Maryan is stringing beads onto a shoelace. "One two three four six." I stop her. "Five. Five." "Fife." She closes her eyes in concentration. "Fife." V is neither a letter nor a sound in the Somali language, and Maryan is not my first student to just hope it would go away. She starts back at the beginning. "One two three four fife " She looks over at me expectantly and I nod. She smiles. Her skin is the color of cinnamon bark. Her cheekbones are regal. She is missing an incisor. It is March, 2007, and Maryan has been in the U.S. for six weeks. According to her paperwork her birthday is January 1, 1945, but this is an estimate. The year might have been 1944, or it might have been 1946, or it might have been 1947. The date most certainly wasn't January 1st. All of the older women in my class have assigned birthdays of January 1st. " six " Maryan adds a bead to the shoelace. "Eight " "Seven," I say. "Seven." The other students are ostensibly working on a reading worksheet, but everyone is listening. Several of them are counting with her under their breath. "Sefen eight nine." She strings her last bead, "Ten." I gesture for her to start over and she does, this time counting to ten slowly but without stumbling. The classroom erupts in laughter and cheering. Maryan grins and thrusts out a hand in victory. Perpendicular to her body, it's too high for a handshake, too low for a high-five. I split the difference and give her a half-slap, half-clasp. I don't yet know Maryan's story, but these things are almost statistical certainties: She can milk a camel. She can recite her clan lineage back twenty generations or more. She is Muslim. She's never been to school. She's been married, although she may not have been her husband's only wife. She's borne multiple children without medical assistance. She's outlived several, if not all, of her children. She's undergone infibulation, the most extreme form of female circumcision. She's participated in the infibulation of her daughters. She's lived through famine. She's lived through flood. She's lived through war. Many wars. She's spent years in a refugee camp in Kenya or Ethiopia or Uganda. She still has family in Somalia. She has family all over the world. I put away the beads and pull a new book out of my bag, a Somali-English children's picture dictionary. Almost all of the available material for teaching numbers and the alphabet is aimed at American children, so I was excited to find this book. My class is sometimes reduced to one long Pictionary session as my students and I try to make ourselves understood with few common words, and I've learned the limits of Western iconography. Any toddler born in the U.S. would recognize that an oval with a squiggly tail is a pig, or a circle with eyes and whiskers is a cat. But not my students. They haven't grown up drawing cute animal pictures. They have been taught that on the Day of Judgment Allah will present them with any image they have made of people or animals and ask them to breathe a spirit into it. Creating images of living things is considered the ultimate in human arrogance. Yet my students are pragmatists, and they confer amongst themselves until finally a spokesperson renders the verdict: "We don't know, Teachah." They always sound sad. Turning to the picture book's counting page, I take Maryan's hand and trace the numeral 1 with her finger. Then I point to the picture beside it, a realistic-looking horse. "One horse," I say. She watches me closely to see how the word is said. "One horse," she repeats. We move to the next row. She traces the numeral 2 with her finger. I point to the picture beside it: "One bird." She repeats, "One bird." "Two birds." She repeats, "Two birds." We move to the next row. She traces the numeral 3 with her finger. I point to the corresponding picture: "One bullet." She says, "One bullet." I say, "Two bullets." She says, "Two bullets." I say, "Three bullets." She says, "Three bullets." |
©Stephanie Harrison
Updated 01/02/09