—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
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
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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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES
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
ROBERT RADIN
13
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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TEACHING ENGLISH TO REFUGEES
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.
—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