Teaching English to Refugees 9783838275024

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—Katharine Haake, Professor of English, California State University Northridge, author of The Time of Quarantine and That Water, Those Rocks

Robert Radin

“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.”

“Part parable and part memoir, this powerful meditation on language and memory, teachers and students, has a mysterious and magical force to it. It’s a beautiful gift from Robert Radin to his students, and to us, his fortunate readers.”

“ Teaching English to Refugees is a major achievement. This compassionate memoir explores the author’s engagement, as a friend and a teacher, with students who seek to find their places in a foreign world. Rather than teach language in the standard ways, Radin takes a different approach, one that imitates the process by which young children first learn. An impressive and stirring story.” —Merrill Joan Gerber, Professor of Creative Writing, California Institute of Technology, author of Glimmering Girls and The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn

“Robert Radin’s Teaching English to Refugees is brilliant, poignant, and profound. A master storyteller, Radin offers powerful portraits of his adult students, thoughtful commentary on language acquisition, and vivid personal narratives. Teaching English to Refugees is superb creative nonfiction at its best.” —Miriam Kotzin, Professor of English, Drexel University, author of Reclaiming the Dead

Teaching English to Refugees

—James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts Amherst, author of At Memory’s Edge and The Texture of Memory

Teaching English to Refugees Robert Radin

Robert Radin is the director of citizenship and immigration services at a prominent social-service agency in Massachusetts. His work has appeared in various publications and has been recognized in The Best American Short Stories 2016 and The Best American Essays 2019. ISBN: 978-3-8382-1502-0

ibidem

ibidem

Robert Radin

Teaching English to Refugees

Robert Radin

TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES

Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http://dnb.d-nb.de abrufbar. Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

ISBN-13: 978-3-8382-7502-4 © ibidem-Verlag, Stuttgart 2021 Alle Rechte vorbehalten Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Dies gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und elektronische Speicherformen sowie die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

For Amy and Max

Table of Contents

Part One: The Color Blue .................................................................... 9 Part Two: Springfield 2011................................................................ 39 Part Three: Rapture of the Deep ...................................................... 65 Credits................................................................................................. 121 Acknowledgements.......................................................................... 123

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

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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

िफ टर

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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.

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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: 15

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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES 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

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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.

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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES 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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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:

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

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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.

3. Twin Earth

When I was in college I read an article by the British philosopher Hilary Putnam on the meaning of meaning. Putnam argued that the meaning of a word—the word water, for example—was its chemical formula: H2O. So if you and I were talking about water and Putnam asked how we knew we were talking about the same thing and we told him it was because we had the same image in mind he would tell us we were dead wrong. The only way to know if we meant the same thing was to go out and find the water we were referring to and analyze its chemical composition. Meaning, according to Putnam, wasn’t in your head. It wasn’t a mental experience at all. It was something outside of you, something only a scientist could determine and verify. He illustrated his point with a story. He imagined another planet: Twin Earth. On Twin Earth there was a substance that had all the properties of what Earthlings called water. Twin Earthlings drank it, swam in it, and put it in their car radiators. When Earthlings and Twin Earthlings talked about water it seemed like they were referring to the same thing. But when a scientist analyzed the substance Twin Earthlings called water he discovered it had a different chemical composition—XYZ instead of H2O. Since water was, by definition, H2O, the Twin Earthlings weren’t talking about water when they were talking about water. I was depressed in college and took comfort in the notion of Twin Earth, a parallel world where I had my counterpart, 26

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another me who had responded differently to the same set of circumstances, another me who had an entirely different life. But that’s not why I remember Putnam’s article. I remember it because it’s absurd. Yes, meaning isn’t in my head, but that’s not the moral of the story. It doesn’t matter whether Twin Earthlings are referring to the exact same thing when they use the word water, so long as they do the exact same things with the word water. I won’t know they’re referring to something different, so there will be no reason to wonder whether they’re referring to something different. Words are tools, not indications of the ultimate nature of reality. Reference is the result of language, not its raison d’etre. Still, it’s a difficult conviction for me to let go of. I notice it creeping back in, when I ask myself questions like this: Do Sabeen and I mean the same thing by the word blue? Do we see the same shade when we close our eyes, or when we look at the sky?

It’s as if blue had an essence, as if its truth were hidden from me and I had to find it. Every time I notice myself thinking this way I need to change the question. I need to ask myself whether Sabeen and I mean the same thing by the word colander, whether we see the same colander when we close our eyes. Then and only then will I ask myself a better question: Why are you such a jackass?

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I have a photo of my son from when he was a baby. He has a colander on his head. He’s wearing it as a hat, so it’s a hat. I can imagine myself doing the same thing: I come to Earth from a far-away galaxy and land in an alley behind a restaurant and enter the kitchen through the back door. It’s after hours and there’s no one there; the staff are all out front, celebrating a server’s birthday. I hear them singing the birthday song, though, since I’m from another galaxy, I don’t recognize it as the birthday song. I see all kinds of objects laid out before me: a pot, a pan, a knife, a cutting board, a mixing bowl, a wooden spoon. It’s as if I’m in the picture from the picture dictionary, but I have no idea what any of these things are. I don’t even recognize them as tools. Many of the objects have holes in them: the grater, the steamer, the garlic press, the colander, the strainer. I wonder what these things have in common. I put the colander on my head, because on my planet hats with holes are very popular since it gets so hot. This hat is not exactly like the hats we wear, but it’s similar. It’s close enough. I can’t imagine it being anything other than a hat.

Now one of the cooks returns to the kitchen to grab some matches, and she sees me standing there with the colander on my head, and she laughs, and I realize this isn’t a hat after all. When she finally stops laughing she explains that this object is used to drain the water out of different foods, like pasta or rice or beans, and as she’s explaining this our eyes meet, and we fall in love, and we steal away to my spaceship, where she

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sees, inside the cabin, in the corner where I keep my spacesuit, something that looks like a colander, and she puts it on her head.

When I was eight years old my family moved from Los Angeles to Attleboro, Massachusetts. Attleboro was, at that time, a dying mill town, and the high rates of inflation afflicting the country were hitting it particularly hard. We lived around the corner from the Sawchuks. Seven beautiful girls—all older than me—and one boy, Billy, who was a year younger. Mr. Sawchuk owned Sawchuk’s General Store on the other side of town. We used to walk there every weekend to buy shoestring licorice and baseball cards. Billy was a strange, sadistic kid. He was still able to suck his feet, like a baby, and never missed an opportunity to do so. I’d ring the doorbell and one of his gorgeous sisters would answer the door and lead me into the living room, where Billy would be doubled over on the floor, sucking on his big toe, screaming between sucks. Smell my feet, smell my feet, give me something good to eat! I’m sure he moved on to his dick at some point. On the day in question I remember his sisters on the stairs, some of them sitting, some of them standing, all of them dressed in diaphanous gowns, assuming languorous, seductive poses. I know this can’t be possible, but that’s how I remember it.

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There was a round object on the floor at the foot of the stairs, a plastic disk with flower-shaped fluting in the center. I didn’t know what it was and asked Billy. It’s a harmonica, he said. I loved the harmonica. I used to stand on the corner in front of our house and play my Hohner C, making up shit, pretending I had the blues. Play it, he said. I picked it up and put it in my mouth and blew, never noticing the razor blade. Billy fell on the floor, laughing and sucking his feet. It’s a lady’s shaver, he said. I took it out of my mouth. Fortunately I hadn’t cut myself. You’re an asshole, I said. You’re a dirty Jew, he said.

I didn’t know how I could have been so stupid. But I’d never seen such a thing. When Billy said it was a harmonica it seemed possible. It didn’t look like a harmonica, but it looked more like a harmonica than a razor:

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In a perfect world all I would have needed to do was look at it, but in this world that wasn’t enough. I didn’t have enough information. If I’d seen Billy’s sisters using it to shave their legs I would have known. Billy pointed to an object and attached a word to it. I used the object in a way that conformed with the use of the word he had given me. This kind of thing happens all the time, though most of the time I can trust what the other person is telling me. Billy was an unreliable narrator. He was playing a different kind of game: the game of making a fool out of me.

Here’s another example of the game: The summer I turned 11 my family moved from Attleboro to San Diego. We lived in a condominium complex next to the freeway. I made friends

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with a bunch of boys my age. One of them had an older brother named Keith. We were playing chain tag one afternoon when Keith told me they all wanted to take me on a snipe hunt. I asked him what a snipe was. It’s like a wild boar, he said, but not as aggressive. They live in the field. They come out at night. There was a big parcel of undeveloped land next to the condominiums that we simply called “the field.” This was where Keith and his friends built their underground forts, where they drank and got high. We used to raid the forts in the early-morning hours when Keith and his friends were still asleep and rifle through their cache of Playboy magazines. I always found the experience a bit disturbing. If this was what being a teenager was about then I wanted no part of it. Don’t worry, Keith said. We’ll be with you the whole time. When I asked him what we were going to do with the snipe when we caught it he told me they tasted really good. Like chicken, he said.

That night we stood at the top of the long bank of ice plant that separated the condominiums from the field. Everyone had flashlights except for me. Keith gave me a stick and a coffee can and told me the plan. When you see a snipe bang on the can, he said. Then yell Snipe! It will drive it towards us. We descended the bank. There were deep ditches that channeled the rain west to the freeway during flash floods, and we followed one of them down, boys peeling off in pairs

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to form a dragnet, until it was just me and one other boy left. His name was Pat. I’m going to go up and get ready, Pat said. Please don’t leave me, I said. Pat stayed with me for a couple more minutes, then he climbed out of the ditch. You know what to do, he said. I crouched down and panicked. What if there was more than one snipe and they decided to gang up on me? What if a snipe impaled me with its tusks? I imagined the snipe as a giant rat and started to cry.

I don’t know how long I was in the ditch, but at some point I summoned my courage, gripped the stick, and climbed out. The field was fallow, studded with sage scrub, and in the light of the moon I could make out their twisted shapes. I banged on the can, hoping the other boys would emerge from the dark. I called for Pat, but he didn’t answer. Maybe he was keeping quiet for the snipe, I thought. I wondered what I should do if I didn’t see a snipe. It was the one possibility we hadn’t discussed. But just then I heard a rustle, and a snort, and I took off running as fast as I could, banging on the can and screaming. There’s a snipe! There’s a snipe! When I reached the condos I ran straight up the ice plant. Keith and the other boys were all at the top, waiting for me, laughing their asses off.

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For Keith to make a fool out of me I had to be familiar with certain kinds of games. The snipe hunt was a logical extension of chain tag, a game I knew how to play since we played it every day that summer. In chain tag all the players start out as equals. One player is it. He counts to some number—I think we counted to 100—while the other players hide. Then the it player goes looking for the others. When he finds someone that person then joins him in the search. The game proceeds until all the players are looking for one last person, and when he’s finally found he’s declared the winner. The first player found then becomes it for the next round of play. Chain tag was a hunting game. I was good at hiding, so I often won.

4. Listen, Speak, Read, Write

When Ramadan ended everyone stayed home for the week to celebrate Eid. Even the students who didn’t celebrate Eid stayed home. When everyone returned I divided them into two teams and had the teams sit on opposite sides of the room. I pulled two chairs to the front and invited a player from each team to come up. They sat side by side, facing their teammates, and I stood behind them with my box of utensils. I took a utensil out of the box and their teammates pantomimed how to use it. The first player to guess what it was won a point for their team. Noor didn’t want to come up when it was her turn, and I told her that was okay. I could see she was nervous. She was wearing a Russian fur hat instead of her hijab and she kept pulling on the flaps, tucking in every stray strand of hair. Zana and Ramesh went against each other. I took a ladle out of the box and Noor jumped up, making an exaggerated scooping motion with her arm, emptying the contents of her imaginary ladle into an imaginary bowl. Ramesh was looking at her instead of his own teammates, who were yelling at him, but Zana guessed the word first. Noor clapped. Do the dance, she said. Ramesh smiled his Bollywood smile, his teeth blinding white. I realized they’d come to some sort of agreement, made a bet she was now cashing in. He stood and swept his arms wide, swiveled his hips, spun his wrists. He pushed at 35

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the air with his open palms, forming complicated shapes with his fingers, a kind of sign language. He was telling us a story, though we could only guess what it was about.

During the break the sisters went into the computer lab. When I came in they were standing near the server, looking at their phones. Noor had taken off her hat and Zana had taken off her hijab. Noor’s hair was long and straight and chestnut. Zana’s hair was darker, wavier. I expected them to cover their heads, but instead they just looked at me. Maybe they were telling me it was okay, I thought: I wasn’t family, but I was their teacher. In Iraq they had a saying: The teacher is next to God. Or maybe they were conveying just the opposite. Maybe they wanted me to look away. It was all happening so fast and there were no words or gestures.

After the break I gave everyone a sheet of notebook paper and performed the first action, then waited for them to write the corresponding command on their paper. Noor had fastened the chin strap on her hat, but she was still distracted. She was looking at a map on the opposite wall, a political map of the United States circa 1807. She seemed to be studying the large yellow section that represented the Louisiana Purchase. I put the pot on the stove, but she didn’t hear the accompanying words in her head. Instead she heard the

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Arabic equivalent of something like this: I wish I hadn’t worn this hat.

.‫ﺃﺗﻤﻨﻰ ﻟﻮ ﻟﻢ ﺃﺭﺗﺪﻱ ﻫﺬﻩ ﺍﻟﻘﺒﻌﺔ‬

It wasn’t until she saw Zana writing Turn the heat to high that she picked up her pencil and wrote. I waited for her, then I smashed the garlic.

Part Two: Springfield 2011

1. The Swimming Pool

Local meteorologists had issued a tornado watch, so I closed the program for the evening. The tornado never came to pass, but in the ensuing days, as I talked with staff about my decision, they shared their memories of what had happened the last time. This is the story one of the caseworkers told me:

I turned right onto Harrison, heading towards Dwight, and there was a cop parked in front of the civic center. He pulled me over and started yelling at me, telling me I wasn’t allowed to make a right turn off Main, and I was thinking to myself What the fuck are you talking about? because I made that turn every day. He took my license and registration and walked back to the cruiser and I was sitting there, getting more and more angry, and then I looked in my side-view mirror and saw him running towards me, and he gave me my license and registration and said there was a tornado coming and ran back to the cruiser and took off. I knew I should stay put, but I wanted to know what was going on, so I drove up to Dwight and turned right and there it was, pulling up trees like weeds.

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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES This is the story one of the teachers told me: I was driving home from work the same way as always, past my old high school, but this time I didn’t see it, or didn’t recognize it, because all the trees out front were gone. I thought I was lost, or maybe I’d taken a wrong turn, and the more I drove the worse it got. There were cars overturned, houses completely flattened, broken glass everywhere. I felt like I was going crazy. It never occurred to me that we’d had a tornado, because we don’t get tornadoes.

Everyone I talked to was in their cars at the time. As soon as the danger and the confusion had passed they started telling themselves what had happened. Then they told other people. They were rehearsing their stories, editing them, recording some details and leaving out others. The words they used would determine what they remembered and what they didn’t. The words would determine the images they saw when they closed their eyes.

I was at the church when the tornado hit. From my office window I saw the swirl of debris. It looked like giant birds of prey, preparing to strike:

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I had grown up with earthquakes, but tornadoes were foreign to me. I’d never even seen one on TV, unless you counted The Wizard of Oz. The sexton on duty at the time panicked when he saw the funnel cloud. I tried to calm him down, but he ran around the church, locking all the doors. People are going to be coming here, looking for shelter, I said. I got to see if my apartment’s okay, he said. The streets are blocked off, I said. He handed me a ring of keys. Someone knocks, let them in, he said. Unless they look sketchy. I’m not going to turn people away. That’s your call, he said. I’m out of here.

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About ten minutes later there was a knock at the main entrance. The wind was so strong I had to put all my weight on the crash bar to get the door open. It was Amal. I motioned for her to come inside and we sat down on adjoining sofas in the lobby. Did you call your caseworker, I asked. She shook her head and started to cry. I moved closer to her. Just close enough, I thought, that she would know I cared, but not too close. She wiped her eyes with her jilbab. We sat there for a long time, listening to the sirens. Then I went to the kitchen and made a plate for her from what I could find in the fridge: two dinner rolls, coleslaw, and some potato salad. She ate everything and dozed off. I was afraid she might wake up and not know where she was, so I stayed with her for a while, looking out the window that faced Sumner Avenue, watching the sky get dark. I hadn’t seen her since she’d started cleaning rooms at the Sheraton. I still remembered the day I did her intake. She was wearing silver ankle boots that were too big for her, so she clopped when she walked. Her caseworker had told me they were the first thing she bought when she got to New York. Her mother had taken her south after militiamen killed her father and sister, and when the drought and famine began they walked the 500 kilometers to Dadaab in their bare feet. By the time they arrived her mother was sick from complications from starvation—too sick to be treated in the camp—so they applied for resettlement. Her mother died before the application was approved. Amal was younger than the other women we’d resettled from Somalia, but like them she’d never been to school,

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though she’d picked up some English from an aid worker. I asked her a series of general questions to get a baseline before asking more specific questions targeted to her level. One of the questions I asked was What do you like about living in the United States? Without hesitation she said freedom. This was what everyone said when they first got here, but then something changed. Sometimes I noticed it in class, but sometimes I didn’t notice it until the exit interview, when I asked the question again and instead of saying freedom they said safety.

When I was sure she was sound asleep I went down to the basement. It had once been the heart of the church. There’d been a movie theater, and a concert hall, and a swimming pool, and a locker room with showers, and a gym with a parquet basketball court and an indoor track. But they’d shut it all down years ago. I’d always wanted to see the swimming pool. Sometimes people would return to the church after many years away and ask if I could show it to them. They were so disappointed when I told them it was closed. They had so many memories, they said. I found the key and unlocked the door and turned on the lights. I knew the pool had been drained, but I was surprised to see it filled with furniture: tables, desks, and chairs from the old parochial school. I could still smell the chlorine. I sat down by one of the ladders and imagined life the way it would have been:

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When I went back upstairs to check on Amal she was gone.

2. Doing the Laundry

In 2010 a study came out that showed a correlation between a child’s educational attainment and the presence of books in the home. The authors only noted the correlation; they didn’t draw any conclusions. But their findings were controversial nonetheless, because conventional wisdom had it that the mere presence of books in the home wasn’t enough—parents had to read to their children if they wanted to develop their literacy and boost their chances of succeeding academically. The study made sense to me. Infants put books in their mouths, after all. Toddlers used them as building blocks. The more familiar an object was, the more attractive it became. And if there were lots of books in the home then parents were spending lots of time reading them, and their children were spending lots of time watching them do this. Reading, like any other behavior, got passed down. If parents didn’t think reading was a compelling way to experience a story, then their children probably wouldn’t.

When I first started working with women from Somalia I was confident. I’d worked with non-literate learners before and knew what to do. What I didn’t realize was that the learners I’d worked with had all come from literate communities. They’d all seen people read, even if no one in their family read. They’d all 47

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seen a school, even if they’d never set foot in one. They’d all seen a pencil, even if they didn’t know how to hold one. And so they knew—even if they didn’t know they knew—that symbols corresponded to sounds. They just didn’t know what sounds. The women from Somalia were different. They’d grown up in villages in the Lower Juba where there were no books or schools or pencils. Even after the government initiated its literacy campaign, declaring Af Maxaa the nation’s official written language, the women were excluded because they were Bantu and spoke Maay Maay. The idea that a spoken language might have a written analogue wasn’t just strange—it had never occurred to them. It couldn’t occur to them.

I began by teaching them the English alphabet—that is, the names of the letters. Then I taught them the sounds the letters made, alone and in two- or three-letter combinations: a, at, cat. I had them arrange magnetized letters on cookie sheets, and trace letters in the air, and then in boxes of sand, and invent hand and body gestures for the sounds—so the short e in bed became a character familiar to all of them, an old woman from the camp, hard of hearing, walking with a stick, holding her hand up to her ear: Ehhhh? Soon they became proficient: They could look at a word and say it out loud in a way that approximated the way a native speaker would say it. But there was still a quality in their voices that was missing. It reminded me of those textto-speech programs: They sounded robotic because they

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couldn’t account for stress, for the emphasis readers employed to convey their understanding of what they were reading and what was important to them.

In some ways I’d left them worse off than when they started: They’d learned some of the surface features of English, but it wasn’t connected to anything. I remember standing at the board one day, sweating, because I no longer knew what to do. Then I remembered a technique I’d used to help nonliterate Americans learn to read: I listened to them talk. I had them tell me a story and I wrote down everything they said, verbatim, so if they used a word in a way it wasn’t typically used, or said something in a way that didn’t conform to grammatical conventions, I wrote it down anyway, exactly as they said it. First I wrote one sentence and had them read it back to me. Then, as they gained confidence, I wrote two sentences, then three, until they were able to read back the whole story. Then I had them copy the story. Then I wrote individual words from the story and had them read the words. Then I dictated the words and they wrote them. I needed to do this with the women from Somalia. I needed to get them verbally fluent in a story, and I realized the only way I could do that was through an action sequence. The action sequence was the story. Once I gave them a language we both could use I could write down what they said and they would see there was a relationship between

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sounds and symbols. But I had to start with words; I could move to letters later.

The first story we did was the story of doing the laundry. I held a laundry basket full of dark and light clothing: shirts, pants, socks. I grimaced to convey that I wasn’t looking forward to the task ahead of me. I walked ten steps, opened an imaginary door to an imaginary laundromat, went inside, and set my basket down on a table. I separated the clothes into two piles: one dark, one light. I opened the lid of the washing machine and put the dark clothes into the tub. I held a clear plastic measuring cup in one hand and a bottle of detergent in the other and pretended to fill the cup halfway; then I poured the detergent into the tub. I turned the temperature dial all the way to the right, to cold, and took some quarters out of my pocket and inserted them into the coin slot. I pressed the start button and sat down. I looked at my watch a few times; then I stood up and lifted the lid of the washing machine and took out the clothes. I opened the door to the dryer and put the wet clothes inside. I closed the door and turned the temperature dial all the way to the left, to high.

I performed the sequence a second time; then I did it two more times with the following commands:

You need to do the laundry.

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Separate the dark and light clothes. Put the dark clothes in the washing machine. Add half a cup of detergent. Set the temperature to cold. Put in the coins. Press start. Sit down. Wait. Take the clothes out of the washing machine. Put the clothes in the dryer.

I motioned for Amal to come up. She pointed to herself, as if to say Who, me? I pointed back, as if to say Yes, you. She had a lazy eye. So did I. Sometimes she seemed abstracted, maybe even sad, then her eye would realign and I’d see her seeing me. Of course at that moment my eye might have been drifting, so she wouldn’t know I was looking at her. An ophthalmologist once told me which of my eyes was lazy, but I’d since forgotten. All I knew was that I didn’t have true binocular vision. When I tracked something I alternated between eyes, piecing together distance and depth based on previous experience. I couldn’t actually see distance and depth the way other people did. Amal came to the front of the room and waited for my command. You need to do the laundry, I said. She pulled back her jilbab, exposing her hands. It seemed so brazen to me—the other women never would have done this. They kept their hands covered at all times.

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She picked up the laundry basket full of clothing and grimaced to convey she wasn’t looking forward to the task ahead of her. She took ten steps, opened the imaginary door to the laundromat, went inside, and set the basket down on the table.

I realized they had to be able to think in English before they could read in English. That’s why I began with doing the laundry, because I knew they’d never seen a washing machine before they came to the United States, or a dryer, or a measuring cup, or laundry detergent. They’d never separated clothes by color, or pushed a button, or turned a dial. They couldn’t translate these words into Maay Maay because they’d never used these words in Maay Maay. They were forced to think these things in English. I imagined myself in a similar situation, working at a fruit-canning factory in Mogadishu, learning how to adjust the first operation seam roll to curl the cover hook and body hook into the proper position, my supervisor teaching me by giving me the following instructions:

Ka saar xiriiriyaha isla markaana hagaaji daboolka illaa tallaabada ugu horeysa ee adkeysi. Si adag u adkee fiilooyinka xadhkaha daboolka. Qadka hagaha waa inuu ahaadaa dhumuc la mid ah tii kan ka horreeyay.

Even if I translated the supervisor’s instructions into English it wouldn’t help:

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Loosen the lock nut and adjust the set screw until the first operation seam roll is snugly in position with the chuck. While holding the first operation gauge wire in position between the chuck lip and the ground profile of the first operation seam roll, tighten the lock nut. The larger diameter gauge wire should be the approximate thickness of the first operation seam.

I’d used all of these words before, but I’d never used them in this way. I knew how to do something, but I only knew how to do it in my new language.

When they could say all of the commands I set a pad of newsprint on a tripod and gave each of them a sheet of handwriting paper. I picked up the basket full of light and dark clothing and grimaced. You need do laundry, they said. I took a marker and on the first page of newsprint I wrote what they said, exactly as they said it, in block letters. They copied the sentence. Then I held the marker under the first letter of each word and had them read the sentence back to me. Every day we reviewed the commands we’d already written, then we added a few more, and when they could read the whole story I put them in pairs and gave each pair an envelope with the commands, each command on a separate strip of paper, and they spread them out and sequenced them. Then I stood at the table and they told me what to do, yelling at me when I performed the wrong action.

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No! Separate dark and light clothes! No! Add half cup detergent! No! Put clothes in dryer! I could tell they understood by the words they emphasized. They weren’t saying the words to themselves first. They weren’t visualizing an action before telling me to perform it. There were their words and my actions. That’s it.

On the last day of the unit I gave everyone a sheet of handwriting paper and performed the actions and waited for them to write the corresponding commands. As I was reviewing Amal’s paper after class I was struck by one of the sentences she’d written:

Set the temperature to cold!

She’d punctuated all of her other sentences with a period—as we’d practiced in class—but for this one sentence she’d used an exclamation mark. It was actually the correct form of punctuation, because these were commands, the verbs in the imperative, but I wondered where she could have learned it, and why she would’ve chosen it for this one sentence and not for any of the others. It was like she was winking at me, letting me know she’d cracked the code for the game we’d been playing.

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It was an ordinary sentence, but the more I read it the more extraordinary it seemed, because she had made me hear her words in my head. I stood up, and, as if crossing a proscenium to address an audience, read the sentence out loud, then again to myself:

Set the temperature to cold!

I’d always assumed my inner voice sounded like my outer voice, but now, as I attended to these words, I realized it didn’t. My inner voice had no pitch, no timbre, no amplitude. Somehow I had shut down the most fundamental aspect of speech—sound—but my vocal cords kept moving. My thoughts were muscle memories.

3. Speech, Thought, Memory

I have a lilac bush in my backyard. Sometimes I stand at the kitchen window, staring at it:

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When my wife sees me looking out the window and asks me what I’m doing I pretend I’m considering the best way to install the clothesline she’s been begging me for for years. I guess I could dig two holes, fill them with concrete, and set the posts, I say. She looks at me, incredulous. I’m just thinking out loud, I say. You mean talking? she says. She’s teasing me, but she’s also making an important point: If she can hear me, then I’m not thinking.

It reminds of when my son was little, and I visited him at his preschool. The room was noisy, children working on projects in different groups, sometimes talking to each other about what they were doing, but more often talking to themselves. They were thinking out loud. They were narrating their lives. In time the teacher asked them to use their inside voices when they were in the classroom. Then she asked them to quiet their self-talk even further, and to raise their hands when they had a question. She was teaching them to think the way grownups thought. When my son was in kindergarten his teacher used a similar method to teach the children how to read. First she encouraged them to move their mouths, forming the shapes of the sounds the letters made. Then she encouraged them to say the words under their breath. Then, when they were confident, she had them read the words out loud. Later, when they’d developed some mastery of the relationships between sounds and letters, she taught them to

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say the words under their breath, to subvocalize the sounds, then sub-subvocalize the sounds, then sub-sub-subvocalize the sounds, until the words went inside them, until they could read to themselves, until they could hear an inner voice.

When I was driving home from work the other night there was a story on the radio about a man who was born deaf in a village in Mexico. He had friends who were also deaf, and they used to tell each other stories by acting them out, pantomiming the main plot points. The man learned sign language as an adult, and it distanced him from his friends, because they never learned to sign, because their way of communicating remained so time-consuming. But it was more than that. What really made the man sad was the fact that he couldn’t remember what it was like to think the way his friends thought. He couldn’t remember what it was like to think without sign language. It wasn’t that he didn’t remember events from before he learned to sign; it was that all of his memories had been reconstituted in and through sign language.

I’ve experienced this same sense of loss, though I know it’s more intense for this man because he didn’t learn the language he now thinks in until he was an adult. For example, when I was a boy I used to get ear infections all the time, and they were always accompanied by

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a loud ringing in my ear. On one occasion my mother sat me on her lap and held me, and rocked me back and forth, and whispered something to me, words of reassurance, maybe, or a song. She never did things like this. She was so uncomfortable with physical affection. I think that’s why I remember it. I think that’s why it’s a happy memory. It happened before I learned to think. I see myself from afar, as if I’m watching myself, and I have a vague sense of my mother’s arms around me. But these images and sense impressions are the product of my thoughts, of words I’ve said to myself over many years. Language is a form of collective memory. It’s a system for remembering. There are all these things I can’t remember: my first experience of blueness, or the warmth of the sun on my cheek, or the fragrance of a flower. I tell myself this is what’s real: the world before words. But I’m focusing on pleasant experiences. There’s also pain. And words are the only way to get through it.

4. Kaddish

My mother and I had been out of touch for some time when the tornado hit Springfield. There was no threat to my safety, so I didn’t think to call her. I didn’t think she’d even know we’d had a tornado. But she did. She saw the footage on TV and left me a message. She didn’t sound worried, but when I called her back she was crying. I’m sorry, I said. For a moment I felt the way I had when I was a little boy, like my mother and I had the same body, the same thoughts, and I resolved, once again, to be a better son.

I called her the following week, but I knew I’d made a mistake as soon as she picked up the phone. She asked me why I was calling. I just thought, I said. You just thought what? That maybe we should talk more often. Not every week. How about once a month? I don’t know what to tell you. This was our last conversation. Three days later her lungs filled with fluid and she couldn’t breathe.

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After she died I started saying the mourner’s kaddish. This is the first line of the prayer:

I said it by myself, in my bedroom, knowing full well I was violating Jewish custom. You were supposed to say the kaddish only in a minyan—a group of at least ten other Jews—because you weren’t supposed to engage in this kind of mourning alone. But I didn’t care. I needed something to structure my grief. I read the text in Hebrew rather than the English transliteration. I say read though I wasn’t really reading, because I didn’t understand Hebrew and had only the vaguest sense of what the kaddish meant in English. I’d memorized it, and the words functioned more like musical notes, indicating tempo and dynamics. Some of the sentences were so long they left me out of breath.

The kaddish was a way to remember my mother. A formal way, in contrast to all of the informal, accidental ways I remembered her, like when I saw the lilacs blooming in the spring.

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They’d always been her favorite flower. She grew up in East New York and would go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden to see them. Once, before I ever saw a lilac, I got her a red rose. I was with my grandmother at the train station in Crown Heights, and a man was selling roses from a bucket, and I bought one. My grandmother trimmed the stem with a nail clipper and put it in her purse, and on the train she told me I shouldn’t be disappointed if it was dead by the time we saw my mother later that day, but it lived.

5. Cambuulo

The last time I saw Amal was at Food Zone. She was standing in the Asian-food aisle, putting bags of adzuki beans into her basket. It was just before she moved to Maine. I think she would’ve ended up there anyway—there was a Bantu community in Lewiston—but the tornado made it happen faster. Teacher, she said. You know cambuulo? I told her I didn’t. Ah, she said, and she took a quick, short breath and held it in. This was how Ethiopians and Eritreans indicated assent. I’d never seen someone from Somalia do it. It bean and butter and sugar, she said. I make for you. You don’t have to do that, I said. She asked me what I was buying. Soy sauce, I said. For stir fry. She nodded, but she didn’t understand. Her right eye was drifting. It looked like she was looking at the cans of water chestnuts. You cook vegetables in a big pan at high heat with just a little bit of oil, I said. Her eye suddenly realigned and I saw her seeing me. I’ll make it for you, I said.

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Part Three: Rapture of the Deep

1. No Standing

The Eritreans were the first to come to me asking for driver’s ed, because they’d never learned to drive and couldn’t take the permit test in Tigrinya. But I’d just started the program at the time, and didn’t have any money, and couldn’t get my act together before they left to join expat communities in California and D.C. The demand dropped after that. The Iraqis knew how to drive and could take the permit test in Arabic. The Burmese Bamar could take it in Burmese, though the Karen couldn’t; they didn’t speak Burmese and had spent their lives in the mountains hiding from the military, so they’d never been to school. They took the literacy class instead, and eventually moved away to New York or Nebraska. The Bhutanese settled in Springfield, but they made sure to stay within walking distance of work and services. They didn’t want to learn how to drive. The Congolese were the first since the Eritreans to come to me en masse. I think it was Camille who asked about it first. The day she came for her intake she was wearing a purple head-wrap and a yellow liputa dress. I need to drive, she said. You can’t get ahead in the United States if you can’t drive. She was conflating Springfield and the United States. Everyone did this when they first arrived. But her point was well-taken.

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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES I’ll see what I can do, I said. God bless you, she said.

I contacted the state agency in charge of refugee education and employment to see if I could get funding for the class. They said they didn’t know where to begin, but could give me a little money to pilot something, so long as I understood that they would use my data to develop a request for proposals the following year, and that it would be an openbidding process—they couldn’t guarantee me future funding. I said okay. As soon as I got the money I set about rewriting the driver’s manual at a lower reading level so it would be more accessible, though I made sure to retain the keywords they’d likely encounter on the permit exam. For each reading I created true/false and multiple-choice exercises to check their comprehension. This was what we read for parking on hills: When you leave your car, you must stop the engine, pull up the hand brake, put the ignition in the locked position, remove your key, and lock the door. When you park on a hill, pull up your hand brake. If you have a manual transmission, put your car in gear. If you have an automatic transmission, put your car in park (P). If you are parking downhill against a curb, turn your wheels in, towards the curb. If you are parking uphill against a curb, turn your wheels out, away from the curb. If there is no curb, turn your wheels in.

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They read the story to themselves, then I read it to them, then they read it to the person sitting next to them, then I projected the story on the board and they came up and circled the words they didn’t understand. As we went over the words I thought of a mnemonic device that had helped me when I was a teenager. You know Superman, I said. They nodded. Think about what he says when he takes flight. They stared back at me, waiting. Up, up, and away! They looked puzzled. Maybe they knew who Superman was but had never heard him say this, I thought, or had heard him say it but had no idea what he was talking about. I went into a crouch and made my arms straight and rose up from my hindquarters like I was about to take off. Up, up, and away! They started laughing and yelling at each other in Swahili. Have I done something wrong, I asked. Camille shook her head. This is like old dance, she said. We call it Mutuashi. That’s why.

The next class I wrote the word park on the board and asked them what it meant.

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Like when you go to Food Zone, Camille said. They have a big parking lot. I wrote Food Zone and parking lot on the board. Do I turn off the engine or leave it running? Turn it off. Do I leave my keys in the ignition? No. Right. Now sometimes I need to park my car but there’s no parking lot. Or I have to pay to park in a parking lot, or a garage, and this can be very expensive. For example, in New York City. So I have to park on the street. I was speaking from experience. Painful personal experience. My mother-in-law lived on 68th and 1st and we visited her at least four times a year. On these trips I spent more time thinking about parking than any human being should, and knew it was only a fraction of the time New Yorkers spent thinking about it. I’d learned the only way I could reliably find a spot on the street was to park during alternate-side parking restrictions, the days and times when parking was prohibited to allow for street sweeping. These were the only times residents moved their cars, so it was the only time I could find a spot. I’d park and sit in my car for an hour and a half and if the street sweep came I’d pull out so it could pass, then pull back into the spot, unless someone else came up from behind me and took it, in which case I’d follow the street sweep and take the next space, then sit in my car for the rest of the restriction period, because if a traffic cop came and I wasn’t in my car she’d give me a ticket to the tune of $125. The only problem with my system was that we never got to the city early enough to take advantage of alternate-side

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parking on the first day, so I still had to drive around and find a space and parallel park. Sometimes this took an hour or more. I’d think I’d found something and slow down, hoping I’d hit the jackpot, only to see a white sign with red letters staring back at me: No Standing Any Time. It felt like a slap in the face. My wife and son would urge me to continue on, but I was aggrieved, and would idle there, in front of the space, trying to convince myself no standing meant something else, because I could think of no good reason why they’d use the word standing when they could use the word parking, until a cabbie came racing up behind me, honking and cursing, and I’d give him the bird, and my wife would yell at me for modeling such bad behavior for my son, and my son, sitting in the backseat, would laugh his ass off. I drew two parallel lines on the board. Maybe you remember this from school, I said. What do we call these lines? Parallel, Antoine said. I drew two cars on the lower line, with a space between them, and a car on the upper line, directly across from the space. I’m looking for a space to park my car, I said. When I start, I’m parallel to the space, and to the other cars. When I finish I’m on the same line as the other cars. I drew an arrow from the car on the upper line to the space on the lower line. This is called parallel parking, I said. I have to do it for my road test. I can’t, Camille said. You can.

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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES If God is willing. Yes. If God is willing.

I turned off the lights and projected a video on the board. It was an overhead shot of a Toyota Camry driving down a city street, with an overlay video in the upper-left corner showing the driver’s hands on the steering wheel. He pulled up to a space between a Ford Taurus and a Honda Pilot, assessed whether it was big enough, then pulled even with the Pilot, put the car in reverse, cranked the steering wheel all the way to the right, and backed up. When his right headlight was even with the back of the Pilot he stopped, cranked the steering wheel all the way to the left, and backed into the space, coming so close to the Taurus that it looked like he was going to hit it. Everyone gasped. I paused the video. Sometimes you have to get really close to the car behind you, I said. But I think he gets too close.

We watched the video two more times and both times they held their breath, even though they knew he didn’t hit the Taurus. I turned on the lights. I want you to work with the person sitting next to you, I said. I gave each pair an envelope containing a set of pictures. They spread the pictures out on the table, picked up each one, studied it, and put it in the place they thought it occupied in the sequence. I projected the sequence on the board and they

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checked it and made any changes they needed to make. I pointed to each picture and told them what to do, in a series of commands, then gave each pair an envelope with the commands on separate strips of paper. I want you to put the words with the pictures, I said. They matched the commands and the pictures, and when they were ready I read the commands and they checked to see if they’d gotten everything right:

Pull up next to the first car. Check your distance. Line up the back of your car with the back of the first car. Turn your steering wheel towards the curb.

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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES Put the car in reverse. Back up. Stop when you see the headlights of the second car in your side-view mirror.

Turn your steering wheel back to the middle. Back up.

ROBERT RADIN Stop when the front of your car is even with the back of the first car.

Turn your steering wheel away from the curb.

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I read the commands one more time. They listened, repeating the words just under their breath.

Now I want you to talk to your partner, I said. I want you to teach your partner how to parallel park. They started talking to each other. When they weren’t sure what to say, or what came next, they looked at the pictures and the words. I walked around the room, listening. You guys sound really good, I said. Are you ready? They groaned. They wanted more time so they could memorize the script. It doesn’t matter what words you use, I said. Please, Teacher, Camille said. Put the pictures and the words back in the envelopes, I said. They did as I instructed. I collected all the envelopes.

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Okay, I said. Who can teach us how to parallel park? No one volunteered, so I waited. Finally Camille stood up and walked to the board. She pointed to the first picture. First you look at the space and you say okay, I want to know if this space is okay for my car. Then you say okay, this space is okay. So then you go up next to the car. You got to be one meter away from the car. So you say okay, yeah, that’s good. Then you turn your steering wheel all the way. She faced the class and traced a circle in the air, clockwise, with her right hand. Then she pointed to the second picture. You put the car in reverse and you go back, she said. You are looking in the mirror. She tapped the side-view mirror several times with her index finger. She leaned against the board. Teacher, she said. You’re doing great, I said. She shook her head. I turned to the class and asked them what she could say. You see the headlights in the mirror, Antoine said. And you stop. Camille repeated what Antoine said. Then she pointed to the wheels in picture three. You make the steering wheel straight, she said. And you make the wheels straight too, Yuyu said. I’m the teacher, Camille said. Everyone laughed. She pointed to picture four. And you go back back back, she said. Slow. You are the same with the back of that car, Bernadette said. Camille pointed to the bumper of the first car.

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And you stop, Josephine said. Excellent, Camille said. Excellent was my favorite word of praise and they all knew it. They were cracking up. You turn the steering wheel all the way, Antoine said. Camille traced a circle in the air with her left hand. And you go back and back, Yuyu said. Slow. Camille pointed to picture six. And then you stop, she said. Everyone burst into applause.

2. 170 Feet Below

I had a few more people come to the board and teach us how to parallel park, then we took a break. When we returned we read about what to do when driving close to a truck or bus. You can pass on the right if the vehicle you are passing is making a left turn, if you are driving on a one-way street, or if you are driving on a road where traffic goes in one direction. Be careful when driving next to trucks and buses. Trucks and buses have many blind spots. Do not drive closely behind a truck or bus.

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If you cannot see a truck’s mirrors, you are tailgating. You are driving too close. This is dangerous. If the truck stops, you will not have time to stop. It takes longer to pass a truck or bus. Remember that trucks and buses go slower uphill and faster downhill. Do not pass a truck or bus on the right unless it is necessary.

When I was adapting this section of the manual I was relieved to learn it was permissible to pass on the right if you were driving on a road where traffic went in one direction. But now, as I read the story to them, and came to the sentence Do not pass a truck or bus on the right unless it is necessary, I had to blink hard to hold back my tears. Teacher, Camille said. Are you okay?

Sometime in the middle of August 1991, I packed up my Mazda hatchback with clothes, books, a computer, a barbell, and 150 pounds of cast-iron weights. I’d bought the weights just before learning I’d been accepted into grad school at the University of Massachusetts, and hadn’t used them once. I drove from L.A. to Las Vegas on the first day, and planned to get to Denver on the second, but when I stopped for gas in Richfield, Utah, a mechanic who worked at the station pointed out that my tires were bald and that I shouldn’t be driving on them, so I waited around for a couple of hours while he installed a new set. I got back on the road still hoping to reach Denver, but as I drove through the San Rafael Swell and into Colorado, the shadow of my car lengthening in front of me, I knew I wasn’t going to make it—

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not unless I wanted to drive through the Rockies at night— so I got off the interstate and decided to check out the Colorado National Monument. There was only one road in and one road out: It twisted along the rim of the Colorado Plateau in a series of hairpin turns over sheer cliffs. I took it slow, stopping at a couple of lookouts to take pictures, and at dusk drove on to Grand Junction, where I checked into a Motel 6 for the night.

The interstate was empty the next morning: just one tractor trailer in the left lane. I stayed behind it for a stretch, hoping the driver would see me and move over, but he didn’t. I was afraid of getting stuck behind him as we gained elevation— as the two eastbound lanes merged into one—so I decided to pass him on the right:

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I don’t remember the moment of impact, or spinning out; it all happened too fast. The first thing I remember is the grill of the truck, inches from my face, and the door panel collapsed around me, and the handle of the window crank jammed into my side. And I remember the vibration of the truck’s engine, steady, deafening, and screaming for help, and realizing the driver couldn’t hear me. And I remember looking down the highway, hoping someone would see me in their rear-view mirror and stop, and wave the truck driver down, but there were no cars for as far as I could see.

I prayed to God. I don’t remember what I said. I know I used the word please.

And then the truck heaved, and its engine revved. I thought the driver was speeding up, but he was downshifting. My car shook as he dropped gears, and when he stopped I sat there for a minute, then got out of my car on the passenger side. A young man climbed down from the cabin of the truck. Holy shit, he said. He was looking at my car. The tires were blown. The wheels had been ground down to the axles. My father fell asleep, he said. I looked up at the truck. I could see the silhouette of someone sitting motionless at the steering wheel. I thought I heard something, the young man said. I’m like Dad, you’ve got to pull over, but he didn’t believe me.

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The cop arrived first, then the ambulance, and while the paramedics were examining me the cop walked the highway, studying the tread marks. When he was finished with his investigation he spoke to the paramedics and they told him I was okay. Then he turned to me. Somebody up there likes you, he said. Every time I’ve seen this happen the car flips and the truck drives right over it. Roadkill. The truck driver got out of the truck and came over to us. He was a stout man with a moustache. It wasn’t my fault, he said. You veered into his lane, the cop said. He was passing me on the right, the truck driver said. I’m giving you a ticket, the cop said.

A flatbed tow truck pulled up. The driver spoke to the cop for a minute, then winched my car. He’s going to take you to a body shop, the cop said. I got into the tow truck and we headed back to Grand Junction. Thank you, I said. I’m not the one you need to thank, the driver said. I mean for taking me to the body shop. Jesus Christ saved you today, he said. He’s giving you a second chance.

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The men at the body shop were working on a canary-yellow Chevy Vega when we got there. I’d always loved the Vega. It combined what were, for me, the two principal virtues of a car: sportiness and practicality. The owner of the shop came out and told the tow-truck driver where to put my car. Then he asked me what happened. I gave him some cursory details. He shook his head. They’re going to total it, he said. The man from the insurance company arrived about ten minutes later. He was wearing a plaid sport coat. He looked like Kirk Douglas. He walked around my car with a clipboard, taking notes, then got down on the ground and looked under the car. All I could think about was what it was going to do to his sport coat. The grit and the grime. The dry cleaner would never get it out. When he was finished inspecting my car he came over and shook my hand. They’ll put it on the lift, he said, but I can already see the frame is bent. It can’t be fixed. I had mixed feelings. I liked the Mazda. It represented a kind of milestone for me: It was the first new car I’d ever purchased. But I also knew that, even if it could’ve been repaired, I’d never be able to drive it again, because it would always make me think about what had happened.

The man from the insurance company spoke with the owner of the body shop; then we got in his car and drove to his office, an unassuming storefront in a strip mall, dark inside,

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70s-vintage wood paneling covering the walls. There was a sturdy woman sitting at a sturdier metal desk. This is Anita, the man said. She’s my secretary. Anita stood and shook my hand. They said you were dead, she said. I don’t understand, I said. On the radio, she said. They said you were dead. I felt like my life had gone on without me. Or my death had gone on without me. He must have big plans for you, she said. Anita, enough, the man said. Please cut him a check for the book value. We can’t, she said. They called. If we file a claim they’re going to dispute it. The cop wrote him a ticket, the man said. His son said he fell asleep, I said. They’re challenging it, she said.

The man from the insurance company told me not to worry. He said he’d look into it, and that he’d seen this kind of thing before, and that it was probably posturing on the carrier’s part, because they ran high liabilities and never wanted to pay claims. I guess you’re going to have to stay in town for a few days, he said. Until we get this sorted out. He took me to get a rental car. I drove back to the Motel 6 and requested the same room I’d had the night before. The man from the insurance company called me late that afternoon to give me an update.

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He’s got two previous claims against him, he said. If the ticket sticks he’ll lose his license. That’s why he’s fighting it. So I don’t know what to tell you. You can get back on the road, but I can’t promise you we’ll be able to reimburse you for anything. I knew I couldn’t drive the rest of the way to Massachusetts; I’d have a panic attack every time a tractor trailer pulled alongside me. But I couldn’t afford to fly the rest of the way. I didn’t have any money. A judge needs to review the case, the man said. They’ll probably call in the cop. If it were me I’d stick around, try to keep my expenses down. Give it some thought. Let me know what you’d like to do.

When I went to get dinner that night I found red flyers all over the windshield of my rental car, pinned under the wiper blades. I pulled one off and looked at it. There was an image of a cross and a series of questions. Did I feel hopeless? Did I realize there was someone there, someone who loved me? Someone who could heal me? Someone who could take away my pain? He was waiting for me with open arms. All I had to do was let Him into my heart.

When I was a boy I was scared of Jesus, and had never really gotten over it. I grew up in mostly Catholic neighborhoods, so I’d been called a kike, and a dirty Jew, and had learned to live with it, but when we lived in Attleboro there was one

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family, the Cerenzas, who wouldn’t leave it at that. They had two boys my age, Johnny and Marky, and four girls who were older. One day the boys were playing at my house and after they went home I found a snow globe of the crucifixion on my desk. It was the first time I’d seen it up close. Christ’s body was yellow. The cloth covering his loins was red. I shook the globe and watched the snow fall around him. I thought Johnny and Marky must have left the snow globe at my house by accident. I tried to give it back to them, but they told me it wasn’t theirs. They started leaving other representations of the crucifixion in my room, hiding them in my dresser, or under my bed, so I wouldn’t find them right away. There was a glass paperweight with Christ on the cross in gold. There was a wood carving of Christ on the cross with real nails driven through his ankles and his wrists. He was in agony. I think some part of me knew it was the Cerenzas, but I was also afraid it wasn’t them, that it was supernatural, that God was telling me I had done something wrong, and that the only way I could be redeemed was by becoming a Christian. So I didn’t know what to do with the crucifixes, because I was afraid if I threw them away something bad would happen, so I kept them in a shoebox in my closet, and sometimes I would take them out and look at them. There was something about Christ’s body that spoke to me, something about how thin he was, like me. Something about the way his legs were bent, the way his knees touched, the way his arms were spread like a bird. One Saturday morning I was over at Johnny and Marky’s house listening to Jackson Five records when the four Cerenza girls burst into the bedroom dressed in their

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Catholic school uniforms: black vests, green plaid skirts, knee socks, and saddle shoes. Let’s listen to something else, they said. They put on the soundtrack for Jesus Christ Superstar. As the overture began all the Cerenza kids started singing in unison: Jesus Christ. Superstar. Do you think you’re what they say you are? I was sitting on the floor trying to lip sync, but I didn’t know the words. He’s not singing, one of the Cerenza girls said. And then it was as if they had planned it in advance: Without saying a word to each other they turned on me and started chanting: You killed Christ! You killed Christ! You killed Christ! The oldest daughter was in my face, spitting the words at me, then she picked me up, dragged me across the room, pushed me into the closet, and slammed the door, and they all leaned against it so I couldn’t get out, and kept screaming at me about the terrible thing I had done. As the overture segued into Judas’ first solo, I knelt down in the dark and prayed they wouldn’t open the door.

I put the flyer back on the windshield, went to my room, and turned on the TV. There was a news special about the coup in the Soviet Union, which was entering its third day. I felt bad that I was only just finding out about it, because ordinarily this was something I would’ve been paying close attention to, but I couldn’t focus on it right now.

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I flipped through the channels until I came upon Sea Hunt, an old black-and-white show starring Lloyd Bridges. It reminded me of some of the shows I used to watch in syndication as a boy—Combat, Branded, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea—and I couldn’t believe I’d never seen it before. Bridges played Mike Nelson, a former navy frogman who, as Bridges explained in voiceover, did freelance work for governments and corporations, but also helped individuals in need. In this episode a mining company had discovered an ore of beryllium at the bottom of an underwater canyon off the coast of Madagascar. But the ocean currents made it impossible for them to use their equipment to dredge it, so they were looking for scuba divers to do it. They wanted to hire Mike to put together a diving team, but he told the boss of the mining company it wouldn’t be easy to find men who could do the job, because at that depth divers were prone to rapture of the deep. The boss was confused, so Mike explained: It’s a groggy feeling, caused by compressed nitrogen in the body. The technical term for it is nitrogen narcosis. You don’t know where you are and you start seeing things. Still, with this caveat, Mike agreed to take the job. The mining company set up a diving barge a mile from the canyon and he set about testing men. Before he took them down he explained that he’d be evaluating them based on the number of rocks they could gather, their diving technique, their response to orders, and their reaction to emergency. He had an underwater slate, and if he needed to communicate something to them he’d write his instructions on it.

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The last two divers he took down were Paul and Doug. Unbeknownst to him, the two had once been best friends, but had had a falling out when Paul’s girlfriend left him for Doug. Paul was still angry about it, and once in the canyon he worked fast, picking up lots of big rocks and putting them into a net in an effort to make Doug look bad. Concerned Paul would push himself to the point of exhaustion, Mike wrote Slow down! on his slate. But it was too late. .

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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES I was grading Doug, observing him closely, when Paul suddenly did the unexpected. Instead of a rock, he picked up a guitar fish and began doing a warrior dance.

I told him he had rapture of the deep. I ordered him to go up to the shallower water where the condition would automatically clear up.

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But instead of obeying, he nearly bashed my head in.

Then he surprised Doug. This was rapture of the deep at its unpredictable worst. One minute he was like a kid playing games, the next he was a crazed madman bent on killing every living creature within reach.

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3. Rules of the road

Teacher, Camille said. Are you okay? Give me a second, I said. I just have something in my eye. When I was ready I read the rest of the story to them, then projected it on the board. They came up and circled the words they didn’t understand: blind spot tailgating necessary shake

I turned off the projector and wrote blind spot on the board and drew a box around it, then elicited what they knew about it, writing down everything they said until the board was covered with their ideas and they had a working sense of what blind spot meant. Then I erased it and we started over again with the next word on the list. The only word that still stymied them was tailgating, so I turned the projector back on and we looked at the illustration. I pointed to the car that was directly behind the truck:

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I’m tailgating, I said. I’m driving too close. If the truck stops, I’ll crash into it. It’s dangerous to tailgate any kind of vehicle, but a car has a back window, so the driver can see me. She can flash her lights to get me to slow down, or change lanes to let me pass. A truck doesn’t have a back window. It only has mirrors, and the mirrors only show cars that are next to the truck, not behind it. So if I’m driving here, the truck driver can’t see me. To be safe I have to make sure I can see the mirrors of the truck at all times. If I can see the mirrors, then the truck driver can see me. If I can’t see the mirrors, then I’m in the truck driver’s blind spot. I’m in danger. I was dissatisfied with my explanation. All I was doing was repeating what was in the reading, in different terms. This was why, I realized, the permit test was so difficult for them: It was abstract. It was testing them on words they’d studied, words they’d memorized but had never used, and probably never would.

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When I was a teenager I used to go to the junkyard to get parts for my VW. I’d always get waylaid there, lost in the rows and rows of totaled vehicles, stacked and rusting. I’d find a car I liked and climb into it and imagine the world it had once been a part of, scenes that had come to me from movies: a young man driving up the Pacific Coast Highway the day before leaving for Vietnam, or a middle-aged woman driving down Sunset Boulevard the day after Kennedy was shot, wearing Harlequin sunglasses and a black scarf over her head to keep her hair from blowing into her face. I had the luxury to imagine such things only because there was so much else I could take for granted. I knew what a turn signal was, and a gear shift, and a radio dial. I had used these words countless times. If Camille had been with me she wouldn’t have seen what I saw. If I’d taken the knob off a gear shift and showed it to her she would’ve been puzzled. There were numbers on it—one through five, arranged in a pattern, odd on top, even below, the letter R below the number five—but it was a code she couldn’t crack, the instructions for a game she didn’t know how to play. She might have thought the knob was something else: A pestle, or the handle for a door, or a projectile, and she would’ve had different words for each of these things, words she could never translate as gear-shift knob, no matter how many times she looked them up on her phone.

I handed out the yes/no worksheet and gave them a few minutes to complete it, then projected it on the board:

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Circle YES or NO

1. You can pass on the right if you are driving on a one-way street.

Yes

No

2. Trucks and buses have many blind spots.

Yes

No

3. Tailgating is when you drive too close behind a car or truck.

Yes

No

4. It takes less time to pass a truck or bus.

Yes

No

5. Trucks and buses go faster uphill.

Yes

No

As we were going over it Camille asked if she would get a ticket if she tailgated. Maybe, I said. If I pass a car on the right on a two-way street and a police officer sees me, he will give me a ticket. He can see I’m breaking the law. But police officers almost never

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give tickets for tailgating because it’s not always clear who’s in the wrong. It depends on how much traffic there is, and how fast the car in front is going, and how fast the car behind is going, and if the car in front should’ve let the car behind pass, and if it was safe to do so. So for me it’s not so much about breaking the law or getting a ticket. I don’t tailgate because it’s very dangerous.

The more I talked the more conflicted I felt. It wasn’t the first time: It seemed like everything that had anything to do with driving automatically begged questions about racism, about driving while black. I’d planned to address it in a couple of weeks, when we got to the reading about what to do when a cop pulls you over, but I felt an obligation to say something now, to let them know that nothing was as straightforward as the driver’s manual made it seem, that they would have to follow a different set of rules because of the color of their skin. The only thing holding me back was that I didn’t want to hasten the end of their honeymoon. Like all refugees who had just arrived, they were in love. They thought the United States was perfect. I wanted them to feel that way for as long as possible. They’d experienced so much trauma; they deserved to relax and enjoy their newfound safety. I have to tell you something, I said. It’s going to be different for you. You will have to be more careful. There’s a lot of racism in the United States. The police will watch you in a way they don’t watch me. If a police officer sees me tailgating, he probably won’t do anything. If he sees you

100 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES tailgating, he might give you a ticket. I’m sorry I have to tell you this, but I want you to be prepared. I’m really sorry. Teacher, Camille said. It’s okay.

4. More rules of the road

Driving is a rule-governed behavior, but those rules can vary in different places, in different parts of the world. If I drive in a foreign country I might find it stressful, and look, desperately, for the ways in which driving in this place and driving in the United States are similar. Some of the rules will no doubt be the same, but many will be completely different, so different that they won’t appear to be rules at all. And then there are the rules that have been codified into law and the ones that remain unwritten, customs only locals may know. Sometimes it’s not such a big deal. For example, when I first moved to western Massachusetts I was confounded by the way people gave directions. Instead of saying Go straight and turn right on Elm Street they said Go past Porter’s Shoe Repair and make a right where Ma’s Millinery used to be. I had no idea what they were talking about, and if I asked them what street Ma’s Millinery used to be on they looked at me like I had two heads. And then if someone asked me for directions and I told them how to get where they wanted to go by using cardinal points—north, south, east, and west—the shit really hit the fan, because, unlike me, they hadn’t spent their lives navigating the L.A. freeway system, so they thought I was fucking with them. People in Massachusetts are so illogical, I told myself.

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102 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES This is what I do when I’m in an unfamiliar situation: I try to find something familiar. I try to soothe myself. I try to reduce my anxiety. But when I’m driving in a foreign country and find rules I recognize, I don’t then tell myself these shared rules are universal, the rules all drivers must follow to maintain a minimum degree of safety. I don’t tell myself these rules transcend country and culture. I don’t tell myself these rules are deep. I don’t tell myself this because I know the rules for driving are conventions, a series of social agreements. And I know that they’ve developed over time, and that there are more rules now than there were when people first started driving, which is not to say that the rules that regulated driving in 1930 were somehow incomplete. It’s the same with a language and its grammar. A grammar can describe how a particular group of people use a particular language, but there’s nothing deep or universal or transcendent about it. It’s just one more language activity.

Grammar emerges from language, not vice versa, so it can never describe everything that’s happening in a language at a given time. It’s like the light from a star. My wife is an editor and this drives her crazy. She hates it when people don’t follow the rules. She balks when I say gonna instead of going to, and bemoans the spelling of doughnut as donut. One of her biggest pet peeves is when English speakers use the verb lay when they should use lie. Lay means to place

ROBERT RADIN 103 one thing on top of another. It’s similar to put, and is often used for dramatic effect, as in Cher’s “Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves”: But every night all the men would come around, and lay their money down. The past tense of lay is laid. Last night all the men came around, and laid their money down. English speakers tend to follow convention when they use the verb lay, but then they mix up lay and lie. Lie means to put one’s body in a reclining position. The past tense of lie is lay, which is the cause of the confusion. English speakers will say I’m going to lie down for a nap or I’m going to lay down for a nap. The substitution is already acceptable in speech, and soon will be acceptable in writing. As the usage of a word changes, so does its grammar. There’s nothing my wife can do about it, and this is what frustrates her.

Grammar posits time. It tells me when something happened and its relative importance. So I might say I drove to work or I was driving to work. In the first case, I want you to know that I’m finished driving to work, and in the second I want you to know that I was doing something—driving to work—when something more important to me happened. For example: I was driving to work when my wife called. Now the important part of the story is the phone ringing—my wife calling me—

104 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES and driving to work is a background activity, an action I was engaged in when something more important happened, something I gave my full attention to. Grammar also posits being. It tells me what something is—noun, adjective, verb, preposition—and, once again, its relative importance. When I read this sentence—Stop when you see the headlights of the second car in your side-view mirror— I’m struck by the fact that each word is a discrete unit, separate from the others, so that all the words, at first blush, seem equal. But when I analyze the grammar of the sentence I realize some of the words are more important than others. The word mirror, for example, seems to correspond to something irreducible, so much so that I could distill the entire sentence to this single word, teach Camille to stop when she sees the headlights of the second car in her sideview mirror simply by saying mirror, and she’d never need to learn the other words, at least not in order to stop when she sees the headlights of the second car in her side-view mirror.

Which brings me back to Plato’s argument in the Cratylus: The name, like the picture, is an imitation. By name Plato means primary names, or what he elsewhere calls primitive—or first—nouns. He thinks letters function the way pigment does for the painter, that they have certain inherent properties, such that certain letters, when combined, capture the essence of the object to which they refer in a way that other letters don’t, or can’t. For example, he would argue that in English we can use only the letters s,

ROBERT RADIN 105 k, and y to form the word that refers to the sky, in the same way that a painter, when looking at the sky, must use some shade of blue in order to render it accurately. Plato’s reasoning is rather convoluted, but it’s by way of making a broader point: Words are images. They point to or represent or depict objects. They derive their meaning from their reference. And so it follows that primary names—the nouns that are the building blocks for all of language—are labels, but they’re also propositions: They name, and in the act of naming, they state what is true. They assert This thing exists.

This is the implicit premise of Plato’s theory of meaning: Some words are more important than others. Nouns are the best because the relationship between the word and the object is singular: The word mirror refers to one thing. Verbs are pretty good too, but not as good as nouns, because the same verb can refer to more than one action: I check my distance, but I also check my anger when another driver cuts me off. As for the other parts of speech, I’m not sure what they refer to, or how, but I trust that it’ll all work itself out somehow. If I’m good with the nouns and the verbs then I’m good to go.

And yet I can’t shake the feeling: All words are equal. They’re just sounds or letters grouped together and separated from

106 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES each other in time, or space. On a brute, physical level, that’s all language is.

Sometimes it helps me to think about this list of words: table, unicorn, God, the. Sometimes it helps me to think about how these words derive their meaning, because it seems so different for each word. Table is pretty straightforward: It refers to a concrete, physical object. Unicorn, however, is a bit more complicated. I don’t remember thinking about this word until I was in college. My first real girlfriend believed in unicorns, or at least she said she believed in unicorns. I hope she didn’t. I hope I wasn’t dating someone who believed in unicorns. Unicorns are imaginary creatures, so if the word unicorn refers at all it refers to images of unicorns, rather than to actual animals in the actual world. For my girlfriend the word unicorn conjured courtly love. It evoked a longing within her for another time, a realm in which true romance engendered a kind of spiritual enlightenment. When I told a friend who happened to be an English major about it he said unicorns were phallic symbols. He said it as if it were common knowledge, a matter of established fact, and I was embarrassed, first because it made me feel like my girlfriend’s relationship to the word unicorn was juvenile, and second because I’d never considered the possibility that something could symbolize a penis. Now I was seeing penises everywhere.

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One day I made the mistake of telling my girlfriend that unicorns didn’t exist. She told me there was no way to prove that. Maybe they’re hiding, she said. Maybe they don’t want to be found. The fact that she could use the word unicorn and I understood what she was talking about allowed her to attribute existence to unicorns, to make existence a condition of the meaning of the word. This was vexing to me, but there was nothing I could do about it.

I think my relationship to the word unicorn is so complicated because my girlfriend left me for an Englishman she met at a leather shop in Florence. I still feel wounded by it. She believed in unicorns. That’s the word she used: believe. So either her belief was predicated on the actual existence of unicorns, or it was predicated on the possible nonexistence of unicorns, and that’s why she believed, because she couldn’t know. This is a distinction people often make between knowledge and belief. The only way for me to find out what was going through her head, to understand what the necessary conditions for her belief were, would be to track her down and call her up and ask her, and that would be weird. She’d probably hang up on me.

108 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES The word God might refer to a person or it might refer to a visual representation of God, or it might refer to something abstract, an idea, or an emotion, like love. But the word God begs the same questions about the nature of belief that the word unicorn does; the only difference is that the stakes are so much higher, because so many people believe that God gives their lives meaning. That is, their belief in God is contingent on the existence of God. That is, the word God has meaning if and only if God exists. This is a lot of pressure to put on a word.

We have a saying in English:

There are no atheists in foxholes.

It points out what happens when your life is in danger: You pray. You ask for God’s help. Even people who say they don’t believe in God ask for God’s help when confronting their own death, or the death of a loved one. Even an atheist prays for God’s protection in a moment of danger. I find the saying compelling because it captures a certain kind of situation in which we use the word God. But when people say this they have something else in mind. They see it as a demonstration: The existence of God is proven by virtue of the atheist’s hypocrisy.

ROBERT RADIN 109 The saying begs a bigger question about the nature of prayer, about whether my prayer is actually prayer if I don’t believe, in that moment, that someone’s listening, someone who has the power to intervene in human affairs, to determine the outcome of events. This is the argument implicit in the saying:

I pray. Prayer requires a belief in God. Therefore, when I pray I believe in God.

But it’s circular: It hinges on my definition of prayer. Once I define prayer in this way, there’s only one logical conclusion.

It’s as if belief imbues the act of prayer with a passion so powerful it can bring God into being, even in a moment of danger, or especially in a moment of danger, so that prayer without belief is nothing more than a pale imitation, a hollow exercise, words without feeling, without conviction. I don’t know. I don’t believe in God and never have. But I’ve prayed. Many times. Throughout my life. With all my heart. When the truck hit me on the interstate. When my son was a baby and he got very sick. Whenever I’ve been worried about my son, whenever I’ve been scared for his safety, I’ve prayed to God, pleaded with God, begged God.

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Maybe someone is listening, maybe not. But in this situation I pray. In this situation I say this kind of thing.

The person who believes God exists, the person who doesn’t, and the person who doesn’t think it’s possible to know all subscribe to the same mistaken theory of meaning, so choosing between the three positions is beside the point. The word God has meaning, and its meaning has nothing to do with existence or nonexistence.

The word the is the exception on this list. It has a different grammatical status precisely because it appears to derive its meaning in such a different way, because it doesn’t refer to anything at all. Its meaning is instead predicated on a common experience, a context that is familiar to a group of language users. It presumes we all know what we’re talking about, so when I say Sit on the table you know not only what table I’m referring to but why I’m referring to that specific table, why I’m saying Sit on the table instead of Sit on a table. It’s the same when we use words figuratively. The Yiddish expression for Shit or get off the pot is Tuchen afen tisch, which, translated word for word, is Put your ass on the table. You wouldn’t tell me to put my ass on a table—hey, go find a table and put your ass on it—because we both know what we’re

ROBERT RADIN 111 talking about: The thing I don’t want to do, the thing I’m afraid to do, the thing you’re urging me to do. You have no choice: You have to use the word the.

I guess if someone asked me if the word the exists I’d have to say yes. I guess I’d have to say all words exist, insofar as all words have one or more physical properties. But this is a strange and trivial observation. I’ve never asked myself whether the exists. That is, I’ve never asked myself what the word the refers to. That is, I’ve never wondered whether the could be a noun, whether there was such a thing as the-ness.

Table, unicorn, and God derive their meaning in the same way as the. The isn’t the exception; it’s the rule.

Existence is a noun. Exist is a verb. Existing and existent are adjectives. I use existing a lot, often to describe a current condition or state of affairs: The existing regime needs to be overthrown. I don’t use existent too much, and when I do it’s in the same way I use a related word—extant. So I might say This is the only existent block print of a unicorn from the Tudor period. Either way, I never use existing or existent to attribute existence to an object. I don’t say The table is existing, or The

112 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES table is existent, or The table has existence, or even The table exists, unless I’m doing philosophy, and am trying to talk myself into, or out of, some sort of solipsism. But I’m not plumbing the depths of anything when I do this—I’m simply acting, once again, like a jackass, searching for something essential, something transcendent, telling myself I can find it if I just use different words.

5. Camille

I can’t say the life here is bad, because, first, you are responsible for yourself. And if you have a family, you are responsible for your family too. In Congo, we just think about our parents. We just stay close to our parents. But here you learn more things. Here you work, and in Congo sometimes you can’t. Here, you need to. If not, you can’t survive in a good way. Here you get your money, and you know what you can do, and what you can’t.

Without my license, surely I can’t move on, because even different jobs, when they ask you do you have your license and you say no, they will not give you the job, because they think if you don’t have license you are not reliable. Like where I am now, I’m working, and it’s very far, like 40 minutes away. I’m a caregiver. I give them a bath, or a shower, and medicine. I do some shopping for them. I go to the supermarket. They make a list, then I go with that list. I pick up the things they wrote down, I go back, and I give to them. If they need to go to a doctor’s appointment, I bring them, because I have my license. If I don’t have that, I can’t.

The driver’s license opens the door for everyone who is fighting for that opportunity. Even from the time you have the learner’s permit to the time you get your driver’s license, 113

114 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES you feel something change in your body. You feel like you’re happy. You’re good. You’re safe. You can do anything you want. You can go anywhere you want.

I’ve been driving for two years. Now I don’t think about driving; I just think about safety. I make sure I have my seatbelt, look to see if my car is good, and focus in front of me, on the car in front of me, just look at that, and be safe, and look for something bad in the road, and make sure everything is okay. I’m feeling very good, because driving has helped me a lot. Before I couldn’t go to work and bring my children to school. I couldn’t do it. But now, in the morning I wake up and prepare my kids and bring them first to school, and then I go to my job. Or I go to work first and then I request some hours to bring my children to their doctors’ appointments. If I can’t drive, I can’t do nothing. It will be hard to do four things in one day, in a short time. It will be impossible.

In Congo we don’t have all the rules we have here in America. That’s why you see, especially in Uvira, where I’m from, we don’t have good roads like here. We don’t have any lights to show you, like if you see this light you need to stop or you need to go. We don’t have that. We don’t have even the road markings, for the people to cross the road, or you need to drive on this side of the street. So it was very new when we came here and learned about driving.

ROBERT RADIN 115 In Congo, if you are crossing the road, it’s your responsibility to make sure you see if the car is near to you. It’s not like here, where the driver sees the people want to cross and starts to slow down and stop. It’s my responsibility. I see the car there, I say oh, okay, let me wait here, until the car passes, and then I can cross the road. If I don’t see good, and the car is fast, it can hit me. It happens. A lot.

People don’t go to driving school in Congo. Someone can show you how to drive and then you learn from there. You don’t need to go to school. You don’t need a license for driving. You buy your car, you go to the motor-vehicle registration, you show them this is my car, you give the money, they register you, they give you the plates and everything and you put your car on the road. No test, no insurance, no nothing.

Most of the laws here in America, in Congo we don’t have that. So we just learn more things according to God.

I’m Christian. My parents are Catholic, and they believe that a lot. Like my mom, before, sometimes we say Mom, can you change your religion? And she says no, I can’t change. Why change? Forever and ever I will still be Catholic, because I believe in Mary. And we say okay, it’s good. And me, too, I was Catholic, when I was a little girl. But when I grew up I had to change. I said okay, I will be Christian, and then when I go there, I saw it was not a big difference. It’s the way you

116 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES believe in God or Jesus. The Christian, they do some things different than Catholic, like for the baptism. The Catholic takes the cup and water and pours that on the head of someone, but the Christian they put someone in more water, like a small river or piscine. They put them in there. And the way they preach is different. Catholics they can preach, and the word they preach here today in Catholic church, everywhere it will be the same word. But the Christian, it’s different. One church can preach this word, another church this word.

I changed when I got married. My husband was Christian. And they say the women don’t have religion. We say that. So when you get married, you follow your husband. But some women, no. Like one of my sisters, in Africa, she was saying she can’t follow her husband, she will stay Catholic, and the husband Christian. It’s okay. They did that. They had the wedding. It was good. They still live like that.

I miss my parents. My family. I left Uvira because of war. You see, there we don’t have peace. No peace. We can still eat, we can still drink, but if you don’t have peace, it’s like it’s nothing. It’s dangerous for me, for my family, for everyone there until now. My mother stayed because when the war started, we ran different ways. She ran to a village. The people who ran to the village, they just went back. One by one, one by one, they went back to Uvira, even though it is still dangerous. So they were going that way, and me, I was going with my uncle the other way, so from there it was hard to be together again. So I just went with my uncle and

ROBERT RADIN 117 started a new life in Kenya. I didn’t think again about Uvira, because when I remembered that, I thought about all the things that happened, and I said no, I can’t go back there again. Let me stay here and continue the life here.

I can’t talk to my mother every day because in Uvira we still have the problem of electricity. Sometimes she doesn’t have power in her phone. You can call and you can’t find her. When you find her, she tells you oh, I didn’t have power in the phone, so I was going somewhere to charge it, so now I have charge, so now we can talk. It’s very hard for me. That’s why I need to be a citizen, so I can go back to help her.

Maybe the good life is in heaven. Because here we’re suffering a lot. Even though we say America is good, it’s not good like heaven. We still have suffering. If they send you the bill and you don’t think you can pay all that amount, you say my goodness, what is this? In heaven, if you have the chance to go there, everything is free. You pray to get there one day.

When I am a citizen, I want to bring my fiancé. He’s in Kenya. I met him in Nairobi. So maybe I can stay with him and he can help me with the kids too. Because I did a lot, and it’s hard. I can work hard—very hard—but the money I get, I can’t save, because of bills. Rent, car, everything. But if you are two, it is better than one. You share.

118 TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES My husband, the father of the kids, he passed away. Some people were shooting, and they shot him. It happened like that. And then I said no, I can’t stay like this, let me do something. Let me leave. God let me leave.

Credits

Part One: The Color Blue Pages 23, 31: Illustrations by Henry Sato Part Two: Springfield 2011 Page 43: Photo by permission of Peter Cowles, Robert Macedo, and the Amateur Radio Skywarn Program Page 46: Photo by permission of Trinity United Methodist Church Page 56: Photo by author Part Three: Rapture of the Deep Pages 73-76, 79, 81-82: Illustrations by Henry Sato Pages 92-94: Screenshots from Sea Hunt, MGM, 1958

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people: My students, for sharing your lives with me, and for teaching me how to teach Valerie Lange, Jakob Horstmann, and Laura Quilter, for your counsel and support Henry Sato, for your illustrations and your friendship Amy Kroin, for being my reader, my editor, and the love of my life Max Radin, for always being my baby boy

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