Memoir - 3 Demeaning, Difficult Days

  I am currently in Grade 11. I, after almost 8 years of learning Arabic, am certainly not a native speaker, but I can understand some things, like “How are you?”, or how to introduce myself with “My name is ___, and I’m from ___” etc., etc. But that wasn’t the case when I first moved to Abu Dhabi.

  Before I lived in Abu Dhabi, I lived in the small town of Mt. Pleasant in Charleston, South Carolina. So, as I was in 3^rd grade in a public school, I still was not learning any other language than English. Sure, I took some Arabic in a mosque on the other side of the bridge (it cut the town in two), but it was the simple “ت ,ب ,أ,…” with a few additions of “أنا آكل” (I eat) and “مرحباً” (hello), you know, the simple things. But I was still ahead of everyone in my class language-wise.

  When I was told we were moving in late November, my mom told me of how, in this new city, everyone spoke Arabic really well. It was then that I decided that I was more interested in Arabic. This was not because I hated English or felt that I was behind in it, no, I was the star spelling student in my class (A+’s covered my report). But, I felt that I wanted to be more than just ‘an English speaker’, so I set to study. I tried to speak at home and my parents practiced with me to help me improve. By the time we were ready to move, it was already late December, just after Christmas. I arrived 16 hours later, a long trip for a young, recently 10-year-old girl, but I was excited to see the locals who, I was told by my parents, were ‘bilingual’ (meaning they spoke both English and Arabic).

  In the 5 days I stayed in a hotel downtown, my parents had already found a school willing to take me. It was a private school for girls called “Al Rawafed”, it was downtown and, because it stated it was ‘private’, my parents thought that the education system would be better sophisticated. So, I went with my tiny uniform on and was practically skipping to school. I kept reminding myself of how to say “مرحباً, اسمي زينة ” which was the only phrase I was most confident in saying. The principal had told me that students could speak English, so I wouldn’t feel isolated, but I was still shocked when all I heard in the hallways were “khilahudska” and “ysajklasz”. Older kids were there as well, girls and boys (I was as shocked to see them as my parents were), but I said nothing as I was brought to P.E. class.

  A girl immediately ran up to me when I had sat on the bare ground, the tiles were old and crusty and there were no marks for courts or any area for the boys to play soccer, so I made sure to sit in a corner away from the ball. This girl just stared at me and practically screamed in her thick accent “axjxbzkdjjks!”. I was so scared that, out of instinct, I stated my name in Arabic, the phrase I had practiced for so long. She laughed at my accent and stated in slightly worse English “You new? Yes, you were not here yesterday and 2 days before.” I nodded and looked to my teacher for help, but he screamed “قف!” which I knew was ‘stop!’ from the Arabic spelling tests I took before.

  The girls were doing some sort of stretching exercises before they were stopped but the boys continued playing. The teacher had to take the ball and a kid had almost kicked him if not for his loud whistle. The girl was still talking to me and, after the teacher rambled in Arabic, something about water (ما), all the girls ran to me. I was bombarded with questions about “Why you look not same?” or “Why Arabic not know?”. When I still couldn’t understand them, they turned to the same girl that ran to me, and she said “Why you are different? I from Lebanon, she” she pointed to a tan girl with straight black hair “from here, Emirati”, she rambled about the other 6 girls before we were taken inside. I still didn’t understand those around me but I nodded in fear of being ridiculed. I went to my second class, which was math, and even my teacher had trouble speaking English. She was not sweet by any standard, but she gave me advanced questions since I could do nothing else.

  It was the next class that truly showed me how horrible it was to not speak the majority language. In the last class, the boys were too focused on not getting in trouble to bother me, but in Arabic, they were the ones asking questions. The first girl that talked to me was shoved as the boys, about 15 compared to the 8 girls, started speaking rapidly in Arabic, pointing at my eyes, my hair and my skin, why, I didn’t know, but I was still terrified and began hugging my pencil case close to me, a gift from my parents for the first day of school. I said without a thought “It ain’t nice to point.” in my slang dialect. A mistake, I knew, to code-switch from my formal English with my teachers to the informal dialect I had used with my old classmates.

  When they figured I couldn’t speak Arabic, one boy stepped in front of my table while the others gave way. From the way he walked and how the other boys stepped away, he was the head. He even had spots of blood on his shirt, the result of him fighting a boy, as the Lebanese girl had told me. He was much, much taller than me, as tall as the board hanging on the wall and when he spoke, he looked down at me.

  He spoke with a heavy accent and seemed to speak in a more colloquial dialect from the way he slurred his words and emphasized certain phrases. He slammed his hands on my desk as he said “Why you حمار?” the other boys snickered and the Lebanese girl, as well as other girls, had cringed at his question. I knew he said something horrible, because the Lebanese girl looked at me with pity. I turned to him and simply stated “مرحباً, اسمي زينة ”, the only thing I knew, and he laughed at that. “You no Arabic. Why have name Zina?”. I knew my name was Arabic because my parents had told me before (my younger sister’s name is Sophia and my elder’s is Dina, so I was confused as to why my name was so weird). So I took offense at that, but shrank further in fear of angering him. He then said “You no Zina, you حمار ”, repeating what he said before. At this time, the teacher came in and I knew something was wrong because she balked at that and screamed at him, he then sat with temper still lining his face. She began teaching the class, something about grammar and how to correctly make sentences, but the whole time I understood nothing, only hearing “صح” or “هذا” which I knew meant ‘right’ and ‘this’, respectfully.

  When she finished, she brought me to the front as the class was writing, as I assume, paragraphs and she gave me a paper filled with sentences to copy. I thanked her in English and she smiled sadly at me. She did this for me for the three days I stayed at that school.

  But, she and the other teachers weren’t always there to keep the boys away when it was recess. I would always sit in a corner to stay away from the boys as they became violent, rage driven machines whilst paying but, throughout the playground were small wall-mounted T.V. screens that played Arabic dubbed movies, so I’d make sure to sit where I could watch. That first day it was Black Beauty. I had put my lunchbox, a flimsy pink-flower fabric one, on the ground in front of the T.V., waiting for my little sister. I was watching and I heard a girl shout “sbchjsa!”, I ignored it, thinking it was someone playing games. A heartbeat later, in the corner of my eye, I saw a boy running to me with a leather ball being kicked in front of him. I reacted too late. He not only stepped on my lunchbox, crushing all my food, he also kicked the ball in my shoulder, causing me to cry in pain. It was a short lunch and it was already ending so by the time I had picked up my things and threw them away, I found that lunch was almost over. So I sat there, watching Black Beauty, for the entirety of the lunch while clutching my arm and hiding from the sight of the impossibly tall boy.

  This happened again the next day, but I avoided the same boy before he did any damage, I had made sure to move where a wall was behind me so that he couldn’t ‘accidentally’ hit me. The third day is what got me to leave the school. The third day was picture day where half of the students would take pictures. A girl in another class had decided to not wear the right pants and she was forced to wear someone else’s. Every girl in my grade had spoken to the teacher, but each said they couldn’t, making excuses in Arabic. That same teacher came to me. She said “bcxjbsjisx  ملابس (clothes) oqihasjdfk” but I didn’t understand her so I said “I’m sorry miss, I don’t know what your question is.” She then grabbed me and dragged me to the bathroom, that was where I learned the situation. The girl was wearing very short pants that clearly weren’t the school’s. The teacher, when I just stood there, tugged on my pants and shoved me to a cubicle. I heard the next cubicle lock and the girl passed her shorts to me under the door. I was terrified of doing such a thing, but more terrified of the teacher outside my door so I took off my pants and gave them to the teacher, whilst wearing the other girl’s pants.

  The teacher shoved the other girl out and when I was going to go back to my class, she shoved me back into the cubicle and screamed “قف!”, which I knew not only meant ‘stop’, but meant ‘stand’. I got what she was ordering and, in my most formal dialect of Arabic, stated “نعم (yes) ma’am”. I waited almost an hour for the girl and teacher inside that bathroom, my bag and things were still in my classroom and I was left to do nothing but wait. I wanted to go outside, but I was worried the teacher or someone else might find me and scream at me in Arabic, firstly for disobeying a teacher and secondly for being dumb enough in Arabic to not understand them. So I stayed and, when I was just about to scream for help, I heard a door open and the teacher lecturing the girl. She threw my pants over the wall, almost landing in the toilet, when I caught it. I gave her shorts back under the door and exited the bathroom. There was a new black ink stain from a pen that marked my inner thigh, but I didn’t care. By the time I was back, my things were thrown across my table and my bag was wide open with my things quickly stuffed inside. My pencil case had been broken but nothing was stolen. I found that the Arabic teacher had packed everything for me and, later that day, I went to the principal to ask her to let me leave. She said no and, when my mom picked me up at the end of the day, I told her the story privately. She was furious and I was at a new school, Chouifat Downtown, the next day.

  I will never forget how, in those 3 days, I learned how alienated people who did not know a preferred social dialect could feel. I was ashamed, ridiculed and felt like the world was against me. Now, 8 years later, I continue to learn Arabic and make sure to never make another feel that, because they don’t know English or they cannot code-switch into the more preferred dialect, that they should feel less than who they are. And I make sure that, even if I don’t know the perfect social dialect, that I should not feel less than who I am.

Opinion Column

How My Parents Indirectly Caused Me to Get Bullied

Zina Kaissi

  My little problem started when I was in 4^th grade. To be frank, I was bullied; no, not the ‘I was beat-up’ bullying or the ‘I got called names’ bullying, mine was worse. I was the ‘You can’t speak English’ bullied. Now, you have to remember that I am this 10 year-old kid who has no idea why this is happening to her. I spoke great English (as great as a 4^th grader’s could be), I read and wrote in English and I even had the best scores when it came to spelling tests. So what was wrong with me? Well, it wasn’t me that was ‘wrong’, it was my parents.

  Both of my parents were immigrants who couldn’t speak what others would call ‘perfect’ English. But they were just perfect to me. They disregarded grammar and found it easier to simply speak what’s on their minds, even if it’d sound like gibberish to others. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean they were dumb. My mother is a nurse who works the day shift in the emergency section of a hospital while my father works in I.T. They both watch the news, read about changes in the economic industry and even talk about political news so you couldn’t call them uneducated, but yet, they were still labeled as so.

  All because they couldn’t speak ‘perfect’ English, it was assumed I couldn’t either. So, in class, I was shunned and found that, when it was group work time, I had to tell my teacher that I preferred working alone rather than force others to work with me. But I’ll always remember the time when we were forced to work in partners in 6^th grade.

  It was our school’s annual science fair and my partner and I, another girl who preferred nail-work over school work, was forced to be my partner. I say forced because, after she outright refused, the teacher told her it was either partner up with me or get an F, you can see which she begrudgingly chose. So, our project was to see which liquids would cause a pea plant to grow the fastest. Throughout the experiment, I was the one doing the work while my partner went off with her friends. I was a science nerd who just couldn’t fail, so, I made an A+ project. But, when it was time to present, I was never asked what the project was, never asked of how it was done, only she was. Even when she didn’t know anything, she was seen as smarter, better and much more reliable than me. Even then, I still didn’t know why. I thought I did something wrong or that I really was dumb, so I didn’t fight it. Not until years later.

  Fast-forward to 10^th grade. I’m still bullied and I’m still blaming myself. It’s parent-teacher conferences and both my parents have come to meet my homeroom teacher, who’s also my English teacher. Immediately I know something’s wrong. My teacher looks at my parents in their work clothes, my mom in her nurse outfit and my dad in his suit, and seems to have a double-take. When we sit, he starts off with, “What do you work as?”. No hellos, no ‘how are you?’ or even a handshake.

  That’s when my mom starts with “I a nurse and he is work in I.T.” I never felt more embarrassed in my life when my teacher replied with “Really?”, like he couldn’t actually believe my parents had the capability to be such things. And it only got worse there, when my parents asked how I was in class, my grades or how I could improve, my teacher gave sharp replies and only told me that, to improve, I had to take ELL classes as I needed more time in an environment that exposed me to ‘perfect’ English. My parents were insulted and when they took it to the principal, they were met with “He has done nothing wrong, he has simply given your child a chance to improve.” The next week, I was in a new school. But, unlike my last schools, this one had a larger population of immigrant children. I still remember what my now-best friend said to me on my first day at lunchtime, “How bad was it?” And, wow, I cried. I cried so bad and when I finally stopped for breath, everyone at the table started telling me their stories. A Hispanic boy had told me that, because he needed the help at ELL, he was ridiculed and even his teachers punished him for speaking Spanish with his younger sister at lunch. Another Asian girl told me that her English teacher made sure that she never was able to ‘spread her wings’ in creative writing and instead was forced to do exercises from the textbook of the younger grades to ‘give her extra help’. I couldn’t stop laughing at that, especially since, in the school, she was known as the best script writer. She even modernized Hamlet somehow! (I didn’t get to see I but I was told that it had wizards.)

  It was then that I realized that I wasn’t the problem, but these people’s ideas were. Of course English is an important language, but what they thought was that it was the only important language. And I smiled at how, now, I knew that the problem was never me. It was like a weight was lifted off of me.

  After that, I went on in my life and ignored those who thought otherwise of my abilities. My mother and father both continued to support me and now, over a decade later, I am now an English professor who teaches people of every nationality. But I always slip into my ‘broken’ English at home, not caring who’s there to listen. Even in my classroom I’m more casual as I find that using ‘perfect’ English makes it harder for me to build relationships with my students.

  It is from my story that I realized that so many children of immigrant parents are labeled as ‘dumb’ regarding English due to their parents speaking ‘broken’ English. Which is why, years later, I help kids who’ve thought otherwise of their abilities and help them to see what they really can do.

Kool A.D.'s Article - An Analysis

  Below is a paragraph analyzing Kool A.D.'s article "How to Pay for a Baby" where we were tasked to analysis the author's use of dialects.

  In Kool A.D.’s article, “How to Pay for a Baby”, there is a strong sense of a Southern U.S. regional dialect which is presumably spoken by a male of a younger age. This can be seen from the constant use of informal, slang and colloquial dialects that are found in the text with a shortage of formal dialect. The informal dialect is used strongly in this text throughout Kool A.D.’s explanation of how to pay for your baby, the respective title of the article, and is seen to even slip into slang and colloquial dialects when he appears to be passionately annoyed at a certain fact about raising a child. An example of his informal dialect is when he begins to speak about the toys that can be used or given to the children. He states that, regarding books, “[the babies] like kid’s books but they’ll even listen to illuminati conspiracy theories or a Kehlani interview if you read it with some drama and funny voices.” His lack of a formal tone and the relaxed and laid-back way of addressing the solution is a clear use of informal dialect and could relate to how young he truly is. But, as said before, he does slip into slang and colloquial dialects when he begins to become passionate about a problem, showing how his temper could also relate to his possible young age or gender. When speaking about money, he states that you, the new parent, must “get your yaper up. Yaper, also known as feddy, bread, guap, clams, smackerinos, legal tender, coinage, etc., is crucial to child rearing.” The vocab used here can be connected to the Southern U.S. regional dialect as these terms are mainly used by natives of the Southern-most states and, as he continues to cuss throughout the article, it shows how young and temperamental he could be. It is through his strong use of Southern U.S. regiolect slang terms that we are able to understand how his idiolect is that of a young Southern U.S. male who has a strong accent and commonly uses informal and colloquial dialect – associated terms that point him out to be so.

An Intro to Me

A picture that reminds myself of who I am.

Part 1 - My Bio

  Where to start? Firstly, I'm Zina Kaissi, sister to two and an all-around book nerd whose main passions are to read, write and draw till the day's done. I've read a variety of books from fantastic fantasy novels to the thrilling world of Sci-fi. But, I will always place my family above all else, above my reading obsession, my studying and my dreams. They are what I care about the most for a person cannot be happy when they cannot share the smiles of their family.

  And it is from that love that I found my passion for reading and my love of language. Without language, I would be unable to explain what I see, hear or feel to others or show the world, as I am now, who I am. Language in itself is an art that takes years to master and something so complex as it changes constantly, adapting to the new generations and becoming something completely new, just as Shakespearean has, through adapting, become our modern tongue of quick sentences and abbreviations. And because of this, it is an important subject to study, especially to myself, as you not only learn words with which to express your feelings or stories, but learn with it the new cultures of the people of the world. You could learn what they find value in from the way they associate certain ideas or beliefs with specific phrases, like how water might be important to a drought-ridden country, thus calling the water 'life-saving' or 'essential'.

  But, as there are many languages in the world, some might feel that they have some barriers that they have to work through due to their knowledge of languages. These language barriers could be caused by where these people live where their native language might not be widely used. Luckily, due to my mother language being English, I have not found such barriers but, to me, I find that the lack of knowledge of the UAE's other main language, Arabic, blocks me from experiencing their full, unfiltered culture, causing me to lack the chance to experience this country as locals or native Arabic speakers do. This, to me, is a barrier that I plan to overcome by learning and, eventually, speaking Arabic to expose myself to not just the culture of the U.A.E., but also to other Arabic-majority speaking countries such as Saudi Arabia or Oman.



Part 2: My Goal Setting

  Just as my first DP year rolls by, I hope to join the volleyball team at the school as I have always wanted to find a sports team to play in for the school but hadn't found the right sport until last year. Additionally, I hope to finish my book's editing so that it can be published soon. And, I'll have a better chance at editing my book successfully as, by analyzing multiple texts in the class, I will understand how much certain words or phrases can impact an audience's mood and help me to portray the tone I had wanted to achieve in some areas of my book. And, after these 2 years, I will finally be able to finish my book. But, I can also understand the world and its cultures better, which could help me in college when I learn in a larger international environment where I can pick up the skills of analysis from this class and use it in the outside world to understand how others feel through their novels or other pieces of writing, such as newspaper articles.