ENGLISH IS BROKEN HERE; or MS. S-

Memories of an English Language Learner

That’s me on the right - please note the plastic on the furniture.

When you’re seven, shit happens and you almost never understand.  Incomprehension is the default of life, but even more so when you’re young. 

We had immigrated to Parlin, NJ, my siblings and I, in 1974 — mere months before the “Fall” of Saigon — and it was about as fun as you might imagine.  We were poor Afro-brown Dominicans at a time when even the Puerto Rican kids didn’t know what a Dominican was.  That first year the racism was a constant battering wave. Sometimes it knocked you down completely and took you for a nice long roll, but even at low tide you were always struggling against it to keep your balance, your sense of self, always flailing about.  What I remember most clearly are the contorted furious faces, white and black and mixed, the unintelligible screaming and outbursts, the endless derisive laughter.  I sometimes wonder if this is the reason I have trouble laughing easily, unless I’m with my closest friends.  I don’t think I laughed much that first year.

And of course I remember the fights.  Sometimes me versus the assholes.  Sometimes me and my brother versus the assholes.  Sometimes me, my brother and my oldest sister versus the assholes.  And I remember the boot camp cruelties of my newly acquired father, the father I had spent my first years longing to be reunited with.

Careful, as they say, what you wish for. 

A year passed.  On page that hell-slog takes exactly three words but in that subjective space of my immigrant childhood those twelve months felt like a decade — or three.  But it passed, nevertheless.    

My sisters and brother learned English quickly, but not me.  I could understand as well as they could, but for whatever reason I had trouble speaking el inglés.  The words just wouldn’t come out — and when they did, they came out machacao.  My siblings laughed along with the rest of the kids, which wasn't cute, but I’m sure I would have done the same.  I tend to believe it had to do with my father who, having elected me to be the family scapegoat, delighted in staging family demonstrations to underscore exactly how big a fuck-up I was.  But maybe it was just something that was, a difficulty I would have suffered no matter the home dynamic.

Whatever the etiology, the shit wasn’t improving.  I opened my mouth and garble came out.  My siblings started to leave me far behind.  My mother urged me to improve but was unable to do much herself: You want to end up like me? she demanded again and again.  She, who couldn’t speak a word of English and ultimately never would. 

Someone at Madison Park Elementary School must have noticed what was happening and took pity on me because during that second year I was assigned a speech therapist.  One advantage of my father moving us to Parlin, NJ was that there were resources for that kind of thing. 

Twice a week I was pulled out of classes to meet with the speech therapist. 

Was I delighted?  Eager to put my impediment behind me?  Grateful that I was given what my cousins in the Bronx and Brooklyn never got? 

Not exactly. 

Every time I was told to go to my “special class” I was consumed with humiliation at being singled out for remediation.  More than once the teacher had to pry me from the desk and push me down the hall to my session.  Humiliated and furious.  Furious at the mockery from my classmates.  Furious at myself for having this problem.  And most furious of all at my speech therapist.

Ms S— was young.  (I call her Ms. S— not because I’m trying to protect her anonymity but because that’s all I remember of her name.) I realize now she must have been in her early twenties.  Fresh out of college.  She had the posture I forever associate with people who study dance and never moved more than she had to.  She was Boricua, the first Latina teacher I would have until I got to middle school, and I still remember that her long curly hair was mesmerically dark. 

I honestly don’t know how she put up with me.  I refused to participate at first, wouldn’t do any of the exercises.  When she spoke to me, in English or Spanish, I pretended not to understand.  Just seethed during that half-hour and when it was time to go I raced back to my classroom, refused even to say good-bye.

But Ms S— was patient (I’m guessing I wasn’t her first cabeza dura) and my non-English was its own form of encouragement.  I might have loathed the special sessions, loathed the negative distinction of being remedial, but I also knew I had to learn to speak English no matter what, if only to put an end to the mockery. 

Ms S— was patient and she was a good teacher.  Never threw my resistance at me, never pushed, never expressed impatience or exasperation.  Each time we met she said something I still remember: You can be mad or you can learn, but you can’t do both. 

She said it in Spanish and English. 

I’m thankful I got Ms S— as early as I did.  I doubt I would have been as amenable after another year of my father kicking my ass.  Fortunately I wasn’t yet so broken that I couldn’t eventually recognize good sense. 

You can be mad or you can learn, but you can’t do both.

She was right, of course, and somewhere inside me I must have known it.

What else I must have known: that Ms S— wasn’t trying to humiliate me — that she was only trying to help.  Showed her kindness in small ways and big ways — from how she pronounced my name correctly to the snacks she always brought me.   Maybe she had a clue what I was going through, both because of the country and because of my family.  Maybe that’s why she could be patient with a knucklehead like me.  Why she could be so compassionate.  Whatever the reason: Ms S— felt for me, and no matter how much I wanted to pretend otherwise, I needed someone, anyone, to feel for me in those days. 

I do not remember making the decision but one day I went along with one of her exercises.  When making a th- sound in English put your tongue between your teeth. And then another and then another. 

You can be mad or you can learn, but you can’t do both.

She wasn’t wrong.  Before the end of the year whatever block I had on my English cracked and I began to improve noticeably.  (And my Spanish, sadly, collapsed and never fully recovered.)

Ms S— never got to see the hyper-fluent Englisher I would become.  One May day she told me that our sessions were over and I was too much of a young bruto to properly thank her or say good-bye. 

I walked out of that final session and I never saw Ms S— again.  Put that whole thing behind me.  In time I forgot all but the first syllable of her name and her poise, and years later when I got some sense in me and tried to reach out to my elementary school no one had access to that information.  The one teacher I had stayed in touch with from those days had already passed. 

So Ms. S— is nothing more than a faded memory.  

And yet here I am still speaking and writing with the tongue she gave me.  

Here I am still reflecting on the debt I owe her — a debt I try to repay, in part, with my own teaching.

I like to imagine that maybe Ms S— has seen my name in a bookstore or a library (the strange name that she alone pronounced correctly in those years). I hope she knows that it all began with her¹. 

1. I’ve borrowed my title from Coco Fusco’s brilliant book English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas. https://thenewpress.com/books/english-broken-here