"The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought."
--Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume
No more teaching outfits
No more students
No more arriving early
No more markers
No more lesson plans
No more attendance sheets
No more teacher’s books
No more whiteboards
No more “sh…”
No more student conflict
No more behavior problems
No more spelling things like an American
No more having to say, “I’m a Canadan, actually."
No more first day introductions
No more, “Here are the rules.”
åndi falsafa f lHayat: ida åishti Tawilan, kulshi li tåalimti ghadi ykun mustaåmal.
I have a philosophy for life: If you live long enough, everything you learn will come in handy.
Hta darija.
Even Darija.
*Did you notice that "philosophy" is "falsafa"? How sweet is that? I've been studying Arabic for eight months, and that is my first holy-crap-look-at-that English-Arabic cognate.
“I kissed him on the cheek and suddenly understood the distance that separates words from communion. You need very many words and even more pauses, and thousands of tiny motions, so slight that they are barely noticeable even to the trained eye; you need an even larger palette of tones, merely to signal misunderstanding; you have to pass through all of this before you reach a state where you know that your meaning and your words are one, no more and no less, and that they are instantaneously grasped by the person for whom they are meant. Before you achieve this, you need recourse to many lies.”
From Leaves of Narcissus, by Somaya Ramadan (Egyptian), from The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction.
The process of cultural adjustment, which is also known as the U-shaped curve of cultural adjustment, encompasses five distinct stages:
“The woman noticed that her daughter had slowed down and her movements were sluggish as if she had to drag her body along.”
[Upon finding her daughter pregnant, the woman leads her out into the desert to a small village, where…]
“A man passed by them and saw the woman crying. He stopped and asked what the matter was. He was big, his bones were well defined, and his neck thick. She told him her story.
The man looked toward the girl who lowered her face. He contemplated the situation while the woman continued complaining that her husband had died without leaving her a boy.
The man said to himself, ‘Be kind for once. Here is a weak woman with no man to help her.’
He was a professional killer, robber and thief, but times change. He said to himself, ‘Old age has begun to creep up on me and I have nothing left. Any action I take, I pay the price even more now.’
He patted the woman’s shoulder and comforted her. He carried her belongings and led the procession to his home. At home he served them food, which they ate, and then prepared a bed for them, telling the woman to sleep peacefully and let him take charge of her worries.
As night descended on the village, the man approached the girl and broke her neck. He put the body into a sack, carried it to the river and dumped it in. He then lighthertedly returned home.
In the morning he prepared breakfast for the woman and placed her and her belongings on a donkey. As he walked beside the donkey back to the village the woman raised her face to heaven and muttered prayers thanking God for the man.”
--“Benevolence,” by Sabri Moussa, from The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction.
