by Munazza Alam
It started with a wooden stool and a tattered primer. Sitting on this stool, I had to look up to see my mother, my teacher. My little feet dangled above the floor for what seemed like miles, and I longed for the day when I would be big enough to be rooted to the ground. My mother patiently explained in Urdu, “God’s words are written in the Arabic language, so you must learn to read it.” This was the primer from which my sisters and cousins before me learned. After reading this primer, I too would become a part of this tradition, this language. I swung my feet back and forth above the ground, planning my great jump off the stool. My four-year-old hands reached for the yellowed dog-eared primer, but the twenty-nine unfamiliar letters on the page kept slipping away.
I confused ‘ta’ with ‘ya’ and ‘nūn’ with ‘ba’ because I could not remember which letter’s dots were above the line and which were below. I whined, “I don’t want to practice the sounds of ‘ain’ and ‘ghain’. And this is not my primer!” But after weeks of lessons, ‘ta’ and ‘ya’ differentiated themselves for me, and I mixed their sounds with the rules of ‘jazm’ and ‘shadda’ to create Arabic words that held no meaning for me because I did not speak this tongue. But I continued reading, reaching for the letters that did not make themselves clear even after the primer was read, completed, and done. I continue reaching every day for these unfamiliar words even though my feet now reach the floor.
I am in first grade, learning to read English letters. I am relieved because ‘A’ and ‘B’ do not look different when combined with other letters, like the Arabic letters do. They do not have confusing dots or unfamiliar meanings. The letters go left to right, and I have no trouble drawing these shapes and lines. So I easily sound out the letters using my phonics skills. They form a word that rises up off the page to greet me with a message. Rainbow Fish and The Very Hungry Caterpillar come alive when I flip the shiny, white pages of the book that is mine and no one else’s. I can understand every word on the pages that are not tattered or dog-eared. I swing my feet back and forth because the wooden stool I sit on now is small enough for me to fit. My feet touch the ground, and I know who I am because I can write my name and my address and I know what the words on the page mean. There is no primer that I can finish and suddenly possess the ability to read English. My journey with this language leads me to a wealth of novels, stories, and poems that reveal themselves to me. The words on a page, waiting for me to read them. I continue flipping the pages of a primer that I cannot possibly finish.
I am twelve years old, sitting before auntie at my Sunday school in the mosque. “This is Urdu class, where you shut off the English switch. It’s time to learn something new,” she said. With that warning, auntie opened the primer that greeted me with familiar letters. I put my finger on the spot and boldly declare, “I can read those letters: ‘alif’, ‘ba’…” But auntie cut me off before I could continue. “You have it all wrong. You are not reading Arabic – look at the letters again.” As I closely studied the whole chart on the page, I noticed the extra letters that took their place beside the familiar figures I already knew. The extras had more dots, more confusion.
Smiling, auntie gently placed my finger under the ‘alif’ and told me to repeat after her. I do, and then I begin to recognize the letters of my mother tongue. Right to left and thirty-six letters, the Urdu alphabet has sounds so different from the Arabic letters I once confused them with. I welcomed these new Urdu grammar rules, and I yearned to finish my primer and begin a storybook so that mine would have another page.
I learned how to read three times, and each time, the method was the same: learn the letters, learn their sounds, and learn how these parts add up to a whole word, a whole phrase, or a whole sentence. At first, I was a letter, then I became a word, and now I have become a sentence with a message to convey.
