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Non-Native Speaker Stories by Sari Mathes
Twentieth century American literature is rich with stories brought to America by immigrants and their children. Immigrant authors are woven tightly into the culture and history of America. Their stories are what I grew up reading, and, many, many moons later, what I still reach for when I want to lose myself in someone else’s words. While the demographics of immigration have changed and today’s accents don’t sound the same, the immigrant voice still has something important to say to me.
When single motherhood found me teaching English to non-native speakers in a New York City junior high school, it opened an anthology of stories I had never heard before, stories that were screaming to be told. Fascinating adventures of fleeing dictatorships, heartbreakers of leaving home behind, portraits of courage, brilliance, resilience, sacrifice, and love, all locked within my students’ minds. Only the storytellers were not cognizant of the goldmines they guarded with their broken English and their self-effacing humility.
It was up to me as their ESL teacher to provide the means for these stories to surface along with their acquisition of English. But, at first I didn’t even know that the stories were there and I needed to learn how to facilitate their emergence. The administration didn’t help. The kids who did speak English were difficult enough to educate; the foreign-born got dumped into my class with hardly a look back by administrators who went mute when spoken to in any language other than their own. Me? I was a grammarian, a writer, a sociolinguist, not a formally trained educator, and certainly not a disciplinarian. I, too, had been dumped in Room 230 without a map or how-to manual on how to bridge the language barrier.
Twenty years later, I have crossed that bridge countless times with a wonderful variety of remarkable individuals brought to me courtesy of immigration. Cliché as it may be, my students have given me much more than they received. I learned that every person has a story to tell and that every story is richly unique and worthy of an audience.
My non-native speakers stories had elements that were generally missing from their American counterparts. The collision of two cultures and the assimilation into an alien society have been prevalent themes in modern literature for more than a century, of course, with Chaim Potak, Vladimir Nabakov, Kahlil Gibran, Frank McCourt, Isaac Stern, and others, sharing their coming-to-America experiences. The same themes are now emerging from a new generation of immigrants. Asians, Latinos, Africans, and more, are embellishing those themes with their own cultural differences and branding their stories as unique versions of that same model.
Whether your first language is not English, the universality of your experience coupled with the individuality your culture stamps on it, is a story waiting to be told. Don’t let any awkwardness with the language or modesty hold you back. Put your impressions, your ideas, your adventures, down on paper. Keep a journal of experiences as you strive to acquire this most difficult language. Grammar and vocabulary can be edited, facts can be researched, manuscripts organized or repaired, after you have your ideas in place. Your journal will aid you in polishing up your English, and, who knows, you may be one of the voices of the new wave of immigrant literature in the 21st century.
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