Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me
Page 9
good evening, sorry Miss because it’s too late for sent the message in this time, but just I’m remind you about my dad story did you remember that? Basically my dad he wants to write all his story from Iraq to Turkey and England. But don’t tell anybody about the story, because my dad he does not want
I reply to Farah carefully, with my standard advice.
It was nice to meet your dad. Please tell him that writing a story down is not the same as publishing it in a book. Sometimes it is a good idea to write your story down just for yourself, in your own language. When you have the story safe, then you can move on and decide what you want to do with it. But if you rush along, and worry about how it could be published, or what people might think about it, sometimes that stops you writing it. Maybe we could help with a translator? There might be a student at the university who could help.
Twenty minutes later, I get the following reply:
this message sent to you in wrong, sorry about that means this message not for you for someone else. sorry!!!! don’t worry about it. thank you.
Farah
And minutes later, another.
just i’m remind you about my dad story, please do not tell anyone about the story, and also don’t tell the university!!!!! that mean don’t tell anyone about it please!!! my dad he does not want anybody to know about the story from his friend or anyone please.
And of course, I say OK, but I don’t see Farah again; she drops out of Poetry Group. There is clearly a panic in her house, a panic about stories.
Priya’s Poem
After that first meeting, Priti and Priya started coming fairly regularly to my writing groups, and I slowly learned how to teach them. I discovered over those years that poems and stories that directly addressed the migrant experience always got a powerful response. I also discovered that simply telling kids that it was OK to write in their own language, or specifying that their home landscape would be good, and yes to please include it, could have a powerful effect. Over time, Priti had several very creditable goes at the teen novel for Bengalis; she had a splendid sense of melodrama and a good line in kidnappings.
Priya, though, had something else. One day, I went into Miss H’s Year 11 second set, a wild set of kids, all beards and facial piercings, and spotted Priya in her floor-length skirt, nearly grown now, but still quiet as a shadow amongst them. I was working on Carol Ann Duffy with the class, getting them to play with the line breaks on the computer screen, interrogating the choices. We were all having so much noisy fun that it wasn’t till near the end of the lesson that I saw what Priya was typing.
Homesick
There is that strange smell again, the tang of
cars on the road screeching, not like
the laborious rickshaw in Bangladesh. There is no
inviting market, no smell of spices and sliced fruit –
Look ahead, jump, skip and hop. Hide the fact
you are alienated. Chew on the candy floss.
It melts in your mouth. Such foreign stuff!
It sounded like Duffy, but it also sounded like Priya – a super-charged, sonorous, sophisticated Priya. She had never written like that before – the irony, the confidence, the assonance, the eccentric, powerful diction; but she had also never before addressed her migrant experience directly. Perhaps the two were related?
‘Miss,’ said Priya, disturbed by my slack-jawed staring. ‘Is it OK? I wrote my own.’
Amina’s Birthday
Amina used to be one of my writing students. She was so bright; I thought she had gone to university. Now, though, she has turned back up at school, a support worker for asylum seekers. I ask her what she thinks the problem with Farah’s family might be. Don’t they have their papers? I’d understood they were that very rare thing: government-sponsored refugees.
‘Yes,’ says Amina, ‘but that doesn’t mean they aren’t hiding something. All refugees are hiding something. Have you ever met one that wasn’t?’
I haven’t, but my experience isn’t as wide as hers. I say: ‘I think it’s because they only get one chance. They arrive at the airport or whatever, and then they have to tell exactly the right story to get in. It’s really hard.’
Amina is nodding at me vigorously. ‘And then they have to stick to it forever! And they make mistakes, and they don’t speak English. It’s impossible. And people smugglers, they tell them to lie.’
‘Do you think everyone uses people smugglers?’ I ask.
Amina’s pretty features are flushing; her voice is rising. ‘Yes! How else do you get out? How do you get across the Mediterranean? All the people who actually get here, they started with money! They had houses, cars, family, and they sold it all to get here! They gave it all to people smugglers. And when you get here, they tell you to lie! That’s what they do. They take your money, and tell you to lie, because then they have a hold on you.’
And of course it had happened to her. Amina came here when she was three from the Indian subcontinent. Her father has a claim to British citizenship through his mother, which should have worked out fine. But her parents, in ignorance and fear, had put themselves in the hands of people smugglers, brutal ones, who kept her father at sweated labour for years. At one point, her mother went to prison.
‘Why do you think I’m not at university?’ asks Amina. ‘Do you think, if I had clean papers, I wouldn’t be there in a second?’ And of course, she would. She’s hugely clever, and desperate to learn.
The family’s affairs are now being painfully unpicked by a better lawyer, paid for, in part, by Amina. But there is a lot to do.
‘They made me lie about my birthday!’
‘Your birthday? Why? To make you younger?’
‘I was only three! No, so there would be something wrong on every passport. Something to feel bad about. So now I’ve got two birthdays, the real one and the passport one. Pakistani and English. But you know what? So have a lot of Pakistanis.’
She shows me on her phone an invitation to a party for another of my former students, smiling in a glittering headscarf. ‘For her real birthday!’ she says. ‘Pakistanis only.’
‘I thought Saira went to university?’ I said. She certainly ought to have.
‘No! She’s in the same boat as me. Hasn’t got her papers, so she can’t go. She pretends it’s because she doesn’t want to, but she does!’
Amina wants to do more than go to university; she wants to write. She’s good; I’m always encouraging her. I tell her to write down Saira’s story, or maybe Farah’s. Later that evening, she texts me:
I’m trying to write but it’s hard. The lying, the whole family lying, it stops you writing. It’s the shame. This shame that we shouldn’t have to carry.
Priya’s Poems
So by the time Priya hit the sixth form, I knew she was talented, and I knew she was writing. I set her off on projects, gave her particular things to read. All the same, when I first pulled her poem out of my pigeon hole and read it and felt my eyes prickle and the hairs on the back of my neck rise, I also thought she could not have written it, no sixth-former could. This poem, I mean.
My Mother Country
I don’t remember her
in the summer,
lagoon water sizzling,
the kingfisher leaping,
or even the sweet honey mangoes
they tell me I used to love.
I don’t remember
her comforting garment,
or her saps of date trees,
providing the meagre earnings
for those farmers
out there
in the gulf
under the calidity of the sun,
or the mosquitoes
droning in the monsoon,
or the tipa tapa of the rain,
on the tin roofs,
dripping on the window,
I think.
Because, after all, Priya wasn’t academically brilliant. She did come to Poetry Group, but not always, only at lu
nchtimes, when she could fit it in. Her A Levels were in Economics, Ethics, and Politics, and she was usually to be found in the library, with a dry textbook, working like stink. She read a lot in Bengali though. Could the poem be a translation? I googled it, typing in first the title, then the whole piece, but nothing came up.
In the process, I read the poem again. As a speech act, there was something very familiar about it. That trick of opening like a Japanese fan, of furling out from a neat dark cover to display the gorgeous, sensual landscape of Bangladesh, then folding itself back into a pose of meek denial – how many times had I heard that from our students? ‘I came from Somalia/Afghanistan/Brazil when I was six/nine/three, Miss, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about it.’ And what was it Priya told me the other week? About the importance of the word ‘mother’ in Bengali: We say mother country, Miss, mother fruit . . .?
Calidity, indeed. Well, Priya was devoted to her thesaurus – ‘calidity’ would be exactly the sort of obscure word she would jackdaw away, for the glitter of it. And she loved patternings and echoes; ‘meagre earnings’, halfway to a palindrome, was exactly the sort of phrase she doodled in her margins. And the rich sound, those lamenting ‘o’s, droning in the monsoon, and the irony? Well, I’d heard them before, in the response to Duffy.
So I decided ‘My Mother Country’ really was Priya’s work. I sent Priya an email – flipping amazing, what have you been reading? – then typed up a fresh copy of the poem in Times New Roman, removing a stray comma, marvelling again at the shape. I printed out a copy and taped it to the staffroom tea urn (someone read it out at a Senior Leadership Team meeting later in the day), then made another, and took it across to Miss H. She stuck it on her door, just above the handle, so that everyone entering or leaving her classroom had to read it. Then I copied off a class set and took it into my next scheduled lesson, Miss T’s Year 7s, and read it to them, and asked them for a poem beginning: I don’t remember.
Afterwards, I leafed through the results in the staffroom, dazzled. Priya’s poem was a magic key; it had unlocked, in half an hour, thirty poems. Sana had written about her mother tongue: How shameful, shameful, forgotten. Ismail, who had never written a poem before, who rarely spoke, covered three pages with sensual remembrance, ending: I don’t remember the fearless boy I used to be / no, I don’t remember my country, Bangladesh. So many of them, and so good, so fresh, and, like Priya’s poem, with such sophisticated soundscapes – it was freakish, especially when you considered that almost all of the kids in Miss T’s class had two languages. Most of them, in fact, had lost a country and a language before they were ten.
And that was when I first thought: maybe that loss isn’t something I have to compensate for. Maybe that loss is a poet’s gain. The kids in that class didn’t have foreign accents; they had picked up English exactly as it was spoken around them, as only kids can. So they must have been able to listen to the sounds of language, as well as the sense, with extra, children-only, other-language-only ears. Extra sound awareness: that must make poets. Also that shock of dislocation that had turned them in on themselves; which made them listen to their inner voice; the period each had gone through when silence itself was my friend, as Priya had put it, in another poem: doesn’t that also make a writer, that sort of orphaning? So many of the children in our school had a loss to mourn, a country, a family – and in the end, isn’t that what poetry is for? By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept. A spell to bring things back.
If all that was the case, then our school wasn’t a ‘disadvantaged comprehensive’ when it came to poetry. In fact, it stood at an advantage, rather as the Western Rift Valley stands to long-distance runners. Our students were like those Kenyan children who ran ten miles barefoot to school and grew up to dominate the world in long-distance running; hardened by the low oxygen and harsh peaks, exposed to great beauty and great fear, fitted out, just by their daily lives, for the very longest distances. In which case, I thought, in which case it is about time I did a Rift Valley on the kids, and trained up a team, and we won something. Specifically, it is time someone, let’s say Priya, won the Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award.
I’d judged this annual competition, which is run by the national Poetry Society, back in 2006, and then taught the residential writing course – an Arvon course – that is the prize for the young winners. It may not sound like much of a prize, a week in the country with fourteen others and a couple of poets, but the famous annual Foyle course has evolved into a powerful intervention. By the time I read Priya’s poem, the Foyle group I’d taught a few years earlier were scything through Oxbridge, publishing pamphlets with our most prestigious publishing houses, writing for the national press, and all the time networking frantically with each other like an artsy version of the Bullingdon Club. By mixing a group of exceptionally talented youngsters together, many of them privileged but a couple definitely not, that course had, almost violently, changed most of their lives. I wanted some of that for my students: not just the poetry, but the sense of entitlement, and yes, the networking too. The thing called cultural capital. Imagine the netful just one kid could bring back, I thought. Imagine the sweet, soulful kids I had taught on the Foyle course being confronted with Priya’s experience.
I remembered that the rower Steve Redgrave was discovered by his shoes. An enterprising teacher had decided that his comprehensive lads should get in a rowing eight, so he organized the boat, then went into the boys’ changing room to see who had the biggest feet. I decided to start my quest for prizes in a similar way; by looking for poets’ footprints, targeting students like Priya, with the same special abilities she had. I wanted students tempered by loss; turned inward instead of outward; who were quiet; who read; the ones who still seemed to live in two worlds and two languages; who still seemed unassimilated, other: foreign. I thought I’d start with just girls, because I could think of several new arrivals who would be happier that way. And so it was that I asked my English colleagues to recommend some Very Quiet Foreign Girls, and because they are not only brilliant, but always get my jokes, they immediately understood, and obliged.
Miss H said, ‘Oh yes, I have one for you. Kala only came last term, but she wrote something that was quite definitely a poem.’ Miss W introduced me to Shakila. Miss T, who is prone to melodrama, said, ‘Fatima! So I left it there, my teddy bear, its blank eyes staring – these lines are forever graven on my heart.’ And Miss P said: ‘You can use my room.’ Which was particularly generous, as Miss P is very tidy, and I am not. Miss A raised an eyebrow dryly and suggested: ‘Possibly find another name? You’ll have a problem getting all that on a T-shirt.’
Miss A is always right. The group, officially the ‘Other Countries Poetry Group’, was held every Thursday lunchtime for two terms in Miss P’s tidy room. It was quiet there, and, when the bell rang for tutor time, and the clamour of teenagers rushing to class rose round us like water, we had a special dispensation to stay on in our sealed chamber, our airlock, writing. As well as Priya, Priti, and Shakila, there was Priya’s younger sister Disha, and their anxious friend Neelam, all from Bangladesh; then Fatima of the melancholy teddy bear, and Saira, with the thick glasses and infinite naiveté, both from India; Kala, Miss H’s silent, traumatized arrival from Sri Lanka; and, white-blonde among all the black plaits and hijabs, and younger than the others, Eszter, from Hungary.
We did my usual thing: we read a poem, then wrote one. But they wrote brilliantly; the thing I was looking for, that special, foreign ability to hear poetic sounds and sense shape, surfaced in spades. So Kala, who rarely spoke, who scarcely had, you would say to talk to her, any English, who cannot possibly have understood half the words of Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Originally’, nevertheless responded to it in a way that showed she had heard the rhymes, and how they chimed with the sense, and, more widely, how much she heard the ‘l’s in English, the bells:
I remember a room, next to my class
One that was always empty, until
We heard the bell. Then
It was filled with our voices, filled
With the jokes we used to tell.
Then I left it
To be here.
Where all rooms fill
With people I don’t know.
Shakila, meanwhile, seemed to have the floor plan of a poem in her head and to need help only with filling in the blocks. She would call out to me for words, urgently, her black, almond-shaped eyes snapping, slim fingers blossoming: Thingies!
‘Miss! A thingy! A bird. You are in the desert. It is not an owl!’
‘Vulture?’
‘Yes! Spell please!’ And her high-set, starched hijab – did she have extra ears under there? – would rustle earnestly as she wrote it down.
We know that people learn foreign languages best by immersion – so why not poetry? My quiet foreign girls seemed to learn form as they learned English: rapidly, and not word by word or brick by brick, but wholesale, structure by structure, arch by arch. They were not put off by difficulty – the stronger and stranger a poem, in fact, the more rhetorical and ‘poem-y’, the more they liked it. So when we read Auden, for instance – ‘On this Island’ – the girls reproduced the awed and awesome tone of that most peculiar poem, and its clotted sound, without seeming to think about it, and effortlessly translated its English cliff into their own landscapes. Eszter wrote about a Hungarian plain where the light was ‘riding its cloud horse’, and enjoined us to ‘remember it / the free and wild wind / like a gentle touch’. Shakila picked up on the verb form, and, after shouting for many ‘thingies’, created a poem about arrival at the airport, clutching ‘bags full of dictionaries’, all in the imperative:
See the country
like a journey
unfold right there.
Let your life change.
And Priya, who was by now, it seemed fair to say, motoring, conjured up a magical Sylheti junglescape, where a Bengal tiger ‘obsolete as an emperor / breathes’.