Teaching English to Refugees E-Book

Robert Radin

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

“Robert Radin’s Teaching English to Refugees does it all, weaving together memoir, philosophy of language, social-justice advocacy, and graphic narrative into a haunting meditation on what can happen when the least powerful among us escape oppression and seek refuge in the United States. With the unerring precision of both linguist and poet, Radin tells a story of teaching English to refugees from such troubled areas of the world as Iraq, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. As he struggles to find ways to reach across languages and cultures so disparate they do not even seem to be part of the same world, a quieter story plays out—his own, where multi-generational Jewish legacies get compressed into incisive and singular moments of prose you won’t soon forget. Through it all, the voices of his Muslim students—haltingly at first, and then with increasing confidence—carve out a space for being all their own. Like Jenny Erpenbeck’s Go, Went, Gone, this spare, unsparing, and intrepid book takes a close, unwavering look at some of the hardest stories of our times until nothing is what it seems at first and students become teachers to us all.”—Katharine Haake, Professor of English, California State University Northridge, author of The Time of Quarantine and That Water, Those Rocks

Leseprobe

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

 

1. The Picture Dictionary

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.