by Aaron Barlow
Sometimes, after giving us the sentence a second time, Nemerci would straighten up, give the command, “Répétez,” and point at an unlucky mute. I was not a good repeater. I always listened intently to Nemerci, let her syllables float up my auditory canal. I tried to clear a spot in my brain where the melodious French sounds could sink in and become my own. But something terrible happened to those sounds when forced to travel from my brain to my lips. My syllables moved slowly. Clearly, whatever they had gone through on their trip between my brain and my mouth had exhausted them. Where Nemerci’s syllables floated and glided, mine herked and jerked, as if their trip had made them paranoid or punch drunk or both. My syllables became shape-shifting tricksters. I recognized the moment they escaped my lips that they didn’t flow the way that Nemerci’s did. Still, as I listened to the sounds of my words, the shy, muffled h; the wild, rolling r, they seemed spot-on to me, the kinds of sounds that must hover in the air over outdoor cafés in Paris. But, by the time they reached Nemerci, they must have transformed themselves into something very different. As I spoke, Nemerci would twist up her face as if she were listening to me pound away at the keyboard of a piano while wearing boxing gloves.
Other times, instead of repeating, class members would have to respond to Nemerci’s sentence with a sentence of their own creation. Nemerci would stand before us and say something like “Comment tu t’appelle? Comment tu t’appelle?” Even without vocabulary we could always tell when Nemerci expected an answer. When she pronounced the final word of a question, her voice would suddenly jump an octave, as if she had been poked with something sharp, and she would raise her eyebrows until they nearly crawled under her headscarf. When she finished speaking, she would cock her head to the side and point an ear toward our group as if anxious to capture the brilliant sounds about to erupt from us. Then she would point.
The first mute called upon faced special challenges. I had to go through Nemerci’s questions word by word, skimming through my sparse French vocabulary, hoping to find the alchemy that would transform the French words into English words. Some transformed easily. Comment for example, became how as soon as it entered my consciousness. Comment I retained from high school. I had heard Madame Doering speak it a thousand times. I also recalled comment easily because I liked the word, admired its versatility. In addition to starting questions, in casual conversation comment could become a sentence all by itself. Stretch out the middle o sound, raise the pitch of your voice slightly as you bit off the silent t clinging to its end and it became cooommen, an expression of surprise and awe, a kind of Chadian equivalent of “holy cow.” Just as quickly, I could transform tu into you. Pronouns were almost impossible not to learn. They forced themselves into nearly every communication, buzzing through the air of the training center like swarms of gnats.
How and you provided an entryway into Nemerci’s sentence, but the bulk of the hard work of making meaning still remained. Anything might follow how and you. How are you feeling today? How would you like your eggs? How far are you from home? How do you plan to survive in Chad without understanding French? The most important elements of Nemerci’s questions always lay at the end, and these most important elements tended to be the most cryptic, for example t’appelle.
From high school French class I remembered t’appelle as an awkward-looking contraction. The apostrophe appeared much too early, jumping up out of nowhere at the beginning of the word like someone barging into a conversation, interrupting the beginning of a story. The construction of t’appelle struck me as tenuous and ugly. The word lacked balance, all the weight resting at the end. The t seemed like a kind of tumor growing off the front end of the word, disfiguring it, obscuring its meaning.
I developed a strategy for dealing with the unfamiliar and confusing elements of the language, letters blooming in unexpected places, slashes and dots perching atop letters. I ignored them. When confronted by t’appelle, I performed mental surgery on the word, cutting away what looked problematic and ugly, leaving me with a mutt of a sentence: How you appelle?
To transform a word like appelle into English, I first scoured the already converted words for clues. Even mundane words like how and you provided some help. While the meaning of appelle remained wide open, how and you hinted at the function of appelle. In order to form a coherent question, how and you needed the aid of a verb.
Once I could make an educated guess as to the part of speech a French word might be, I started looking for English cognates. The one redeeming quality all of us mutes recognized in the French language was that it is filled with English cognates, words that share common origins with English words. The cognates were like cousins of the English words I knew so well, cousins that had grown up in Europe and acquired exotic mannerisms and habits, but retained a familiar essence. The French taxi, stripped of its lilting pronunciation, became the earthy English taxi. Banane affected some sophistication, but so strongly resembled banana that their relationship could not go unnoticed.
The cognates usually revealed themselves right away or not at all. I’d let a word like appelle bang around in my head, try to visualize the word, investigate the letters that made it up, try to feel the sounds tripping across the bones of my inner ear, listening for the English heartbeat that I hoped pumped somewhere in the background. And when my search came up empty, I’d get desperate. Appelle. Appelle. It seemed to have a lot in common with apple. Could apple be a verb? Maybe. Maybe in agriculture circles one could apple something, maybe apple a new orchard. But would Nemerci ask me how I apple? Is this the kind of thing that would prove handy in a Chadian village? Did apples even exist in Chad? I had to admit that I had hit a dead end.
Once a cognate search proved fruitless, I had only rote memory to turn to. For years, I thought of the bits of high school French classes I retained the way that other people might think of the recalled flashes of car accidents. Infrequently, I’d dust off my memories and examine them, but only to cringe, to feel the chill run up my spine, to feel the muscles in my shoulders contract, to feel the wave of relief, like a sudden blast of cool air, when I reassured myself I would never have to sit through a Madame Doering lecture again.
For the most part, I was a quiet and pleasant high school student. I got along with most teachers, and though I found some classes to be misdirected or boring, I never found any of my teachers offensive. Except for Madame Doering. Every snap of her pointy-toed shoes against the tile floor, every word that came out of her puckered mouth plucked at my nerves. If she would have walked into class and announced, “Instead of teaching today, I’m just going to run my fingernails up and down the blackboard for the next forty-five minutes,” I would have been relieved. I can’t say exactly what bothered me so much, but her French accent, the way her voice became twittery and birdlike when she spoke, was part of the problem. And I hated the clucking she made in the back of her throat when students gave poor answers, the way she would slowly shake her head from side to side as if dumbfounded that children from northern Indiana spoke French badly.
But my irritation with her went deeper, deeper than I could understand. It seemed almost innate, a kind of allergic reaction. Pollen caused my eyes to burn and my nose to run. Madame Doering caused the muscles of my back and jaw to tense. But, sitting in a boukarou surrounded by Nemerci and my fellow mutes, all eyes on me, waiting for some response, I had no one else to turn to but Madame Doering.
Every chapter of my high school French textbook opened with a dialogue, a script presented under a crude cartoon drawing of teenagers. Madame Doering gave these dialogues the weight and import that the English teachers gave Hamlet and Huckleberry Finn. We’d spend days on every new dialogue. First Madame Doering would read them to us, walking around the classroom, using her one free hand to pantomime, as best she could, the action of the dialogue, the pitch of her voice rising or falling to indicate a change of character. Then the students would read the dialogue aloud, first all togeth
er, like a chorus of first graders recounting the adventures of Dick and Jane in unison. Then Madame Doering would call on individuals to read. Eventually, parts would be assigned. Tom, you be Jean-Paul and Mary, you can be Stéphanie. Over and over I’d read and hear the dialogue until the characters’ conversations bored into my memory like a commercial jingle I couldn’t shake.
Finally, in Chad, I found a use for the French small talk Madame Doering had pounded into me. I discovered that I could still recall large portions of those dialogues. Over the years they had became an amalgam, rather than a series of distinct conversations; all the greetings, the obvious questions, the flat answers had jumbled together in no particular order. When I needed to decode a word like appelle, I’d start digging through the hodgepodge, hoping to find something useful. It was like listening to a series of whispered non-sequiturs.
“Comment ça va?”
“Fermez la porte.”
“Où vas-tu?”
“Il fait chaud.”
“Quelle huere est-il?”
Surprisingly often, I would stumble across something useful: “Oui, ça va. Et toi?” “Je m’appelle Philippe.” I’d found it. Appelle. The ‘m’ troubled me though. Nemerci’s appelle sprouted a ‘t’. There is a big difference between an ‘m’ and a ‘t’ and I worried that maybe I had wandered down a blind alley, fallen into a trap. I searched the dialogue fragments one more time.
“J’ai soif.”
“Pas mal.”
Nothing. “Je m’appelle Philippe” was my best option.
I’d lurch back into decoding mode. Je was easy, another one of the omnipresent pronouns. I could see the conversion going on in my head, variables shaken out of their disguises like working on an algebra test. Je = I. Philippe was also easy. Philippe = Phil. I liked translating proper names, liked to strip them of their Frenchness, break them down to something that felt more blue-collar. I could close my eyes and see the new sentence, glowing like neon: I m’appelle Phil. I’d conjure up Nemerci’s question that I had partly translated, make comparisons, get my equation in order.
If Comment tu t’appelle? = How you t’appelle? and Je m’appelle Philippe = I m’appelle Phil, what does the variable appelle equal? I’d start lining up the like terms in my head while rubbing my chin and looking at the straw ceiling of the boukarou. Nemerci would repeat the question. “Comment tu t’appelle.” I could feel the drops of sweat blooming on the back of my neck, hear the fabric of my fellow mutes’ pants and skirts rubbing against their chairs as they shifted in their seats.
How you t’appelle? I m’appelle Phil. I knew Nemerci had asked a question. The scrap from the high school dialogue seemed more like a statement…maybe an answer. How you something. I something Phil. I started to recall other lines from the dialogue.
Philippe: Je m’appelle Philippe.
Alice: Bonjour Philippe. Je m’appelle Alice.
Philippe and Alice traded names, probably paving the way for future discussions about what time they got up in the morning and things they enjoyed buying in the market. More importantly, they had provided me with an answer for Nemerci. Finally.
I’d lower my head as if I had lost interest in the boukarou ceiling and make eye contact with Nemerci. Her dark eyes grew to the size of fifty-cent pieces, imploring me to take a shot, to say anything French.
“Je…” I would start.
The other mutes would always lean slightly toward any mute starting to speak, listening carefully, knowing that they soon would have to give a similar response.
“…m’appelle…”
Nemerci’s hands would come together palm to palm in front of her chest, almost like prayer.
I’d end with a flourish, a nod toward cultural sensitivity and an attempt to hang a big, flashing sign in the air that said Look How Frenchified I Am: “…Toe-ma.”
I’d feel the French syllables in my mouth as I spoke them, each one slippery and alive with erratic tremors, like Jell-O sliding across my tongue. And as I’d launch them into the air, I’d grip the seat of my chair and watch Nemerci’s face and listen, hoping that the wobble of life I felt in the syllables as they formed in my mouth could sustain them in the real world, but fearing they would simply splat against Chad’s parched, bronze soil, absorbed into the dust, drowned out by the braying of nearby donkeys, ignored by the women and men and children I’d been sent to help.
Tom Weller, who served in Chad from 1993–95, is a former factory worker, substitute teacher, and Planned Parenthood sexuality educator, in addition to being an RPCV. He currently teaches at Indiana State University, where he is the Student Support Services writing specialist. He eats at least one pound of peanuts per week, a bad habit he picked up while serving in Chad. “Learning to Speak” appeared previously in Americans Do Their Business Abroad: Stories by People Who Should Have Known Better but Are Glad They Didn’t.
First and Last Days
Bob Powers
Who gains the most? A simple recounting provides the answer.
In 1964, Tembwe was a small village in central Malawi composed of seven or eight mostly Indian-run mom-and-pop stores, a church, and one bar open three months (the growing season) out of every year.
I woke up, that first sunny morning, to find half the village standing in a line outside my front door. I’m not sure who organized it, my Malawian counterpart or the village chief. Along with my roommate Dick, I was asked to take a seat in one of the two chairs placed directly in the path of the front doorway.
Over the next three or four hours, one by one, five hundred or so Malawians entered our new home.
Always respectful, they placed one hand over their right arm and, bowing slightly shook our hands. Then, most asked if they could touch our hair, which they did, giggling hysterically.
I sat there and grinned from ear to ear.
Two years later Dick, who worked the agricultural end of the newly formed Tembwe Cooperative Society, and I, who helped with the consumer end, were quickly evacuated from the small village that we had learned to love.
Unbeknownst to us, a similar evacuation among co-op Volunteers was taking place throughout the country. “Politics” had reared its ugly head and, along with our Malawian counterparts, we were forced to leave.
“It’s for your own safety,” we were told, though after forty years I don’t recall feeling unsafe.
What I do recall is that I went to Malawi thinking that I would “change the world.” I left knowing that the world, in this case Malawi and its people, had changed me.
And, for that I have been ever grateful.
Bob Powers served in Malawi from 1964-66. He was a member of the Co-op Project. He became head of training at AT&T and later a management consultant to some of the world’s largest corporations. He has written several books on business and gay and lesbian issues. Bob lives with his husband, Donald Clement in Portland, Oregon and Lucca, Italy.
Hena Kisoa Kely and Blue Nail Polish
Amanda Wonson
When we leave, we certainly leave something behind, if nothing but a piece of ourselves.
When I think of Vavatenina, I try not to remember the things that made me uncomfortable, like the slightly creepy man who lived next door or the taxi-brousse driver who couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to sleep with him and have the café au lait babies he was offering. I try not to think of the reasons why I left, even though I’m convinced they were valid for me at that time in my life. Instead, I mostly remember the children, the ones I taught. The five-year-old girls who used to dance and sing in front of my house, the ones I taught to play Frisbee, and the others who became hooked on Go Fish. The children of Vavatenina welcomed me and brought joy to my heart.
The one with the biggest hold on my heart was a four-year-old named Tino who lived next door to me. It was love at first sight between us, from the fir
st shy smile he gave me, and it is impossible to separate him from my memories of Vavatenina.
Tino’s big sister Clara was one of my first friends in Vavatenina, a troisième student desperate to learn English and who was always ready to lend a helping hand in my transition to the town. It wasn’t long before all of Clara’s and Tino’s siblings were frequent visitors at my house: the oldest brother and Clara to practice English, the middle brother to do a little helping out and to look after the younger ones, and the two youngest to play and watch whatever I was up to. The two brothers above Tino loved teaching him one of the few English words they knew and daring him to run up and say it to me. Gradually these brief encounters gave way to something of a friendship between me and the little boy.
Tino would show up accompanied by an older sibling or occasionally by his father, and often became shy as soon as he got close to me. Yet Clara told me that it was to my house Tino threatened to run when he didn’t like things at home; there was a bond that developed between us.
I’ve always enjoyed the company of little kids, and Tino was the sweetest of them all in my little neighborhood of Bemasoandro. Some of the others were loud. Some of them were annoying. One of them used to hit me. Tino liked to watch whatever I did. He was fascinated by my Walkman with the little speakers I had bought back home. When I brought out nail polish to a gathering of kids on my front porch, he insisted on wearing the color I chose for myself, a color that I still think of as “Tino blue.”
While I played with all of the neighborhood children and loved sharing time and games with them, there were a few special rituals that only Tino and I shared. We couldn’t communicate well in words, as I spoke very little Malagasy and he didn’t speak French or English. All the same, I began to teach him English. If I held up my hand and pointed to my fingers, he would recite: “One, two, three, four, feeve!” He also picked up quickly on “Give me five” and “Give me ten.” And then there was “Hena Kisoa Kely.”
