The Newcomer

A new student appeared in our class this week. She is unlike all the other students in our class, for reasons beyond the bizarre fact that she has joined us halfway through the semester.

Her name is Anne, she is in her early sixties, and she is also taking a Chinese class at the university. She never specified her reasons for taking Arabic, specifically, but she alluded to the idea that both these languages come from countries high on the US list of terrorist nations. We only had a couple of minutes to chat before class started, so I really don't know if she is planning to visit any Chinese- or Arabic-speaking countries, or if she wants to better understand what people from these countries are saying in news reports.

Perhaps she firmly believes there is a real threat of one of these countries invading the US, making these language skills particularly valuable. I'm trying not to assume she's that kind of crazy.

I do know she was very impressed with Eihab's style of teaching and the fact that my classmates and I can identify vocabulary words he utters, then write them in Arabic script.

"You are amazing," she whispered into my ear each time I wrote down a word.

She had to leave early to get to her Chinese class, so we weren't able to talk more after class, but I expect to see her there again. She was very appreciative when I made a point of walking her through the textbook and explaining how the online component works.

As I read back over what I just wrote, I realize that it sounds like I might have made this woman up. She might be my internal cheerleader, a mental construct I have devised to keep me going through the semester.

I assure you, she is real. But so is my fatigue about the class.

You see, I have lost my excitement about class, and the next eight weeks stretch out before me in a seemingly endless slog. I have come to this kind of nadir at the middle of every semester since I returned to college ten years ago. The difference now is that I have zero motivation to keep going.

I enrolled in this Arabic class for fun. Well, maybe not "fun," exactly, but for my own edification, rather than for a degree or job requirement. And at first, it really was fun. Each new character we learned led to new vocabulary; each new word led to phrases we could use; before we knew it, we were engaging in meaningful conversation.

Well, not meaningful in any grand sense, but useful, at least.

Right this moment, if I really had to, I could introduce myself to an Arab-speaking person in her own language, tell her where I am from and what I do, ask the same of her, and invite her to have coffee or tea with me. I could even tell her how I take my coffee, ask how she takes hers, and describe my house and car to her.

If that's not meaningful then I don't know what is.

Perhaps this new student is a gift from the universe, a real-life construct who will re-energize my focus and propel me through the end of the semester.

I am skipping one class this week to enjoy a morning at home with my husband. Next week, I will dig deep to find some remaining enthusiasm to complete what I signed up for.

Who knows? Maybe very soon Anne and I will be discussing, in Arabic, our coffee preferences, our houses, our cars. And I could have a shiny, eager study partner who is not twenty years my junior.

Insha'Allah!

The Saudi Feminist

I see a lot of Arab men for tutoring at my job. Whenever I see an Arabic name on my schedule, I am careful to comport myself in a culturally sensitive manner: I consciously avoid any kind of physical contact, even a bumped elbow on the desk, as we work through grammar problems. I don't want any misunderstandings about my availability.

Consequently, when a student named Saleh appeared on my schedule for Tuesday, I prepared for that kind of reserve. I am usually something of a toucher. Without even realizing it sometimes, I will reach out and lightly touch my interlocutor's arm during a conversation. It's mostly unconscious, but it might have to do with trying to make certain the other person is engaged in the conversation. Maybe it's a holdover from my singing telegram days, when flirtatiousness was de riguer. I don't know. Whatever the reason, I am aware of my behavior and make every effort to curb this habit with Saudi men.

So I was completely surprised when Saleh extended his right hand to shake mine as I greeted him.

I hid my gut reaction and proceeded to begin our tutoring session as usual. We sat at my desk, I jotted down his student ID number, and he got out the essay he wanted to work on. As with most international students, Saleh wanted to look at his grammar, but also to make sure the organization and content were good.

Within the first paragraph, I knew I was working with a very unusual Saudi student.

His essay was about how shocked he was to see women driving cars in the US. But that's not the surprising part. I knew women were not allowed to drive in Saudi Arabia. The surprising part was his attitude toward the phenomenon.

Saleh was writing about the reasons Americans need to drive as an everyday survival skill. And his point of view was that women driving was a good thing.

As we worked through his paragraphs comparing the ways families function in his homeland and here in the US, I couldn't keep a silly grin from my mouth. His essay discussed the isolation and powerlessness women must feel when they cannot drive a sick child to the hospital, but have to wait for an ambulance that might arrive too late. He also cited the common absence of fathers in American families, and the extra burden this places on women, making the ability to drive a matter of survival for them and their families.

I suddenly realized that I was tutoring an extremely rare type of student: Saleh was a Saudi feminist!

I never knew such a creature existed. And I felt extremely lucky, once again, to have the job I have. I get to listen to the interesting and often bizarre stories of students from a myriad of backgrounds and experience level. They share with me their struggles with teenaged parenthood, drug and alcohol addiction, physical abuse from parents and partners, abandonment, adoption, death, disease, and fear of all kinds.

And now I have heard the story of a Saudi who believes women should be able to drive and have more power and independence.

I believe I might have heard it all now.

Roadwork of the MInd

It just came out of my mouth without any thought.

"Et voila! Tres bien!"

I was sitting in Arabic class practicing a little scene with my two conversation partners, and the French phrase just popped out.

The three of us had finished greeting each other, asking how each other was doing, telling where we were from and what our occupations were, and introducing each other in turn. We had effectively exhausted all of our Arabic vocabulary.

The French phrases then leapt from my mouth, confusing my conversation partners and embarrassing myself.

We all laughed, then went back to practicing our boring little scene.

These last couple of weeks, my brain has been working overtime to memorize not only the sounds of Arabic words and phrases, but also the alien-looking script for those words and phrases. I have mastered the look and sound of the numbers one through ten, and I can greet my Arabic-speaking students in their native tongue without much stumbling.

But every time I try to think in Arabic, I end up thinking in French.

Which is a little perplexing, seeing as my French fluency was embarrassingly rusty earlier in the summer when we visited France for the fourth time. In Paris, Thenay, and Faverges, I had difficulty interacting with waiters and sales clerks, discerning menu details, and even conversing with the family I had lived with during my semester abroad. Five years ago, I had been the star performer among my fellow students in the summer abroad program, tutoring them on the intricacies of French grammar and slang. This summer, I was just another tourist fumbling through her rusty high-school-level language skills.

Perhaps the new pathways in my brain that are trying to form with this new language are the same pathways that once carried my French thinking. Those were etched pretty deep, it seems. And now they are getting tangled up with these new, very foreign Arabic sounds and symbols.

I'm doing everything I can to pave over these old pathways with Arabic asphalt, much as the local rod crews are repaving our little dead-end street. First they shaved off the old, patched up blacktop, leaving the road raw and grooved and a couple of inches lower than the jagged edge of our cement driveway.

Likewise, I spent a long, lazy summer shaving off the layers of French grammar I worked so hard for so long to learn, by immersing myself in online Solitaire and Netflix bingeing. My language center was left as exposed and unfinished looking as our street now is.

Next, the giant, smelly trucks carrying a load of steaming tar will lumber down our street and idle there, while a crew of four or five young, sweaty guys shovel heaps of thick, gravelly, vile-smelling goo over the grooved skeleton of our road, matching it up to the yards and driveways of all our neighbors.

The next few weeks will find my own language center attempting to fill gaps in my Arabic skill set with the stinking goo of alien sound combinations. I will try desperately to match these new sounds and scripts to pictures and ideas I already know in English and French: house, sister, bread, car, book, brother.

Inevitably, there will be potholes and crevasses where I've missed the mark. Patches will be necessary to link the new to the old.

And I will occasionally make up brand new sounds that do not make actual words in any of the three languages my poor brain is now juggling, like the weird sinkholes that sometimes spontaneously appear in a newly paved road. These are necessary depressions on the way to fluency, like speedbumps or the gouges left behind by snowplows.

My challenge is to keep on driving, despite the bumps in the linguistic road and the unposted rules of grammar and the other crazy drivers tempting me to mispronounce or reach for vocabulary that I'm not ready for yet.

I have to trust that I'll get used to these new roads eventually, like I got used to driving a manual transmission. My brain may jump and lurch and occasionally stall out. But with lots of repetition and practice, one day the correct sounds will fall from my mouth without any effort, just as I now downshift with total ease.

In the meantime, I think it's kind of good that French phrases surface unbidden from time to time. I think that means my brain is putting this new Arabic information in the correct compartments, filing it in the Language drawers I opened and organized all through my undergraduate career.

Now, if only I could link that drawer metaphor to the driving metaphor. Quel dommage.