it.
Fortunately most people are nice. I like Muhamad, who works at the hostel. Heâs there when we need help. Sometimes he asks me to help him out, and I go to his office to translate when a new Bangladeshi family arrives. He always gives me a Coke.
Like me, my father goes to school: he has French lessons. He never misses a lesson, and is absolutely determined to learn the language in order to âintegrateâ. But he makes lots of mistakes and gets his words muddled up. For instance, one lunchtime in the canteen he hears someone say:
â Bon appétit !â
So after that he says it all the time to everyone, in the lobby, on the stairs, in the garden:
â Bon appétit ! Bon appétit ! Bon appétit !â
He thinks it means âhelloâ. It makes me laugh.
XP : At first I thought Nura wasnât making much effort to learn French. While his son was bilingual within a matter of months, Nura had difficulty following what was being said and found it difficult to string even two or three words together to make himself understood. Even now his French is still rudimentary. He understands what people say to him, though youâre never quite sure to what degree. He can make himself understood in daily life, but he finds it difficult to discuss more complex matters.
Yet in fact Nura was assiduous in attending the numerous French lessons that were laid on at the hostel and at other community centres in Créteil. He would spend long hours hunched over the books that I passed on to him, and I even funded some private lessons for him â with a Bulgarian as his teacher. The truth was that the one thing that would have helped Nuraâs language skills to take off was spending time in a French-speaking environment, surrounded by colleagues, friends and neighbours who spoke French. And at that time he had access to none of this. As time went on, I began to realise just how stupendous an effort of will it had cost him to achieve as much as he had. It was a predicament in which he was by no means alone. People from Mali and Senegal, who are used to hearing several languages that share a structure not dissimilar to French, find French much easier to learn. People from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, by contrast, speak languages that bear so little resemblance to French in their structure â not to speak of their written forms and ways of thought â that they often struggle. Moreover, Nura was 45 and had never learned any language apart from his native Bengali, with the exception of a little basic English. So for him the idea of learning another language was a completely foreign concept.
How many times did I look at Nura and wonder how lonely he must feel, so far away from his family, his friends and his place in Bangladeshi society; looked at askance by so many people; locked into his own language, culture and hopes; and with his only chance of a future â and his only companionship â resting on an eight-year-old child.
After school, in the hostel corridors, in the kitchen, the only thing the adults ever talk about is their âpapersâ. Itâs one word everyone knows, even people who can barely understand any French. My father is doing everything he possibly can to get papers for us. Itâs taking him ages for all sorts of reasons: he has to get hold of documents from Bangladesh; the offices out there close down every time thereâs a demonstration; the post is slow; my father doesnât want to give them our address in France; and everything has to be translated.
When finally heâs managed to get everything together, we go to the OFPRA, the French government department dealing with refugees and stateless people. When we get there, we have to take a ticket and wait in a big room with loads of other people. As the ticket numbers come up they appear on a small screen. It takes ages for them to change, even when I stop looking. Also Iâm worried: what if I
Fortunately most people are nice. I like Muhamad, who works at the hostel. Heâs there when we need help. Sometimes he asks me to help him out, and I go to his office to translate when a new Bangladeshi family arrives. He always gives me a Coke.
Like me, my father goes to school: he has French lessons. He never misses a lesson, and is absolutely determined to learn the language in order to âintegrateâ. But he makes lots of mistakes and gets his words muddled up. For instance, one lunchtime in the canteen he hears someone say:
â Bon appétit !â
So after that he says it all the time to everyone, in the lobby, on the stairs, in the garden:
â Bon appétit ! Bon appétit ! Bon appétit !â
He thinks it means âhelloâ. It makes me laugh.
XP : At first I thought Nura wasnât making much effort to learn French. While his son was bilingual within a matter of months, Nura had difficulty following what was being said and found it difficult to string even two or three words together to make himself understood. Even now his French is still rudimentary. He understands what people say to him, though youâre never quite sure to what degree. He can make himself understood in daily life, but he finds it difficult to discuss more complex matters.
Yet in fact Nura was assiduous in attending the numerous French lessons that were laid on at the hostel and at other community centres in Créteil. He would spend long hours hunched over the books that I passed on to him, and I even funded some private lessons for him â with a Bulgarian as his teacher. The truth was that the one thing that would have helped Nuraâs language skills to take off was spending time in a French-speaking environment, surrounded by colleagues, friends and neighbours who spoke French. And at that time he had access to none of this. As time went on, I began to realise just how stupendous an effort of will it had cost him to achieve as much as he had. It was a predicament in which he was by no means alone. People from Mali and Senegal, who are used to hearing several languages that share a structure not dissimilar to French, find French much easier to learn. People from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, by contrast, speak languages that bear so little resemblance to French in their structure â not to speak of their written forms and ways of thought â that they often struggle. Moreover, Nura was 45 and had never learned any language apart from his native Bengali, with the exception of a little basic English. So for him the idea of learning another language was a completely foreign concept.
How many times did I look at Nura and wonder how lonely he must feel, so far away from his family, his friends and his place in Bangladeshi society; looked at askance by so many people; locked into his own language, culture and hopes; and with his only chance of a future â and his only companionship â resting on an eight-year-old child.
After school, in the hostel corridors, in the kitchen, the only thing the adults ever talk about is their âpapersâ. Itâs one word everyone knows, even people who can barely understand any French. My father is doing everything he possibly can to get papers for us. Itâs taking him ages for all sorts of reasons: he has to get hold of documents from Bangladesh; the offices out there close down every time thereâs a demonstration; the post is slow; my father doesnât want to give them our address in France; and everything has to be translated.
When finally heâs managed to get everything together, we go to the OFPRA, the French government department dealing with refugees and stateless people. When we get there, we have to take a ticket and wait in a big room with loads of other people. As the ticket numbers come up they appear on a small screen. It takes ages for them to change, even when I stop looking. Also Iâm worried: what if I
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