by Helen Thorpe
The one other student who chose an alternative destination was a girl wearing jeans, an orange hijab, and a T-shirt with a Superman emblem. “I would fly to Germany, because my best friend is there,” she told Ms. Hijazi.
Over the ensuing weeks, the students in 2A read a series of short stories, and Ms. Hijazi went over basic academic terms she thought they should know, such as “Literature. Say it! Lit-er-a-ture!” Soon Lisbeth and Nadia and all the students could answer Ms. Hijazi’s questions about words such as conflict, protagonist, antagonist, synonym, antonym, characterization, plot, and setting. Many of the words were easy for Lisbeth to grasp, because in Spanish they had near perfect cognates, such as narrador, protagonista, and sinónimo, but she got stuck sometimes with the words that did not have a close twin. One day, while I was sitting behind Lisbeth, she arched over backward to put the top of her head onto my desk so that I was looking at her face upside down, then she stuck out her tongue. After that, she conceded she had no idea what “plot” signified. I told her it was a series of dramatic events. “For example, your mom was a police officer who arrested some gang members, and they threatened to kill her, so she had to move to the United States,” I said to her in Spanish. “Then you were threatened and you had to move here, too. That’s the plot of your story.”
“Okay!” said Lisbeth, nodding happily—now she understood plot.
* * *
In the mornings, Ms. Hijazi taught ELA 2B to a smaller group. That was where I found Methusella, who had skipped over 1A, 1B, and 2A. In January, when he would finish 2B (each upper-level ELA section lasted for one semester), Methusella would exit the school’s English Language Acquisition program and enter a mainstream English class, where he would tackle assignments on a par with his native-born peers. Ksanet and Amaniel had also tested into Ms. Hijazi’s 2B class. During the first week of school, Ms. Hijazi showed her students a photograph of a polar bear in a comical stance and asked them to write a paragraph about the animal. Methusella, wearing blue jeans and a gray T-shirt that said on it MAYBE YOU SHOULD PRACTICE, bent over his paper. He finished before anybody else and handed the sheet to his new teacher.
“Wow,” she said in a surprised tone. “This is perfect English.”
A few days later, Ms. Hijazi asked her students to write about a happy memory. Methusella wrote that he was overjoyed to be “living in a peaceful country.” When he raced through another writing assignment ahead of everybody else, Ms. Hijazi told him to look in the closet where she kept books and pick something to read. Methusella selected a classic, My Side of the Mountain, by Jean Craighead George (a book I had bought for my own son), and then got lost in its pages. Ms. Hijazi told me after class that everything Methusella showed her was written in full sentences, and he spelled every word correctly—a level of competence she almost never saw.
Initially, Methusella, Ksanet, and Amaniel were the only students from Mr. Williams’s room who had been placed into Ms. Hijazi’s level 2B class, but Solomon soon joined them. He had been placed in level 2A, but Ms. Hijazi thought the work was too easy for him. On Solomon’s first day in the higher-level class, he wrote down seven new vocabulary words (ambitious, prodigy, discordant, accusation, expectation, inevitable, reproach) and looked up their meanings. Later that week, Ms. Hijazi remarked on the temperamental differences she saw between the two brothers. She pointed to Solomon and said to me, “Like, the gentlest human being, ever.” Of Methusella, she said, “He has an edge! He gets angry!” She spoke with fondness—she liked Methusella’s imperious side.
A few days later, Ms. Hijazi described the ideal structure of a basic paragraph (topic sentence, supporting details, closing sentence), then asked everybody to practice what she had described. As she walked around the room, Ms. Hijazi noticed that Solomon had placed a sheet of lined paper on his desk with the three holes on the right, his pen hovering over the back of the page. She turned it over, saying, “Always have the holes on the left side.” The teacher made a grimace, as if to say, The things these kids don’t know!
After they worked on writing paragraphs, Ms. Hijazi told her students to take out their textbooks and open them to a story called “The Moustache,” by Robert Cormier.
A talkative kid announced, “I have a mustache!”
“We’re really happy for you,” Ms. Hijazi said sarcastically.
She showed the students how to take Cornell notes. In the left column, they should list the main idea, the setting, new words. In the right column, they should transcribe an assiduous summary of the story, citing specific evidence for their assertions, along with page numbers. As they went along, Ms. Hijazi grilled the students on the meaning of certain words, such as “obscure.” She drew their attention to an abstract illustration.
“Is that a clear picture or an obscure picture?” she demanded.
“Obscure!” chorused the students.
“Oh, I love you guys,” Ms. Hijazi sang out.
About one month into the school year, the students in 2B began reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie. The Absolutely True Diary resonated for many of the students, because of how closely a reservation resembled a refugee camp. In both situations, large groups of people who were considered foreign by a dominant society were detained inside an enclosure, ostensibly for their own benefit, but in a way that actually seemed to be more about protecting everybody else from those deemed “other.” Alexie’s sidesplitting yet painful autobiography begins with a description of life on the rez in which the narrator jokes about belonging to the “Black-Eye-of-the-Month Club.” Later he describes how good a chicken leg tastes when he has not eaten for eighteen and a half hours. “That’s true!” one of Ms. Hijazi’s students affirmed, in a tone of recognition.
The narrator recounts what happens after he leaves the reservation to attend a white school—a move analogous to the act of resettling in the developed world. As a result of changing schools, the author loses his original friends, who consider him a traitor; at the white school, he is greeted by a solid wall of racism. Negotiating the two disparate worlds is not easy, and survivor’s guilt is a major theme. As serene, blue-skied days gave way to windy, yellow-leaved days, Ms. Hijazi read all of The Absolutely True Diary out loud with her 2B class. Most days, she gave the students a writing exercise, then settled her rear end on top of a desk, put her feet on the seat of a chair, slid her reading glasses down to her nose, and asked Methusella where they had left off. He always knew the exact page number. Then they resumed the story of Junior and his battle to feel accepted.
Ms. Hijazi wrote lists of challenging words from the book on poster-sized pieces of paper, which she taped up all around the classroom. Slowly the walls accrued words, until the students were surrounded by multisyllabic vocabulary. At random moments, Ms. Hijazi would quiz them on the significance of a given word. (“What does ‘pathetic’ mean?” she barked. “Sad!” responded the room.) She also asked them to make a cartoon strip about the book’s major events, complete with evidence for every assertion. The students thought the assignment was fun, but she was actually teaching them skills they would need to write an academic paper. Methusella drew a picture of Junior leaving the rez and quoted one of the characters telling Junior: “You’re going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation” (p. 43). As the months flew by, and Methusella sailed into full-fledged intermediate fluency, I found it incredible to see the speed at which he absorbed a more complex English vocabulary.
* * *
Across the stairwell in 1B, Noelia Hopkin was handing out envelopes filled with small pieces of colored paper. Each piece of paper displayed a word, which she asked the students to assemble into color-coded sentences. The students in 1B were still in early speech emergence, and Ms. Hopkin was working with them on language control—right where Mr. Williams had left off. The students puzzled happily over the colored words. They became so quiet that I could hear singing coming through t
he air ducts; somewhere in the building, a choir was performing. At one point, I noticed that Mariam had arranged several pieces of orange paper in the following order: “Was hungry I.” That would have been correct sentence structure in Arabic, I pointed out, but in English we say, “I was hungry.” Mariam nodded. Her sentence, when she got all of the orange words in the right order, read, “Dad asked me if I was hungry and I said yes.”
For the first six weeks of their second school year, Jakleen and Mariam remained present, engaged, and happy. Anytime I saw them—in Ms. Hopkin’s room or in the crowded hallways, surrounded by new friends—they appeared lighthearted. Their lives had taken a turn for the better, I thought. During the second half of September, however, Ebtisam simultaneously experienced another spate of trouble. After her car had been stolen the previous spring, Ebtisam had grown fearful about the possible involvement of the part-time security guard. In the middle of the summer, some kind of altercation had taken place between Ebtisam and the man’s eleven-year-old son. Ebtisam said she yelled at the boy—nothing else. But the father claimed she had pushed his son off a bicycle, causing the boy to scrape his elbow. Although the boy’s injuries were slight, the father pressed charges. As a result, Ebtisam faced allegations of assault and “wrongs to minors.” Then Ebtisam received an eviction notice, because the manager of the apartment complex heard that she had assaulted a child. “Every day brings a new problem,” Ebtisam said dejectedly. “I don’t know what happened to me in this country.”
Whitney Haruf from Lutheran intervened with the manager of the apartment complex, arguing that Ebtisam had not been convicted of a crime and pointing out that the child in question showed no sign of serious injury. The manager relented, allowing her to remain in the apartment. After that, Ebtisam had to take a day off work to appear at her arraignment at the plush new downtown courthouse. I found her sitting on a blond wood bench near a picture window, just outside the courtroom, chewing the inside of her cheek. She was dressed like a teenager, in jeans and a purple jacket; Mark from New Life Community Church sat nearby. As it turned out, Ebtisam could not enter a plea, because the court had neglected to provide an interpreter. The judge reacted with impatience, as though Ebtisam had failed to mention this would be necessary (in fact Whitney Haruf had made two phone calls to the clerk’s office to try to ensure that an interpreter would be provided, to no avail). The judge rescheduled the proceedings, meaning that Ebtisam would have to miss a second day of work.
We rode downstairs in an elevator with a young African-American man wearing a backward baseball hat and a stony expression. Mark tried to offer him a postcard about New Life, but the young man refused to meet his gaze. “Jesus came for everyone,” Mark told him. I felt uncomfortable about his proselytizing, as the atmosphere in the elevator grew tense. Yet I admired how Mark kept showing up for Ebtisam, whenever she had a problem, time and time again.
Ebtisam returned to the courtroom a few weeks later to enter a plea of not guilty. As she walked out dispiritedly, I tried to lift her mood by pointing out that none of the cases heard by the judge appeared serious. Another person had been accused of shoplifting a vape pen from a tobacco store, while someone else had been charged with playing a stereo too loudly. Ebtisam could not keep the matter in perspective, however, and as soon as we exited the courtroom, her face crumpled and her shoulders started shaking. It was frightening, having to appear in a formal legal setting. She said unhappily that nothing like this had ever happened to her before.
A few days later, I went over to Lutheran Family Services to speak with Whitney Haruf and found her conferring with her colleague Eh Klo, the woman who had secured the housing voucher for Ebtisam. Eh Klo was wearing a cotton tunic that I recognized as a traditional Karen-style shirt, a marker of her status as a former refugee. Eh Klo asked if I had heard the terrible news: Ebtisam and one or two of her daughters had been in a serious car accident. Eh Klo and Whitney worked with that subsection of refugees who struggled more than others, and every once in a while, they saw this—an awful series of predicaments, piling on top of one another. “Add, add, add, add,” said Eh Klo, demonstrating how the problems accrued.
I drove to Denver Health, the city hospital, the following morning. In the pediatric Intensive Care Unit, I found Jakleen wearing a white hospital gown and thick red socks with white rubber zigzags on the soles. She sat in a glider, rocking forward and backward, forward and back. She looked unscathed, but did not greet me. Ebtisam had slept on a chair that pulled out into a bed, and from her shattered expression, I gathered it had been a bad night. Two nurses bustled around, and one of them started feeding Jakleen some yogurt, one spoonful at a time. The nurses were adamantly cheerful. One of them said, “She’s taken four bites of yogurt—that’s something.”
I asked Jakleen how she was feeling. Her eyes slid over me incuriously. Very slowly, she pointed to her collarbone. I told myself maybe she wasn’t doing that badly, for I could not see a single cut or bruise. Then the two nurses hoisted Jakleen up by her armpits, saying it was time for a shower. She swayed between them and her knees buckled and her head lolled to one side. Both nurses rushed to step closer, so they could sustain more of her weight. Jakleen had a broken clavicle, broken ribs, a broken pelvis, several skull fractures, and a traumatic brain injury. The primary thing that concerned the medical staff was the bleeding in her brain. They were taking daily CAT scans until her condition stabilized. Due to the broken pelvis, she could not walk properly, and a bad fall could be catastrophic. She would not be safe anywhere but in the ICU for the foreseeable future.
The nurses wrote down essential tasks that Jakleen had to accomplish on a whiteboard (“pee” and “walk a lot”). They strapped a large black belt around her waist and held the belt tightly so that she could not fall and made her walk around the ICU. Jakleen exhibited a strange lurching gait, and I did not know if that was due to the broken bones or the brain injury. Ebtisam never left her side, as Sara, her friend from Saudi Arabia, moved into the apartment at Pine Creek to care for Lulu and Mariam. Meanwhile, Ebtisam fielded a constant stream of phone calls about her rapidly deteriorating finances. At one point, Yasir called; the county had mistakenly terminated her food stamps benefits, and he was trying to get her back onto the roster. Ebtisam wasn’t reporting to work, so her income had ceased. And her car was stuck in a lot where it was accruing daily fees, even though it was totaled. She also faced criminal charges of careless driving.
“I want smoke,” Ebtisam said at one point.
She wanted to light up as soon as we stepped outdoors, but a sign written in English said there was a $300 fine for smoking on Denver Health property.
“Not here!” I warned.
We walked over to a little park, where several hospital employees stood in a circle, smoking.
“I want go back, Iraq,” Ebtisam announced.
What a statement, I thought—that returning to a country blown apart by war might be easier than this. Then I realized maybe she meant go back to prewar Iraq, go back to a time before all the disasters. Ebtisam wore the same kind of red socks as Jakleen, the ones with white zigzags on the bottom, which I read as a gesture of solidarity with her daughter. She wore her sneakers with the heels pushed down, to accommodate the thick socks. On her wrist were two paper hospital bracelets, one neon yellow and the other neon orange. We sat on the grass under some catalpa trees. Ebtisam seemed blasted apart, emotionally.
Two weary-looking veterans arrived, one in a wheelchair, the other pushing a bicycle. The vets carried a large American flag and all their personal belongings. Homeless, probably—probably Vietnam, judging by their age. In one park, the representatives of two wars hunkered down, seeking comfort in nicotine. In each theater, we had been hampered by our inability to comprehend other cultures, especially those involving people of non-European descent. We went to war in places where people spoke languages that were not close to English. We went to war in places where people ordered their sentences differently, generated me
aning through tones we could not hear, wrote their letters one after another in the opposite direction from us. I did not believe this was a coincidence. Our inability to comprehend one another lay at the heart of conflict.
Away from the gloom of the ICU, I could see that someone had sewn neat black stitches around one of Ebtisam’s eyes. She listed all her problems, one after another, going over the whole litany. She asked if I thought that her apartment might be haunted. Was that why so many bad things had happened? Jakleen had said the accident was her fault. Ebtisam looked at me with a question on her face. I thought she was asking whether I thought she was guilty of causing all those fractures, all that internal bleeding. I told her that I had not witnessed the accident, I did not know if it was her fault. But I had caused a car accident once myself, three decades earlier, and I still felt guilty. I wanted to let her know she was not the only person who had taken a wrong turn and bashed into something hard.
We drove over to her workplace, so that Ebtisam could explain her absence.
“Smiles!” the manager said, when he saw her.
That was her nickname. We described Jakleen’s injuries and Ebtisam said she did not know when she might return.
“Get better, help your daughter get better,” he told her. “We miss you.”
When I asked a representative of the company if I could identify her place of employment, the owners asked that I refrain from doing so. They feared reprisal for giving an American job to a person who spoke Arabic.
* * *
For the next month, as I drove to and from the ICU, I tried to absorb the news I was hearing on my car radio. Bunker-busting bombs were being hurled at Aleppo, and the presidential election had tightened, as a series of scandals burst forth like fireworks in the media. Donald Trump might not have paid any income tax for the past twenty years. He had bragged of groping women. Hillary Clinton had misused a private email server for official communications, jeopardizing national security, and FBI director James Comey announced a renewed investigation into the matter. I could not stand what was happening in the ICU, and the news of what was happening in the world at large felt almost as destabilizing.