Édith has a young cousin who works with asylum seekers, and Édith remembers she used to give literacy classes in the past. A very pretty redhead with green eyes, an English teacher, who rides around Paris on her bike as a matter of principle, come rain or shine. Édith calls to ask her about teaching material.
Sara remembers that they had used photocopied handouts, in a given order; the method was fairly traditional. She didn’t keep them, but she knows of some specialized associations, she still has some names and phone numbers in her address book.
The volunteers Édith manages to get hold of don’t know of any miracle methods. One of them suggests making up a method on a case-by-case basis, another suggests she use schoolbooks. A third one recommends she try the big educational bookstore on the rue du Four.
The illustrious bookstore has nothing for helping analphabets. The sales assistant looks like a pontificating doctor, and informs Édith that there is a difference between analphabet and illiterate: “First you have the people who have never learned to read and write—they’re analphabets. Then you have the illiterates, who learned but have forgotten. You said this person is from Morocco? Try L’Harmattan bookstore over on the rue des Écoles. They specialize in Africa. As you can tell, from the name.”
The two encyclopedias Édith and Gilles have at home do not make any distinction between illiterate and analphabet. Édith decides to try L’Harmattan anyway: do they have any books for teaching an adult how to read? “It’s not like she ever learned and then forgot.” The saleswoman, who is black, and also very sure of herself, just laughs. “Absolutely. You have your basic illiterate French people, who have forgotten, and then you have immigrants, who are analphabets.” She leads Édith over to a shelf where at least forty textbooks are crammed together.
Initially Édith is afraid she’ll never be able to choose. She can still see Jacques with his eyes raised heavenward—the phonics method is far superior to the whole language method. But all the textbooks on sale at L’Harmattan are variations on the whole language method, with one exception. And that is the book Édith chooses.
Reading, a First Step toward Insertion: A Reading Method for Adult Beginners. The author is a professor. She herself had analphabet students from abroad and, according to the back cover, as she could not find a textbook she thought was suitable for the situation, she wrote her own.
Édith leafs through it slowly. Three quarters of the book are written in “joined-up handwriting,” as the children say. The bulk of the learning process will be based on this type of writing. After that comes printing, then capital letters.
The method is very simple. You begin with the five vowels and the consonant m; from page one you can already write ma, me, mo, mimi, mama.
From pages two to six you learn how to use the l (le lit, la mule, ali a lu). From pages seven to ten you add the t, from eleven to fifteen the r. By then you have several dozen words. Then the first diphthongs, then the silent letters. By page sixteen you can read la petite mule a mal à la patte.
Consonants come along one after the other, not in alphabetical order; then there are subtleties like ph and gn; then words that are more and more complicated, up to expéditeur, destinataire, numéro d’immatriculation.
It seems like a good method. At the register, though, Édith is assailed by doubts. She asks the young saleswoman: “Why have nearly all the manuals opted for the whole language method?” The bookseller is cautious. It is a war that has been fought for fifty years. There are champions of both methods. She is conciliatory: “You know, the human brain combines both methods. You can begin with an analytical approach, but as soon as you know the words you recognize them globally. Or, on the contrary, you can familiarize yourself with them by grasping the whole word, but then before long you’ll be trying to deconstruct them.”
That evening Édith reads the textbook attentively. She mustn’t get this wrong. If Fadila fails a second time round, she’ll give up altogether.
With Martin it didn’t even take a month. Édith knows that it won’t go that quickly this time.
She spends several hours on the internet. First of all she discovers that there are still many proponents of the phonics method. On the specialized websites nearly everyone seems to prefer it. Édith thought she was being old-fashioned, but in fact it is the whole language method that seems to be outmoded.
She refreshes her memory. The expression is “cursive handwriting,” not “joined-up.” Of course. What you write is a grapheme, what you hear is a phoneme. A morpheme is the root shared by several words in the same family. You’re not supposed to say illiterate, false beginner is the preferred phrase, or complete beginner. But such reservations no longer apply when you’re referring to illiteracy as a phenomenon, or the rate of illiteracy. Established pedagogues are encouraging: you don’t have to be a professor to teach someone to read. It is complicated, Édith reads, and it can take a long time, but sometimes it goes very fast, too.
3
That Tuesday, when Fadila comes in, Édith hands her the textbook.
“Good,” says Fadila. “We beginning next week.”
“Why not today? We can start right away, or in a while, when you’ve finished.”
Fadila turns on her heels without replying. Once she has finished the ironing she comes into the kitchen for a coffee. She sits on a stool, her feet flat on the floor in front of her. Édith is washing the lettuce. “Shall we have a look at the book?” she asks.
“Next week,” says Fadila.
The following week, Édith tries again: “Perhaps it would be better to start right away, as soon as you get here. You’re often in a hurry when you leave.”
“We gonna see,” murmurs Fadila, tying her headscarf behind her neck.
Édith begins to wonder if they will ever start. Fadila must be afraid, but she doesn’t realize that Édith is as afraid as she is.
After two hours have gone by, when Édith sees her coming back in, she asks again, “Shall we get going?”
“We get going,” answers Fadila, with a big smile that Édith is seeing for the first time.
They sit side by side at the table in the dining room. Édith pushes her papers to one side. She’s been thinking about this first session for ten days now. She bought a big pad of lined paper. The textbook recommends starting off with letters written at least three times larger than usual. Édith has prepared a sheet inspired by page one in the book, where she has written the name fadila in cursive letters—no capitals for the moment—and the five vowels. She has decided it would be good to see that very special word fadila as a whole right away: it’s obvious what it means, and they can use it as a matrix for the first letters she learns. A concession to the whole language method. Édith was careful to write it in big letters. On the special lined paper, the a and the o fill an entire space between two lines, the d and the l take up three, and the f takes up six.
On the paper she sets down in front of Fadila she points to the word fadila, at the top in the middle of a line, and pronounces it. Then she points to the five vowels ten lines further down. She names them one after the other as she points to them: a, e, i, o, u.
“Is like zero,” says Fadila, her forefinger on the o.
“Exactly. It’s written the same way, you’re right. But this is an o. You find it in the word olive, or orange—and you know the sound, o. These letters, these five here, have a loud sound: a, o, u. They’re called vowels. There are other letters that you don’t hear as well, f, s, or m, they’re called consonants, we’ll look at them later.
“Listen carefully: Fa-di-la,” says Édith, pointing to the word on the paper. “Can you hear? Fa (she stresses the a), di, la (again stressing the a).”
“This is the letter a,” she says, pointing to the a. “Look, in fadila you have the letter a twice, and if you listen carefully, you can hear it twice, too, Fa-di-la.”
She has a
red felt-tip at the ready, in addition to the black pen she used to write the five vowels and the name fadila on the sheet of paper. She underlines the a in Fadila’s name, twice, in red. “Here you have the letter a, twice: here, and here.” Then she writes in red, below the name and just below each a, a new separate a.
“Do you remember the name of this letter?”
Silence.
“It’s a.”
“A,” echoes Fadila.
“Your turn to write it.”
On a second sheet of paper Édith writes the letter a on its own, in big letters. She deconstructs the gesture: “You start with a circle, like for an o. Then you draw a line down the side, like this. See?”
She writes a several times on a line, slowly.
“Your turn,” she says, putting down the felt-tip. “Go ahead.”
Fadila picks up the pen with all five fingers of her right hand. She holds it vertically, perpendicular to the white sheet.
“Go ahead,” says Édith, encouraging her. “Make an a.”
Fadila places the pen on the sheet without supporting herself with the side of her hand or her forearm. She moves the point around for a moment, traces the fragment of a curve, then gives up.
“I’ll do it with you,” says Édith, taking Fadila’s hand in her own.
She is troubled somewhat by this contact of warm skin, by the gesture and her own maternal side. It must seem strange to Fadila, too, she thinks.
Together they draw a perfectly recognizable a. And then another. And another.
“You see? You start from the top, make your circle, always in the same direction. Like this. Then the line on the right.”
But when it’s Fadila’s turn, she moves the pen forward, then back again. And puts it down.
She must not know what a circle is, thinks Édith, or a line, or what I mean by on the right.
“We’ll stop there for now.” It is clear she mustn’t insist. “You’ll practice at home, all right?”
“All right,” says Fadila.
She seems pleased. But is it with the idea of working at home, or because they’ve stopped?
Édith gives her the main sheet, with fadila, the red a’s, and the vowels all in a line.
“This is your model,” she explains. “Study it carefully. And then write here on the second sheet. To start with, make the o, the letter that’s like a zero. See, they’re circles, it’s easy.”
As she is speaking, Édith writes three big, identical o’s at the beginning of the three lines, at the top of the page. “Write them here, side by side.” She shows her how, following the three lines with her finger. “After that you can try the a.”
In the lower half of the page she writes three a’s, at the beginning of three lines also one after the other. “Remember, first the circle, then the line, like this.”
She hands the two sheets of paper to Fadila, then a few other blank ones, and the black felt-tip. Fadila takes the sheets and puts them in her bag. She leaves the pen on the table: “I have at home.”
“It’s a pity to wait a whole week before continuing,” says Édith. “When will you be back on this street?”
Fadila works three mornings a week for an old lady at number 16, Monday, Wednesday, Friday. She can stop by Édith’s tomorrow, Wednesday, at noon.
“Perfect,” says Édith, writing it down in her diary. She sees she will have to delay a lunch engagement.
The sheet that Fadila brings to her the next day at half past twelve is one of the most moving documents Édith has seen in a long time. Fadila did not fill in the lines they had started with a and o, but wrote on one of the blank sheets. Was it her intention to do a sort of draft? Or did she not understand what Édith had asked of her? She brought only this sheet. In one corner, at the bottom to the right (or, it could be the upper left), there is a little pile of signs crammed close together, untidy scratchings where it is impossible to recognize either an a or an o, or any other letter for that matter.
Fadila’s school age, clearly, is not four, but two. She doesn’t know what a line is, nor how to go from left to right. She cannot distinguish a curve from a straight line. She cannot conceive that letters have to be identical yet separate, with equal spaces in between. Perhaps she has never done any drawing, either.
French children, when they learn how to read at the age of five or six, have three or four years of pre-school instruction behind them where they spend hours with pencils in their hands—drawing, connecting dots, learning directions, making lines and circles and dashes, always the same size, always on a horizontal line, always from left to right and top to bottom.
Fadila is in a hurry, she cannot stay. She has taken off her coat but not her black headscarf. Édith holds her back: “Just a minute. When you write there’s a way to hold your pen that makes it easier.”
She shows Fadila how to squeeze the pen between her thumb, forefinger and middle finger while placing her hand right on the paper. She has her curl her fingers then slips the pen between them. Fadila is tense, her fingers are stiff. She cannot find the position on her own.
“It will come,” says Édith. “Let me quickly make another sheet with the o for you.”
This time she writes several o’s on three lines.
“That one’s like zero,” says Fadila.
“Exactly. See: do a few of them on the same line, like this. Keep going in this direction, to the right, here and then here and then here. Understand?”
Of course Fadila understands. But she has to go. She takes the paper with her.
“Will you come again on Friday at noon?”
“Inshallah,” says Fadila.
On Friday Édith waits for Fadila in vain. She calls her that evening: “Will you come on Monday?”
“Yes,” says Fadila, “but if I no coming Monday it no matter, I coming Tuesday.”
4
On Monday Fadila fails to show. Édith expected as much; she doesn’t call her.
On Tuesday Fadila arrives on time. “I no writing, no time,” she says, the moment she takes off her coat. “I going shower, sleeping at my son.”
Édith immediately feels an urge to play down the importance of things, that same urge she used to feel when one of her sons, when they were little, would come home with a bad grade, his eyes filled with fear. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t matter, we’ll write together. Sit down.”
Fadila doesn’t say anything about wanting to postpone the lesson until late afternoon. Édith sees this as a good sign.
She writes a big o and says to Fadila, “Your turn.” Fadila tries. She struggles. Édith takes her hand and they draw the o together.
“Your turn,” says Édith again.
Fadila manages a stunted o.
“There you are. Go on. Make a few.”
Fadila draws a few very uneven o’s. Some of them look like an o, others don’t.
“I can’t,” she says.
“Yes you can,” Édith says encouragingly.
Fadila never draws her o’s twice in the same direction. Édith repeats that she has to start at the top then go from left to right, curving the line by moving the pen in a counter-clockwise direction: always the same gesture, always the same direction. Fadila does not seem to see the point in doing something so repetitive.
Édith draws an o perfectly wedged between its two lines, and she insists upon the spot where she started. An inch further to the right she marks another spot on the upper line. “Start there. Go ahead.” She shows the direction of the circle to be drawn.
Fadila manages fairly well this time.
On a blank sheet Édith prepares a line with a finished o at the beginning and then a dozen or so little dots for starting all the other o’s. “This is for you to do at home. Now let’s look at the a again.”
She has decided that Fadila must learn to read t
he letter a first before trying to write it. She wonders if reading might not be easier than writing. The experts say that the two must be learned together, that one feeds the other, but to Édith it seems clear that Fadila’s eye is more used to reading than her hand is to writing.
She opens the textbook to the first page, shows her a first a, then another, then she asks her if she sees any more a’s. Fadila finds a few. She also points to letters that are not a’s, like an o, a u, and an n. But on the sheet in front of her, where Édith writes fadila, she gets it right: she finds the two a’s.
“Good,” says Édith. “Now, to do the a, remember, first you make an o, then you add a little line on the right-hand side.”
As she speaks she draws an a at the beginning of a line halfway down the homework sheet. She thickens the dot where she started the line, just as she had done with the o, and on the same line she sets out a dozen little starting points.
“Shall we continue?” she asks. “Do you want to?”
“Go on,” says Fadila, cheerfully.
“Let’s try a new letter.”
Another vowel, the i: the i in fadila, the i they see here and there in the textbook. Édith points out the fact that this letter is the only one on the page that has a little dot above it.
“You see them, the i’s? Show me a few.”
Fadila shows her an o, an e, it doesn’t seem to matter to her. Édith insists on the dot which makes the i completely different from all the other letters. But she has to admit that Fadila does not seem to see the dot.
She cannot tell the i apart from the other letters. Clearly there is nothing distinctive about a dot above a letter. As for “above,” it’s as if Fadila hadn’t a clue what she meant by it.
And yet she seems to have a perfect grasp of the notions of above and under. Édith searches her memory, trying to figure out what is going on. Fadila knows what above means (“Once you’ve ironed the shirts, put them there on top of the washing machine”) and under (“The screws must have fallen under the table, I’ll have a look”). Why can’t Fadila see what a dot above an i means?
Bitter Almonds Page 2