‘Cat and Dog and Sky and Wind’
‘Cat and Dog and Sky and Wind’
A piece by Nick Xuereb
What is a word? A carrier bag for meaning? A little boat on a broad sea? Is a word just an image or the thing itself? Do words think? Do they feel? Why do some words have two meanings? Why do other words have three? Line up enough words in a row and you have a sentence. String together a few of these and you have a paragraph. Carve away at your paragraph with a chisel and knife and you get a poem.
One property of words that’s worth keeping in mind is their tendency to multiply. There’s no up without down, no cat without dog, no love without hate. A word can’t exist in isolation. Words need other words like human beings need other human beings. It is not too much of a stretch, therefore, to imagine a word as a member of a community. Why not? Words eat and drink, words work, words go to school, have children, argue, cry. Words hurt. Words heal. Let’s take the metaphor seriously. If a word is a member of a community, what sort of community is it? What are its values?
In our classes at Alpha Land, students spend a lot of time and effort forming words into rudimentary English sentences. The sky is blue. My name is Ahmed. I like fishing. For many, it is their first time expressing themselves in English. Their pronunciation is awkward, their confidence low. The journey from French to English is arduous, from Arabic and Farsi even more so. Students brush up against their physical limitations. Simple English words like scissors, hour, schedule and comfortable can feel like rocks in the mouths of people whose mother tongues have their roots to the south and east of the Mediterranean. I tell my students learning English is very difficult. I tell them come back tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. Still, it is a lot to ask of someone. Students can become disheartened. The language can seem too vast, too unwieldy. They want to master English in six months. I tell them it will probably take years.
But a word can’t exist in isolation, and neither can a student. There’s no student without teacher, no teacher without class, no class without students and so on. As Paulo Freire argued in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a relationship between teacher and student that is based on the passive reception of knowledge is dehumanising. While a classroom, like any community, might depend on hierarchy to establish social order, this structure does not necessarily need to be rigid or inhuman. In Freire’s classroom, a student should feel free to teach and a teacher must be prepared to learn.
We are aware at Alpha Land that a word can also be a weapon. A word that comes up a lot when I’m talking with students about the situation facing refugees in Greece is ignorance. I am often surprised by how many people know it in English. It’s a word that seems to possess the crude finality of a full-stop, squatting smugly at either end of a sentence, barring both the way forward and the way back. Ignorance can seem insurmountable, especially to those who’ve experienced its repercussions firsthand. But against ignorance there is empathy and understanding. In the classroom, these are near synonyms. ‘Teacher, I understand’—a word can be a bridge, a word can hold your hand.
So I tell my students learning English is very difficult, but we will do it together. I say I am learning too. Sometimes they don’t believe me. They smile shyly. They say, ‘Thank you, Teacher.’ But there’s a look in their eyes like, ‘Easy for you to say.’ Of course, they’re right. Few things are so much easier said than done as learning a language. My own efforts in this regard have been suitably humbling. A few words in Arabic, a little high school French, but nothing much sticks. My students are more patient teachers than I. ‘How do you say it in your language?’ I ask them. Shukran. Le poisson. Mutarjim. I pronounce the foreign words with a rising inflection, every sound uncertain, a question mark dangling from the end of my tongue.
No educator who takes their work seriously can say in good faith that they do not have doubts about the efficacy of their classroom. A lesson is a slippery thing, and grand plans sometimes need a long leash. A shaky lesson can shake your confidence. Students’ trust can’t be taken for granted. If a lesson seems too difficult, if words no longer flow freely from my students’ lips and the classroom goes quiet, I worry I won’t see them again.
But people do come back. With startling regularity. The same faces reappear at Alpha Land day after day, and they come smiling and vivid, the gleam of sweat on the brow, eyes squinting in the Samos sun. They come ready to learn. They come wanting to understand. What is a word? I write hundreds on the whiteboard each day. I write cat and dog and sky and wind. I tell my students their English is improving. I listen to them coax the words through the threshold of the throat, over the bridge of the tongue, past the gate of the teeth. I listen to the wind batter the canvas walls of my classroom, a sound like horses at a gallop, and I wonder if even the mountains feel the urge to speak.