…multilingualism

While traveling through Morocco chaperoning 33 students on an Arabic and History study tour, I surprised my colleagues by revealing a basic level of understanding of both French and Spanish. Because I have always been ashamed to have lost my fluency in the Romance languages, I don’t often speak about my capacity for world language. In fact, I don’t know that I have had the opportunity or need to even remember the ease with which I learned languages throughout my life until we spent four days at a language school in Rabat, Morocco, where I impressed my teacher, my colleagues, and even myself with the amount of Arabic I learned in just four days of class (about 16 hours total).

In the 80s, public schools still prioritized a rich humanities focus, so students had art, languages and even physical education classes every day instead of the part time study that is now the norm for most students. I began learning Spanish in kindergarten, and studied it through the seventh grade. When my family moved in the late 80s from the working class suburb I had grown up in to a wealthier suburb farther from the city, my parents gave me the option of staying registered at my K-8 school to graduate with my friends or start at the middle school in our new town in order to make friends before high school. Being terrified of the transition to high school and naive to the horrifying and disorienting culture of middle school, I chose to change schools. Relieved to finally relinquish my detested given Spanish name (Juanita), I wanted to doubly ensure it remained in my past and so opted to learn French instead of continuing my Spanish language education.

Madame Nica was our sole French teacher in high school, and she ran her class like an army, expecting all of her students to keep pace and fall into line. She was a native Francophile who insisted on raising her children to speak Francaise first and Anglais second, which we found both laudable and ridiculous. But she also introduced us to Nutella and croissants, as well as crepes, and I was immediately smitten with la culture Francaise. Our senior year, my friends and I predictably wrote a song using all of the nonsense expressions we had collected over the four years we had studied avec Madame: aptly titled, “Tien, dit!” and had a refrain that went something like this: “tien, dit! Donc. Bof! Ah, zut alors!”

I continued French classes in college, eventually learning to read and write poetry and literature. I loved conjugating verbs and learning new vocabulary, and even considered a major in comparative literature for a time. However, as my displeasure with my “choice” to attend Loyola University Chicago over Northwestern grew, I began weighing the pros and cons of transferring to another school or studying abroad at Loyola’s Rome campus. Eventually settling on Rome, I enrolled in the mandatory two semesters of Italian to prepare myself for a semester abroad.

While I give credit to my early introduction to Romance languages for the ease with which I picked up and easily learned all three world languages, learning Arabic is much more of a challenge. To try to learn a language with an entirely different alphabet and no standard phonetic spelling of words in the Latin alphabet is like trying to complete a Wordle using kanji. Even learning to write my “a, b, c’s” (from right to left as well!) made me feel like a left-handed person writing with their right hand. After my initial embarrassment, though, and some evening practice, I quickly started to grasp some of the rules, such as when to connect letters, and how to add vowel sounds with accent marks (as there are no vowels per se in Arabic). As I learned, memories of my great-Aunt Shulamit teaching me with her Arabic primers came rushing back. Meandering through the markets in Fes and Chefchaouen, I recognized the slippers many men wore from my weekend sleepovers at my Poppi and Noni’s house, which was filled with Turkish rugs and metal shai pots.

My nine days in Morocco filled me with a sense of belonging and peace that I have not felt anywhere in the U.S. or abroad. Despite being 7,650 km away from my family’s homeland of Iran, Morocco felt like home. Perhaps it is the Mediterranean aesthetic, the familiarity of seeing French on signs everywhere, the kindness of the Moroccan people, or all of the above. Morocco is a wonderfully complex, complicated, place where convivencia thrives. All of the country is a glorious joyful compromise the likes of which I have not found in any other place.