Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me

by Kate Clanchy

  But I am more confident now, after Aimee and Shakila. I don’t believe that poetry will upset Heya; I think life does, and poetry can bring control. We ask Heya to come to Ghazal Club. This is a new idea of mine and Shakila’s, inspired by the poet Mona Arshi. We have assembled Persian, Pashto, Urdu, and Bengali speakers. They all know a version of the word ‘ghazal’ and its echoing, couplet form from their own language and their own mothers, and in Ghazal Club we read and write ghazals in English. If Heya comes, we promise, she can add Arabic to the mix and listen, she can write her ghazal on flowers, or stars, or really anything pretty and cheerful at all. There will be no tears, I promise the form tutor.

  And finally, Heya comes, a hesitant, small, neat figure in a long skirt, a T-shirt that says ‘Big Sister’ and was probably designed for a British six-year-old, and a tight black Syrian-style hijab over grand lumps of hair. Like all the Syrian kids, she is very pretty: pale skinned and dark eyed, with a sensitive mouth and a tiny, high-pitched voice. She is very interested in the ghazal. She knows it well. She has some on her phone, look. Yes, Heya certainly wants to write one. She chooses the word ‘country’ as her repeating word. And before you know it, she has written another deeply moving and odd poem featuring dead children, and blood, and she is in tears, and I am in trouble.

  Now Heya won’t come to Ghazal Club either. Don’t I get it? says her form tutor. Leave her alone. Poetry just opens wounds. If so, Heya is very intent on hurting herself; she passes me in the corridor and hands me a sheet of A4 covered in purple ink. I read it and find it to be another poem, written probably in Arabic and then passed through Google Translate. The English is marvellously strange. ‘My sister, you are leaving by my doorway . . . my sister, in our not-there room, wait for me’.

  I show Shakila and together we do for Heya what I once did for her, what she does for her little Pashtun friend: we type up the poem and put the line breaks in. Line breaks, this is only in English, says Shakila. Probably, Heya has a rhyme in Arabic. Probably, this is an ode. But Shakila is adept at all English things now. We version Heya’s work into a strong English poem. We make a couple of nice copies of it, and at lunchtime, I go down to Heya’s form room, clasping them. But I am not allowed to show Heya. The form teacher will pass them on at an appropriate moment. Heya has been upset by poetry again. Did I know that she lost three sisters in Damascus? Yes, three, she has just told the form teacher. They died in front of her. A bomb fell on the house. Heya is really upset, now, and all because of that poem – but I didn’t tell her to write that one, I squeak, helplessly – and I should take on board that Heya won’t be writing any more poetry.

  I retreat. The form teacher is upset because he is being confronted by a level of distress he cannot accommodate. He isn’t a therapist; he is a teacher in the middle of his school day. And I’m not a therapist either, remember? I don’t know what I’m doing. Maybe Heya shouldn’t write any poems. Maybe the trauma of seeing your sisters die is something you should raise only in a safe place: a hospital, perhaps. Maybe a poem doesn’t count.

  I ask Shakila. She says, in her husky, precise, Farsi accent, ‘Three sisters? Three is a lot.’ And sits looking at her pretty hands for a while. Then she says, ‘You know, in Damascus, those are Hazara boys who do the bombing. There is a regiment of them, Miss, there.’

  I did know that. In Iran, the authorities round up illegal Hazara labourers and conscript them to fight for Assad in Syria, boys the same age as Shakila, very often. But it had hardly occurred to me that Shakila is Shia and Heya is Sunni; that they are from opposite sides of the deep rift in the Middle East. I’d thought of them, simply, as similar kinds of literary girls. Is that the problem? At Ghazal Club, the two girls sat next to each other, and exchanged words in Arabic and Persian.

  ‘I don’t think Heya thinks like that at all,’ I say. ‘Do you? Honestly?’

  ‘No,’ says Shakila, and she sighs. ‘Not really. I think poems just make her remember. You know? We’ll try again. Miss, try an Arabic poem.’

  I remember how long the head poem took to write, and I try again. Shakila is right that we should have a dual text. I go to Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet who is also, thankfully, lyrical, accessible, and widely available on the internet in two languages. I pick some sections from ‘Under Siege’, about the war in Palestine. I manage to stick the Arabic original to the right-hand margin of my A4 sheet. I make several copies. Then, without a word to the form teacher, Shakila and I ambush Heya when we know she has a study lesson, and entice her to the conference room, which we have booked in advance, and which is carpeted and quiet. We feed her grapes. We whip out the Darwish poem. We hope.

  It works. In minutes, Shakila and Heya are swapping words in Arabic, Persian, and English, working out, first, what has been done in the English translation, what the soul of the poem means. Then they start. Heya, I notice, is writing straight into English, with occasional glances at the dictionary on her phone, rather than, as she has before, writing in Arabic and translating afterwards. She writes about her street as it used to be, her house, her courtyard, the trees that grew there, the birds . . . (But everyone from Damascus writes about the birds. When I see the images of the bombed city now, I worry about the doves, where they have gone.)

  Shakila sticks close to the Darwish text, and makes a sophisticated Persian/English version of its ending – how do you create a new compound noun for ‘Homeland’? Heya, meanwhile, returns to her own story. We are back in the house in Damascus, the bomb, the noise, the dust, the blood. ‘How I held my sister’s body,’ she writes, as the bell goes, and she hands me the piece of paper. The form teacher will find out what I did, I know, and we will be back at square one.

  Except this time Heya is not crying.

  For the next four weeks Heya does not/cannot/will not come to Poetry Group, or even to look at the proofs of the anthology I am putting together, heavily featuring her poems, and I have nearly given up on her when two little Syrian sisters approach me with a wad of A4 ‘for the book’. The book – one I’m making with the university for a translation project – is practically on press, and so I can’t include their work. I explain this to the little sisters and they shake their heads. They will not have it.

  So we call up Google Translate. I call in Shakila and the Professor of Arabic to make versions of the poems. Gosh, they’re good. Four poems making a word play on ‘Homeland’ . . . another lamenting the view from the window . . . an idea occurs to me. When the girls come back to me, two meek black hijabs, two pairs of specs, I show them the Mahmoud Darwish print-out. They nod at once. Yes, Heya showed them that. She helped them write their poems.

  And when the book is printed, no one could be prouder than Heya; she can hardly let it out of her hands. She asks her whole family to the launch, and they come and bring tabbouleh. She stands in front of them and reads her poems, in Arabic and in English, the one about dawn, the one about her sisters, and the new one. We clap and clap.

  A week later a small Syrian boy appears, looking for me. He is from the same set of government-sponsored refugees as Heya, but has much less English, as if he were refusing to learn it. I know him, though. I think the whole school does. He is very short and exceptionally beautiful, with tawny hair and skin and huge, fringed, smoky blue eyes. At break times he plays basketball with the Year 11 girls, their mascot and pet, and I’ve seen him break-dance for them, tiny taut body thrown up and backwards, truly wild, reckless, almost feral. He was two years in the jungle in Calais. Firmly, now, he hands me a poem, written in Arabic. ‘For the book,’ he says, and I try to explain that the book is published already and there won’t be another one till next year and— ‘Poem,’ he says firmly.

  So I tell him to go along to the library and borrow Heya. She comes, modest and smiling. She says the writing is good, good Arabic, and gets out her phone, loaded with Google Translate. I put a new document up on the screen.

  ‘They carried her in a black tent to my house,’ says Heya, in
her high, careful little voice. I stare. Then a news bulletin comes to mind: a funeral in the Middle East, a body wrapped in black.

  ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘like a shroud? Like a funeral?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Heya. ‘Funeral. And now we need the word for grave. But not grave. The word for the hole for the grave.’

  And so we go on, the small boy – and he is such a very small boy – looking anxiously from one face to another. Working with Heya is nearly as good as working with Shakila. She doesn’t have so many words, but she certainly has the same drive for precision. Soon, we have this:

  They carry you in a black shroud to my door.

  This is your plot, Syria, strung with ropes, ready,

  These are your deserts, and your mountains,

  And all the people calling your name.

  Syria, you must say to the mourners: my name

  Is not on the grave. Though Daddy is martyred

  And will not come back through the door,

  Though from behind the cloth comes the wail of pain.

  The name of Syria is not on the grave.

  ‘Is it a good poem?’ asks Heya.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I think so. But it is . . . surprising. It sounds very old.’

  ‘I will tell him it is a good poem,’ says Heya. And she does, in Arabic, and he smiles.

  ‘Tell him,’ I say, ‘that he has a very grown-up poet living inside him.’

  She does, and this makes them both laugh.

  Then I say, ‘Tell him, please, that if you are a poet it is hard to lose your language, very, very hard. But he can get it back. He can still write poems. He can learn to write in English too.’

  ‘We can find his poem,’ says Heya.

  And she passes on the messages, and the small boy cries.

  Acknowledgements

  Dear Colleagues: this book is full of my debts to you. I would name you all, but then the kids would be more identifiable, and I know you always put them first. So if you have worked with me, please imagine your name here and accept my thanks.

  I am very grateful to Zoë Waldie and Kris Doyle for their guidance and excellent edits, and to Paul Baggaley and all at Picador for their unstinting support over many years.

  Some Kids I Taught

  and

  What They Taught Me

  Kate Clanchy is a writer, teacher and journalist. Her poetry collection Slattern won a Forward Prize. Her short story ‘The Not-Dead and the Saved’ won both the 2009 BBC National Short Story Award and the VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her novel Meeting the English was shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Her BBC Radio 3 programme about her work with students was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes prize. In 2018 she was appointed MBE for services to literature, and an anthology of her students’ work, England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim.

  NOVELS

  Meeting the English

  POEMS

  Slattern

  Samarkand

  Newborn

  Selected Poems

  The Picador Book of Birth Poems (ed.)

  England: Poems from a School (ed.)

  NON-FICTION

  Antigona and Me

  SHORT STORIES

  The Not-Dead and the Saved

  First published 2019 by Picador

  This electronic edition first published 2019 by Picador

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan

  20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-1-5098-4030-4

  Copyright © Kate Clanchy 2019

  Cover design: Mel Four / Picador art department

  Photography: Jeff Cottenden

  The right of Kate Clanchy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The following texts are quoted in this book: ‘The Trees’ by Philip Larkin (here), ‘Cabaret’ by Fred Ebb (here), ‘Autobiographia Literaria’ by Frank O’Hara (here), ‘A Summer Night’ by W. H. Auden (here), ‘I Cannot Remember My Mother’ by Rabindranath Tagore (here), ‘Trio’ by Edwin Morgan (here) and ‘Today’ by Frank O’Hara (here).

  ‘My Beast’ from Furniture by Lorraine Mariner (Picador, 2009) appears here by permission of the author and publisher. Copyright © Lorraine Mariner 2009.

  The work of students is quoted with their permission.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damage.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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