I Was Arab Enough to Stay, but Not Arabic Enough to Read the Board

I knew some of the letters. That was what made the board so confusing. Before school, my mother had worked with me on Arabic. As I remember it, I could recognize individual letters, and I thought that meant I would be okay. Then I sat in an Arabic lesson in grade one and watched those letters join up. What had seemed familiar on its own became a set of shapes I could not turn into words quickly enough.

I had spent the first five years of my life in Canada. When I moved to Saudi Arabia, I went to a school where the other lessons were in English. It was the language I was comfortable in. I understood some Arabic, but understanding something said to you and reading what a teacher has written are different things. I had not arrived at school knowing how different.

It was one of my early days. When Arabic began, I tried to copy what was on the board, but I could not keep up. I did not feel able to ask the teacher for help. Eventually I put my head down and cried.

Then someone from the school came into the room and called for the non-Arab children. I remember Indian and Pakistani children getting up. I stood with them. I could not follow the lesson, and they were being offered a way out of it. At that age, this seemed like enough reason to join them.

My mother later told me that the school had called her. Her son did not speak Arabic well enough for the class, but he was Arab, so he had to take it. I was Arab enough to stay, but not Arabic enough to read the board.

That is how I understand the moment now. I do not imagine I had a sentence like that ready in grade one. I was a child crying over work I could not do. The school knew which group I belonged to, and I did not have the skill that was supposed to come with it.

My mother helped me practise. For about a month, we went over the letters again. I wrote them, repeated them and worked on how they connected. Knowing the pieces had given me confidence; now I had to learn how to use them. It helped. I learned enough to keep up, even though Arabic was still much less comfortable than English.

I am glad she helped me learn it. I do not look back at that class and think the answer was for me never to study Arabic. I needed help with something I could not do, and with practice I got better at it.

Arabic remained a difficult subject for me. I generally did well at school, which made that difficulty stand out. Composition was especially hard: having an idea did not mean I knew how to make it sound right in Arabic.

In one later assignment, I wrote about a soldier defending his country. I ended with something along the lines of: the soldier defends his nation the way a mouse defends its cheese. I thought the comparison made sense. Each was protecting something important to it. My teacher did not appreciate comparing a soldier to a mouse. My mother thought it was very funny.

The schoolwork ended, but I am still self-conscious about my Arabic. I notice my vocabulary, my pronunciation, the grammatical genders I mix up. Sometimes I feel people judging the mistakes. Sometimes I cannot tell how much of that judgment is coming from them and how much I have brought into the conversation myself. I know the feeling well enough that I do not always need someone to say anything for it to arrive.

An ordinary language mistake can become much bigger in my head. I am no longer just looking for a word. I am wondering what the missing word says about me, or what someone else will decide it says.

Arabic matters to me, and I want to speak it better. There is plenty of work in that already: learning to read, finding the word I need, trying again when I get it wrong. I do not think proving that I belong needs to be part of the same assignment.

My mother helped me practise, and I got better at reading the board. Being Arab had not supplied the skill. Struggling with the skill had not made me someone else.

I still have Arabic to learn. I would like to be able to get on with learning it without feeling that my place is waiting for the result.