Communication + Language

I was a shy kid. I never liked speaking in front of classes or at family reunions or to strangers at the grocery store. As a child, I didn’t like the feeling of words in my mouth clattering against my teeth. It felt unnatural to shove them out onto my lips, where they slipped to the ground, completely unnoticed. I hated when people would tell me to be louder or to repeat myself, which happened often; it still gets on my nerves when somebody asks me to repeat myself. I smile politely and clear my throat.

I was put in remedial English in second grade because I didn’t like reading in front of the class. Not wanting to read out loud equated to not knowing how to read at all. In remedial English, a woman with a kind, round face ‘taught’ me how to read for a few weeks until informing my second grade teacher that I read above my grade level.

Despite not needing the extra attention, I enjoyed the few weeks in remedial English because I didn’t have to read in front of my classmates. I’d sit across from the round-faced woman in a tiny room and whisper-read out of picture books until she sent me back to class. Whispering felt a lot more bearable than talking loudly, the words felt like a stream of water when I whispered them.

There were a few times in elementary school and middle school when teachers would tell me to scream during class. I would sit there, eyes wide, quietly, unable to escape. I didn’t like screaming, so I didn’t even open my mouth. I sat there like a caged animal looking down at the patterned tile floor while the teacher, whoever they were, tried to egg me on. The rest of the class sat quietly waiting for me to shout. I never did.

The handful of times this happened it felt like the most humiliating thing that ever happened to me. A few times, I sat in my desk and cried until the teacher moved on with their lesson or got tired watching me sit there wiping tears off my own face. I’m proud of myself now, that I didn’t even try to scream. It was a quiet sort of defiance. What’s wrong with being quiet anyway? Why did so many of those teachers want to make me loud?

I don’t hold this against the teachers now. They probably misread my discomfort as something else, as if I was holding myself back from what a true child wants. At the time I understood that I was abnormal, and having it pointed out in front of a class again and again made me feel ashamed and wronged. I’d sit in a bathroom stall or in a dark corner of the library and cry quietly, pleased for once that I was too quiet to hear.

I think my childhood would have been more bearable if adults would have just let me be quiet. I was happiest when I didn’t have to look up to the face of a grown-up and try to make myself heard, try to sift words out of my brain and translate them into something other people could understand. It felt like every adult wanted me to speak. It made me extremely anxious, wary of everyone, every new teacher, family member, my dad’s work friends. I retreated into myself, not knowing if my vocal chords were the enemy or if all these people were.

Once as an eight-year-old, I trekked over to a neighbor’s house in the dreary overcast and snow to ask if they could come out to play. Halfway across their front yard I remembered I’d have to ask their parent if they opened the door. I stood there for a moment before turning around and following my footsteps home; I’d rather be alone than have to open my mouth.

Another time a family friend held my child-sized wrist and wouldn’t let go until I carried out a conversation of small talk at an acceptable volume. I don’t remember if I cried, but I probably did; I cried a lot as a kid. Every time something like this happened I was reminded of how people saw me.

When my family moved back to Michigan the summer before my eighth-grade year, I made a conscious effort to speak more loudly. It worked for the most part. Teachers would still ask me to speak up, but it was a lot less than before. I still felt a jolt when my eighth-grade science teacher with her tan, freckled skin would tell me to repeat myself three times in a row. Something akin to shame and memory.

The school I attended from eighth grade until my senior year of high school unintentionally forced me to be more outspoken. It was a predominately white, protestant school. I was one of the only brown people there, and I developed an identity around defending myself as a brown person, as a queer person, as an orthodox Christian. It felt like every chunk of myself was starkly different to those of my classmates.

I argued with teachers and other students during class about immigration, politics, biblical interpretation, feminism, socialism. The phrase ‘choose your battles’ meant nothing to me, but I was fifteen and full of angst, just beginning to realize what an unfair world we lived in. I fought with everyone, all the time.

In eleventh grade, I wrote my awful bible teacher a letter detailing why she was wrong about her views on race and gender. She called me to her desk the next day, saying nothing of substance, and then sending me back to my seat. A lot of my conversations with her went like that— me arguing, her dismissing me, me stewing. Once I argued with her about gender in front of the class, clearly implying that I was transgender. A girl from my class came up to me afterward and encouraged me, saying that she wished the teacher would take me more seriously and that she was glad I’d spoken up. I felt a bud of pride sprout inside me.

There were a few other brown kids and LGBT kids in our high school. Most of them suffered more than I did there, some of the more outspoken gay kids were threatened with expulsions and suspensions, constantly being called slurs by the other students there. I tried to fly under the radar as much as possible.

In eighth grade, most of the boys took to taunting an Arabic boy in my class. It happened constantly, it seemed whenever I saw this boy he was being bombarded with insults. They called him a terrorist, a towelhead and ticked their speech into an accent, they spoke loud gibberish and called it Arabic. As an Egyptian, it made me angry and offended, but I didn’t say anything. I tried to make myself blind to it.

Once in math class the Arabic boy told the teacher about the bullying. The teacher lamely said they could report it to the school and try to get them suspended, clearly knowing the kid wouldn’t want to take such drastic measures. For a moment, I was angrier at her than the boys doing the bullying. Every teacher at that school turned a blind eye to the bullying at that school. Only once did I hear a teacher tell a student not to use the word ‘faggot.’ I heard that word so much at that school, and it felt like a punch in the chest every time.

My senior year I heard a white boy I particularly disliked speak in gibberish again. “I’m speaking your language,” he said to the Arabic boy. I felt a flush of rekindled anger. I wanted to face him and tell him what an ass he was. I wanted to make him understand that Arabic is a language made of glass, that he was shattering it in my ears. I wanted to open my mouth and utter a sound, a phrase, anything that would make him curl into himself, make him red in the face angry, and so ashamed he couldn’t speak. Instead, I swallowed and said nothing.

I regret not saying something, but there was nothing I could have said that would have made him as hurt as his racist comments made me. And I know exactly what would have happened if I had told him to cut it out— he would have turned to me like many others had before, not looking me in the eye like so many had before, but instead looking at the top of my head, just past my ear, anywhere but at the short, brown freak in front of him. He would have turned back around and said nothing to me.

Once, I did talk to him about another incident. How he and a small group of boys would schout at me during the weekly chapel, “STAND UP,” during the pledge of allegiance. I didn’t stand up. This happened every week and it struck a nerve in me, my heart pounding every time. One day after chapel, as the hundred fifty some students made the trek back to the main building, I decided to talk to him and ask him to stop.

I tried to match my strides to his, but he didn’t slow down. I spoke to him while he looked straight ahead, muttering in response, glancing down at me, continuing to walk fast away away away. I don’t remember what I said, but I felt a sense of myself floundering, my voice not making its way quite to him. I felt like a child looking up at him, small and breakable.

The boys didn’t stop shouting at me just because I asked one of them to, but they got tired of it on their own eventually.

*

To this day when I get upset, I become quiet just like I was as a child. It could be described as regression, but regression is meant to comfort you and this soft of quiet isn’t comforting. It feels all-consuming and worthless. Words will not form in my throat, every word is heavy and unbelievable behind my teeth.

My mom will sit on the edge of my bed and ask me question after question while I stare at her with the numb integrity of a child. My answer is always silence. My answer is that there is no answer. In times like that, I sometimes wish I didn’t have a voice at all. That my vocal cords would have been malformed in the womb, a radio with no channels, a cassette with no tape in it.

Silence isn’t all bad. I’ve learned a lot of things by being quiet and unassuming. People will fill the gaps in conversation easily when you just listen. I’m not a good talker anyway, I’d rather somebody pour their words into me and let me exist in that context only. I am a holder of a hundred secrets, a pot filled with soil and seeds. I pride myself on getting people to talk easily.

When I worked at Kroger, I liked trying to get the customers to reveal a bit of their lives to me, to let me hold a piece of who they are in my sun-darkened hands. When they didn’t talk, I’d guess what their lives were like based on what they were buying, who they were with, how they treated the cashier. On a particularly slow day, an irritable woman with French-tipped nails buying eighteen one-liter bottles of diet coke told me about her husband who just had a stroke and her ordeal at the hospital. I double-bagged her soda bottles and consoled her as she shed her rough façade.

I liked the kind customers most of all, the ones who didn’t need to use words to communicate who they were. I wanted to be like them. One day an elderly black woman excitedly told me about how they’d restocked her favorite Hostess cupcakes. As she spoke, she opened one of the boxes and placed a plastic-wrapped cake in my hand. I ate it during my lunch break and silently prayed that God would bless her. Another time, a white man with a trimmed grey beard reached out to hand me a five-dollar bill for bagging his groceries. Unbeknownst to him, I had just had one of the worse days of my life and was planning to work an eight-hour shift with no food.

“You don’t need to give this to me,” I said, hesitating to take the bill.

“I know,” he said, “I want to.” His eyes looked human. His eyes made me believe there were still good people in the world, good people who would give money to strangers for no reason. I took the bill and bought food. I consider that one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. I hope wherever he is people are doing nice things for him, too.

Earlier that day I was outside pushing carts into the store in the late June heat. I’d stack up five carts, grab the first in line with my fist and let the one closest to me stab me in the belly until I got them into the store. That summer my diaphragm was constantly bruised.

On one of my rounds on the left side of the lot, a man in a beat-up dark green car stared at me from his lowered window. His car was sitting right next to the cart corral. His eyebrows with thick and looked like they’d been sloppily drawn in in sharpie marker. His hair was recently shaved. His eyes were fixed on me, but he looked dazed and unsteady.

I felt a wave of unease wash over me. Something about his black marble eyes shaded from the sun looked unreal and wrong. I ignored the feeling in my gut and approached the cart corral, his fingers were lifted just above the car door, as if he was beckoning me over. His eyes were on me when I made the mistake of looking inside his open car window.

“Jesus,” I whispered, the inside of my body floated out from beneath me, I felt the pressure of a hand squeeze my stomach. I looked back up into his eyes, he wasn’t even human. There was nothing in those eyes. I later wondered what his life was like, what made him do things like this, who made him the person he was. But in that moment, standing before him felt like facing the devil, he looked completely unhuman, almost grotesque in his abnormality.

He muttered something after me, his voice a whisper like a lighter catching flame, the beginning of something horrifying, of a body catching fire, a question in his thick, drug-muddled voice.

I shouted at him, one strong word, one “NO.” I ran back into the store. I should have gotten his license plate number, but I didn’t. I ran, knowing his eyes were still on me. I stood in the store trying to explain the situation to my manager, stumbling around the words. Describing whatever happened was almost as hard as experiencing it. What words could I use to tell my middle-aged manager about the horror of flesh and brokenness I just saw? Were there polite words to say, what would sound most professional, am I supposed to remain professional right now? I looked at her hands while I spoke, stuttering. This is how words in a language can disarm you.

*

Having grandparents who didn’t speak much English taught me a lot about the beauty of shared communication. Ocean Vuong said in On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, “A work of myriad communications, I learned to speak to the men not with my tongue, which was useless there, but with smiles, hand gestures, even silences, hesitations. I made out people, verbs, abstractions, ideas with my fingers, my arms, and by drawing in the dirt.”

A lot of times, my grandmother would talk in Arabic while I listened, sometimes offering simple English words in exchange for monologues of Arabic stretched over me. I tried to speak Arabic, but only with her. She’d smile and tease me for mispronouncing every word I spoke, all my inflections wrong. I didn’t mind when she teased me. Even when she had Parkinson’s and had to focus all her energy on speaking two words, she’d still tease me about my Arabic. I’d still laugh.

“When are you going to learn Arabic,” she’d say, “Tell me something in Arabic.” I’d try to tell her about school when we laid in the same bed, underneath a fort of heavy blankets. She’d laugh as she tried to stitch meaning into my pointless words.

I wish my parents taught me Arabic when I was a child. Everything I know now is from listening and observing. I can translate it in my head well enough but rolling the words in my mouth and unearthing them from my throat feels foreign and unnatural. My throat feels half-made, unable to speak the words all my ancestors spoke before me.

Being with my grandparents was a demonstration in how you can love without reason, without knowing. We loved each other because we were together not because we really knew each other. To show love we didn’t use words. My grandpa bought me chocolates, I scratched my grandma’s back and slept in the same bed with her, I baked my grandpa cakes with reduced sugar because he was a diabetic, my grandpa would boil eggs for us every morning.

When my grandma was dying in the hospital, I was left alone with her for an hour. It was night, the fluorescent hospital lights brightening above us, my reflection in the window staring back at me. My grandma laid there staring at me, a tube taped to her nose. She’d cry out occasionally. I held her hand, her skintight against her flesh, veins popping out.

When I was volunteering at hospice, I learned that sometimes the dying wanted permission to pass away. I tried to communicate to her in my mangled American Arabic, that if she wanted to go she could. If she wanted to die and had the chance to, she could. She stared at me, saying nothing. I wonder if she understood the message I was trying to send, the grammatically incorrect and important message I desperately wanted to give. She died two weeks later.

The crying my mother did after the phone call was earth-shattering, a desolate weeping that no language could absorb the blows of. “Mama,” she sobbed, “Mama.” One word cannot cover this massive anguish.

I can say anguish, grief, misery, agony, but those words still don’t fully cover the feeling. Like a blanket that doesn’t cover my feet, I can describe my grandmother’s death but I can’t use my words to make you feel it. I can’t even use my words to make you understand the wailing of my mother, how I immediately knew what happened, how a language can be so useless.