color Blue

Part Two: Springfield 2011

Part Three: Rapture of the Deep

Credits

Acknowledgements

Part One: The Color Blue

Sabeen came to class early. She said she couldn’t understand English.

But I understand you, she said.

This was what she meant: Americans talked so fast. Even when she got the gist of it she couldn’t respond. In her head all she heard were the words of her first language.

I’m from California, I said. People speak slower in California.

I was exaggerating a bit. Native Californians did speak a slower, less inflected form of English, but I was trying to make a broader point about regional differences the world over. I reminded her that people in southern Iraq didn’t speak the same as people in the north, but my efforts were in vain: Now she wanted to move to California.

When everyone arrived I gave them a copy of a page from the picture dictionary. It was a drawing of three cooks in a restaurant kitchen. One was peeling potatoes, another was rolling out a pie crust, and another was opening a can.

The cooks were surrounded by utensils. Each utensil had a number that corresponded to a list of words at the bottom of the page. If Sabeen wanted to know the word for what she used to drain pasta she looked for the number next to that item and found the word on the list. Then she said the word to herself. Colander.

The picture dictionary was based on a common assumption: To learn a language was to learn the names native speakers gave to different things. It could be something concrete, like colander, or abstract, like hunger.

It was an old idea. Plato articulated a version of it in the Cratylus:

The name, like the picture, is an imitation.

The picture dictionary wasn’t just positing a theory of language acquisition—it was positing a theory of meaning. A word meant what it referred to. If I didn’t have a colander in front of me, I could close my eyes and see the image of one in my head.

I turned on the document camera and projected the page on the board. I pointed to the colander and asked them what it was and they said the word colander. Then they took out their phones and translated the word into their languages:

مصفاة

တစ်ဦ

kichujio

shaandho

फिल्टर

They were looking for identities, equivalencies. The picture dictionary encouraged this because it too was a tool for translation: It translated an actual colander into a picture of a colander, and then a picture of a colander into the word colander. The whole process was visual: They trusted what they could see with their own two eyes.

We played a game. I put the following utensils in a big cardboard box:

A grater

A pan

A pot

A ladle

A knife

A colander

A spatula

A mixing bowl

A wooden spoon

A cutting board

A whisk

A vegetable peeler

I took a utensil out of the box and showed it to them. They told me the word for it and I wrote the word on the left side of the board. I did this until I’d made a list of all the utensils. Then I showed them the utensils in a different order and they told me the words again and I made a new list on the right side of the board.

I had them read each list out loud, then I took all the utensils and put them back in the box and divided them into two teams. One person from each team came to the board, took an eraser, and stood in front of a list. I took a utensil out of the box and showed it to them. Their teammates yelled the word to them and they looked for the word and erased it. The first person to erase the word got a point for their team.

The game might help them remember the word colander, but it might not. They might go home that night and open the kitchen cabinet and see the steel bowl with the holes and the handles and not remember what it was called and blame themselves, telling themselves it was because they were adults, that it was easier for children.

The excitement they’d felt when they first arrived—that sense of safety and infinite possibility—would start to give way to resignation.

2. Making Pasta

Like the picture dictionary, the game was based on a false assumption: To learn a language was to learn the names native speakers gave to different things. By playing the game we were perpetuating a myth. But that was okay, because that wasn’t the point of the game.

They came from cultures that stressed the importance of rules, and memorization, and the authority of the teacher, so the game challenged their expectations about what could happen in a classroom. It got them laughing.

But it was more than this. They’d all studied the grammar of their first language as children, so now, as adults, they had very fixed ideas about the nature of language and how to go about learning a new one. I could try to counter that. I could make the way we learned English part of the experience of learning English, but that would be a waste of precious time: I’d never convince them that a language and its grammar weren’t one and the same. We’d get much more done if I gave them something familiar—in this instance a game that treated words like labels—then took some of the new words and did something completely different with them.

I wheeled a small black utility table to the front of the room and placed the following objects on it:

A bottle of olive oil

A box of pasta

A tomato

A bulb of garlic

A wooden spoon

A knife

A colander

A spatula

A pot

A pan

A plate

A fork

A cutting board

A jar of basil

A shaker of black pepper

I took a step back from the table and stroked my chin and nodded. I’d just had an epiphany: I wanted to make pasta!

I stepped up to the table and turned on the imaginary cold-water tap and filled the pot with water. I put the pot on the stove and turned the heat to high. While the water was boiling, I placed the bulb of garlic on the cutting board and smashed it with the side of my knife. I separated a clove, cut off the tip, removed the skin, then diced it. I put the pan on the stove and turned the heat to low. I put oil in the pan. I scraped the garlic off the cutting board and into the pan. I added basil and black pepper. I chopped the tomatoes and added them. While the tomatoes were cooking down, I put the pasta in the boiling water. I stirred it occasionally, testing to see if it was al dente. When it was ready, I drained it in the colander, put it on the plate, and spooned on the sauce.

A friend of mine lived in Italy for many years and he taught me how to make this sauce. I watched him do it, then he wrote down the steps for me on an index card. He added capers, and for a long time I did too, until the supermarket near me closed, and the new one I started going to charged three times as much for them.

I pantomimed the steps a second time, making sure my every action was discrete, that there were no incidental movements. I stayed silent the entire time.

This was the closest I’d ever come to acting like a mime. As a child I hated mimes, so I didn’t appreciate the skill involved. To be convincing I needed to oversell each gesture, to invest it with all the details I took for granted in the course of my ordinary affairs.

I performed the sequence a third time, only now I preceded each action with a command, as if telling myself what to do:

Fill the pot with water.

Put the pot on the stove.

Turn the heat to high.

Smash the garlic.

Peel the garlic.

Dice the garlic.

Put oil in the pan.

Turn the heat to low.

Put the garlic in the pan.

Add basil and black pepper.

Chop the tomatoes.

Add the tomatoes.

Put the pasta in the boiling water.

Stir the pasta.

Drain the pasta.

Put the pasta on a plate.

Put the sauce on the pasta.

I performed the actions with the commands a second time, then I asked them if they were ready. They nodded and I motioned for them to stand up. I gave them the commands and they performed the actions.

I stood in front of Sabeen and told her to smash the garlic. She repeated the command to make sure she’d heard me right.

Her breath was bad. It was the last week of Ramadan and she was still fasting. The same thing happened to me on Yom Kippur.

She held her hand up as if she were balancing a bulb of garlic on her fingertips, then she tensed her fingers to indicate she was gripping it and put it on the table. She held out her right hand flat as if it were a knife, placed it over the bulb of garlic, and struck it with the heel of her left hand.

I moved to Zana and told her to peel the garlic. She picked up the bulb and with two fingers she separated a clove, then made a peeling motion, pinching her fingers together and twisting her wrist.

I moved to Noor, Zana’s sister, and told her to dice the garlic. She narrowed her eyes. She was thinking.

She looked at Ramesh. He held his right hand rigid as if it were a knife. He tapped the table in a quick, staccato rhythm and she imitated him. Then she looked at me to confirm she’d gotten it right.

I motioned for everyone to sit down.

I want you to work with the person sitting next to you, I said. I want you to put the sentences in order.

I gave each pair an envelope with the commands. Each command was on a separate strip of paper. They spread them out on the table, picking up each one and reading it like it was a fortune, then putting it in the place they thought it occupied in the sequence, understanding that it was provisional, a placeholder until they’d gone through all the commands and made sure there wasn’t a better choice.

Even pairs who spoke the same language were quiet now, moving the commands around until they reached a silent agreement. I didn’t offer any assistance, and they didn’t ask.

When each pair had decided on a sequence they felt good about I went back to the utility table and pantomimed the whole sequence again, not saying a word. I paused after each action so that if they’d placed a command out of order they had plenty of time to move it.

Yes? I said.

By yes I meant May I have your permission to go on to the next step?

Yes, they said.

Now the word yes meant Please proceed, sir.

This time I said the commands without performing them. They listened and read along, repeating the words just under their breath.

Zana came to the front of the room. She stood at the utility table, staring at her sister and the other students. She was wearing a navy trench coat, cinched at the waist. Her brown hijab went straight out in back, which meant she had a long ponytail she was tying low.

Most young women from Baghdad still wore their hijabs in the Kaleeji style. Kaleeji meant “from the gulf.” It was like a beehive, or a bouffant hijab. It began as a way for women to show the length of their hair without actually revealing it. They made high ponytails so their hijabs stood up in the back, or they wrapped their hair on top of their heads before covering it. The look had become so popular that women with short hair were fastening cardboard cones to their heads to achieve the same effect.

We went around the room and each student gave Zana a command and she performed the action. When she was finished she went back to her seat and everyone clapped. Then Noor came up. She was wearing a black unitard and a black silk hijab. She didn’t tie her hair at all, so her hijab lay flat against her neck.

This time we went in the opposite direction, so each person had a chance to give a new command; then they put the commands back in the envelopes and gave the envelopes to me. Then Ramesh came to the front.

Tell him what to do, I said.

He looked like a Bollywood movie star: dark eyes, cleft chin, pouty mouth. He was a first-generation refugee: Like all citizens of Bhutan of Nepali ancestry, his parents had been forced to leave. They moved to a camp in eastern Nepal, where Ramesh was born and raised. He’d never known Bhutan and never would.

Noor wanted to go first but she’d forgotten the command. I asked the class what she could say and they told her. She shook her finger at Ramesh.

Fill the pot with water, she said.

He picked up the pot, placed it under the tap, and turned on the water.

Noor and Zana came to my office after class. Zana did all the talking, even though she was the younger one.

My sister want divorce, she said. You can help us?

I was shocked. I’d done their intakes only a few months before. They’d told me they were from Jordan and I hadn’t questioned it; young women from Baghdad often said this. What they didn’t say, but explained to me now, was that their uncle had been murdered for working as a phlebotomist for the Americans inside the Green Zone, and that their father had been injured in a car-bomb blast outside a mosque. That’s when the family fled to Amman, draining their savings on a one-room apartment on the outskirts of the city, Noor and Zana keeping themselves busy by studying for A levels they would never take.

It was during this time that Noor began emailing with Ahmed, the son of her father’s former business associate. Ahmed was an enterprising young man who’d owned an internet café in Baghdad. He and his family had been resettled to the United States.

They corresponded for a year and then Ahmed asked her father for her hand in marriage. He had to do it over the phone, in defiance of Iraqi custom, but given the circumstances—there were no longer any paternal cousins who were eligible candidates—her father gave his consent.

Two years later their family was resettled to the United States, and when they arrived Noor couldn’t wait to see Ahmed. They got married in a mosque and had their reception at the Lions Club. She went to live with his family, and that’s when the trouble began.

He angry all time, Zana said. He yell. His mother yell. Noor want get apartment, but he say no.

Have you talked to your caseworker?

She no help. She say my sister stay with him.

Noor said something to Zana in Arabic, but Zana didn’t translate.

I know a good lawyer, I said.

When I came in the next day Sabeen was waiting for me in the hallway outside the classroom.

My husband he want go back Iraq, she said.

But it’s so dangerous, I said.

I no go. My children love the life here. Anyway, he wait for green card.

She turned away, looking down the hall in the direction of the water cooler, and for a moment I felt the panic I’d felt when I first moved the program here. It was the perfect space for us: a former parochial school inside a Neo-Gothic church close to downtown, with no iconography in the public spaces, except for one red cross around the corner from the cooler, outside the transept of the main sanctuary. That cross had me so worried: I was afraid they wouldn’t want to come into the building if they saw it. But it turned out they didn’t care.

I unlocked the classroom door and we went inside. Sabeen took a piece of paper out of her pocket and unfolded it.

I bring for you, she said.

She showed me a picture of a tool, but I had no idea what it was. Since we were learning words for kitchen utensils, I assumed it was a kitchen utensil:

She asked me what it was called and I told her I didn’t know. She explained to me in Arabic, even though she knew I didn’t speak Arabic.

ضع العجين في الآلة. اختر التصميم. اضغط على المكبس. ضع ملفات تعريف الارتباط على ورقة الخبز.

When everyone arrived I gave them each a sheet of notebook paper. I performed the actions silently and they told me the command. I wrote the command on the board and they copied it on their paper. When we were finished I had them read each command off the board before I erased it.

Sabeen stayed after class. She wanted to talk some more.

You are Jew, she said. Yes?

I nodded.

Iraq people no believe, she said.

I was the first Jew many of them had ever known. They didn’t realize there was a difference between a Jew and an Israeli.

We are same, she said.

I still remembered the first day she came to class. She wasn’t covered, which was striking enough, but then she had the nerve to talk about it, telling everyone how she’d been a journalist in Baghdad, how when she rode her moped to her bureau office to file a story she had to wear a hijab or she could get killed, but that she took it off as soon as she got inside. She was so glad she didn’t have to worry about this now. When women from Iraq asked her why she didn’t cover, when they said she should be ashamed of herself, she told them she didn’t care, because she knew God was in her heart.

Someday I take you Baghdad, she said. When safe.

I would love to do that, I said.

We go Amarah. I born this city, you know.

Usually when a student said something like this I took it as an expression of gratitude; I was teaching them English and they wanted to reciprocate in some way. But this felt different. I thought Sabeen might be serious.

For a moment I imagined us walking along the banks of the Tigris. She pointed to the sky and said ﺳﻤﺎء. She pointed to a tree and said ﺷﺠﺮة. She pointed to the water and said ﻣﺎء. It never occurred to me that she could be indicating anything different, that what I took to be sky could instead be the word for the color blue, or that what I took to be tree could be the word for leaf, or that what I took to be water could be the word for river.

I was only able to understand what she was pointing at because I had a language—English—that I spoke and thought in, and because I’d engaged in this kind of activity before. Without this I wouldn’t have had a clue.

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