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.