The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  Hi Mrs

  Hi Methusella! Have you been playing in the snow or are you staying inside to keep warm?

  Am inside because outside is too much cold and am doing my homework

  That’s nice. My son is playing video games with our next-door neighbors. I wish he was doing his homework!

  Oh that’s great is this your son here in your profile picture

  Yes that’s him. But he was only about eight years old when we took that picture. Now he is 13. He plays soccer and baseball and likes sports a lot. He is also a good student, like you and Solomon. He is a great kid, I am a lucky mom.

  Oh me too i like sports do you have only one child Mrs

  Yes I have only one child. I wish I had many more! We Irish people like big families. Many of my cousins have four or five children. But in some ways having only one child does make life easier . . . I am going to go and check on my son and his friends—I hope you have a good rest of the weekend.

  In journalism, traditionally, becoming close to your subjects is discouraged. The reasoning behind this is that the journalist might cross over a line—might lose his or her objectivity. And teachers generally do not talk about how much, emotionally, students offer them. But when the girls walked over with their arms open for an embrace or the boys were giving soul handshakes or Saúl was saying Tia! or Lisbeth was taking selfies with her cheek pressed tightly to my face, the warmth of the students’ affection filled my life with a sunny kind of joy. The thought of the end of the school year, which would happen in just one month, induced in me an anticipatory sadness; I did not want the year to end. I confessed this to Eddie Williams one day, upstairs in the copy room, and he admitted that the jubilance emanating from the students was lifting him up as well.

  “I just feel like there’s so much more life in your room,” I told him. “The kids are so much more exuberant and more talkative and they’re interacting more with one another, and you can feel their personalities so much more. It’s like a totally different classroom than it was back at the start of the year. I enjoy the time I spend in the classroom for so many reasons—watching the way you teach and watching all the kids evolve. But I also just enjoy interacting with them these days.”

  “They want to show their appreciation and their affection,” Mr. Williams replied. “Yeah. I feel lucky, too, to be in the classroom with them.”

  * * *

  As they grew more communicative, the students attracted more visitors. Eritreans flocked to Room 142 at lunchtime to chat with Yonatan and Ksanet, while Shani made friends with anybody from countries that bordered Tajikistan, and Jakleen pulled in a bevy of suitors. Her most frequent visitor was Ghasem, along with his perpetual shadow, Rahim (the two young men from Afghanistan who had moved upstairs at the start of the year). Ghasem’s face took on a fiery, possessive look whenever he gazed at the object of his adoration, cat-eyed, stylish Jakleen. The main impediment in their just-about-flowering romance was the fact that they could not actually speak to one another—not much, anyway. Ghasem spoke Dari, Pashtu, and Farsi, but not Arabic; Jakleen spoke several varieties of Arabic, as well as Turkish, but not any of the languages Ghasem knew. They managed to conduct a full-blown flirtation nonetheless using Google Translate and pidgin English.

  One day, over lunch, Jakleen held out her hand and said, in a curt voice, “Give me your phone!” Ghasem wore a dubious look on his face but handed over his device as bid. She played with it happily for a few minutes and then looked over at me to make sure I registered her command over the boy. Ghasem looked at Jakleen with a slightly haunted expression, as though he wished he could have either his phone or the girl holding it. She cocked one eyebrow at me jauntily, as if to say, See what I can do? It was indeed impressive. Jakleen kept all her suitors at a slight distance, which only enhanced her hold on them, but sometimes her methods were cruel. She would shun, ignore, and tease in a fashion that bordered on mean. At this point in the year, however, I began seeing Jakleen walk the hallways in Ghasem’s company more and more often, as he assiduously showed up at the doors of her various classrooms. If I had to guess which boy she liked the most, I would have said it was this stocky, dark-haired young man from Afghanistan in a leather bomber jacket and designer jeans. He had a handsome face, steadily-gazing-at-you brown eyes, and sideburns that were slightly long, rock-and-roll style. Shani saw matters the same way and confided to me that Ghasem was Jakleen’s first official boyfriend. “No!” objected Jakleen, when I checked to see if this was true. “No boyfriend! Friend.”

  Meanwhile, Jakleen continued to see what power she could exert over other boys. For the moment, Saúl remained the boy she interacted with most in Room 142. One day, Jakleen walked over to exchange pleasantries with him, then she drifted away and began studiously ignoring him. After a while, Saúl began yelling urgently, from across the classroom, “J-a-a-a-k-l-e-e-en, J-a-a-a-k-l-e-e-en!” She kept pretending she could not hear him, even though he sounded exactly like Marlon Brando crying, “S-t-e-e-l-l-a-a-a!” Lovelorn. The other newcomers were charmed by this half-genuine, half-farcical playacting; the classroom had turned into a stage, and Jakleen and Saúl had assumed the roles of the romantic leads. They all knew their appointed posts in the daily drama: Methusella commandeered leading man in the academic realm, Saúl played the incorrigible flirt, Jakleen served as the unattainable object of his affection, and Lisbeth provided comic relief. Everybody else served as extras, taking turns at little cameos.

  Even as the newcomers’ individual natures came into view more distinctly, they simultaneously started to braid themselves together more completely into one interwoven whole. With the advent of spring, as more and more interactions took place, I found myself able to appreciate in an entirely new fashion how all the different languages represented in the room converged in ways I had not previously recognized. I glimpsed this convergence one afternoon in the middle of April, while sitting with Shani, Jakleen, and Mariam. They were talking about a book that Mr. Williams had started reading out loud with the class. The book was called Cesar Chavez: Fighting for Farmworkers, and it was a nonfiction graphic novel.

  For Mr. Williams, the story of Cesar Chavez held tremendous power. He got a little emotional, trying to explain the significance of this guy his students had never heard of before—trying to put into words why Cesar Chavez mattered. At one point, as I was listening to Shani, Jakleen, and Mariam discuss a poster they were making to illustrate the book’s contents, I found myself wondering how the three girls were managing to communicate. Shani spoke Tajik, Russian, and a little Farsi, while Jakleen and Mariam were Arabic speakers—in other words, they did not share a common language. Yet they seemed to understand one another perfectly, and they were not using Google Translate, nor English. How were they interacting? I could hear all three of them saying the word kitab. What was that? “Book!” Shani told me. “My language, their language, same.”

  The word for “book” was virtually identical in each of their home languages. In Arabic, it was kitab; in Tajik, kitob. In Turkish, it was kitap, Jakleen pointed out, and in Farsi, Shani hastened to add, the word was kitab, just like Arabic. Initially, I thought this kind of convergence existed only in the Middle East, but as I spent more time with students from Africa, I came to realize I was wrong. Dilli told me that in Kunama, the word for “book” was kitaba, and Methusella said in Swahili it was kitabu. That was the moment when I finally grasped my own arrogance as an English speaker. I mean, the arrogance harbored by someone who knew only European languages, which rendered the well-laced interconnectedness of the rest of the world invisible. I was starting to see it, though—the centuries-old ties that bound Africa and the Middle East, born of hundreds of years of trade and travel and conquest and marriage. Once the students grasped that I would exclaim with delight if they found a word that had moved through many of their countries, they started flocking to me to share loanwords and cognates. More than one-third of Swahili comes from Arabic, meaning the links between those two langu
ages are as powerful as those between English and Spanish. But it was also possible to chart the reach of Arabic across the entire African continent, into Kunama and Tigrinya as well.

  Earlier, when Mr. Williams had been discussing the consumption of insects, Ksanet and Yonatan had discovered that Tigrinya shared the same word for “insect” as Arabic—hasharat. This turned out to be a fairly common term across much of Africa and the Middle East. Words for food were often shared as well. We discovered that “spinach” was nearly identical in many languages: Turkish (ispanak), Tajik (isfanoç), Amharic (sipinati), and Spanish (espinaca). Students from the Middle East and from Africa also shared many words for the passage of time: minute (dakika), hour (saa), morning (asubuhi), afternoon (alasri), century (karne), and the word for time itself (wakati).

  As the kids discovered these commonalities, I began to feel as though I were watching something like the living embodiment of a linguistic tree. The classroom and the relationships forming inside of it were an almost a perfect map of language proximity around the globe. Generally, students chose to communicate most with others whose home languages shared large numbers of cognates with their own, which meant their first friendships often developed along the same lines as language groupings. As this took place around me, I grew to see my own position on the world’s tree of languages more clearly. English speakers can easily grasp the vast coterminology of all the Indo-European languages—our own limb of the global tree—but we are generally deaf and dumb to the equally large influence of Arabic, Chinese, or Hindi across parts of the globe where English does not dominate. We cannot hear or see the tremendous coterminology that has resulted among various other language families, such as between Arabic and the African languages. It was to our detriment, not understanding how tightly interconnected other parts of the world are. When we make enemies in the Middle East, for example, we alienate whole swaths of Africa, too—often without knowing.

  Qalb was the word that the students wanted to teach me about most. One day over lunch, Shani got very puppylike about this concept, bouncing around in her chair as we were sitting with Rahim, Jakleen, and Mariam. “Qalb! My language, qalb! Arabic, qalb! Farsi, qalb! ” Shani proclaimed. Okay, I thought, I get it; they’ve found another cognate. But what was qalb? “Qalb means ‘heart,’ ” Rahim explained in more advanced English. “This word, it is the same in all our languages.” I tried to get a better sense of the concept, which the students and I discussed over a series of days. Could you say that Mr. Williams had a qalb that pumped blood through his body? Yes, Ghasem confirmed. Could you ask, “How much qalb did it take for Mr. Williams to do this, year after year, with such infinite patience, for room after room of newcomers?” Yes, the students agreed. When two people fell in love—was that qalb? Yes.

  I left South thinking that qalb and heart were one and the same. I used one word to refer to a muscle in my body and the concept of falling in love and the idea of what it takes to raise a family or to teach an entire classroom full of teenagers from around the world, and the students from the Middle East would use one single word for all of that, too. Qalb and heart seemed identical. Then I looked up qalb on Google Translate one weekend, while the kids were missing me and I was missing the kids. When I asked Google to change “heart” into Arabic, it gave qalb, as expected. But when I asked Google to switch qalb into English, I got heart, center, middle, transformation, conscience, core, marrow, pith, pulp, gist, essence, quintessence, topple, alter, flip, tip, overturn, reversal, overthrow, capsize, whimsical, capricious, convert, change, counterfeit. In addition, the word meant: substance, being, pluck.

  I am in love with this word, I thought. What is all this movement about? My own concept of heart did not include flip, capsize, or reverse. Our two cultures did not have the same idea of what was happening at the core of our beings. There was something reified and stolid about my sense of heart, whereas the idea of heart that these kids possessed appeared to have a lighter, more nimble quality. Whatever it was, qalb seemed more fluid and less constrained than anything I had imagined happening inside of me.

  * * *

  While the kids were falling in love with each other, and I was falling in love with the room, and marveling at all this place had to teach me about the world that I did not know, Miss Pauline kept trying to supply the students with more words for saying what was going on inside their own hearts. Ever since our conversation about the well-taped boxes, I had been thinking of the therapist’s ongoing work as an effort to get these students to untape themselves. I wondered if watching them do so would deepen our knowledge of one another, if the students would reveal more about their pasts, enlightening me as to their burdens. But I think Miss Pauline was probably aiming for something else—I think she was trying to facilitate growth, healing, the kind of change that springs from self-knowledge. For several months, she had been trying to instruct the newcomers on how to read their insides. This was a surprisingly difficult skill to master, especially for those who had experienced harsh events. They might not want to know, they might not want to look at their own awful qalb.

  Miss Pauline wanted the students to experience any terrifying emotions (helplessness, despair, shame, anger, guilt, suffering) they might be harboring in a safe way so that they could be freed up, could find renewal. She had been asking the students to draw images of the emotions they contained for a while, because she thought art might surprise them into discovering what they didn’t want to feel, while they were using a different part of their brains than they used for speaking or writing. One day in April, she distributed pages from an adult coloring book with complex line drawings of mandalas. She was giving them templates. She told the students to choose a pattern, decide which parts to color, and fill those in with whatever hues they desired. Then they were to write some feeling words to go along with the shapes and colors. She handed out a list of fifty-eight positive emotions and sixty-six negative emotions, in case the kids did not know the right English terms for what they were feeling.

  After the first set of students returned with their emblazoned mandalas, Lisbeth beckoned me over, so that I could see all the emotions nameable in the English language according to Miss Pauline. Lisbeth pointed to one word in particular that had caught her attention: “Miss! Look: Sexy.” Then she made her can-you-believe-it-I’m-totally-outraged face.

  Lisbeth had chosen a large circle, filled with little beaded spheres in paisley-like patterns. She had colored parts of her mandala leaf green, dark blue, hot pink, and deep purple. Beside that, in watery orange, she had written “beautiful.” She had decided to be bonita on the inside. When I looked more closely at her copy of “The Feeling List,” I saw that Lisbeth had actually circled five positive words: beautiful, good, happy, loving, sexy. And just one word on the negative side: angry.

  It appeared next to impossible for Miss Pauline to get the other kids to look at the negative emotions they might contain. I wondered if she had discussed in group that day the meaning of the negative word “bitter,” because a few students did return with that word written on their mandalas, instead of any of the other sixty-five negative terms they might have chosen. I saw “great, happy, bitter, good” written on one mandala and “great, happy, good, bitter” on another. I also saw a “happy, joyful, bitter” mandala. Otherwise, most of the students eschewed any expression of unpleasant feelings. Bachan had chosen a waves-of-fire mandala pattern and had colored his center orange, followed by a large ring of deep blue, and then a whole lot of yellow. I did not know what his ring of blue guarded, girdling his orange core. He had written, in a big loose scrawl, just “happy.” It was either what most of the kids felt, or the only thing they felt safe naming.

  Dilli was all stars and moons, in magenta, orange, blue, green, and brown, with a freely scrawled magenta h-a-p-p-y across the bottom of her page. Shani had written HAPPY in all caps and had made a girly-looking web of pale blue stars and deep red hearts. Nadia was waves of navy blue and pumpkin-orange fire, with a p
enciled happy, although in deep green marker she also wrote in Portuguese, Ao nome a beleza. To name the beauty.

  Solomon had chosen a pattern with a sunlike center and four rings of fire encircling that orb. He had made the rings leaf green, bright orange, magenta, and forest green. His “happy” was orange. Methusella had been more expansive about his positive feelings. He had chosen a simple mandala, populated with triangles and diamonds and squares, all very right-angled, which he had colored in electric blue, fiery orange, and golden yellow. He wrote “HAPPY, joyful, excited, friendly, forgiving.” One of the few students who named a bigger range of emotions was Kaee Reh. He had chosen the same template as Shani, but had colored his in shades of dark green, periwinkle blue, and lemon yellow—an entirely different palette. I liked the emotions he wrote because they were contradictory, and because he named them in three colors: a green happy, a red sad, and a blue confuse[d].

  Even Jakleen warmed to group that day. She had picked an especially ornate starburst pattern, with strings of little spheres and strings of small hearts emanating from an asterisk-like center. She had colored the center cool green and navy blue. Her spheres were aqua, and she had made the hearts deep maroon. In between the cool spheres and the warm hearts she had drawn columns of lavender. It was a wheel of alternating cool spokes and hot spokes. In terms of her emotions, however, she had written only, somewhat impudently, “Not bad.” As Jakleen had been refusing to participate in group for a while, it was progress for her to write anything. I also found it amusing that she remained so obstinate about not revealing her inner state. “Not bad” seemed like a deliberate attempt to thwart Miss Pauline, yet said so much. Jakleen’s word choice was also more idiosyncratic and playful than anybody else’s. She was the only person who had ignored Miss Pauline’s extensive but relatively orthodox list of what one could feel.