The insides
of me twisted and gyrated by the time he finished his sentence. “Stupid immigrants—they come to America and
don’t learn English.” The old me would
have tolerated, perhaps even accepted his diagnosis. The old me, the me that idealized America as
being superior in all ways, was naïve and comatose. Then I became an immigrant and everything
changed. I love the word then.
There is great pain in those four letters, but hope: hope thrums in the
conjunction.
When I lived in West Africa, I sweated
over the French language: its articles and reflexive verbs and exceptions and idioms. I spent hours studying at home and
transitioned into a child when I walked away from its smug, English-speaking
walls. People spoke too fast, it seemed. The signs had too many words I couldn’t
translate; sometimes I couldn’t even gather the overall meaning. Africans followed the exceptions, rather than
the rules; the informal rather than former protocol. Whatever: all native speakers—of any
language—do this. We contract
verbs. We sputter out fragmented
sentences. We omit intonation. We use the wrong tense when we mean the right
one. We do all these things and more, to
the point that a foreigner could become proficient in the “formal” use of a
language and still be fucked.
All of this
simply to say: learning a language is hard.
It takes time, patience, humility, and dauntlessness. Let’s delight in the one phrase—hell, the one
word—we can catch while listening to the taxi driver. Let’s listen with a hell-bent, industrious
desire only to understand more. And
still, our skin will slip off in paper-thin strips. We’ll only scratch the surface of the
language for many, many years.
Why expect more of others? Why assume an immigrant, who most likely
earns a meager wage at best and thus has to work more hours than his American
counterpart, has the time or energy to learn English well? Why place this nation on a pedestal when its
people, when I am drifting about, an
ephemeral being trying to buy my way to lasting significance? I am the lost soul. I am sinking in the very American mire of
solidity, riches, and ease. I am the one who can learn from them.
I’ll end with her ending. My sponsor.
I asked her the other day what she imagined the meaning of life to
be. She fisted her hand in the air and
said, “Remember this? This is what happens when you drink. You contract and go inside yourself and great
pain comes with contraction.” Then the
fist unclenched; open, receptive.
“This,” she breathed, “this is what we need to do. Expand.
Always learning, endless expansion: that is the meaning of life.” This is another word I now love: expansion. My sponsor wants me to end life like I just
began it: with brain cells buzzing possibilities, with wonder and
innocence and an open heart, no matter the breaking.
And how can I expand with
like-minded people? I must go the way of
the immigrant. I must stretch myself,
not for me, but for something I will someday find, not as vision, but as
reality.
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